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+} + +p.byline +{ +font-style: italic; +margin-bottom: 2em; +} + +.figureHead, .noteref, .pseudonoteref, span.leftnote, p.legend, .versenum, .stage +{ +color: #001FA4; +} + +.rightnote, .pagenum, .linenum, .pagenum a +{ +color: #AAAAAA; +} + +a.hidden:hover, a.noteref:hover +{ +color: red; +} + +p.dropcap:first-letter +{ +color: #001FA4; +font-weight: bold; +} + +sub, sup +{ +line-height: 0; +} + + + +</style></head> +<body> + + +<pre> + +Project Gutenberg's Tales of the Malayan Coast, by Rounsevelle Wildman + +This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with +almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + +Title: Tales of the Malayan Coast + From Penang to the Philippines + +Author: Rounsevelle Wildman + +Release Date: January 12, 2009 [EBook #27784] + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 + +*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TALES OF THE MALAYAN COAST *** + + + + +Produced by Jeroen Hellingman and the Online Distributed +Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This book was +produced from scanned images of public domain material +from the Google Print project.) + + + + + + +</pre> + + +<div class="front"><div class="div1"><span class="pagenum"> +[<a href="#toc">Contents</a>] +</span><p class="aligncenter">Tales of the Malayan Coast + +</p> +<p class="aligncenter">Rounsevelle Wildman + +</p> +</div> +<div class="div1"><span class="pagenum"> +[<a href="#toc">Contents</a>] +</span><p></p> +<div class="figure"><img border="0" src="images/wildman.jpg" alt="Rounsevelle Wildman, U. S. Consul-General at Hong Kong." width="276" height="420"><p class="figureHead">Rounsevelle Wildman, U. S. Consul-General at Hong Kong.</p> +</div><p> + +</p> +<p></p> +<div class="figure"><img border="0" src="images/wildman-signature.gif" alt="Signature: Rounsevelle Wildman." width="640" height="130"></div><p> + + + +</p> +</div> +<div class="titlePage"> +<h1 class="docTitle">Tales of the Malayan Coast</h1> +<h2 class="docTitle">From Penang to the Philippines</h2> +<h2 class="byline">By +<br> +<span class="docAuthor">Rounsevelle Wildman</span> +<br> +Consul General of the United States at <span class="corr" id="xd0e127" title="Source: Hong-Kong">Hong Kong</span> +<br> +Illustrated by Henry Sandham + + +</h2> +<h2 class="docImprint">Boston +<br> +Lothrop Publishing Company +</h2> +</div><div class="div1"><span class="pagenum"> +[<a href="#toc">Contents</a>] +</span><p class="aligncenter"><span class="smallcaps">Copyright</span>, 1899,<br> +By +<br> +<span class="smallcaps">Lothrop Publishing Company.</span> + +</p> +<p class="aligncenter"><i>Norwood Press</i><br> +<i>J. S. Cushing & Co.—Berwick & Smith</i><br> +<i>Norwood Mass. U.S.A.</i> + +</p> +</div> +<div class="div1"><span class="pagenum"> +[<a href="#toc">Contents</a>] +</span><p></p> +<div class="figure"><img border="0" src="images/dewey.jpg" alt="George Dewey, Admiral U. S. Navy" width="303" height="420"><p class="figureHead">George Dewey, Admiral U. S. Navy</p> +<p class="alignright">Copyright, 1889, by Frances Benjamin Johnston.</p> +</div><p> + +</p> +<p></p> +<div class="figure"><img border="0" src="images/dewey-signature.gif" alt="Signature: George Dewey." width="600" height="147"></div><p> + + +</p> +</div> +<div class="div1"><span class="pagenum"> +[<a href="#toc">Contents</a>] +</span><p class="aligncenter">To</p> +<p class="aligncenter">Our Hero</p> +<p class="aligncenter">And my friend</p> +<p class="aligncenter">Admiral George Dewey, U.S.N.</p> +<p class="aligncenter">I Dedicate this Book + + +</p> +<p></p> +<div class="figure"><img border="0" src="images/dewey-dedication.gif" alt="Handwritten dedication by General Dewey." width="720" height="566"></div><p> + + +</p> +<div class="blockquote"> +<p><i>Flagship Olympia</i>,<br> +<i>Manila</i>, 21 Sept., 1898. + +</p> +<p>My Dear Wildman:— + +</p> +<p>Yours of 12th instant is at hand. I am much flattered by your request to dedicate your book to me, and would be pleased to +have you do so. + +</p> +<p>With kindest regards, I am, + +</p> +<p>Very truly yours, + +</p> +<p>George Dewey. </p> +</div><p> + + +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb5" href="#pb5">5</a>]</span></p> +</div> +<div class="div1"><span class="pagenum"> +[<a href="#toc">Contents</a>] +</span><h2 class="normal">Preface</h2> +<p>These stories are the result of nine years’ residence and experience on the Malayan coast—that land of romance and adventure +which the ancients knew as the Golden Chersonesus, and which, in modern times, has been brought again into the atmosphere +of valor and performance by Rajah Brooke of Sarawak, the hero of English expansion, and Admiral George Dewey of the Asiatic +squadron, the hero of American achievement. The author, in his official duties as Special Commissioner of the United States +for the Straits Settlement and Siam, and, later, as Consul General of the United States at Hong Kong, has mingled with and +studied the diverse people of the Malayan coast, from the Sultan of Johore and Aguinaldo <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb6" href="#pb6">6</a>]</span>the Filipino to the lowest Eurasian and “China boy” of that wonderful Oriental land. These stories are based on his experiences +afloat and ashore, and are offered to the American public at this time when all glimpses of the land that Columbus sailed +to find are of especial interest to the modern possessors of the land he really did discover. + + + + +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb7" href="#pb7">7</a>]</span></p> +</div> +<div id="toc" class="div1"><span class="pagenum"> +[<a href="#toc">Contents</a>] +</span><h2 class="normal">Contents</h2> +<ol class="lsoff"> +<li> <span class="tocPagenum">Page</span> + +</li> +<li><a href="#ch1">Baboo’s Good Tiger</a> <span class="tocPagenum">9</span> + +</li> +<li><a href="#ch2">Baboo’s Pirates</a> <span class="tocPagenum">28</span> + +</li> +<li><a href="#ch3">How we Played Robinson Crusoe</a> <span class="tocPagenum">47</span> + +</li> +<li><a href="#ch4">The Sarong</a> <span class="tocPagenum">66</span> + +</li> +<li><a href="#ch5">The Kris</a> <span class="tocPagenum">74</span> + +</li> +<li><a href="#ch6">The White Rajah of Borneo</a> <span class="tocPagenum">81</span> + +</li> +<li><a href="#ch7">Amok!</a> <span class="tocPagenum">101</span> + +</li> +<li><a href="#ch8">Lepas’s Revenge</a> <span class="tocPagenum">130</span> + +</li> +<li><a href="#ch9">King Solomon’s Mines</a> <span class="tocPagenum">147</span> + +</li> +<li><a href="#ch10">Busuk</a> <span class="tocPagenum">181</span> + +</li> +<li><a href="#ch11">A Crocodile Hunt</a> <span class="tocPagenum">200</span> + +</li> +<li><a href="#ch12">A New Year’s Day in Malaya</a> <span class="tocPagenum">219</span> + +</li> +<li><a href="#ch13">In the Burst of the Southwest Monsoon</a> <span class="tocPagenum">230</span> + +</li> +<li><a href="#ch14">A Pig Hunt on Mount Ophir</a> <span class="tocPagenum">254</span> + +</li> +<li><a href="#ch15">In the Court of Johore</a> <span class="tocPagenum">270</span> + +</li> +<li><a href="#ch16">In the Golden Chersonese</a> <span class="tocPagenum">293</span> + +</li> +<li><a href="#ch17">A Fight with Illanum Pirates</a> <span class="tocPagenum">321</span></li> +</ol> +</div> +</div><span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb8" href="#pb8">8</a>]</span><div class="body"> +<div id="ch1" class="div1"><span class="pagenum"> +[<a href="#toc">Contents</a>] +</span><h2 class="super">Tales of the Malayan Coast<br> +From Penang to the Philippines +</h2><span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb9" href="#pb9">9</a>]</span><h2 class="normal">Baboo’s Good Tiger</h2> +<h2 class="sub">A Tale of the Malacca Jungle</h2> +<p>Aboo Din’s first-born, Baboo, was only four years old when he had his famous adventure with the tiger he had found sleeping +in the hot lallang grass within the distance of a child’s voice from Aboo Din’s bungalow. + +</p> +<p>For a long time before that hardly a day had passed but Aboo-Din, who was our <i>syce</i>, or groom, and wore the American colors proudly on his right arm, came in from the servants’ quarters with an anxious look +on his kindly brown face and asked respectfully for the <i>tuan</i> (lord) or <i>mem</i> (lady). + +</p> +<p>“What is it, Aboo Din?” the mistress would inquire, as visions of Baboo drowned in the great Shanghai jar, or of Baboo lying +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb10" href="#pb10">10</a>]</span>crushed by a boa among the yellow bamboos beyond the hedge, passed swiftly through her mind. + +</p> +<p>“Mem see Baboo?” came the inevitable question. + +</p> +<p>It was unnecessary to say more. At once Ah Minga, the “boy”; Zim, the cook; the <i>kebuns</i> (gardeners); the <i>tukanayer</i> (water-boy), and even the sleek Hindu <i>dirzee</i>, who sat sewing, dozing, and chewing betel-nut, on the shady side of the veranda, turned out with one accord and commenced +a systematic search for the missing Baboo. + +</p> +<p>Sometimes he was no farther off than the protecting screen of the “compound” hedge, or the cool, green shadows beneath the +bungalow. But oftener the government Sikhs had to be appealed to, and Kampong Glam in Singapore searched from the great market +to the courtyards of Sultan Ali. It was useless to whip him, for whippings seemed only to make Baboo grow. He would lisp serenely +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb11" href="#pb11">11</a>]</span>as Aboo Din took down the rattan withe from above the door, “<i>Baboo baniak jahat!</i>” (Baboo very bad!) and there was something so charmingly impersonal in all his mischief, that we came between his own brown +body and the rod, time and again. There was nothing distinctive in Baboo’s features or form. To the casual observer he might +have been any one of a half-dozen of his playmates. Like them, he went about perfectly naked, his soft, brown skin shining +like polished rosewood in the fierce Malayan sun. + +</p> +<p>His hair was black, straight, and short, and his eyes as black as coals. Like his companions, he stood as straight as an arrow, +and could carry a pail of water on his head without spilling a drop. + +</p> +<p>He, too, ate rice three times a day. It puffed him up like a little old man, which added to his grotesqueness and gave him +a certain air of dignity that went well with his features when they were in repose. Around <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb12" href="#pb12">12</a>]</span>his waist he wore a silver chain with a silver heart suspended from it. Its purpose was to keep off the evil spirits. + +</p> +<p>There was always an atmosphere of sandalwood and Arab essence about Baboo that reminded me of the holds of the old sailing-ships +that used to come into Boston harbor from the Indies. I think his mother must have rubbed the perfumes into his hair as the +one way of declaring to the world her affection for him. She could not give him clothes, or ornaments, or toys: such was not +the fashion of Baboo’s race. Neither was he old enough to wear the silk <i>sarong</i> that his Aunt Fatima had woven for him on her loom. + +</p> +<p>Baboo had been well trained, and however lordly he might be in the quarters, he was marked in his respect to the mistress. +He would touch his forehead to the red earth when I drove away of a morning to the office; though the next moment I might +catch <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb13" href="#pb13">13</a>]</span>him blowing a tiny ball of clay from his <i>sumpitan</i> into the ear of his father, the <i>syce</i>, as he stood majestically on the step behind me. + +</p> +<p>Baboo went to school for two hours every day to a fat old Arab <i>penager</i>, or teacher, whose schoolroom was an open stall, and whose only furniture a bench, on which he sat cross-legged, and flourished +a whip in one hand and a chapter of the Koran in the other. + +</p> +<p>There were a dozen little fellows in the school; all naked. They stood up in line, and in a soft musical treble chanted in +chorus the glorious promises of the Koran, even while their eyes wandered from the dusky corner where a cheko lizard was struggling +with an atlas moth, to the frantic gesticulations of a naked Hindu who was calling his meek-eyed bullocks hard names because +they insisted on lying down in the middle of the road for their noonday siesta. +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb14" href="#pb14">14</a>]</span></p> +<p>Baboo’s father, Aboo Din, was a Hadji, for he had been to Mecca. When nothing else could make Baboo forget the effects of +the green durian he had eaten, Aboo Din would take the child on his knees and sing to him of his trip to Mecca, in a quaint, +monotonous voice, full of sorrowful quavers. Baboo believed he himself could have left Singapore any day and found Mecca in +the dark. + +</p> +<p>We had been living some weeks in a government bungalow, fourteen miles from Singapore, across the island that looks out on +the Straits of Malacca. The fishing and hunting were excellent. I had shot wild pig, deer, tapirs, and for some days had been +getting ready to track down a tiger that had been prowling in the jungle about the bungalow. + +</p> +<p>But of a morning, as we lay lazily chatting in our long chairs behind the bamboo chicks, the cries of “Harimau! Harimau!” +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb15" href="#pb15">15</a>]</span>and “Baboo” came up to us from the servants’ quarters. + +</p> +<p>Aboo Din sprang over the railing of the veranda, and without stopping even to touch the back of his hand to his forehead, +cried,— + +</p> +<p>“Tuan Consul, tiger have eat chow dog and got Baboo!” + +</p> +<p>Then he rushed into the dining room, snatched up my Winchester and cartridge-belt, and handed them to me with a “<i>Lekas</i> (quick)! Come!” + +</p> +<p>He sprang back off the veranda and ran to his quarters where the men were arming themselves with ugly <i>krises</i> and heavy <i>parangs</i>. + +</p> +<p>I had not much hope of finding the tiger, much less of rescuing Baboo, dead or alive. The jungle loomed up like an impassable +wall on all three sides of the compound, so dense, compact, and interwoven, that a bird could not fly through it. Still I +knew that my men, if they had the courage, could follow where the tiger led, and could cut a path for me. +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb16" href="#pb16">16</a>]</span></p> +<p>Aboo Din unloosed a half-dozen pariah dogs that we kept for wild pig, and led them to the spot where the tiger had last lain. +In an instant the entire pack sent up a doleful howl and slunk back to their kennels. + +</p> +<p>Aboo Din lashed them mercilessly and drove them into the jungle, where he followed on his hands and knees. I only waited to +don my green <i>kaki</i> suit and canvas shooting hat and despatch a man to the neighboring <i>kampong</i>, or village, to ask the <i>punghulo</i> (chief) to send me his <i>shikaris</i>, or hunters. Then I plunged into the jungle path that my <i>kebuns</i> had cut with their keen <i>parangs</i>, or jungle-knives. Ten feet within the confines of the forest the metallic glare of the sun and the pitiless reflections +of the China Sea were lost in a dim, green twilight. Far ahead I could hear the half-hearted snarls of the cowardly, deserting +curs, and Aboo Din’s angry voice rapidly exhausting the curses of the Koran on their heads. +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb17" href="#pb17">17</a>]</span></p> +<p>My men, who were naked save for a cotton <i>sarong</i> wound around their waists, slashed here a rubber-vine, there a thorny rattan, and again a mass of creepers that were as tenacious +as iron ropes, all the time pressing forward at a rapid walk. Ofttimes the trail led from the solid ground through a swamp +where grew great sago palms, and out of which a black, sluggish stream flowed toward the straits. Gray iguanas and pendants +of dove orchids hung from the limbs above, and green and gold lizards scuttled up the trees at our approach. + +</p> +<p>At the first plot of wet ground Aboo Din sent up a shout, and awaited my coming. I found him on his hands and knees, gazing +stupidly at the prints in the moist earth. + +</p> +<p>“Tuan,” he shouted, “see Baboo’s feet, one—two—three—more! Praise be to Allah!” + +</p> +<p>I dropped down among the lily-pads and pitcher-plants beside him. There, sure <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb18" href="#pb18">18</a>]</span>enough, close by the catlike footmarks of the tiger, was the perfect impression of one of Baboo’s bare feet. Farther on was +the imprint of another, and then a third. Wonderful! The intervals between the several footmarks were far enough apart for +the stride of a man! + +</p> +<p>“<i>Apa?</i>” (What does it mean?) I said. + +</p> +<p>Aboo Din tore his hair and called upon Allah and the assembled Malays to witness that he was the father of this Baboo, but +that, in the sight of Mohammed, he was innocent of this witchcraft. He had striven from Hari Rahmadan to Hari Rahmanan to +bring this four-year-old up in the light of the Koran, but here he was striding through the jungle, three feet and more at +a step, holding to a tiger’s tail! + +</p> +<p>I shouted with laughter as the truth dawned upon me. It must be so,—Baboo was alive. His footprints were before me. He was +being dragged through the jungle by a full-grown <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb19" href="#pb19">19</a>]</span>Malayan tiger! How else explain his impossible strides, overlapping the beast’s marks! + +</p> +<p>Aboo Din turned his face toward Mecca, and his lips moved in prayer. + +</p> +<p>“May Allah be kind to this tiger!” he mumbled. “He is in the hands of a witch. We shall find him as harmless as an old cat. +Baboo will break out his teeth with a club of billion wood and bite off his claws with his own teeth. Allah is merciful!” + +</p> +<p>We pushed on for half an hour over a dry, foliage-cushioned strip of ground that left no trace of the pursued. At the second +wet spot we dashed forward eagerly and scanned the trail for signs of Baboo, but only the pads of the tiger marred the surface +of the slime. + +</p> +<p>Aboo Din squatted at the root of a huge mangrove and broke forth into loud lamentations, while the last remaining cur took +advantage of his preoccupation to sneak back on the homeward trail. +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb20" href="#pb20">20</a>]</span></p> +<p>“Aboo,” I commanded sarcastically, “<i>pergie!</i> (move on!) Baboo is a man and a witch. He is tired of walking, and is riding on the back of the tiger!” + +</p> +<p>Aboo gazed into my face incredulously for a moment; then, picking up his <i>parang</i> and tightening his <i>sarong</i>, strode on ahead without a word. + +</p> +<p>At noon we came upon a sandy stretch of soil that contained a few diseased cocoanut palms, fringed by a sluggish lagoon, and +a great banian tree whose trunk was hardly more than a mass of interlaced roots. A troop of long-armed <i>wah-wah</i> monkeys were scolding and whistling within its dense foliage with surprising intensity. Occasionally one would drop from +an outreaching limb to one of the pendulous roots, and then, with a shrill whistle of fright, spring back to the protection +of his mates. + +</p> +<p>A Malay silenced them by throwing a half-ripe cocoanut into the midst of the tree, and <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb21" href="#pb21">21</a>]</span>we moved on to the shade of the sturdiest palm. There we sat down to rest and eat some biscuits softened in the milk of a +cocoanut. + +</p> +<p>“There is a boa in the roots of the banian, Aboo,” I said, looking longingly toward its deep shadow. + +</p> +<p>He nodded his head, and drew from the pouch in the knot in his <i>sarong</i> a few broken fragments of areca nut. These he wrapped in a lemon leaf well smeared with lime, and tucked the entire mass +into the corner of his mouth. + +</p> +<p>In a moment a brilliant red juice dyed his lips, and he closed his eyes in happy contentment, oblivious, for the time, of +the sand and fallen trunks that seemed to dance in the parching rays of the sun, oblivious, even, of the loss of his first-born. + +</p> +<p>I was revolving in my mind whether there was any use in continuing the chase, which I would have given up long before, had +I not <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb22" href="#pb22">22</a>]</span>known that a tiger who has eaten to repletion is both timid and lazy. This one had certainly breakfasted on a dog or on some +animal before encountering Baboo. + +</p> +<p>I had hoped that possibly the barking of the curs might have caused him to drop the child, and make off where pursuit would +be impossible; but so far we had, after those footprints, found neither traces of Baboo alive, nor the blood which should +have been seen had the tiger killed the child. + +</p> +<p>Suddenly a long, pear-shaped mangrove-pod struck me full in the breast. I sprang up in surprise, for I was under a cocoanut +tree, and there was no mangrove nearer than the lagoon. + +</p> +<p>A Malay looked up sleepily, and pointed toward the wide-spreading banian. + +</p> +<p>“Monkey, Tuan!” + +</p> +<p>My eyes followed the direction indicated, and could just distinguish a grinning face among the interlacing roots at the base +of <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb23" href="#pb23">23</a>]</span>the tree. So I picked up the green, dartlike end of the pod, and took careful aim at the brown face and milk-white teeth. + +</p> +<p>Then it struck me as peculiar that a monkey, after all the evidence of fright we had so lately witnessed, should seek a hiding-place +that must be within easy reach of its greatest enemy, the boa-constrictor. + +</p> +<p>Aboo Din had aroused himself, and was looking intently in the same direction. Before I could take a step toward the tree he +had leaped to his feet, and was bounding across the little space, shouting, “Baboo! Baboo!” + +</p> +<p>The small brown face instantly disappeared, and we were left staring blankly at a dark opening into the heart of the woody +maze. Then we heard the small, well-known voice of Baboo:— + +</p> +<p>“<i>Tabek</i> (greeting), Tuan! Greeting, Aboo Din! Tuan Consul no whip, Baboo come out.” +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb24" href="#pb24">24</a>]</span></p> +<p>Aboo Din ran his long, naked arm into the opening in pursuit of his first-born—the audacious boy who would make terms with +his white master! + +</p> +<p>“Is it not enough before Allah that this son should cause me, a Hadji, to curse daily, but now he must bewitch tigers and +dictate terms to the Tuan and to me, his father? He shall feel the strength of my wrist; I will—O Allah!” + +</p> +<p>Aboo snatched forth his arm with a howl of pain. One of his fingers was bleeding profusely, and the marks of tiny teeth showed +plainly where Baboo had closed them on the offending hand. + +</p> +<p>“<i>Biak</i>, Baboo, <i>mari</i>!” (Good, come forth!) I said. + +</p> +<p>First the round, soft face of the small miscreant appeared; then the head, and then the naked little body. Aboo Din grasped +him in his arms, regardless of his former threats, or of the blood that was flowing from his wounds. <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb25" href="#pb25">25</a>]</span>Then, amid caresses and promises to Allah to kill fire-fighting cocks, the father hugged and kissed Baboo until he cried out +with pain. + +</p> +<p>After each Malay had taken the little fellow in his arms, I turned to Baboo and said, while I tried to be severe,— + +</p> +<p>“Baboo, where is tiger?” + +</p> +<p>“<i>Sudah mati</i> (dead), Tuan,” he answered with dignity. “Tiger over there, Tuan. <i>Sladang</i> kill. I hid here and wait for Aboo Din!” + +</p> +<p>He touched his forehead with the back of his brown palm. There was nothing, either in the little fellow’s bearing or words, +that betrayed fear or bravado. It was only one mishap more or less to him. + +</p> +<p>We followed Baboo’s lead to the edge of the jungle, and there, stretched out in the hot sand, lay the great, tawny beast, +stamped and pawed until he was almost unrecognizable. + +</p> +<p>All about him were the hoof-marks of the great <i>sladang</i>, the fiercest and wildest animal of the peninsula—the Malayan bull that will <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb26" href="#pb26">26</a>]</span>charge a tiger, a black lion, a boa, and even a crocodile, on sight. Hunters will go miles to avoid one of them, and a herd +of elephants will go trumpeting away in fear at their approach. + +</p> +<p>“<i>Kuching besar</i> (big cat) eat Baboo’s chow dog, then sleep in lallang grass,”—this was the child’s story. “Baboo find, and say, ‘<i>Bagus kuching</i> (pretty kitty), see Baboo’s doll?’ Kuching no like Baboo’s doll mem consul give. Kuching run away. Baboo catch tail, run +too. Kuching go long ways. Baboo ’fraid Aboo Din whip and tell kuching must go back. Kuching pick Baboo up in mouth when Baboo +let go. + + +</p> +<p></p> +<div class="figure"><img border="0" src="images/p000.jpg" alt="Baboo’s good tiger" width="472" height="720"><p class="figureHead">Baboo’s good tiger</p> +<p>“Baboo catch tail, run too” (see page <a href="#pb26" class="pageref">26</a>) +</p> +</div><p> + + +</p> +<p>“Kuching hurt Baboo. Baboo stick fingers in kuching’s eye. Kuching no more hurt Baboo. Kuching stop under banian tree and +sleep. Big <i>sladang</i> come, fight kuching. Baboo sorry for good kuching. Baboo hid from <i>sladang</i>,—Aboo Din no whip Baboo?” + +</p> +<p>His voice dropped to a pathetic little quaver, and he put up his hands with an <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb27" href="#pb27">27</a>]</span>appealing gesture; but his brown legs were drawn back ready to flee should Aboo Din make one hostile move. + +</p> +<p>“Baboo,” I said, “you are a hero!” + +</p> +<p>Baboo opened his little black eyes, but did not dispute me. + +</p> +<p>“You shall go to Mecca when you grow up, and become a Hadji, and when you come back the high <i>kadi</i> shall take you in the mosque and make a <i>kateeb</i> of you,” said I. “Now put your forehead to the ground and thank the good Allah that the kuching had eaten dog before he got +you.” + +</p> +<p>Baboo did as he was told, but I think that in his heart he was more grateful that for once he had evaded a whipping than for +his remarkable escape. A little later the <i>punghulo</i> came up with a half-dozen <i>shikaris</i>, or hunters, and a pack of hunting dogs. The men skinned the mutilated carcass of the only “good tiger” I met during my three +years’ hunting in the jungles of this strange old peninsula. + + + + + +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb28" href="#pb28">28</a>]</span></p> +</div> +<div id="ch2" class="div1"><span class="pagenum"> +[<a href="#toc">Contents</a>] +</span><h2 class="normal">Baboo’s Pirates</h2> +<h2 class="sub">An Adventure in the Pahang River</h2> +<p>There was a scuffle in the outer office, and a thin, piping voice was calling down all the curses of the Koran on the heads +of my great top-heavy Hindu guards. + +</p> +<p>“Sons of dogs,” I heard in the most withering contempt, “I will see the Tuan Consul. Know he is my father.” + +</p> +<p>A tall Sikh, with his great red turban awry and his brown <i>kaki</i> uniform torn and soiled, pushed through the bamboo chicks and into my presence. + +</p> +<p>He was dragging a small bit of naked humanity by the folds of its faded cotton <i>sarong</i>. + +</p> +<p>The powerful soldier was hot and flushed, and a little stream of blood trickling from <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb29" href="#pb29">29</a>]</span>his finger tips showed where they had come in contact with his captive’s teeth. It was as though an elephant had been worried +by a pariah cur. + + +</p> +<p></p> +<div class="figure"><img border="0" src="images/p030.jpg" alt="Baboo and the Sikh" width="463" height="720"><p class="figureHead">Baboo and the Sikh</p> +<p>“It was as though an elephant had been worried by a pariah cur”</p> +</div><p> + + +</p> +<p>“Your Excellency,” he said, salaaming and gasping for breath. + +</p> +<p>“It is Baboo, the Harimau-Anak!” + +</p> +<p>Baboo wrenched from the guard’s grasp and glided up to my desk. The back of his open palm went to his forehead, and his big +brown eyes looked up appealingly into mine. + +</p> +<p>“What is it, Tiger-Child?” I asked, bestowing on him the title the Malays of Kampong Glam had given him as a perpetual reminder +of his famous adventure. + +</p> +<p>Dimples came into either tear-stained cheek. He smoothed out the rents in his small <i>sarong</i>, and without deigning to notice his late captor, said in a soft sing-song voice:— + +</p> +<p>“Tuan Consul, Baboo want to go with the Heaven-Born to Pahang. Baboo six years <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb30" href="#pb30">30</a>]</span>old,—can fight pirates like Aboo Din, the father. May Mohammed make Tuan as odorous as musk!” + +</p> +<p>“You are a boaster before Allah, Baboo,” I said, smiling. + +</p> +<p>Baboo dropped his head in perfectly simulated contrition. + +</p> +<p>“I have thought much, Tuan.” + +</p> +<p>News had come to me that an American merchant ship had been wrecked near the mouth of the Pahang River, and that the Malays, +who were at the time in revolt against the English Resident, had taken possession of its cargo of petroleum and made prisoners +of the crew. + +</p> +<p>I had asked the colonial governor for a guard of five Sikhs and a launch, that I might steam up the coast and investigate +the alleged outrage before appealing officially to the British government. + +</p> +<p>Of course Baboo went, much to the disgust of Aboo Din, the <i>syce</i>. +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb31" href="#pb31">31</a>]</span></p> +<p>I never was able to refuse the little fellow anything, and I knew if I left him behind he would be revenged by running away. + +</p> +<p>I had vowed again and again that Baboo should stay lost the next time he indulged in his periodical vanishing act, but each +time when night came and Aboo Din, the <i>syce</i>, and Fatima, the mother, crept pathetically along the veranda to where I was smoking and steeling my heart against the little +rascal, I would snatch up my cork helmet and spring into my cart, which Aboo Din had kept waiting inside the stables for the +moment when I should relent. + +</p> +<p>Since Baboo had become a hero and earned the appellation of the Harimau-Anak, his vanity directed his footsteps toward Kampong +Glam, the Malay quarter of Singapore. Here he was generally to be found, seated on a richly hued Indian rug, with his feet +drawn up under him, amid a circle of admiring shopkeepers, <i>syces</i>, <i>kebuns</i>, and fishermen, <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb32" href="#pb32">32</a>]</span>narrating for the hundredth time how he had been caught at <span class="corr" id="xd0e742" title="Source: Changi">Changhi</span> by a tiger, carried through the jungle on its back until he came to a great banian tree, into which he had crawled while +the tiger slept, how a <i>sladang</i> (wild bull) came out of the lagoon and killed the tiger, and how Tuan Consul and Aboo Din, the father, had found him and +kissed him many times. + +</p> +<p>Often he enlarged on the well-known story and repeated long conversations that he had carried on with the tiger while they +were journeying through the jungle. + +</p> +<p>A brass lamp hung above his head in which the cocoanut oil sputtered and burned and cast a fitful half-light about the box-like +stall. + +</p> +<p>Only the eager faces of the listeners stood out clear and distinct against the shadowy background of tapestries from Madras +and Bokhara, soft rich rugs from Afghanistan and Persia, curiously wrought finger bowls of brass <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb33" href="#pb33">33</a>]</span>and copper from Delhi and Siam, and piles of cunningly painted <i>sarongs</i> from Java. + +</p> +<p>Close against a naked fisherman sat the owner of the bazaar in tall, conical silk-plaited hat and flowing robes, ministering +to the wants of the little actor, as the soft, monotonous voice paused for a brief instant for the tiny cups of black coffee. + +</p> +<p>I never had the heart to interrupt him in the midst of one of these dramatic recitals, but would stand respectfully without +the circle of light until he had finished the last sentence. + +</p> +<p>He was not frightened when I thrust the squatting natives right and left, and he did not forget to arise and touch the back +of his open palm to his forehead, with a calm and reverent, “<i>Tabek, Tuan</i>” (Greeting, my lord). +</p> +<hr class="tb"><p> + +</p> +<p>So Baboo went with us to fight pirates. + +</p> +<p>He unrolled his mat out on the bow where every dash of warm salt water wet <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb34" href="#pb34">34</a>]</span>his brown skin, and where he could watch the flying fish dash across our way. + +</p> +<p>He was very quiet during the two days of the trip, as though he were fully conscious of the heavy responsibility that rested +upon his young shoulders. I had called him a boaster and it had cut him to the quick. + +</p> +<p>We found the wreck of the <i>Bunker Hill</i> on a sunken coral reef near the mouth of the Pahang River, but every vestige of her cargo and stores was gone, even to the +glass in her cabin windows and the brasses on her rails. + +</p> +<p>We worked in along the shore and kept a lookout for camps or signals, but found none. + +</p> +<p>I decided to go up the river as far as possible in the launch in hope of coming across some trace of the missing crew, although +I was satisfied that they had been captured by the noted rebel chief, the Orang Kayah of Semantan, or by his more famous lieutenant, +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb35" href="#pb35">35</a>]</span>the crafty Panglima Muda of Jempol, and were being held for ransom. + +</p> +<p>It was late in the afternoon when we entered the mouth of the Sungi Pahang. + +</p> +<p>Aboo Din advised a delay until the next morning. + +</p> +<p>“The Orang Kayah’s Malays are pirates, Tuan,” he said, with a sinister shrug of his bare shoulders, “he has many men and swift +<i>praus</i>; the Dutch, at Rio, have sold them guns, and they have their <i>krises</i>,—they are cowards in the day.” + +</p> +<p>I smiled at the <i>syce’s</i> fears. + +</p> +<p>I knew that the days of piracy in the Straits of Malacca, save for an occasional outbreak of high-sea petty larceny on a Chinese +lumber junk or a native trader’s <i>tonkang</i>, were past, and I did not believe that the rebels would have the hardihood to attack, day or night, a boat, however unprotected, +bearing the American flag. + +</p> +<p>For an hour or more we ran along between <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb36" href="#pb36">36</a>]</span>the mangrove-bordered shores against a swiftly flowing, muddy current. + +</p> +<p>The great tangled roots of these trees stood up out of the water like a fretwork of lace, and the interwoven branches above +our heads shut out the glassy glare of the sun. We pushed on until the dim twilight faded out, and only a phosphorescent glow +on the water remained to reveal the snags that marked our course. + +</p> +<p>The launch was anchored for the night close under the bank, where the maze of mangroves was beginning to give place to the +solid ground and the jungle. + +</p> +<p>Myriads of fireflies settled down on us and hung from the low limbs of the overhanging trees, relieving the hot, murky darkness +with their thousands of throbbing lamps. + +</p> +<p>From time to time a crocodile splashed in the water as he slid heavily down the clayey bank at the bow. + +</p> +<p>In the trees and rubber-vines all about us <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb37" href="#pb37">37</a>]</span>a colony of long-armed <i>wah-wah</i> monkeys whistled and chattered, and farther away the sharp, rasping note of a cicada kept up a continuous protest at our +invasion. + +</p> +<p>At intervals the long, quivering yell of a tiger frightened the garrulous monkeys into silence, and made us peer apprehensively +toward the impenetrable blackness of the jungle. + +</p> +<p>Aboo Din came to me as I was arranging my mosquito curtains for the night. He was casting quick, timid glances over his shoulder +as he talked. + +</p> +<p>“Tuan, I no like this place. Too close bank. Ten boat-lengths down stream better. Baboo swear by Allah he see faces behind +trees,—once, twice. Baboo good eyes.” + +</p> +<p>I shook off the uncanny feeling that the place was beginning to cast over me, and turned fiercely on the faithful Aboo Din. + +</p> +<p>He slunk away with a low salaam, muttering something about the Heaven-Born being <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb38" href="#pb38">38</a>]</span>all wise, and later I saw him in deep converse with his first-born under a palm-thatched <i>cadjang</i> on the bow. + +</p> +<p>I was half inclined to take Aboo Din’s advice and drop down the stream. Then it occurred to me that I might better face an +imaginary foe than the whirlpools and sunken snags of the Pahang. + +</p> +<p>I posted sentinels fore and aft and lay down and closed my eyes to the legion of fireflies that made the night luminous, and +my ears to the low, musical chant that arose fitfully from among my Malay servants on the stern. + +</p> +<p>The Sikhs were big, massive fellows, fully six feet tall, with towering red turbans that accentuated their height fully a +foot. + +</p> +<p>They were regular artillery-men from Fort Canning, and had seen service all over India. + +</p> +<p>They had not been in Singapore long enough to become acquainted with the Malay language or character, but they knew their +duty, and I trusted to their military training <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb39" href="#pb39">39</a>]</span>rather than to my Malay’s superior knowledge for our safety during the night. + +</p> +<p>I found out later that the cunning in Baboo’s small brown finger was worth all the precision and drill in the Sikh sergeant’s +great body. + +</p> +<p>I fell asleep at last, lulled by the tenderly crooned promises of the Koran, and the drowsy, intermittent prattle of the monkeys +among the varnished leaves above. The night was intensely hot; not a breath of air could stir within our living-cabin, and +the cooling moisture which always comes with nightfall on the equator was lapped up by the thirsty fronds above our heads, +so that I had not slept many hours before I awoke dripping with perspiration, and faint. + +</p> +<p>There was an impression in my mind that I had been awakened by the falling of glass. + +</p> +<p>The Sikh saluted silently as I stepped out on the deck. + +</p> +<p>It lacked some hours of daylight, and <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb40" href="#pb40">40</a>]</span>there was nothing to do but go back to my bed, vowing never again to camp for the night along the steaming shores of a jungle-covered +stream. + +</p> +<p>I slept but indifferently; I missed the cooling swish of the <i>punkah</i>, and all through my dreams the crackle and breaking of glass seemed to mingle with the insistent buzz of the tiger-gnats. + +</p> +<p>Baboo’s diminutive form kept flitting between me and the fireflies. + +</p> +<p>The first half-lights of morning were struggling down through the green canopy above when I was brought to my feet by the +discharge of a Winchester and a long, shrill cry of fright and pain. + +</p> +<p>Before I could disentangle myself from the meshes of the mosquito net I could see dimly a dozen naked forms drop lightly on +to the deck from the obscurity of the bank, followed in each case by a long, piercing scream of pain. +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb41" href="#pb41">41</a>]</span></p> +<p>I snatched up my revolver and rushed out on to the deck in my bare feet. + +</p> +<p>Some one grasped me by the shoulder and shouted:— + +</p> +<p>“<i>Jaga biak, biak, Tuan</i> (be careful, Tuan), pirates!” + +</p> +<p>I recognized Aboo Din’s voice, and I checked myself just as my feet came in contact with a broken beer bottle. + +</p> +<p>The entire surface of the little deck was strewn with glittering star-shaped points that corresponded with the fragments before +me. + +</p> +<p>I had not a moment to investigate, however, for in the gloom, where the bow of the launch touched the foliage-meshed bank, +a scene of wild confusion was taking place. + +</p> +<p>Shadowy forms were leaping, one after another, from the branches above on to the deck. I slowly cocked my revolver, doubting +my senses, for each time one of the invaders reached the deck he sprang into the air with the long, thrilling cry of pain +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb42" href="#pb42">42</a>]</span>that had awakened me, and with another bound was on the bulwarks and over the side of the launch, clinging to the railing. + +</p> +<p>With each cry, Baboo’s mocking voice came out, shrill and exultant, from behind a pile of life-preservers. “O Allah, judge +the dogs. They would <i>kris</i> the great Tuan as he slept—the pariahs!—but they forgot so mean a thing as Baboo!” + +</p> +<p>The smell of warm blood filled the air, and a low snarl among the rubber-vines revealed the presence of a tiger. + +</p> +<p>I felt Aboo Din’s hand tremble on my shoulder. + +</p> +<p>The five Sikhs were drawn up in battle array before the cabin door, waiting for the word of command. I glanced at them and +hesitated. + +</p> +<p>“<i>Tid ’apa, Tuan</i>” (never mind), Aboo Din whispered with a proud ring in his voice. + +</p> +<p>“Baboo blow Orang Kayah’s men away with the breath of his mouth.” +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb43" href="#pb43">43</a>]</span></p> +<p>As he spoke the branches above the bow were thrust aside and a dark form hung for an instant as though in doubt, then shot +straight down upon the corrugated surface of the deck. + +</p> +<p>As before, a shriek of agony heralded the descent, followed by Baboo’s laugh, then the dim shape sprang wildly upon the bulwark, +lost its hold, and went over with a great splash among the labyrinth of snakelike mangrove roots. + +</p> +<p>There was the rushing of many heavy forms through the red mud, a snapping of great jaws, and there was no mistaking the almost +mortal cry that arose from out the darkness. I had often heard it when paddling softly up one of the wild Malayan rivers. + +</p> +<p>It was the death cry of a <i>wah-wah</i> monkey facing the cruel jaws of a crocodile. + +</p> +<p>I plunged my fingers into my ears to smother the sound. I understood it all <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb44" href="#pb44">44</a>]</span>now. Baboo’s pirates, the dreaded Orang Kayah’s rebels, were the troop of monkeys we had heard the night before in the tambusa +trees. + +</p> +<p>“Baboo,” I shouted, “come here! What does this all mean?” + +</p> +<p>The Tiger-Child glided from behind the protecting pile, and came close up to my legs. + +</p> +<p>“Tuan,” he whimpered, “Baboo see many faces behind trees. Baboo ’fraid for Tuan,—Tuan great and good,—save Baboo from tiger,—Baboo +break up all glass bottles—old bottles—Tuan no want old bottle—Baboo and Aboo Din, the father, put them on deck so when Orang +Kayah’s men come out of jungle and drop from trees on deck they cut their feet on glass. Baboo is through talking,—Tuan no +whip Baboo!” + +</p> +<p>There was the pathetic little quaver in his voice that I knew so well. + +</p> +<p>“But they were monkeys, Baboo, not pirates.” +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb45" href="#pb45">45</a>]</span></p> +<p>Baboo shrugged his brown shoulders and kept his eyes on my feet. + +</p> +<p>“Allah is good!” he muttered. + +</p> +<p>Allah was good; they might have been pirates. + +</p> +<p>The snarl of the tiger was growing more insistent and near. I gave the order, and the boat backed out into mid-stream. + +</p> +<p>As the sun was reducing the gloom of the sylvan tunnel to a translucent twilight, we floated down the swift current toward +the ocean. + +</p> +<p>I had given up all hope of finding the shipwrecked men, and decided to ask the government to send a gunboat to demand their +release. + +</p> +<p>As the bow of the launch passed the wreck of the <i>Bunker Hill</i> and responded to the long even swell of the Pacific, Baboo beckoned sheepishly to Aboo Din, and together they swept all trace +of his adventure into the green waters. +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb46" href="#pb46">46</a>]</span></p> +<p>Among the souvenirs of my sojourn in Golden Chersonese is a bit of amber-colored glass bearing the world-renowned name of +a London brewer. There is a dark stain on one side of it that came from the hairy foot of one of Baboo’s “pirates.” + + + + +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb47" href="#pb47">47</a>]</span></p> +</div> +<div id="ch3" class="div1"><span class="pagenum"> +[<a href="#toc">Contents</a>] +</span><h2 class="normal">How we Played Robinson Crusoe</h2> +<h2 class="sub">In the Straits of Malacca</h2> +<p>Two hours’ steam south from Singapore, out into the famous Straits of Malacca, or one day’s steam north from the equator, +stands Raffles’s Lighthouse. Sir Stamford Raffles, the man from whom it took its name, rests in Westminster Abbey, and a heroic-sized +bronze statue of him graces the centre of the beautiful ocean esplanade of Singapore, the city he founded. + +</p> +<p>It was on the rocky island on which stands this light, that we—the mistress and I—played Robinson Crusoe, or, to be nearer +the truth, Swiss Family Robinson. + +</p> +<p>It was hard to imagine, I confess, that the beautiful steam launch that brought us was a wreck; that our half-dozen Chinese +servants <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb48" href="#pb48">48</a>]</span>were members of the family; that the ton of impedimenta was the flotsam of the sea; that the Eurasian keeper and his attendants +were cannibals; but we closed our eyes to all disturbing elements, and only remembered that we were alone on a sunlit rock +in the midst of a sunlit sea, and that the dreams of our childhood were, to some extent, realized. + +</p> +<p>What live American boy has not had the desire, possibly but half-admitted, to some day be like his hero, dear old Crusoe, +on a tropical island, monarch of all, hampered by no dictates of society or fashion? I admit my desire, and, further, that +it did not leave me as I grew older. + +</p> +<p>We had just time to inspect our little island home before the sun went down, far out in the Indian Ocean. + +</p> +<p>Originally the island had been but a barren, uneven rock, the resting-place for gulls; but now its summit has been made flat +by a <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb49" href="#pb49">49</a>]</span>coating of concrete. There is just enough earth between the concrete and the rocky edges of the island to support a circle +of cocoanut trees, a great almond tree, and a queer-looking banian tree, whose wide-spreading arms extend over nearly half +the little plaza. Below the lighthouse, and set back like caves into the side of the island, are the kitchen and the servants’ +quarters, a covered passageway connecting them with the rotunda of the tower, in which we have set our dining table. + +</p> +<p>Ah Ming, our “China boy,” seemed to be inveterate in his determination to spoil our Swiss Family Robinson illusion. We were +hardly settled before he came to us. + +</p> +<p>“<i>Mem</i>” (mistress), “no have got ice-e-blox. Ice-e all glow away.” + +</p> +<p>“Very well, Ming. Dig a hole in the ground, and put the ice in it.” + +</p> +<p>“How can dig? Glound all same, hard like ice-e.” +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb50" href="#pb50">50</a>]</span></p> +<p>“Well, let the ice melt,” I replied. “Robinson Crusoe had no ice.” + +</p> +<p>In a half-hour Jim, the cook, came up to speak to the “<i>Mem</i>.” He lowered his cue, brushed the creases out of his spotless shirt, drew his face down, and commenced:— + +</p> +<p>“Mem, no have got chocolate, how can make puddlin’?” + +</p> +<p>I laughed outright. Jim looked hurt. + +</p> +<p>“Jim, did you ever hear of one Crusoe?” + +</p> +<p>“No, <i>Tuan</i>!” (Lord.) + +</p> +<p>“Well, he was a Tuan who lived for thirty years without once eating chocolate ‘puddlin’.’ We’ll not eat any for ten days. +<i>Sabe?</i>” + +</p> +<p>Jim retired, mortified and astonished. + +</p> +<p>Inside of another half-hour, the <i>Tukang Ayer</i>, or water-carrier, arrived on the scene. He was simply dressed in a pair of knee-breeches. He complained of a lack of silver +polish, and was told to pound up a stone for the knives, and let the silver alone. + +</p> +<p>We are really in the heart of a small archipelago. <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb51" href="#pb51">51</a>]</span>All about us are verdure-covered islands. They are now the homes of native fishermen, but a century ago they were hiding-places +for the fierce Malayan pirates whose sanguinary deeds made the peninsula a byword in the mouths of Europeans. + +</p> +<p>A rocky beach extends about the island proper, contracting and expanding as the tide rises and falls. On this beach a hundred +and one varieties of shells glisten in the salt water, exposing their delicate shades of coloring to the rays of the sun. +Coral formations of endless design and shape come to view through the limpid spectrum, forming a perfect submarine garden +of wondrous beauty. Through the shrubs, branches, ferns, and sponges of coral, the brilliantly colored fish of the Southern +seas sport like goldfish in some immense aquarium. + +</p> +<p>We draw out our chairs within the protection of the almond tree, and watch the sun sink slowly to a level with the masts of +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb52" href="#pb52">52</a>]</span>a bark that is bound for Java and the Bornean coasts. The black, dead lava of our island becomes molten for the time, and +the flakes of salt left on the coral reef by the outgoing tide are filled with suggestions of the gold of the days of ’49. +A faint breeze rustles among the long, fan-like leaves of the palm, and brings out the rich yellow tints with their background +of green. A clear, sweet aroma comes from out the almond tree. The red sun and the white sheets of the bark sail away together +for the Spice Islands of the South Pacific. + +</p> +<p>We sleep in a room in the heart of the lighthouse. The stairway leading to it is so steep that we find it necessary to hold +on to a knotted rope as we ascend. Hundreds of little birds, no larger than sparrows, dash by the windows, flying into the +face of the gale that rages during the night, keeping up all the time a sharp, high note that sounds like wind blowing on +telegraph wires. +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb53" href="#pb53">53</a>]</span></p> +<p>Every morning, at six o’clock, Ah Ming clambers up the perpendicular stairway, with tea and toast. We swallow it hurriedly, +wrap a <i>sarong</i> about us, and take a dip in the sea, the while keeping our eyes open for sharks. Often, after a bath, while stretched out +in a long chair, we see the black fins of a man-eater cruising just outside the reef. I do not know that I ever hit one, but +I have used a good deal of lead firing at them. + +</p> +<p>One morning we started on an exploring expedition, in the keeper’s jolly-boat. It was only a short distance to the first island, +a small rocky one, with a bit of sandy beach, along which were scattered the charred embers of past fires. From under our +feet darted the grotesque little robber-crabs, with their stolen shell houses on their backs. A great white jellyfish, looking +like a big tapioca pudding, had been washed up with the tide out of the reach of the sea, and a small colony of ants was feasting +on it. <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb54" href="#pb54">54</a>]</span>We did not try to explore the interior of the islet. We named it Fir Island from its crown of fir-like casuarina trees, which +sent out on every breeze a balsamic odor that was charged with far-away New England recollections. + +</p> +<p>The next island was a large one. The keeper said it was called <i>Pulo Seneng</i>, or Island of Leisure, and held a little <i>kampong</i>, or village of Malays, under an old <i>punghulo</i>, or chief, named Wahpering. We found, on nearing the verdure-covered island, that it looked much larger than it really was. +The woods grew out into the sea for a quarter of a mile. We entered the wood by a narrow walled inlet, and found ourselves +for the first time in a mangrove swamp. The trees all seemed to be growing on stilts. A perfect labyrinth of roots stood up +out of the water, like a rough scaffold, on which rested the tree trunks, high and dry above the flood. From the limbs of +the trees hung <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb55" href="#pb55">55</a>]</span>the seed pods, two feet in length, sharp-pointed at the lower end, while on the upper end, next to the tree, was a russet +pear-shaped growth. They are so nicely balanced that when in their maturity they drop from the branches, they fall upright +in the mud, literally planting themselves. + +</p> +<p>The <i>punghulo’s</i> house, or bungalow, stood at the head of the inlet. The old man—he must have been sixty—donned his best clothes, relieved +his mouth of a great red quid of betel, and came out to welcome us. He gracefully touched his forehead with the back of his +open palm, and mumbled the Malay greeting:— + +</p> +<p>“<i>Tabek, Tuan?</i>” (How are you, my lord?) + +</p> +<p>When the keeper gave him our cards, and announced us in florid language, the genial old fellow touched his forehead again, +and in his best Bugis Malay begged the great Rajah and Ranee to enter his humble home. +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb56" href="#pb56">56</a>]</span></p> +<p>The only way of entering a Malay home is by a rickety ladder six feet high, and through a four-foot opening. I am afraid that +the great “Rajah and Ranee” lost some of their lately acquired dignity in accepting the invitation. + +</p> +<p>Wahpering’s bungalow, other than being larger and roomier than the ordinary bungalow, was exactly like all others in style +and architecture. + +</p> +<p>It was built close to the water’s edge, on palm posts six feet above the ground. This was for protection from the tiger, from +thieves, from the water, and for sanitary reasons. Within the house we could just stand upright. The floor was of split bamboo, +and was elastic to the foot, causing a sensation which at first made us step carefully. The open places left by the crossing +of the bamboo slats were a great convenience to the <i>punghulo’s</i> wives, as they could sweep all the refuse of the house through <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb57" href="#pb57">57</a>]</span>them; they might also be a great accommodation to the <i>punghulo’s</i> enemies, if he had any, for they could easily ascertain the exact mat on which he slept, and stab him with their keen <i>krises</i> from beneath. + +</p> +<p>In one corner of the room was the hand-loom on which the <i>punghulo’s</i> old wife was weaving the universal article of dress, the <i>sarong</i>. + +</p> +<p>The weaving of a <i>sarong</i> represents the labor of twenty days, and when we gave the dried-up old worker two dollars and a half for one, her <i>syrah</i>-stained gums broke forth from between her bright-red lips in a ghastly grin of pleasure. + +</p> +<p>There must have been the representatives of at least four generations under the <i>punghulo’s</i> hospitable roof. Men and women, alike, were dressed in the skirt-like <i>sarong</i> which fell from the waist down; above that some of the older women wore another garment called a <i>kabaya</i>. The married women <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb58" href="#pb58">58</a>]</span>were easily distinguishable by their swollen gums and filed teeth. + +</p> +<p>The roof and sides of the house were of <i>attap</i>. This is made from the long, arrow-like leaves of the nipah palm. Unlike its brother palms—the cocoa, the sago, the gamooty, +and the areca—the nipah is short, and more like a giant cactus in growth. Its leaves are stripped off by the natives, then +bent over a bamboo rod and sewed together with fibres of the same palm. When dry they become glazed and waterproof. + +</p> +<p>The tall, slender areca palm, which stands about every <i>kampong</i>, supplies the natives with their great luxury—an acorn, known as the betel-nut, which, when crushed and mixed with lime leaves, +takes the place of our chewing tobacco. In fact, the bright-red juice seen oozing from the corners of a Malay’s mouth is as +much a part of himself as is his <i>sarong</i> or <i>kris</i>. Betel-nut chewing holds its own <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb59" href="#pb59">59</a>]</span>against the opium of the Chinese and the tobacco of the European. + +</p> +<p>As soon as we shook hands ceremoniously with the <i>punghulo’s</i> oldest wife, and <i>tabeked</i> to the rest of his big family, the old man scrambled down the ladder, and sent a boy up a cocoanut tree for some fresh nuts. +In a moment half a dozen of the great, oval, green nuts came pounding down into the sand. Another little fellow snatched them +up, and with a sharp <i>parang</i>, or hatchet-like knife, cut away the soft shuck until the cocoanut took the form of a pyramid, at the apex of which he bored +a hole, and a stream of delicious, cool milk gurgled out. We needed no second invitation to apply our lips to the hole. The +meat inside was so soft that we could eat it with a spoon. The cocoanut of commerce contains hardly a suggestion of the tender, +fleshy pulp of a freshly picked nut. + +</p> +<p>We left the <i>punghulo’s</i> house with the old chief in the bow of our boat—he insisted <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb60" href="#pb60">60</a>]</span>upon seeing that we were properly announced to his subjects—and proceeded along the coast for half a mile, and then up a swampy +lagoon to its head. + +</p> +<p>The tall tops of the palms wrapped everything in a cool, green twilight. The waters of the lagoon were filled with little +bronze forms, swimming and sporting about in its tepid depths regardless of the cruel eyes that gleamed at them from great +log-like forms among the mangrove roots. + +</p> +<p>Dozens of naked children fled up the rickety ladders of their homes as we approached. Ring-doves flew through the trees, and +tame monkeys chattered at us from every corner. The men came out to meet us, and did the hospitalities of their village; and +when we left, our boat was loaded down with presents of fish and fruit. + +</p> +<p>Almost every day after that did we visit the <i>kampong</i>, and were always welcomed in the same cordial manner. +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb61" href="#pb61">61</a>]</span></p> +<p>Wahpering was tireless in his attentions. He kept his <i>Sampan Besar</i>, or big boat, with its crew at our disposal day after day. + +</p> +<p>One day I showed him the American flag. He gazed at it thoughtfully and said, “<i>Biak!</i>” (Good.) “How big your country?” I tried to explain. He listened for a moment. “Big as <i>Negri Blanda</i>?” (Holland.) I laughed. “A thousand times larger!” The old fellow shook his head sadly, and looked at me reproachfully. + +</p> +<p>“<i>Tidah! Tidah!</i>” (No, no.) “Rajah, <i>Orang Blanda</i> (Dutchman) show me chart of the world. Holland all red. Take almost all the world. Rest of country small, small. All in one +little corner. How can Rajah say his country big?” + +</p> +<p>There was no denying the old man’s knowledge; I, too, had seen one of these Dutch maps of the world, which are circulated +in Java to make the natives think that Holland is the greatest nation on earth. +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb62" href="#pb62">62</a>]</span></p> +<p>One day glided into another with surprising rapidity. We could swim, explore, or lie out in our long chairs and read and listlessly +dream. All about our little island the silver sheen of the sea was checkered with sails. These strange native craft held for +me a lasting fascination. I gazed out at them as they glided by and saw in them some of the rose-colored visions of my youth. +Piracy, Indian Rajahs, and spice islands seemed to live in their queer red sails and palm-matting roofs. At night a soft, +warm breeze blew from off shore and lulled us to sleep ere we were aware. + +</p> +<p>One morning the old chief made us a visit before we were up. He announced his approach by a salute from a muzzle-loading musket. +I returned it by a discharge from my revolver. He had come over with the morning tide to ask us to spend the day, as his guests, +wild-pig hunting. Of course we accepted with alacrity. I am not going to <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb63" href="#pb63">63</a>]</span>tell you how we found all the able-bodied men and dogs on the island awaiting us, how they beat the jungle with frantic yells +and shouts while we waited on the opposite side, or even how many pigs we shot. It would all take too long. + +</p> +<p>We went fishing every day. The many-colored and many-shaped fish we caught were a constant wonderment to us. One was bottle-green, +with sky-blue fins and tail, and striped with lines of gold. Its skin was stiff and firm as patent leather. Another was pale +blue, with a bright-red proboscis two inches long. We caught cuttle-fish with great lustrous eyes, long jelly feelers, and +a plentiful supply of black fluid; squibs, prawns, mullets, crabs, and devil-fish. These last are considered great delicacies +by the natives. We had one fried. Its meat was perfectly white, and tasted like a tallow candle. + +</p> +<p>The day on which we were to leave, <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb64" href="#pb64">64</a>]</span>Wahpering brought us some fruit and fish and a pair of ring-doves. Motioning me to one side, he whispered, the while looking +shyly at the mistress, “Ranee very beautiful! How much you pay?” I was staggered for the moment, and made him repeat his question. +This time I could not mistake him. “How much you pay for wife?” He gave his thumb a jerk in the direction of the mistress. +I saw that he was really serious, so I collected my senses, and with a practical, businesslike air answered, “Two hundred +dollars.” The old fellow sighed. + +</p> +<p>“The great Rajah very rich! I pay fifty for best wife.” + +</p> +<p>I have not tried to tell you all we did on our tropical island playing Robinson Crusoe. I have only tried to convey some little +impression of a happy ten days that will ever be remembered as one more of those glorious, Oriental chapters in our lives +which are filled with the gorgeous colors of crimson <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb65" href="#pb65">65</a>]</span>and gold, the delicate perfumes of spice-laden breezes, and with imperishable visions of a strange, old-world life. + +</p> +<p>They are chapters that we can read over and over again with an ever increasing interest as the years roll by<span class="corr" id="xd0e1213" title="Not in source">.</span> + + + + +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb66" href="#pb66">66</a>]</span></p> +</div> +<div id="ch4" class="div1"><span class="pagenum"> +[<a href="#toc">Contents</a>] +</span><h2 class="normal">The Sarong</h2> +<h2 class="sub">The Malay’s Chief Garment</h2> +<p>No one knows who invented the <i>sarong</i>. When the great Sir Francis Drake skirted the beautiful jungle-bound shores of that strange Asian peninsula which seems forever +to be pointing a wondering finger into the very heart of the greatest archipelago in the world, he found its inhabitants wearing +the <i>sarong</i>. After a lapse of three centuries they still wear it,—neither Hindu invasion, Mohammedan conversion, Chinese immigration, +nor European conquest has ever taken from them their national dress. Civilization has introduced many articles of clothing; +but no matter how many of these are adopted, the Malay, from his Highness the Sultan of Johore, to the poorest fisherman <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb67" href="#pb67">67</a>]</span>of a squalid <i>kampong</i> on the muddy banks of a mangrove-hidden stream, religiously wears the <i>sarong</i>. + +</p> +<p>It is only an oblong cloth, this fashion-surviving garb, from two to four feet in width and some two yards long; sewn together +at the ends. It looks like a gingham bag with the bottom out. The wearer steps into it, and with two or three ingenious twists +tightens it round the waist, thus forming a skirt and, at the same time, a belt in which he carries the <i>kris</i>, or snake-like dagger, the inevitable pouch of areca nut for chewing, and the few copper cents that he dares not trust in +his unlocked hut. The man’s skirt falls to his knees, and among the poor class forms his only article of dress, while the +woman’s reaches to her ankles and is worn in connection with another <i>sarong</i> that is thrown over her head as a veil, so that when she is abroad and meets one of the opposite sex she can, Moslem-like, +draw it about her face in the <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb68" href="#pb68">68</a>]</span>form of a long, narrow slit, showing only her coal-black eyes and thinly pencilled eyebrows. + +</p> +<p>In style or design the <i>sarong</i> never changes. Like the tartan of the Highlanders, which it greatly resembles, it is invariably a check of gay colors. They +are all woven of silk or cotton, or of silk and cotton mixed, by the native women, and no <i>attap</i>-thatched home is complete without its hand-loom. + +</p> +<p>One day we crawled up the narrow, rickety ladder that led into the two by four opening of old Wahpering’s palm-shaded home. +The little <i>punghulo</i> or chief, touched his forehead with the back of his open palm as we advanced cautiously over the open bamboo floor toward +his old wife, who was seated in one corner by a low, horizontal window, weaving a <i>sarong</i> on a hand-loom. She looked up pleasantly with a soft “<i>Tabek</i>” (Greeting), and went on throwing her shuttle deftly through the brilliantly colored threads. The sharp bang of the dark, +kamooning-wood bar drove the <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb69" href="#pb69">69</a>]</span>thread in place and left room for another. Back and forth flew the shuttle, and thread after thread was added to the fabric, +yet no perceptible addition seemed to be made. + +</p> +<p>“How long does it take to finish it?” I asked in Malay. + +</p> +<p>“Twenty days,” she answered, with a broad smile, showing her black, filed teeth and <i>syrah</i>-stained lips. + +</p> +<p>The red and brown <i>sarong</i> which she wore twisted tightly up under her armpits had cost her almost a month’s work; the green and yellow one her chief +wore about his waist, a month more; the ones she used as screens to divide the interior into rooms, and those of the bevy +of sons and daughters of all ages that crowded about us each cost a month’s more; and yet the labor and material combined +in each represented less than two dollars of our money at the Bazaar in Singapore. + +</p> +<p>I had not the heart to take the one that she offered the mistress, but insisted on giving <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb70" href="#pb70">70</a>]</span>in exchange a pearl-handled penknife, which the chief took, with many a touch of his forehead, “as a remembrance of the condescension +of the <i>Orang American Rajah</i>.” + +</p> +<p>Wahpering’s wife was not dressed to receive us, for we had come swiftly up the dim lagoon, over which her home was built, +and had landed on the sandy beach unannounced. Had she known that we were coming, she would have been dressed as became the +wife of the <i>Punghulo of Pulo Seneng</i> (Island of Leisure). The long, black hair would have been washed beautifully clean with the juice of limes, and twisted up +as a crown on the top of her head. In it would have been stuck pins of the deep-red gold from Mt. Ophir, and sprays of jasmine +and <i>chumpaka</i>. Under her silken <i>sarong</i> would have been an inner garment of white cotton, about her waist a zone of beaded cloth held in front by an oval plate, +and over all would have been thrown a long, loose dressing-gown, <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb71" href="#pb71">71</a>]</span>called the <i>kabaya</i>, falling to her knees and fastened down the front to the silver girdle with golden brooches. Her toes would have been covered +with sandals cunningly embroidered in colored beads and gold tinsel. + +</p> +<p>Wahpering, too, might have added to his <i>sarong</i> a thin vest, buttoned close up to the neck, a light dimity <i>baju</i>, or jacket, and a pair of loose silk drawers. They made no apology for their appearance, but did the honors of the house +with a native grace, regaling us with the cool, fresh milk of the cocoanut, and the delicious globes of the mangosteens. + +</p> +<p>The glare of the noonday sun, here on the equator, is inconceivable. It beats down in bald, irregular waves of heat that seem +to stifle every living being and to burn the foliage to a cinder. Even the sharp, insistent whir of the cicada ceases when +the thermometer on the sunny side of our palm-thatched <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb72" href="#pb72">72</a>]</span>bungalow reaches 155°. If I am forced to go outside, I don my cork helmet, and hold a paper umbrella above it. Even then, +after I have gone a half-hour, I feel dizzy and sick. I pass native after native, whose only head covering, if they have any +at all save their short-cut black hair, is a handkerchief, stiffened, and tied with a peculiar twist on the head, or a rimless +cap with possibly a text of the Koran embroidered on its front. It is only when they are on the sea from early morning to +sunset, that they think it worth while to protect their heads with an umbrella-shaped, cane-worked head frame like those worn +by the natives of Siam and China. The women I meet simply draw their <i>sarongs</i> more closely about their heads as the sun ascends higher and higher into the heavens, and go clattering off down the road +in their wooden pattens, unconscious of my envy or wonderment. + +</p> +<p>The <i>sarong</i> is more to the Malay than is <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb73" href="#pb73">73</a>]</span>the kilt to the Scotchman. It is his dress by day and his covering at night. He uses it as a sail when far out from land in +his cockle-shell boat, or as a bag in which to carry his provisions when following an elephant path through the dense jungle. + +</p> +<p>The checks, in its design, although indistinguishable to the European, differ according to his tribe or clan, and serve him +as a means of identification wherever he may be on the peninsula. + +</p> +<p>The <i>sarong</i> and <i>kris</i> are distinctly and solely Malayan; they are shared with no other country; they are to be placed side by side with the green +turban of the Moslem pilgrim and the cimeter of the Prophet. + +</p> +<p>A history of one, like the history of the other, embraces all that is tragical or romantic in Malayan story. + + + +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb74" href="#pb74">74</a>]</span></p> +</div> +<div id="ch5" class="div1"><span class="pagenum"> +[<a href="#toc">Contents</a>] +</span><h2 class="normal">The Kris</h2> +<h2 class="sub">And how the Malays use it</h2> +<p>In an old dog-eared copy of Monteith’s Geography, I remember a picture of a half-dozen pirate <i>prahus</i> attacking a merchantman off a jungle-bordered shore. A blazing sun hung high in the heavens above the fated ship, and, to +my youthful imagination, seemed to beat down on the tropical scene with a fierce, remorseless intensity. The wedge-shaped +tops of some palm-thatched and palm-shaded huts could just be seen, set well back from the shore. + +</p> +<p>I used to think that if I were a boy on that ship, I would slip quietly overboard, swim ashore, and while the pirates were +busy fighting, I would set fire to their homes and so deliver the ship from their clutches. Little <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb75" href="#pb75">75</a>]</span>did I know then of the acres of bewildering mangrove swamps filled with the treacherous crocodiles that lie between the low-water +line and the firm ground of the coast. + +</p> +<p>But always the most striking thing in the little woodcut to me were the curious, snake-like knives that the naked natives +held in their hands. I had never seen anything like them before. I went to the encyclopædia and found that the name of the +knife was spelled <i>kris</i> and pronounced <i>creese</i>. + +</p> +<p>The day-dreams which seemed impossible in the days of Monteith’s Geography have since been realized. I am living, perhaps, +within sight of the very place where the scene of the picture was laid; for it was supposed to be illustrative of the Malay +Peninsula; and, as I write, one of those snake-like <i>krises</i> lies on the table before me. It is a handsomer <i>kris</i> than those used by the actors in that much-studied picture of my youth. The sheath and handle are of solid gold—<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb76" href="#pb76">76</a>]</span>a rich yellow gold, mined at the foot of Mount Ophir, the very same mountain so famous in Bible history, from which King Solomon +brought “gold, peacocks’ feathers, and monkeys.” The wavy, flame-like blade is veined with gold, and its dull silvery surface +is damascened with as much care as was ever taken with the old swords of Damascus. It is only an inch in width and a foot +in length and does not look half as dangerous as a Turkish cimeter; yet it has a history that would put that of the tomahawk +or the scalping-knife to shame. Many a fat Chinaman, trading between the Java islands and Amoy, has felt its keen edge at +his throat and seen his rich cargo of spices and bird’s-nests rifled, his beloved Joss thrown overboard, and his queer old +junk burnt before his eyes. Many a Dutch and English merchantman sailed from Batavia and Bombay in the days of the old East +India Company and has never more been heard of <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb77" href="#pb77">77</a>]</span>until some mutilated survivor returned with a harrowing tale of Malay piracy and of the lightning-like work of the dreaded +<i>kris</i>. + +</p> +<p>I do not know whether my <i>kris</i> has ever taken life or not. Had it done so, I do not think the Sultan would have given it to me, for a <i>kris</i> becomes almost priceless after its baptism of blood. It is handed down from generation to generation, and its sanguine history +becomes a part of the education of the young. Next to his Koran the <i>kris</i> is the most sacred thing the Malay possesses. He regards it with an almost superstitious reverence. My <i>kris</i> is dear to me, not from any superstitious reasons, but because it was given me by his Highness, the Sultan of Johore, the +only independent sovereign on the peninsula, and because the gold of its sheath came from the jungle-covered slopes of Mount +Ophir. + + +</p> +<p></p> +<div class="figure"><img border="0" src="images/p077.jpg" alt="The making of the kris" width="459" height="720"><p class="figureHead">The making of the kris</p> +<p>“He fashions it from well-hammered and well-tempered Celebes iron”</p> +</div><p> + + +</p> +<p>The maker of the <i>kris</i> is a person of importance among the Malays, and ofttimes he <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb78" href="#pb78">78</a>]</span>is made by his grateful Rajah a <i>Dato</i>, or Lord, for his skill. Like the blades of the sturdy armorers of the Crusades, his blades are considered, as he fashions +them from well-hammered and well-tempered Celebes iron, works of art and models for futurity. He is exceedingly punctilious +in regard to their shape, size, and general formation, and the process of giving them their beautiful water lines is quite +a ceremony. First the razor-like edges are covered with a thin coating of wax to protect them from the action of the acids; +then a mixture of boiled rice, sulphur, and salt is put on the blade and left for seven days until a film of rust rises to +the surface. The blade is then immersed in the water of a young cocoanut or the juice of a pineapple and left seven days longer. +It is next brushed with the juice of a lemon until all the rust is cleared away, and then rubbed with arsenic dissolved in +lime-juice and washed with cold spring water. Finally <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb79" href="#pb79">79</a>]</span>it is anointed with cocoanut oil, and as a concluding test of its fineness and temper, it is said that in the old days its +owner would rush out into the <i>kampong</i>, or village, and stab the first person he met. + +</p> +<p>The sheath of the <i>kris</i> is generally made of <i>kamooning</i> wood, but often of ivory, gold, or silver. The handle, while more frequently of wood or buffalo horn, is sometimes of gold +studded with precious stones and worth more than all the other possessions of its owner put together. + +</p> +<p>The <i>kris</i>, too, has its etiquette. It is always worn on the left side stuck into the folds of the <i>sarong</i>, or skirt, the national dress of the Malay. During an interview it is considered respectful to conceal it; and its handle +is turned with its point close to the body of the wearer, if the wearer be friendly. If, however, there is ill blood existing, +and the wearer is angry, the <i>kris</i> is exposed, and the point of the handle turned the reverse way. +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb80" href="#pb80">80</a>]</span></p> +<p>The <i>kris</i> as a weapon of offence and defence is now almost a thing of the past. It is rapidly going the way of the tomahawk and the +boomerang—into the collector’s cabinet. There is a law in Singapore that forbids its being worn, and outside of Johore and +the native states it is seldom seen. It is still used as an executioner’s knife by the protected Sultan of Selangor, its keen +point being driven into the heart of the victim; but in a few years that practice, too, will be abolished by the humane intervention +of the English government. + +</p> +<p>It is to be hoped that the record of the <i>kris</i> is not as bad as it has been painted by some, and that at times in its bloody career it has been on the side of justice and +right. The part it took in the piracy that once made the East Indian seas so famous was not always done for the sake of gain, +but often for revenge and for independence. + + + +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb81" href="#pb81">81</a>]</span></p> +</div> +<div id="ch6" class="div1"><span class="pagenum"> +[<a href="#toc">Contents</a>] +</span><h2 class="normal">The White Rajah of Borneo</h2> +<h2 class="sub">The Founding of Sarawak</h2> +<p>In the East Indian seas, by Europeans and natives alike, two names are revered with a singleness and devotion that place them +side by side with the national heroes of all countries. + +</p> +<p>The men that bear the names are Englishmen, yet the countless islands of the vast Malayan archipelago are populated by a hundred +European, African, and Asiatic races. + +</p> +<p>Sir Stamford Raffles founded the great city of Singapore, and Sir James Brooke, the “White Rajah,” carved out of a tropical +wilderness just across the equator, in Borneo, the kingdom of Sarawak. + +</p> +<p>There is no one man in all history with whom you may compare Rajah Brooke. His <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb82" href="#pb82">82</a>]</span>career was the score of a hero of the footlights or of the dime novel rather than the life of an actual history-maker in this +prosaic nineteenth century. What is true of him is also true in a less degree of his famous nephew and successor, Sir Charles +Brooke, G. C. M. C., the present Rajah. + +</p> +<p>One morning in Singapore, as I sipped my tea and broke open one cool, delicious mangosteen after another, I was reading in +the daily <i>Straits Times</i> an account of the descent of a band of head-hunting Dyaks from the jungles of the Rejang River in Borneo on an isolated fishing +<i>kampong</i>, or village,—of how they killed men, women, and children, and carried their heads back to their strongholds in triumph, and +of how, in the midst of their feasting and ceremonies, Rajah Brooke, with a little company of fierce native soldiery, had +surprised and exterminated them to the last man; and just then the sound of heavy cannonading in <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb83" href="#pb83">83</a>]</span>the harbor below caused me to drop my paper. + +</p> +<p>In a moment the great guns from Fort Canning answered. I counted—seventeen—and turned inquiringly to the naked <i>punkah-wallah</i>, who stood just outside in the shade of the wide veranda, listlessly pulling the rattan rope that moved the stiff fan above +me. + +</p> +<p>His brown, open palm went respectfully to his forehead. + +</p> +<p>“His Highness, the Rajah of Sarawak,” he answered proudly in Malay. “He come in gunboat <i>Raneé</i> to the <span class="corr" id="xd0e1480" title="Source: Gymkahna">Gymkhana</span> races,—bring gold cup for prizes and fast runners. Come every year, Tuan.” + +</p> +<p>I had forgotten that it was the first day of the long-looked-for <span class="corr" id="xd0e1485" title="Source: Gymkahna">Gymkhana</span> races. A few hours later I met this remarkable man, whose thrilling exploits had commanded my earliest boyish admiration. + +</p> +<p>The kindly old Sultan of Johore, the old <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb84" href="#pb84">84</a>]</span>rebel Sultan of Pahang, the Sultan of Lingae, in all the finery of their native silks and jewels, the nobles of their courts, +and a dozen other dignitaries, were on the grandstand and in the paddock as we entered, yet no one but a modest, gray-haired +little man by the side of the English governor had any place in my thoughts. We knew his history. It was as romantic as the +wild careers of Pizarro and Cortez; as charming as those of Robinson Crusoe and the dear old Swiss Family Robinson; as tragic +as Captain Kidd’s or Morgan’s; and withal, it was modelled after our own Washington. In him I saw the full realization of +every boy’s wildest dreams,—a king of a tropical island. + +</p> +<p>The bell above the judges’ pavilion sounded, and a little whirlwind of running griffins dashed by amid the yells of a thousand +natives in a dozen different tongues. The Rajah leaned out over the gayly decorated <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb85" href="#pb85">85</a>]</span>railing with the eagerness of a boy, as he watched his own colors in the thick of the race. + +</p> +<p>The surging mass of nakedness below caught sight of him, and another yell rent the air, quite distinct from the first, for +Malayan and Kling, Tamil and Siamese, Dyak and Javanese, Hindu, Bugis, Burmese, and Lascar, recognized the famous White Rajah +of Borneo, the man who, all unaided, had broken the power of the savage head-hunting Dyaks, and driven from the seas the fierce +Malayan pirates. The yell was not a cheer. It was a tribute that a tiger might make to his tamer. + +</p> +<p>The Rajah understood. He was used to such sinister outbursts of admiration, for he never took his eyes from the course. He +was secure on his throne now, but I could not but wonder if that yell, which sent a strange thrill through me, did not bring +up recollections of one of the hundred sanguinary <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb86" href="#pb86">86</a>]</span>scenes through which he and his great uncle, the elder Rajah Brooke, had gone when fighting for their lives and kingdom. + +</p> +<p>The Sultan of Johore’s griffin won, and the Rajah stepped back to congratulate him. I, too, passed over to where he stood, +and the kindly old Sultan took me by the hand. + +</p> +<p>“I have a very tender spot in my heart for all Americans,” the Rajah replied to his Highness’s introduction. “It was your +great republic that first recognized the independence of Sarawak.” + +</p> +<p>As we chatted over the triumph of Gladstone, the silver bill, the tariff, and a dozen topics of the day, I was thinking of +the head-hunters of whom I had read in the morning paper. I was thinking, too, of how this man’s uncle had, years before, +with a boat’s crew of English boys, carved out of an unknown island a principality larger than the state of New York, reduced +its savage population to orderly tax-paying citizens, cleared <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb87" href="#pb87">87</a>]</span>the Borneo and Java seas of their thousands of pirate <i>praus</i>, and in their place built up a merchant fleet and a commerce of nearly five millions of dollars a year. The younger Rajah, +too, had done his share in the making of the state. In his light tweed suit and black English derby, he did not look the strange, +impossible hero of romance I had painted him; but there was something in his quiet, clear, well-bred English accent, and the +strong, deep lines about his eyes and mouth, that impressed one with a consciousness of tremendous reserve force. He spoke +always slowly, as though wearied by early years of fighting and exposure in the searching heat of the Bornean sun. + +</p> +<p>We became better acquainted later at balls and dinners, and he was never tired of thanking me for my country’s kindness. +</p> +<hr class="tb"><p> + +</p> +<p>In 1819, when the English took Malacca and the Malay peninsula from the Dutch, <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb88" href="#pb88">88</a>]</span>they agreed to surrender all claims to the islands south of the pirate-infested Straits of Malacca. + +</p> +<p>The Dutch, contented with the fabulously rich island of Java and its twenty-six millions of mild-mannered natives, left the +great islands of Sumatra, Borneo, and Papua to the savage rulers and savage nations that held them. + +</p> +<p>The son of an English clergyman, on a little schooner, with a friend or two and a dozen sailors, sailed into these little +known and dangerous waters one day nineteen years later. His mind was filled with dreams of an East-Indian empire; he was +burning to emulate Cortez and Pizarro, without practising their abuses. He had entered the English army and had been so dangerously +wounded while leading a charge in India after his superiors had fallen that he had been retired on a pension before his twenty-first +year. While regaining his health, he <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb89" href="#pb89">89</a>]</span>had travelled through India, Malaya, and China, and had written a journal of his wanderings. During this period his ambitions +were crowding him on to an enterprise that was as foolhardy as the first voyage of Columbus. + +</p> +<p>He had spied those great tropical islands that touched the equator, and he coveted them. + +</p> +<p>After his father’s death he invested his little fortune in a schooner, and in spite of all the protests and prayers of his +family and friends, he sailed for Singapore, and thence across to the northwest coast of Borneo, landing at Kuching, on the +Sarawak River, in 1838. + +</p> +<p>He had no clearly outlined plan of operations,—he was simply waiting his chance. The province of Sarawak, a dependency of +the Sultan of Borneo, was governed by an old native rajah, whose authority was menaced by the fierce, head-hunting Dyaks of +the interior. Brooke’s chance had come. <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb90" href="#pb90">90</a>]</span>He boldly offered to put down the rebellion if the Rajah would make him his general and second to the throne. The Rajah cunningly +accepted the offer, eager to let the hair-brained young infidel annoy his foes, but with no intention of keeping his promise. + +</p> +<p>After days of marching with his little crew and a small army of natives, through the almost impenetrable rubber jungles, after +a dozen hard-fought battles and deeds of personal heroism, any one of which would make a story, the head-hunters were crushed +and some kind of order restored. He refused to allow the Rajah to torture the prisoners,—thereby winning their gratitude,—and +he refused to be dismissed from his office. He had won his rank, and he appealed to the Sultan. The wily Sultan recognized +that in this stranger he had found a man who would be able to collect his revenue, and much to Brooke’s surprise, a courier +entered Kuching, the capital, one day <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb91" href="#pb91">91</a>]</span>and summarily dismissed the native Rajah and proclaimed the young Englishman Rajah of Sarawak. + +</p> +<p>Brooke was a king at last. His empire was before him, but he was only king because the reigning Sultan relinquished a part +of his dominions that he was unable to control. The tasks to be accomplished before he could make his word law were ones that +England, Holland, and the navies of Europe had shirked. His so-called subjects were the most notorious and daring pirates +in the history of the world; they were head-hunters, they practised slavery, and they were cruel and blood-thirsty on land +and sea. Out of such elements this boy king built his kingdom. How he did it would furnish tales that would outdo Verne, Kingston, +and Stevenson. + +</p> +<p>He abolished military marauding and every form of slavery, established courts, missions, and school houses, and waged war, +single-handed, against head-hunting and piracy. +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb92" href="#pb92">92</a>]</span></p> +<p>Head-hunting is to the Dyaks what amok is to the Malays or scalping to the American Indians. It is even more. No Dyak woman +would marry a man who could not decorate their home with at least one human head. Often bands of Dyaks, numbering from five +to seven thousand, would sally forth from their fortifications and cruise along the coast four or five hundred miles, to surprise +a village and carry the inhabitants’ heads back in triumph. + +</p> +<p>To-day head-hunting is practically stamped out, as is running amok among the Malays, although cases of each occur from time +to time. + +</p> +<p>As his subjects in the jungles were head-hunters, so those of the coast were pirates. Every harbor was a pirate haven. They +lived in big towns, possessed forts and cannon, and acknowledged neither the suzerainty of the Sultan or the domination of +the Dutch. They were stronger than the native rulers, and no European nation would go <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb93" href="#pb93">93</a>]</span>to the great expense of life and treasure needed to break their power. Brooke knew that his title would be but a mockery as +long as the pirates commanded the mouths of all his rivers. + +</p> +<p>With his little schooner, armed with three small guns and manned by a crew of white companions and Dyak sailors, he gave battle +first to the weaker strongholds, gradually attaching the defeated to his standard. He found himself at the end of nine years +their master and a king in something more than name. Combined with the qualities of a fearless fighter, he had the faculty +of winning the good will and admiration of his foes. + +</p> +<p>The fierce Suloos and Illanums became his fast friends. He left their chiefs in power, but punished every outbreak with a +merciless hand. + +</p> +<p>One of the many incidents of his checkered career shows that his spirit was all-powerful among them. He had invited the Chinese +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb94" href="#pb94">94</a>]</span>from Amoy to take up their residence at his capital, Kuching. They were traders and merchants, and soon built up a commerce. +They became so numerous in time that they believed they could seize the government. The plot was successful, and during a +night attack they overcame the Rajah’s small guard, and he escaped to the river in his pajamas without a single follower. + +</p> +<p>Sir Charles told me one day, as we conversed on the broad veranda of the consulate, that that night was the darkest in all +his great uncle’s stormy life. The hopes and work of years were shattered at a single blow, and he was an outcast with a price +on his head. + +</p> +<p>The homeless king knelt in the bottom of the <i>prau</i> and prayed for strength, and then took up the oars and pulled silently toward the ocean. Near morning he was abreast of one +of the largest Suloo forts—the home of his bitterest and bravest foes. +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb95" href="#pb95">95</a>]</span></p> +<p>He turned the head of his boat to the shore and landed unarmed and undressed among the pirates. He surrendered his life, his +throne, and his honor, into their keeping. + +</p> +<p>They listened silently, and then their scarred old chief stepped forward and placed a naked <i>kris</i> in the white man’s hand and kissed his feet. + +</p> +<p>Before the sun went down that day the White Rajah was on his throne again, and ten thousand grim, fierce Suloos were hunting +the Chinese like a pack of bloodhounds. + +</p> +<p>In 1848 Rajah Brooke decided to visit his old home in England, and ask his countrymen for teachers and missions. His fame +had preceded him. All England was alive to his great deeds. There were greetings by enthusiastic crowds wherever he appeared, +banquets by boards of trade, and gifts of freedom of cities. He was lodged in Balmoral Castle, knighted by the Queen, made +Consul-General of Borneo, Governor of Labuan, <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb96" href="#pb96">96</a>]</span>Doctor of Laws by Oxford, and was the lion of the hour. + +</p> +<p>He returned to Sarawak, accompanied by European officers and friends, to carry on his great work of civilization, and to make +of his little tropical kingdom a recognized power. + +</p> +<p>He died in 1868, and was carried back to England for burial, and I predict that at no distant day a grateful people will rise +up and ask of England his body, that it may be laid to rest in the yellow sands under the graceful palms of the unknown nation +of which he was the Washington. + +</p> +<p>His nephew, Sir Charles Brooke, who had also been his faithful companion for many years, succeeded him. + +</p> +<p>Sarawak has to-day a coast-line of over four hundred miles, with an area of fifty thousand square miles, and a population +of three hundred thousand souls. The country produces gold, silver, diamonds, antimony, <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb97" href="#pb97">97</a>]</span>quicksilver, coal, gutta-percha, rubber, canes, rattan, camphor, beeswax, edible bird’s-nests, sago, tapioca, pepper, and +tobacco, all of which find their way to Singapore, and thence to Europe and America. + +</p> +<p>The Rajah is absolute head of the state; but he is advised by a legislative council composed of two Europeans and five native +chiefs. He has a navy of a number of small but effective gunboats, and a well-trained and officered army of several hundred +men, who look after the wild tribes of the interior of Borneo and guard the great coast-line from piratical excursions; otherwise +they would be useless, as his rule is almost fatherly, and he is dearly beloved by his people. + +</p> +<p>It is impossible in one short sketch to relate a tenth of the daring deeds and startling adventures of these two white rajahs. +Their lives have been written in two bulky volumes, and the American boy who loves stories that rival his favorite authors +of adventure <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb98" href="#pb98">98</a>]</span>will find them by going to the library and asking for the “Life of the Rajah of Sarawak.” + +</p> +<p>There is much in this “Life” that might be read by our statesmen and philanthropists with profit; for the building of a kingdom +in a jungle of savage men and savage beasts places the name of Brooke of Borneo among those of the world’s great men, as it +does among those of the heroes of adventure. + +</p> +<p>One evening we were pacing back and forth on the deck of the Rajah’s magnificent gunboat, the <i>Raneé</i>. A soft tropical breeze was blowing off shore. Thousands of lights from running rickshas and bullock carts were dancing along +the wide esplanade that separates the city of Singapore from the sea. The strange old-world cries from the natives came out +to us in a babel of sound. + +</p> +<p>Chinese in <i>sampans</i> and Malays in <i>praus</i> were gliding about our bows and back and forth between the great foreign men-of-war <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb99" href="#pb99">99</a>]</span>that overshadowed us. The Orient was on every hand, and I looked wonderingly at the slightly built, gray-haired man at my +side, with a feeling that he had stepped from out some wild South Sea tale. + +</p> +<p>“Your Highness,” I said, as we chatted, “tell me how you made subjects out of pirates and head-hunters, when our great nation, +with all its power and gold, has only been able after one hundred years to make paupers out of our Indians.” + +</p> +<p>“Do you see that man?” he replied, pointing to a stalwart, brown-faced Dyak, who in the blue and gold uniform of Sarawak was +leaning idly against the bulwarks. “That is the Dato (Lord) Imaum, Judge of the Supreme Court of Sarawak. He was one of the +most redoubtable of the Suloo pirates. My uncle fought him for eight years. In all that time he never broke his word in battle +or in truce. When Sir James was driven from his throne by the Chinese, <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb100" href="#pb100">100</a>]</span>the Dato Imaum fought to reinstate him as his master. + +</p> +<p>“Civilization is only skin deep, and so is barbarism. Had your country never broken its word and been as just as it is powerful, +your red men would have been to-day where our brown men are—our equals.” + +</p> +<p>An hour later I stepped into my launch, which was lying alongside. The American flag at the peak came down, and the guns of +the <i>Raneé</i> belched forth the consular salute. + +</p> +<p>I instinctively raised my hat as we glided over the phosphorescent waters of the harbor, for in my thoughts I was still in +the presence of one of the great ones of the earth. + + + + +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb101" href="#pb101">101</a>]</span></p> +</div> +<div id="ch7" class="div1"><span class="pagenum"> +[<a href="#toc">Contents</a>] +</span><h2 class="normal">Amok!</h2> +<h2 class="sub">A Malayan Story</h2> +<p>If you run amok in Malaya, you may perhaps kill your enemy or wound your dearest friend, but you may be certain that in the +end you will be <i>krissed</i> like a pariah dog. Every man, woman, and child will turn his or her hand against you, from the mother who bore you to the +outcast you have befriended. The laws are as immutable as fate. + +</p> +<p>Just where the great river Maur empties its vast volume of red water across a shifting bar into the Straits of Malacca, stands +the <i>kampong</i> of Bander Maharani. + +</p> +<p>The Sultan Abubaker named the village in honor of his dead Sultana, and here, close down to the bank, was the palace of his +nephew—the Governor, Prince Sulliman. +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb102" href="#pb102">102</a>]</span></p> +<p>A wide, red, well-paved road separated the village of thatch and grass from the palace grounds, and ended at a wharf, up to +which a steam-launch would dash from time to time, startling the half-grown crocodiles that slept beneath the rickety timbers. + +</p> +<p>Sometimes the little Prince Mat, the son of the Governor, came down to the wharf and played with the children of the captain +of the launch, while his <i>Tuan Penager</i>, or Teacher, dozed beneath his yellow umbrella; and often, at their play, his Excellency would pause and watch them, smiling +kindly. + +</p> +<p>At such times, the captain of the launch would fall upon his face, and thank the Prophet that he had lived to see that day. +“For,” he would say, “some day he may speak to me, and ask me for the wish I treasure.” + +</p> +<p>Then he would go back to his work, polishing the brass on the railings of his boat, regardless of the watchful eyes that <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb103" href="#pb103">103</a>]</span>blinked at him from the mud beneath the wharf. + +</p> +<p>He smiled contentedly, for his mind was made up. He would not ask to be made master of the Sultan’s marvellous yacht, that +was sent out from Liverpool,—although the possibility made him catch his breath: he would ask nothing for himself,—he would +ask that his Excellency let his son Noa go to Mecca, that he might become a <i>hadji</i> and then some day—who knows—Noa might become a <i>kateeb</i> in the <i>attap</i>-thatched mosque back of the palace. + +</p> +<p>And Noa, unmindful of his father’s dreaming, played with the little Prince, kicking the <i>ragga</i> ball, or sailing miniature <i>praus</i> out into the river, and off toward the shimmering straits. But often they sat cross-legged and dropped bits of chicken and +fruit between the palm sleepers of the wharf to the birch-colored crocodiles below, who snapped them up, one after another, +never taking <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb104" href="#pb104">104</a>]</span>their small, cruel eyes off the brown faces that peered down at them. + +</p> +<p>Child-life is measured by a few short years in Malaya. The hot, moist air and the fierce rays of the equatorial sun fall upon +child and plant alike, and they grow so fast that you can almost hear them! + +</p> +<p>The little Prince soon forgot his childhood companions in the gorgeous court of his Highness, the Sultan of Johore, and Noa +took the place of his father on the launch, while the old man silently mourned as he leaned back in its stern, and alternately +watched the sunlight that played along the carefully polished rails, and the deepening shadows that bound the black labyrinth +of mangrove roots on the opposite shore. The Governor had never noted his repeated protestations and deep-drawn sighs. + +</p> +<p>“But who cares,” he thought. “It is the will of Allah! The Prince will surely remember us when he returns.” +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb105" href="#pb105">105</a>]</span></p> +<p>On the very edge of Bander Maharani, just where the almost endless miles of betel-nut palms shut from view the yellow turrets +of the palace, stood the palm-thatched bungalow in which Anak grew, in a few short years, from childhood to womanhood. The +hot, sandy soil all about was covered with the flaxen burs of the betel, and the little sunlight that found its way down through +the green and yellow fronds drew rambling checks on the steaming earth, that reminded Anak of the plaid on the silken <i>sarong</i> that Noa’s father had given her the day she was betrothed to his son. + +</p> +<p>Up the bamboo ladder and into the little door,—so low that even Anak, with her scant twelve years, was forced to stoop,—she +would dart when she espied Noa coming sedately down the long aisle of palms that led away to the fungus-covered canal that +separated her little world from the life of the capital city. +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb106" href="#pb106">106</a>]</span></p> +<p>There was coquetry in every glance, as she watched him, from behind the carved bars of her low window, drop contentedly down +on the bench beneath a scarred old cocoanut that stood directly before the door. She thought almost angrily that he ought +to have searched a little for her: she would have repaid him with her arms about his neck. + +</p> +<p>From the cool darkness of the bungalow came the regular click of her mother’s loom. She could see the worker’s head surrounded +by a faint halo of broken twilight. Her mind filled in the details that were hidden by the green shadows—the drawn, stooping +figure, the scant black hair, the swollen gums, the <i>syrah</i>-stained teeth, and sunken neck. She impulsively ran her soft brown fingers over her own warm, plump face, through the luxuriant +tresses of her heavy hair, and then gazed out at the recumbent figure on the bench, waiting patiently for her coming. +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb107" href="#pb107">107</a>]</span></p> +<p>“Soon my teeth, which the American lady that was visiting his Excellency said were so strong and beautiful, will be filed +and blackened, and I will be weaving <i>sarongs</i> for Noa.” + +</p> +<p>She shuddered, she knew not why, and went slowly across the elastic bamboo strips of the floor and down the ladder. + +</p> +<p>Noa watched the trim little figure with its single covering of cotton, the straight, graceful body, and perfectly poised head +and delicate neck, the bare feet and ankles, the sweet, comely face with its fresh young lips, free from the red stains of +the <i>syrah</i> leaf, and its big brown eyes that looked from beneath heavy silken lashes. He smiled, but did not stir as she came to him. +He was proud of her after the manner of his kind. Her beauty appealed to him unconsciously, although he had never been taught +to consider beauty, or even seek it. He would have married her without a <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb108" href="#pb108">108</a>]</span>question, if she had been as hideous as his sister, who was scarred with the small-pox. He would never have complained if, +according to Malayan custom, he had not been permitted to have seen her until the marriage day. He must marry some one, now +that the Prince had gone to Johore, and his father had given up all hope of seeing him a <i>hadji</i>; and besides, the captain of the launch and the old <i>punghulo</i>, or chief, Anak’s father, were fast friends. The marriage meant little more to the man. + +</p> +<p>But to Anak,—once the Prince Mat had told her she was pretty, when she had come down to the wharf to beg a small crocodile +to bury underneath her grandmother’s bungalow to keep off white ants, and her cheeks glowed yet under her brown skin at the +remembrance. Noa had never told her she was beautiful! + +</p> +<p>A featherless hen was scratching in the yellow sand at her feet, and a brood of <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb109" href="#pb109">109</a>]</span>featherless chicks were following each cluck with an intensity of interest that left them no time to watch the actions of +the lovers. + +</p> +<p>“Why did you come?” she asked in the soft liquid accents of her people. + +</p> +<p>There was an eagerness in the question that suggested its own answer. + +</p> +<p>“To bring a message to the <i>punghulo</i>,” he replied, not noticing the coquetry of the look. + +</p> +<p>“Oh! then you are in haste. Why do you wait? My father is at the canal.” + +</p> +<p>“It is about you,” he went on, his face glowing. “The Prince is coming back, and we are to be married. My father, the captain, +made bold to ask his Excellency to let the Prince be present, and he granted our prayer.” + +</p> +<p>She turned away to hide her disappointment. It was the thought of the honor that was his in the eyes of the province, and +not that he was to marry her, that set the lights <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb110" href="#pb110">110</a>]</span>dancing in his eyes! She hated him then for his very love; it was so sure and confident in its right to overlook hers in this +petty attention from a mere boy, who had once condescended to praise her girlish beauty. + +</p> +<p>“When is the Prince coming?” she questioned, ignoring his clumsy attempt to take her hand. + +</p> +<p>“During the feast of Hari Raya Hadji,” he replied, smiling. + +</p> +<p>She kicked some sand with her bare toes, amongst the garrulous chickens. + +</p> +<p>“Tell me about the Prince.” + +</p> +<p>Her mood had changed. Her eyes were wide open, and her face all aglow. She was wondering if he would notice her above the +bridesmaids,—if it was not for her sake he was coming? + +</p> +<p>And then her lover told her of the gossip of the palace,—of the Prince’s life in the Sultan’s court,—of his wit and grace,—of +how he had learned English, and was soon <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb111" href="#pb111">111</a>]</span>to go to London, where he would be entertained by the Queen. + +</p> +<p>Above their heads the wind played with the tattered flags of the palms, leaving openings here and there that exposed the steely-white +glare of the sky, and showed, far away to the northward, the denuded red dome of Mount Ophir. + +</p> +<p>The girl noted the clusters of berries showing redly against the dark green of some pepper-vines that clambered up the black +<i>nebong</i> posts of her home; she wondered vaguely as he talked if she were to go on through life seeing pepper-vines and betel-nut +trees, and hot sand and featherless hens, and never get beyond the shadow of the mysterious mountains. + +</p> +<p>Possibly it was the sight of the white ladies from Singapore, possibly it was the few light words dropped by the half-grown +Prince, possibly it was something within herself,—something inherited from ancestors <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb112" href="#pb112">112</a>]</span>who had lived when the fleets of Solomon and Hiram sought for gold and ivory at the base of the distant mountains,—that drove +her to revolt, and led her to question the right of this marriage that was to seal her forever to the <i>attap</i> bungalow, and the narrow, colorless life that awaited her on the banks of the Maur. She turned fiercely on her wooer, and +her brown eyes flashed. + +</p> +<p>“You have never asked me whether I love!” + +</p> +<p>The Malay half rose from his seat. The look of surprise and perplexity that had filled his face gave place to one of almost +childish wonder. + +</p> +<p>“Of course you love me. Is it not so written in the Koran,—a wife shall reverence her husband?” + +</p> +<p>“Why?” she questioned angrily. + +</p> +<p>He paused a moment, trying dimly to comprehend the question, and then answered slowly,— +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb113" href="#pb113">113</a>]</span></p> +<p>“Because it is written.” + +</p> +<p>She did not draw away when he took her hand; he had chosen his answer better than he knew. + +</p> +<p>“Because it is written,” that was all. Her own feeble revolt was but as a breath of air among the yellow fronds above their +heads. + +</p> +<p>When Noa had gone, the girl drew herself wearily up the ladder, and dropped on a cool palm mat near the never ceasing loom. +For almost the first time in her short, uneventful life she fell to thinking of herself. She wondered if the white ladies +in Singapore married because all had been arranged by a father who forgot you the moment you disappeared within the door of +your own house,—if they loved one man better than another,—if they could always marry the one they liked best. She wondered +why every one must be married,—why could she not go on and live just as she had,—she could weave and sew? +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb114" href="#pb114">114</a>]</span></p> +<p>A gray lizard darted from out its hiding-place in the <i>attap</i> at a great atlas moth which worked its brilliant wings; clumsily it tore their delicate network until the air was full of +a golden dust. + +</p> +<p>“I am the moth,” she said softly, and raised her hand too late to save it from its enemy. + +</p> +<p>The Sultan’s own yacht, the <i>Pante</i>, brought the Prince back to Maur, and as it was low tide, the Governor’s launch went out beyond the bar and met him. + +</p> +<p>The band played the national anthem when he landed on the pier, and Inchi Mohammed, the Tuan Hakim, or Chief Justice, made +a speech. + +</p> +<p>The red gravel walk from the landing to the palace gate was strewn with hibiscus and alamander and yellow convolvulus flowers, +and bordered with the delicate maidenhair fern. + +</p> +<p>Johore and British flags hung in great <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb115" href="#pb115">115</a>]</span>festoons from the deep verandas of the palace, and the brass guns from the fort gave forth the royal salute. + +</p> +<p>Anak was in the crowd with her father, the old chief, and her affianced, Noa. She had put on her silk <i>sarong</i> and <i>kabaya</i>, and some curious gold brooches that were her mother’s. In her coal-black hair she had stuck some sprays of the sweet-smelling +<i>chumpaka</i> flower. On her slender bare feet were sandals cunningly wrought in colored beads. Her soft brown eyes glowed with excitement, +and she edged away from the <i>punghulo’s</i> side until she stood close up in front, so near that she could almost touch the <i>sarong</i> of the Tuan Hakim as he read. + +</p> +<p>The Prince had grown so since he left that she scarcely knew him, and save for the narrow silk <i>sarong</i> about his waist, he was dressed in the English clothes of a Lieutenant of his Highness’s artillery. In the front of his rimless +cap shone the arms of <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb116" href="#pb116">116</a>]</span>Johore set in diamonds, exactly as his father, the Governor, wore them. He paused and smiled as he thanked the cringing Tuan +Hakim. + +</p> +<p>The blood rushed to the girl’s cheeks, and she nearly fell down at his feet. She realized but dimly that Noa was plucking +at her <i>kabaya</i>, wishing her to go with him to see the bungalow that his father was building for them. + +</p> +<p>“The posts are to be of polished <i>nebong”</i> he was saying, “the wood-work of <i>maranti</i> wood from Pahang; and there is to be a cote, ever so cunningly woven of green and yellow bamboo, for your ring-doves, under +the <i>attap</i> of the great eaves above the door.” + +</p> +<p>She turned wearily toward her lover, and the bright look faded from her comely face. With a half-uttered sigh she drew off +her sandals and tucked them carefully beneath the silver zone that held her <i>sarong</i> in place. + +</p> +<p>“Anak,” he said softly, as they left the <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb117" href="#pb117">117</a>]</span>hot, red streets, filled with lumbering bullock-carts and omnipresent <i>rickshas</i>, “why do you look away when I talk of our marriage? Is it because the Koran teaches modesty in woman, or is it because you +are over-proud of your husband when you see him among other men?” + +</p> +<p>But the girl was not listening. + +</p> +<p>He looked at her keenly, and as he saw the red blood mantle her cheek, he smiled and went on:— + +</p> +<p>“It was good of you to wear the <i>sarong</i> I gave you, and your best <i>kabaya</i> and the flowers I like in your hair. I heard more than one say that it showed you would make a good wife in spite of our +knowing one another before marriage.” + +</p> +<p>“You think that it was for you that I put on all this bravery?” she asked, looking him straight in the face. “Am I not to +be your wife? Can I not dress in honor of the young Prince and—Allah?” +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb118" href="#pb118">118</a>]</span></p> +<p>He turned to stammer a reply. The hot blood mounted to his temples, and he grasped the girl’s arm so that she cried out with +pain. + +</p> +<p>“You are to be my wife, and I your master. It is my wish that you should ever dress in honor of our rulers and our Allah, +for in showing honor to those above you, you honor your husband. I do not understand you at all times, but I intend that you +shall understand me. <i>Sudah!</i>” + +</p> +<p>“<i>Tuan Allah Suka!</i>” (The Lord Allah has willed it), she murmured, and they plodded on through the hot sand in silence. + +</p> +<p>After his return they saw the Prince often, and once when Anak came down to the wharf to bring a <i>durian</i> to the captain of the launch from her father, the old <i>punghulo</i>, she met him face to face, and he touched her cheek with his jewelled fingers, and said she had grown much prettier since +he left. +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb119" href="#pb119">119</a>]</span></p> +<p>Noa was not angry at the Prince, rather he was proud of his notice, but a sinister light burned in his eyes as he saw the +flushed face and drooping head of the girl. + +</p> +<p>And once the Prince passed by the <i>punghulo’s</i> home on his way into the jungle in search of a tiger, and inquired for his daughter. Anak treasured the remembrance of these +little attentions, and pondered over them day after day, as she worked by her mother’s side at the loom, or sat outside in +the sand, picking the flossy burs from the betel-nuts, watching the flickering shadows that every breeze in the leaves above +scattered in prodigal wastefulness about and over her. + +</p> +<p>She told herself over and over, as she followed with dreamy eyes the vain endeavors of a chameleon to change his color, as +the shadows painted the sand beneath him first green and then white, that her own <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb120" href="#pb120">120</a>]</span>hopes and strivings were just as futile; and yet when Noa would sit beside her and try to take her hand, she would fly into +a passion, and run sobbing up the ladder of her home. Noa became moody in turn. His father saw it and his mates chaffed him, +but no one guessed the cause. That it should be for the sake of a woman would have been beyond belief; for did not the Koran +say, “If thy wife displease thee, beat her until she see the sin of her ways”? One day, as he thought, it occurred to him, +“She does not want to marry me!” and he asked her, as though it made any difference. There were tears in her eyes, but she +only threw back her head and laughed, and replied as she should:— + +</p> +<p>“That is no concern of ours. Is your father, the captain, displeased with my father’s, the <i>punghulo’s,</i> dowry?” + +</p> +<p>And yet Noa felt that Anak knew what he would have said. +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb121" href="#pb121">121</a>]</span></p> +<p>He went away angry, but with a gnawing at his heart that frightened him,—a strange, new sickness, that seemed to drive him +from despair to a longing for revenge, with the coming and going of each quick breath. He had been trying to make love in +a blind, stumbling way; he did not know it,—why should he? Marriage was but a bargain in Malaya. But Anak with her finer instincts +felt it, and instead of fanning this tiny, unknown spark, she was driving it into other and baser channels. + +</p> +<p>In spite of her better nature she was slowly making a demon out of a lover,—a lover to whom but a few months before she would +have given freely all her love for a smile or the lightest of compliments. + +</p> +<p>From that day until the day of the marriage she never spoke to her lover save in the presence of her elders,—for such was +the law of her race. +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb122" href="#pb122">122</a>]</span></p> +<p>She submitted to the tire-women who were to prepare her for the ceremony, uttering no protest as they filed off her beautiful +white teeth and blackened them with lime, nor when they painted the palms of her hands and the nails of her fingers and toes +red with <i>henna</i>. She showed no interest in the arranging of her glossy black hair with jewelled pins and <i>chumpaka</i> flowers, or in the draping of her <i>sarong</i> and <i>kabaya</i>. Only her lacerated gums ached until one tear after another forced its way from between her blackened lids down her rouged +cheeks. + +</p> +<p>There had been feasting all day outside under the palms, and the youths, her many cousins, had kicked the <i>ragga</i> ball, while the elders sat about and watched and talked and chewed betel-nut. There were great rice curries on brass plates, +with forty <i>sambuls</i>> within easy reach of all, luscious mangosteens, creamy <i>durians</i> and mangoes, and betel-nuts with lemon leaves and lime and <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb123" href="#pb123">123</a>]</span>spices. Fires burned about among the graceful palms at night, and lit up the silken <i>sarongs</i> and polished <i>kris</i> handles of the men, and gold-run <i>kabayas</i> of the women. + +</p> +<p>The Prince came as he promised, just as the old Kadi had pronounced the couple man and wife, and laid at Anak’s feet a wide +gold bracelet set with sapphires, and engraven with the arms of Johore. He dropped his eyes to conceal the look of pity and +abhorrence that her swollen gums and disfigured features inspired, and as he passed across the mats on the bamboo floor he +inwardly cursed the customs of his people that destroyed the beauty of its women. He had lived among the English of Singapore, +and dined at the English Governor’s table. + +</p> +<p>A groan escaped the girl’s lips as she dropped back among the cushions of her tinsel throne. Noa saw the little tragedy, and +for the first time understood its full <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb124" href="#pb124">124</a>]</span>import. He ground his teeth together, and his hand worked uneasily along the scabbard of his <i>kris</i>. + +</p> +<p>In another moment the room was empty, and the bride and groom were left side by side on the gaudily bedecked platform, to +mix and partake of their first betel-nut together. Mechanically Noa picked the broken fragments of the nut from its brass +cup, from another a <i>syrah</i> leaf smeared with lime, added a clove, a cardamom, and a scraping of mace, and handed it to his bride. She took it without +raising her eyes, and placed it against her bleeding gums. In a moment a bright red juice oozed from between her lips and +ran down the corner of her distorted mouth. Noa extended his hand, and she gave him the half-masticated mass. He raised it +to his own mouth, and then for the first time looked the girl full in the face. + +</p> +<p>There was no love-light in the drooping <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb125" href="#pb125">125</a>]</span>brown eyes before him. The <i>syrah</i>-stained lips were slightly parted, exposing the feverish gums, and short, black teeth. Her hands hung listlessly by her side, +and only for the color that came and went beneath the rouge of her brown cheeks, she might have been dead to this last sacred +act of their marriage vows. + +</p> +<p>“Anak!” he said slowly, drawing closer to her side. “Anak, I will be a true husband to you. You shall be my only wife—” + +</p> +<p>He paused, expecting some response, but she only gazed stolidly up at the smoke-begrimed <i>attap</i> of the roof. + +</p> +<p>“Anak—” he repeated, and then a shudder passed through him, and his eyes lit up with a wild, frenzied gleam, + +</p> +<p>A moment he paused irresolute, and then with a spring he grasped the golden handle of his <i>kris</i> and with one bound was across the floor, and on the sand below among the revellers. +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb126" href="#pb126">126</a>]</span></p> +<p>For an instant the snake-like blade of the <i>kris</i> shone dully in the firelight above his head, and then with a yell that echoed far out among the palms, it descended straight +into the heart of the nearest Malay. + +</p> +<p>The hot life-blood spurted out over his hand and naked arm, and dyed the creamy silk of his wedding <i>baju</i> a dark red. + +</p> +<p>Once more he struck, as he chanted a promise from the Koran, and the shrill, agonized cry of a woman broke upon the ears of +the astonished guests. + +</p> +<p>Then the fierce sinister yell of “Amok! amok!” drowned the woman’s moans, and sent every Malay’s hand to the handle of his +<i>kris</i>. + +</p> +<p>“Amok!” sprang from every man’s lips, while women and children, and those too aged to take part in the wild saturnalia of +blood that was to follow, scattered like doves before a hawk. + +</p> +<p>With the rapidity of a Malayan tiger, the <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb127" href="#pb127">127</a>]</span>crazed man leaped from one to another, dealing deadly strokes with his merciless weapon, right and left. There was no gleam +of pity or recognition in his insane glance when he struck down the sister he had played with from childhood, neither did +he note that his father’s hand had dealt the blow that dropped his right arm helpless to his side. Only a cry of baffled rage +and hate escaped his lips, as he snatched his falling knife with his left hand. Another blow, and his father fell across the +quivering body of his sister. + +</p> +<p>“O Allah, the all-merciful and loving kind!” he sang, as the blows rained upon his face and breast. “O Allah, the compassionate.” + +</p> +<p>The golden handle of his <i>kris</i> shone like a dying coal in the centre of a circle of flamelike knives; then with one wild plunge forward, into the midst +of the gleaming points, it went out. +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb128" href="#pb128">128</a>]</span></p> +<p>“<i>Sudah!</i>—It is finished,” and a Malay raised his steel-bladed <i>limbing</i> to thrust it into the bare breast of the dying man. + +</p> +<p>The young Prince stepped out into the firelight and raised his hand. The long, shrill wail of a tiger from far off toward +Mount Ophir seemed to pulsate and quiver on the weird stillness of the night. + +</p> +<p>Noa opened his eyes. They were the eyes of a child, and a faint, sweet smile flickered across the ghastly features and died +away in a spasm of pain. + +</p> +<p>A picture of their childhood days flashed through the mind of the Prince and softened the haughty lines of his young face. +He saw, through it all, the wharf below the palace grounds,—the fat old <i>penager</i> dozing in the sun,—the raft they built together, and the birch-colored crocodiles that lay among the sinuous mangrove roots. + +</p> +<p>“Noa,” he whispered, as he imperiously motioned the crowd back. +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb129" href="#pb129">129</a>]</span></p> +<p>The dying man’s lips moved. The Prince bent lower. + +</p> +<p>“She—loved—you. Yes—” Noa muttered, striving to hold his failing breath,—“love is from—Allah. But not for—me;—for English—and—Princes.” + +</p> +<p>They threw his body without the circle of the fires. + +</p> +<p>The tense feline growl of the tiger grew more distinct. The Prince’s hand sought the jewelled handle of his <i>kris</i>. There was a swift rush in the darkness, a crashing among the rubber-vines, a short, quick snarl, and then all was still. + +</p> +<p>If you run amok in Malaya, you may kill your enemy or your dearest friend, but you will be <i>krissed</i> in the end like a pariah dog. Every man, woman, and child will turn his hand against you, from the mother who bore you to +the outcast you have befriended. + +</p> +<p>The laws are as immutable as fate. + + + +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb130" href="#pb130">130</a>]</span></p> +</div> +<div id="ch8" class="div1"><span class="pagenum"> +[<a href="#toc">Contents</a>] +</span><h2 class="normal">Lepas’s Revenge</h2> +<h2 class="normal">The Tale of a Monkey</h2> +<p>There were many monkeys—I came near saying there were hundreds—in the little clump of jungle trees back of the bungalow. We +could lie in our long chairs, any afternoon, when the sun was on the opposite side of the house, and watch them from behind +the bamboo “chicks” swinging and playing in the maze of rubber-vines. + +</p> +<p>They played tag and high-spy, and a variety of other games. When they were tired of playing, they fell to quarrelling, scolding, +and chasing each other among the stiff, varnished leaves, making so much noise that I could not get my afternoon nap, and +often had to call to the <i>syce</i> to throw a stone into the branches. Then they would scuttle away to the topmost parts of <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb131" href="#pb131">131</a>]</span>the great trees and there join in giving me a rating that ought to have made me ashamed forever to look another monkey in +the face. + +</p> +<p>One day, I went out and threw a stick at them myself, and the next day I found my shoes, which the Chinese “boy” had pipe-clayed +and put out in the sun to dry, missing; and the day after I found the netting of my mosquito house torn from top to bottom. + +</p> +<p>So I was not in the best of humors when I was awakened, one afternoon, by the whistling of a monkey close to my chair. I reached +out quickly for my cork helmet which I had thrown down by my side. As it was there, I looked up in surprise to see what had +become of my visitor. + +</p> +<p>There he sat up against the railing of the veranda with his legs cramped up under him, ready to flee if I made a threatening +gesture. His face was turned toward me, <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb132" href="#pb132">132</a>]</span>with the thin, hairless skin of its upper lip drawn back, showing a perfect row of milk-white teeth that were chattering in +deadly terror. The whole expression of his face was one of conciliation and entreaty. + +</p> +<p>I knew that it was all make-believe, so I half closed my eyes and did not move. The chattering stopped. The little fellow +looked about curiously, drew his mouth up into a pucker, whistled once or twice to make sure I was not awake, and reached +out his bony arm for a few crumbs of cake that had fallen near. + +</p> +<p>He was not more than a foot in height. His diminutive body seemed to have been fitted into a badly worn skin that was two +sizes too large for him, and the scalp of his forehead moved about like an overgrown wig. + +</p> +<p>He was the most ordinary kind of gray, jungle monkey, not even a <i>wah-wah</i> or spider face. +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb133" href="#pb133">133</a>]</span></p> +<p>“Well,” I said, after we had thoroughly inspected each other, “where are my shoes?” + +</p> +<p>Like a flash the whistling ceased, and with a pathetic trembling of his thin upper lip he commenced to beg with his mouth, +and to put up his homely little hands in mute appeal. + +</p> +<p>For a moment I feared he would go into convulsions, but I soon discovered that my sympathy, had been wasted. + +</p> +<p>Then I noticed, for the first time, that there was a leather strap around his body just in front of his back legs, and that +a string was attached to it, which ran through the railings and off the veranda. I looked over, and there, squatting on his +sandalled feet, was a Malay, with the other end of the string in his hand. + +</p> +<p>He arose, smiling, touched his forehead with the back of his brown palm, and asked blandly:— +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb134" href="#pb134">134</a>]</span></p> +<p>“Tuan, want to buy?” + +</p> +<p>The calm assurance of the man amused me. + +</p> +<p>“What, that miserable little monkey?” I said. “Do you take me for a tourist? Look up in those trees and you will see monkeys +that know boiled rice from <i>padi</i>.” + +</p> +<p>The man grinned and showed his brilliantly red teeth and gums. + +</p> +<p>“Tuan see. This monkey very wise,” and he made a motion with his stick. The little fellow sprang from the railing to his bare +head, and sat holding on to his long black hair. + +</p> +<p>“See, Tuan,” and he made another motion, and the monkey leaped to the ground and commenced to run around his master, hopping +first on one foot and then on the other, raising his arms over his head like a ballet dancer. After every revolution he would +stop and turn a handspring. + +</p> +<p>The Malay all the time kept up a droning <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb135" href="#pb135">135</a>]</span>kind of a song in his native tongue, improvising as he went along. + +</p> +<p>The tenor of it was that one Hamat, a poor Malay, but a good Mohammedan, who had never been to Mecca, wanted to go to become +a Hadji. He had no money but he had a good monkey that was very dear to him. He had found it in a distant jungle, beyond Johore, +when a little baby; had brought it up like one of his own children and had taught it to dance and salaam. + +</p> +<p>Now he must sell the monkey to the great Tuan, or Lord, that the money might help take him to Mecca. The monkey must dance +well and please the mighty Tuan. + +</p> +<p>As the little fellow danced, he kept one eye on me as though he understood it all. + +</p> +<p>“How old is he?” I asked, becoming interested. + +</p> +<p>“Just as old as your Excellency would like,” he replied, bowing. +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb136" href="#pb136">136</a>]</span></p> +<p>“Is he a year old?” + +</p> +<p>“If the Tuan please.” + +</p> +<p>“Well, how much do you want for him?” + +</p> +<p>“What your Excellency can give.” + +</p> +<p>“Twenty-five dollars?” I asked. + +</p> +<p>His face lit up from chin to forehead. He hitched nervously at the folds of his <i>sarong</i>, and changed the quid of red betel-nut from one corner of his mouth to the other. + +</p> +<p>“Here, Hamat,” I said, laughing, “here is five dollars; take it; when you come back from Mecca with a green turban come and +see me. If I am sick of the monkey, you can have him back.” + +</p> +<p>So commenced our acquaintance with Lepas. We got into the habit of calling him Lepas, because it was the Malay for “let go,” +which definition we broadened until it became a term of correction for every form of mischief. He was such a restless, active +little imp, with hands into everything and <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb137" href="#pb137">137</a>]</span>upon everything, that it was “Lepas!” from morning to night. + +</p> +<p>He soon learned the word’s twofold meaning. If we said “Lepas” sternly, he subsided at once; but when we called it pleasantly +he came running across the room and leaped into our laps. + +</p> +<p>It did not take Lepas as long to forget his former master as it did to forget his former habits. In truth, his civilization +was never more than skin deep. + + +</p> +<p></p> +<div class="figure"><img border="0" src="images/p136.jpg" alt="Just a gray, jungle monkey" width="465" height="720"><p class="figureHead">Just a gray, jungle monkey</p> +<p>“Lepas would sit for hours cuddled up in the mistress’s lap”</p> +</div><p> + + +</p> +<p>He would sit for hours cuddled up in the mistress’s lap, playing with her work and making deft slaps at passing flies, until +he had thoroughly convinced her of his perfect trustworthiness. Then, the moment her back was turned, he would slip away to +her bureau, and such a mess as he would make of her ribbons and laces! + +</p> +<p>I think he liked the servants better than he did us. He would dance and turn handsprings and salaam for them, but never for +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb138" href="#pb138">138</a>]</span>the mistress or myself. Such tricks, he seemed to think, were beneath his new position in society. + +</p> +<p>He had a standing grudge against me, however, for insisting on his bath in the big Shanghai jar every day, and took delight +in rolling in the red dust of the road the moment he was through. + +</p> +<p>It was not long before he had a feud with the monkeys in the trees, back of the house. He would stand on the ground, within +easy reach of the house, and as saucily as you please, till they were worked up into a white heat of rage over his remarks. + +</p> +<p>Once he caught a baby monkey that had become entangled in the wiry <i>lallang</i> grass under the trees, and dragged it screeching into the house. Before we could get to him he had nearly drowned it by treating +it to a bath,—an act, I suppose, intended to convey to me his opinion of my humane efforts to keep him clean. +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb139" href="#pb139">139</a>]</span></p> +<p>I expected as a matter of course to lose another pair of shoes or something, in payment for this unneighborly behavior, but +the colony in the trees seemed to know that I was innocent. It was not long before they caught the true culprit, and gave +him such a beating that he was quiet and subdued for days. + +</p> +<p>But Lepas was a lovable little fellow with all his mischief. Every afternoon when I came home from the office, tired out with +the heat and the fierce glare of the sun, he would hop over to my chair, whistle soothingly, and make funny little chirrups +with his lips, until I noticed him. + +</p> +<p>Then he would crawl quietly up the legs of the chair until he reached my shoulder, where he would commence with his cool little +fingers to inspect my eyes and nose, and to pick over carefully each hair of my mustache and head. + +</p> +<p>So we forgave him when he pulled all the <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb140" href="#pb140">140</a>]</span>feathers out of a ring-dove that was a valued present from an old native rajah; when he turned lamp-oil into the ice cream, +and when he broke a rare Satsuma bowl in trying to catch a lizard. He was always so penitent after each misadventure! + +</p> +<p>We had heard that Hamat had sailed for Jedda with a shipload of pilgrims and were therefore expecting him back soon; but we +had decided not to give up Lepas. He had become a sort of necessity about the house. + +</p> +<p>Next door to us, lived a high official of the English service. He was a sour, cross old man and did not like pets. Even the +monkeys in the trees knew better than to go into his “compound,” or inclosure. + +</p> +<p>But Lepas started off on a voyage of discovery one day, and not only invaded his compound, but actually entered his house. +The official caught him in the act of hiding his shaving-set between the palm thatch of the roof and the cheese-cloth ceiling. +Recognizing <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb141" href="#pb141">141</a>]</span>Lepas, he did not kill him, but took him by his leathern girdle and soused him in his bath-tub, until he was so near dead +that it took him hours to crawl home. + +</p> +<p>Lepas went around with a sad, injured expression on his wrinkled little face, for days. Not even a mangosteen sprinkled with +sugar could awaken his enthusiasm. + +</p> +<p>He went so far as to make up with the monkeys in the trees, and once or twice I caught him condescending to have a game of +leap-frog with them. I made up my mind that he had determined to turn over a new leaf, but the <i>syce</i> shook his head knowingly and said:— + +</p> +<p>“Lepas all the time thinking. He thinks bad things.” + +</p> +<p>And so it proved. + +</p> +<p>One night the mistress gave a very big dinner party. The high official from next door was there. So were several other high +officials of Singapore, the general commanding <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb142" href="#pb142">142</a>]</span>her Majesty’s troops, and the foreign consuls and members of Legislative Council. + +</p> +<p>It was a hot night, and the <i>punkah-wallah</i> outside kept the <i>punkah</i>, or mechanical fan, switching back and forth over our heads with a rapidity that made us fear its ropes would break, as very +often happened. + +</p> +<p>Suddenly there was a crash, and a champagne glass struck squarely in the high official’s soup and spattered it all over his +white expanse of shirt front. We all looked up at the <i>punkah</i>. At the same instant a big, soft mango smashed in the high official’s face and changed its ruddy red color to a sickly yellow. + +</p> +<p>The women screamed, and the men jumped up from the table. Then began a regular fusillade of wine glasses and tropical fruits. + +</p> +<p>Sometimes they hit the high official from next door, at whom they all seemed to be aimed, but more often they fell upon the +table, among the glass and dishes. In <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb143" href="#pb143">143</a>]</span>a moment everything was in wild confusion, and the mistress’s beautifully decorated table looked as though a bomb had exploded +on it. + +</p> +<p>The Chinese “boys” made a rush for the end of the room, and there, up on the sideboard, among the glass, pelting his enemy, +the high official, as fast as he could throw, was Lepas. + +</p> +<p>A finger bowl struck the butler full in the face, and gave the monkey time to make his escape out into the darkness through +the wide-open doors. + +</p> +<p>We saw nothing more of Lepas for a week or more; we had, indeed, about given him up, wondering as to his whereabouts, when +one afternoon, as I was taking my usual post-tiffin siesta on the cool side of the great, wide-spreading veranda, I heard +a timid whistle, and looked up to see Lepas seated on the railing, as sad and humble as any truant schoolboy. +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb144" href="#pb144">144</a>]</span></p> +<p>His hair was matted and faded and his face was dirty. His form had lost some of the plumpness that had come to it with good +living, but there was the same wicked twinkle in his eyes, and the same hypocritical deceit in his bearing as of old. + +</p> +<p>I reached out my hand to take him, but he hopped a few feet away and began to beg with his teeth. + +</p> +<p>“Lepas,” I said, “you have a bad heart. I wash my hands of you. When Hamat comes back you can go to him and be an ordinary, +low caste monkey. Now go! I never want to see you again!” + +</p> +<p>Lepas puckered up his lips and whistled mournfully for a few moments, but seeing no sign of forgiveness in my face he jumped +down and began to turn handsprings and dance with the most demure grace. + +</p> +<p>I took no notice of him, and after a few vain efforts to attract my attention, he hopped dejectedly off the veranda across +the <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb145" href="#pb145">145</a>]</span>lawn, and disappeared among the <i>timboso</i> trees and rubber-vines. + +</p> +<p>Two weeks later Hamat returned from Mecca. He paid me a visit in state—white robe and green turban. I shook hands and called +him by his new title of nobility, Tuan Hadji, but he did not refer to Lepas. + +</p> +<p>Before many minutes he commenced to look wistfully about. I pointed to the trees back of the house. He went out under them +and called two or three times. + +</p> +<p>There was a great chattering among the rubber-vines, and in a moment down came Lepas and sprang to his old master’s shoulder +as happy as a lover. + +</p> +<p>I never saw Lepas but once again, and that was one evening on the ocean esplanade. He was in the centre of an admiring circle +of half-nude Malay and Hindu boys, going through his quaint antics, while Hamat squatted before him beating on a crocodile-hide +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb146" href="#pb146">146</a>]</span>drum and singing a plaintive, monotonous song. + +</p> +<p>When it was finished, Lepas took an empty cocoanut shell and went out into the crowd to collect pennies. + +</p> +<p>I threw in a dollar. Lepas salaamed low as he snatched it out and bit it to test its genuineness. It was his latest accomplishment. +Then he hid himself among the laughing crowd. + +</p> +<p>That Lepas knew me, I could tell by the droop in his eye and the quick glance he gave to the right and left, to see if there +was room to escape in case I made an effort to avenge my wrongs. + +</p> +<p>I had no desire, however, to renew the acquaintance, and was quite willing to let by-gones be by-gones. + + + + +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb147" href="#pb147">147</a>]</span></p> +</div> +<div id="ch9" class="div1"><span class="pagenum"> +[<a href="#toc">Contents</a>] +</span><h2 class="normal">King Solomon’s Mines</h2> +<h2 class="sub">Being an Account of an Ascent of Mount Ophir in Malaya, by His Excellency, the Tuan Hakim of Maur, and the Writer</h2> +<div class="epigraph"> +<p>“And they came to Ophir, and fetched from thence gold, four hundred and twenty talents, and brought it to King Solomon.”—<span class="smallcaps">1 Kings IX.</span> 28. + + +</p> +<p>“For the King’s ships went to Tarshish with the servants of Huram; every three years once came the ships of Tarshish, bringing +gold and silver, ivory, and apes, and peacocks.”—<span class="smallcaps">2 Chronicles VIII.</span> 21. + +</p> +</div> +<p>The rose tints of a tropical sunrise had broken through the heavy bamboo <i>chicks</i> that jealously guarded the rapidly fleeting half-lights of my room: there came three deferential taps at the door, and the +smiling, olive-tinted face of Ah Minga appeared at the opening. “<i>Tabek</i>, Tuan,” he saluted, <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb148" href="#pb148">148</a>]</span>as he raised the mosquito curtains, and placed a tray of tea and mangosteens on a table by my side. + +</p> +<p>I sprang to the floor and across the heavily rugged room, and pulled up the offending <i>chick</i>. + +</p> +<p>Across the palace grounds, fresh from their morning bath, across the broad river Maur, for the nonce black in the shadow of +the jungle, across the gilded tops of the jungle, forty miles away as the crow flies, rested the serrated peak of Mount Ophir. + +</p> +<p>Directly below me, a soldier in a uniform of duck and a rimless cap with a gold band was pacing up and down the gravelled +walk. A little farther on a bevy of women and children were bathing in the tepid waters of the river, while a man in an unpainted +<i>prau</i> was keeping watch for a possible crocodile. + +</p> +<p>The sun was rising directly behind the peak, a ball of liquid fire. I drew in a long draught of the warm morning air. +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb149" href="#pb149">149</a>]</span></p> +<p>A Malay in a soft silken <i>sarong</i>, which fell about his legs like a woman’s skirt, stood in the door. + +</p> +<p>“The Prince is awaiting the Tuan Consul,” he said, with a graceful salaam. + +</p> +<p>I hurriedly donned my suit of white, drank my tea, and followed him along the grand salon, down a broad flight of steps, through +a marble court, and into the dining room. + +</p> +<p>A great white <i>punkah</i> was lazily vibrating over the heavy rosewood table. + +</p> +<p>Unko Sulliman, the Prince Governor of Maur, came forward and gave me his hand. + +</p> +<p>“It will be a hard climb and a hard day’s work?” he said, pleasantly, in good English. + +</p> +<p>“I have done worse,” I answered. + +</p> +<p>“But not under a Malayan sky. However, it is your wish, and his Highness the Sultan has granted it. The Chief Justice will +accompany you, and now you had better start before the sun is high.” +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb150" href="#pb150">150</a>]</span></p> +<p>I turned to the Tuan Hakim, or Chief Justice, with a gesture of unconcealed pleasure. We had shot crocodiles the day previous +along the banks of the Maur, and I had found him a good shot and an agreeable companion. While not as handsome a man or as +striking a representative of his race as the Unko, or Prince, he was a scholar, and could aid me more than any one else in +my exploration of the ancient gold workings about the base of the famous mountain. + +</p> +<p>The launch was awaiting us at the pier in front of the Residency, and we took our places in the bow, and arranged our guns +as our half-naked crew worked her slowly into mid-stream. We hoped to get some snap shots at the crocodiles that lined the +banks as we steamed swiftly up the river. + +</p> +<p>“I am inclined to agree with Josephus, that yonder mountain is the Mount Ophir of Solomon, when I look at this river. It is +equal to our Hudson, and could easily <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb151" href="#pb151">151</a>]</span>carry ships twice the size of any he or Huram ever floated.” + +</p> +<p>The Tuan Hakim nodded, and kept his eyes fastened on the nearest shore. + +</p> +<p>The course of the great river seemed to stretch out before us in an endless line of majestic circles. From shore to shore, +at high tide, it was a mile in breadth, and so deep that his Highness’s yacht, the <i>Pante</i>, of three hundred tons’ burden, could run up full fifty miles. + +</p> +<p>For a moment we caught a view of the wooden minarets of the little mosque at Bander Maharani; then we dashed on into the heart +of another great curve. + +</p> +<p>“What is it your Koran says that the wise king’s ships brought from Ophir?” he asked, never taking his eyes off the mangrove-bound +shore. + +</p> +<p>“Gold and silver, ivory, and apes, and peacocks,” I replied, quoting literally from Chronicles. +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb152" href="#pb152">152</a>]</span></p> +<p>“<i>Biak</i> (good)! Gold and silver we have plenty. Your English companies are taking it out of the land by the <i>pikul</i> In the old days, before the Portuguese came, the handle of every warrior’s <i>kris</i> was of ivory. Now our elephants are dying before the rifle of the sportsman. Soon our jungles will know them no more. Apes—” +and he pointed at the top of a giant <i>marbow</i>, where a troop of silver <i>wah-wahs</i> were swinging from limb to limb. “The glorious argus pheasant you have seen.” + +</p> +<p>“<i>Boyah</i>, Tuan!” the man at the wheel sung out. + +</p> +<p>I grasped my Winchester Express. Just ahead, half hidden by a black labyrinth of scaffold-like mangrove roots, lay the huge, +mud-covered form of a crocodile. + +</p> +<p>The Tuan Hakim raised his hand, and the launch slowed down and ran in under the bank. + +</p> +<p>“Now!” he whispered, and our rifles exploded in unison. +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb153" href="#pb153">153</a>]</span></p> +<p>A great splash of slimy red mud fell full on the front of my spotless white jacket, another struck in the water close by the +side of the boat. The wounded crocodile had sprung into the air from his tail up, and dropped back into his wallow with a +resounding thud. In another instant he was off the slippery bank and within the security of the mud-colored water. + +</p> +<p>I saw that my companion had more to tell me, possibly a native tradition of the fabled riches that were concealed within the +heart of the historic mountain that was for the moment framed in a setting of green, directly ahead. I put a fresh cartridge +into the barrel, and leaned back in my deck chair. + +</p> +<p>The Chief Justice extracted a manila from his case and handed it to me. + +</p> +<p>“In the days when Tunku Ali III. ruled over Maur, from Malacca to the confines of Johore, the Portuguese came, and Albuquerque +with his ships of war and soldiers <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb154" href="#pb154">154</a>]</span>in iron armor sought to wrest from our people their cities and their riches. My ancestor was a <i>dato</i>,—our <i>laksamana</i>, high admiral, of his Highness’s fleet. His galley was built of burnished teak, the lining of its cabin was of sandalwood,—algum +wood your Koran calls it,—and the turret in its stern was covered with plates of solid gold. You will find record of it to +this day in the state papers of Acheen. + +</p> +<p>“For fully a hundred and forty years did the Emperor of Johore and his valiant allies, the King of Acheen and the Sultan of +Maur, seek to retake Malacca from the Portuguese. The Dato Mamat was the last <i>laksamana</i> of the fleet. With him died the war and the secret of Mount Ophir.” + +</p> +<p>“The secret!” I questioned, as the Tuan Hakim paused. + +</p> +<p>“For one hundred and forty years were we at war with the invaders. Three generations were born and died with arms in their +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb155" href="#pb155">155</a>]</span>hands. No work was done on the land, save by women and children. Still we had plenty of gold with which to fit out fleet after +fleet, with which to arm our soldiers and feed our people. + +</p> +<p>“It came from yonder mountain. Not even the Sultan knew its hiding-place. <i>That</i> was only trusted to one family, and handed from father to son by word of mouth. + +</p> +<p>“Long before the days of Solomon the Wise did my family hold that secret for the state. It was one of them that gave the four +hundred and twenty talents to the <i>laksamana</i> of Huram’s fleet. Your Koran has made record of the gift. He did not know from whence it came. He asked, and we told him +from the <i>Ophirs</i>, which means from the gold mines. Then it was that he called the mountain that raised its head four thousand feet above the +sea, and was the first object his lookout saw as they neared the coast, ‘Mount Ophir.’ +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb156" href="#pb156">156</a>]</span></p> +<p>“No man, however so bold, ventured within a radius of fifteen miles around the foot of the mountain. It was haunted by evil +spirits. No man save the <i>laksamana</i>, who went twice a year and brought away to his <i>prau</i>, which was moored on the bank of the Maur thirty miles from the mountains, ten great loads of pure gold, each time over one +hundred <i>bugels</i>. I know not as to the truth, but it is told that there was one tribe consecrated to the mining of the gold, not one of whom +had ever been outside the shadow of the mountain: that when the great admiral ceased to come, they blocked up the entrance +to the mines, planted trees about the spot, and waited. One after another died, until not one was left. + +</p> +<p>“Such is the tradition of my family, Tuan.” + +</p> +<p>“But the great <i>laksamana</i>?” I asked. “I know of the ancient riches of Malacca. Barbosa tells us that gold was so common <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb157" href="#pb157">157</a>]</span>that it was reckoned by the <i>bhar</i> of four hundred weight.” + +</p> +<p>My companion contemplated the end of his manila. “Do you know how died his Highness, Montezuma of Mexico, Tuan?” + +</p> +<p>I bowed. + +</p> +<p>“So died my ancestor one hundred years later. I will tell you of it, that you may write his name in your histories by the +side of the name of the murdered Sultan of Mexico.” + +</p> +<p>The eyes of the little man flashed, and he looked squarely into mine for the first time. Possibly he may have detected a smile +on my face, at the thought of placing this leader of a band of pirates side by side in history with the once ruler of the +richest empire in the New World, for he paused in the midst of his narrative and said rapidly:— + +</p> +<p>“Must I tell you what your own writers tell of the rulers of our country, to make <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb158" href="#pb158">158</a>]</span>you credit my tale? It is all here,” he said, pointing to his head. “Everything that relates to my home I know. King Emmanuel +of Portugal wrote to his High Kadi at Rome, that his general, the cruel Albuquerque, had sailed to the Aurea Chersonese, called +by the natives Malacca, and found an enormous city of twenty-five thousand houses, that abounded in spices, gold, pearls, +and precious stones. Was Montezuma’s capital greater?” he triumphantly asked. + +</p> +<p>“It was as great then as Singapore is today. Albuquerque captured it, and built a fortress at the mouth of the river, making +the walls fifteen feet thick, all from the ruins of our mosques. This was in 1513.” + +</p> +<p>“Forgive me,” I said hastily, “if I have seemed to cast doubt on the relative importance of your country.” + +</p> +<p>There was a Malay <i>kampong</i>, or village, to our right. Under the heavy green and <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb159" href="#pb159">159</a>]</span>yellow fronds of a cocoanut grove were a half-dozen picturesque palm-thatched houses. They were built up on posts six feet +from the ground, and a dozen men and children scampered down their rickety ladders, as a shrill blast from our whistle aroused +them from their slumbers. Pressed against the wooden bars of their low, narrow windows, we could make out the comely, brown +faces of the women. The <i>punghulo</i>, or chief, walked sedately out to the beach, and touched his forehead to the ground as he recognized his superior. The sunlight +broke through the enwrapping cocoanuts, and brought out dazzling white splotches on the sandy floor before the houses. We +passed a little space of wiry <i>lallang</i> grass, which was waving in the faint breeze, and radiating long, irregular lines of heat, that under our glasses resembled +the marking of watered silk, and were once more abreast the green walls of the impenetrable jungle. +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb160" href="#pb160">160</a>]</span></p> +<p>“The Dato Mamat captured a Portuguese ship within a man’s voice from the harbor of Malacca. On it was the foreign Governor’s +daughter. She was dark, almost as dark as my people. Her eyes were black as night, with long, drooping lashes, and her hair +fell about her shapely neck, a mass of waving curls. She was tall and stately, and her bearing was haughty. The mighty <i>Laksamana</i>, who had fought a hundred battles, and had a hundred wives picked from the princesses of the kingdom,—for there were none +so noble but felt honored in his smiles,—loved this dark-skinned foreigner. It was pitiful! + +</p> +<p>“His great fleet, which was to have swept the very name of the Portuguese from the face of the earth, lay idle before the +harbor. Its captains were burning with ambition, but the Admiral would not give the command, and they dare not disobey. + +</p> +<p>“Day after day went by while the great <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb161" href="#pb161">161</a>]</span>man hung like a pariah dog on the words of his haughty captive. She scorned his words of love, laughed at his prayers, and +sneered at his devotion. Day after day the sun beat down on the burnished decks of the war <i>praus</i>. Night after night the evening gun in the besieged fort sent forth its mocking challenge: still the <i>Dato</i> made no motion. Oh, but it was pitiful! One by one the <i>praus</i> slipped away,—first those from Acheen, and then those from Johore,—but the valiant <i>Laksamana</i> saw them not. He was blind to all save one. Then she spoke: ‘If thou lovest me as thou boastest, and would win my smiles, +send me to my father; then go and bring me of this gold of Ophir,—for the <i>Dato</i> had laid his heart bare before her,—enough to sink yon boat. The daughter of a Braganza does not unite herself with a pauper. +When the moon is full again, I will expect you.’ + +</p> +<p>“So did the <i>Laksamana</i>, to the everlasting <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb162" href="#pb162">162</a>]</span>shame of Islam. When the moon was full he returned in his shining <i>prau</i> before the walls of Malacca, He brought from Ophir, of gold more than enough; of the pearls of Ceylon he brought a <i>chupah</i> full to the brim. He robbed his great palace, that he might lay at the feet of the Portuguese a fortune such as Solomon only +ever saw. And yet the captains of his fleet cared not for the gold, so long as the mighty <i>Dato</i> saved his honor. When he left for the quay, on which stood the Governor, his daughter, and the priests of their religion, +they said not a word, for he passed by with averted face; but each man grasped the jewelled handle of his <i>kris</i>, and swore to Allah under his breath that should but one hair of the mighty Admiral’s head be lacking when he returned, they +would cut the false heart from the woman and feed it to the dogs. + +</p> +<p>“So spoke the captains; but ere the <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb163" href="#pb163">163</a>]</span>breath had passed their lips their chief was a prisoner, and the guns from the fort hurled defiance at the betrayed. + +</p> +<p>“It was pitiful! Allah was avenged. + +</p> +<p>“Fiercely raged the battle, and when there was a breach in the walls, and the captain <i>besar</i> had ordered the attack, the Portuguese held the mighty <i>Laksamana</i> over the walls, and reviled the allied fleets with words of derision. + +</p> +<p>“Not one moved, and all was still. Suddenly the Admiral raised his head, and gazed out and down at his followers. Then he +spoke, and the sound of his voice reached far out to the most distant <i>prau</i> that lay becalmed within the shadow of <i><span class="corr" id="xd0e2560" title="Source: casurina">casuarina</span></i>-shaded Puli. + +</p> +<p>“‘<i>Allah il Allah</i>, I have sinned, and I must die. No more shall my name be known in the land. I am no longer <i>laksamana</i>; neither am I a <i>dato</i>. Allah is just. Tuan Allah Suka!’ +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb164" href="#pb164">164</a>]</span></p> +<p>“A foreigner smote him in the mouth, and a great cry arose from without the walls. + +</p> +<p>“The war went on; but day after day did the Governor send a message to the <i>Laksamana</i> in the dungeon. ‘Reveal the spot where thy gold is hidden, and thy life and liberty are granted.’ + +</p> +<p>“Day by day the <i>Dato</i> replied, ‘My life is a pollution in the nostrils of Allah. Take it.’ + +</p> +<p>“So they laid the great chief on the stones of his cell, bound hand and foot, and one by one did they break the joints of +his toes, his fingers, and then the joints of his legs and arms. When they had finished, and he still lived, the woman came +to him and mocked him, but the Admiral closed his eyes and prayed. ‘O Allah, the all-merciful and the loving kind, forgive +me for my erring heart. Thou knowest that it goes out to this woman still. Let not my country <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb165" href="#pb165">165</a>]</span>suffer for my deeds. I gave unto thy servant Solomon of the gold that has made us great. If thou canst, thou wilt whisper +the secret of our nation to one of thy chosen people, that they may have means whereby to fight thy battles.’ + +</p> +<p>“And then the woman raised her hand, and with one stroke of the axe an attendant severed from his body the head of the once +mighty <i>Laksamana</i> of the fleets of Johore, Acheen and Maur. + +</p> +<p>“So died the secret of Ophir. So fell Malacca forever into the hands of the foreigner.” + +</p> +<p>The Tuan Hakim’s voice trembled as he closed. During the tragic recital he had dropped into the soft, melodious chant of his +nation. At times he would lapse into Malay, and the boatmen would push forward and listen with unconcealed excitement. Then, +as he returned to English, they would drop back into their places, but never take <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb166" href="#pb166">166</a>]</span>their eyes off the face of the speaker. Only our China “boys” took no interest in the past of Maur. It was tiffin time, and +they were anxious to set before us our lunch of rice curry, gula Malacca, whiskey and soda. + +</p> +<p>The sun was directly above us, and the fierce, steely glare of the Malayan sky and water dazzled our eyes. Mount Ophir looked +as far ahead as ever. The winding course of the river seemed at times to take us directly away from it. + +</p> +<p>Just as we had finished our meal, and had lighted our manilas, the steersman turned the little launch sharply about, and headed +directly for the shore. In a moment we had shot under and through the deep fringe of mangrove trees, and had emerged into +the jungle. On all sides the trees rose, columnar and straight, and the ground was firm, although densely covered with ferns +and vines. + +</p> +<p>The launch stopped, and the chief turned <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb167" href="#pb167">167</a>]</span>to me. “Now for the climb. We have thirty miles to the base of the mountain. We will push on ten miles, and spend the night +at a Malay village. The next day we will try and reach the base of the mountain.” + +</p> +<p>I looked about me. We might have been surrounded by prison walls, for all hope there seemed to be of our getting an inch into +the jungle. + +</p> +<p>Our servants gathered up our rather extensive impedimenta, and sprang into the water. We were forced to follow suit, and begin +our day’s march with wet feet. A few steps up the stream we came upon an old elephant track and plunged boldly in,—and it +was in! For three miles we labored through a series of the most elaborate mud-holes that I have ever seen. The elephants in +breaking a path through the jungle are extremely timid in their boldness. The second one always steps in the footprints of +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb168" href="#pb168">168</a>]</span>the first. Year after year it is the same, until in course of time the path is marked by a series of pitfalls, often two feet +in depth; and as it rains nearly every day they become a seething, slimy paste of mud. + +</p> +<p>Our heavy cloth shoes and stockings did not protect us from the attacks of innumerable leeches; for when we at last reached +an open bit of forest and sat down to rest, we found dozens of them attached to our legs and even on our bodies. They were +small, and beautifully marked with stripes of bright yellow. + +</p> +<p>It was twilight when we neared the welcome <i>kampong</i>. We had sent a runner ahead to notify the <i>punghulo</i> of our arrival, and as we finished our struggle with the last thorny rattan, and tripped over the last rubber-vine, we could +hear the shouting of men and the barking of dogs. Evidently we were expected. + +</p> +<p>The <i>kampong</i> might have been any other <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb169" href="#pb169">169</a>]</span>in the kingdom, and the little old weazened <i>punghulo</i>, who came bowing and smiling forward, might have been at the head of any one of a hundred other <i>kampongs</i>,—they were all so much alike. A half-dozen <i>attap</i> bungalows, built under a cocoanut grove, all facing toward a central plaza; a score of dogs for each bungalow; a flock of +featherless fowls scratching and wallowing beneath them, and a bevy of half-naked children playing with a rattan ball within +the light of a central fire,—made up the details of a little picture of Malayan home life that had become very familiar to +me within the last three years. + +</p> +<p>Our servants at once set about preparing supper before the fire, while we for politeness’ sake compounded a mouthful of betel-nut +and <i>syrah</i> leaf from the <i>punghulo’s</i> state box. + +</p> +<p>The next morning we set out for our twenty miles’ tramp, along a narrow jungle <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb170" href="#pb170">170</a>]</span>path, accompanied by some ten natives of the village whom my companion had retained to cut a path for us up the mountain. +It was a long, tiresome journey, and we were heartily glad when it was ended, and we were encamped on the rocky banks of a +fern-hid stream. + +</p> +<p>Twice during our day’s march had we crossed deep, ragged depressions in the earth, which were overgrown with a jungle that +seemed to be coequal in age with the surrounding trees. We did not pause to examine them, although our natives pointed them +out with the expressive word <i>mas</i> (gold). We promised to do that at a later date. On the border of the creek I found some gold-bearing rock, and while the +Tuan Hakim was engaged in securing some superb specimens of the great atlas moth, I sat down and crushed some fragments of +it, and obtained enough gold to satisfy me that the rock would run four ounces to the ton. +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb171" href="#pb171">171</a>]</span></p> +<p>It was a beautiful night. We lay under our mosquito netting, and gazed up through the interlacing branches of the trees at +the star-strewn sky, and smoked our manilas in weary content. The long, full “coo-ee” of the stealthy argus pheasant sounded +at intervals in distant parts of the forest. It might have been the call of the orang-utan, or the wild hillmen of the country, +for they have imitated the call of this most glorious of birds. + +</p> +<p>The shrill, never ceasing whir of the cicada hardly attracted our attention; while the whistle and crash of a monkey that +was inspecting us from his perch among the trees above caused me to peer upward, in hopes of catching a glimpse of his grayish +outlines. + +</p> +<p>I had not had an opportunity of asking my companion for the details of his tragic story. I turned to him, and found him watching +me attentively. “Were you listening to the call of the <i>coo-ee</i>?” he asked. + +</p> +<p>“Yes,” I answered. +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb172" href="#pb172">172</a>]</span></p> +<p>“It is the queen of birds. I will get you one. I have never shot one. They only come out at night, and then only to disappear, +but we can trap them. It will die in captivity. That is why Solomon could not keep them, and sent for new ones every three +years.” + +</p> +<p>“What became of the woman?” I asked. + +</p> +<p>“The body of the <i>Laksamana</i> was thrown over the walls by the Portuguese,” he said moodily. “It was embalmed and laid away. Two months from that day the +woman was walking outside the walls. The war was over. There was no more gold. Three of my people sprang upon her and the +Portuguese she was to marry.” He paused for a moment and looked up at the stars, then went on in a cold, matter-of-fact tone. +“They were lashed to the headless body of the man they had murdered, and thrown into the royal tiger-cage, by order of his +Highness, Ali, Sultan of Maur.” +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb173" href="#pb173">173</a>]</span></p> +<p>I raised my curtain and threw the stub of my cigar out into the darkness, a smothered exclamation of horror escaping my lips. + +</p> +<p>“It was the will of Allah. Good night.” + +</p> +<p>It was nearly nine o’clock the next morning before we started. Our Malays had gone on at daybreak, to cut a path up the base +of the mountain to where the open forest began. + +</p> +<p>We ascended steadily up a moderate slope for several miles, keeping the ravine on our left. It was comparatively easy work +after we had left the jungle behind. After crossing a level plateau we once more found ourselves in a forest so dense that +our men had to use their <i>parangs</i> again. The heat of the jungle was intense, and we suffered severely from the stings of a fly that is not unlike a cicada +in shape. + +</p> +<p>From the jungle we emerged into an immense stone field,—<i>padang-batu</i>, the Malays called it. It extended along the mountain <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb174" href="#pb174">174</a>]</span>side as far as we could see, in places quite bare, at others deeply fissured and covered with a most luxuriant vegetation. +We tramped at times waist deep through ferns, some green, some dark red, and some lined with yellow, clumps of the splendid +<i>Dipteris Horsfieldi</i> and <i>Matonia pectinala</i>, with their slender stems and wide-spreading palmate fronds towering two feet above our heads. The delicate maidenhair lay +like a rich carpet beneath our feet, while hundreds of magnificent climbing pitcher-plants doused us with water as we knocked +against them. Our sympiesometer showed us that we were twenty-eight hundred feet above the sea. + +</p> +<p>Beyond the <i>padang-batu</i> we entered a forest of almost Alpine character, dwarfed and stunted. For several hours we worked along ridges, descended +into valleys, and ascended almost precipitous ledges, until we finally reached a peak that was separated from the true mountain +by a deep, forbidding cañon. +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb175" href="#pb175">175</a>]</span></p> +<p>Several of the older men of the party gave out, and we were forced to leave them with half our baggage and what water was +left: there was a spring, they told us, near the summit. + +</p> +<p>The scramble down the one side of the cañon, and up the other, was a hard hour’s work. Its rocky, almost perpendicular sides +were covered with a bushy vegetation on top of a foundation of mosses and dead leaves, so that it afforded us more hindrance +than help. + +</p> +<p>Just below the summit we came to where a projecting rock gave us shelter, and a natural basin contained flowing water. Dropping +my load, and hardly waiting to catch my breath, I was on my way up the fifty feet that lay between us and the top. In another +moment I had mounted the small, rocky, rhododendron-covered platform, and stood, the first of my party, on the summit of Mount +Ophir. The little American flag <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb176" href="#pb176">176</a>]</span>that I had brought with me I waved frantically above my head, much to the amusement of my attendants. + +</p> +<p>Four thousand feet below, to the east, stretched the silver sheen of the Indian Ocean. The smoke of a passing steamer lay +like a dark stain on the blue and white of the sky. Close into the shore was the little capital town of Bander Maharani, connecting +itself with us by a long, snake-like ribbon of shimmering light,—the great river Maur. + +</p> +<p>To the north and west successive ranges of hill and valley, divided by the glistening river, and all covered by an interminable +jungle of vivid green, fell away until lost in the cloudless horizon. + +</p> +<p>For a moment I stood and gazed out over the vast expanse that lay before me, my mind filled with the wild, unwritten poetry +of its jungles and its people; then I turned to my companion. +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb177" href="#pb177">177</a>]</span></p> +<p>“It is beautiful!” + +</p> +<p>He shrugged his shoulders. + +</p> +<p>“But not equal to the view from our own Mount Washington.” + +</p> +<p>“Then why take so much trouble to secure it? Mount Pulei is as high, and there is a good road to its top.” + +</p> +<p>I laughed. “Mount Pulei or Mount Washington is not Ophir.” + +</p> +<p>“True!” he answered, opening his eyes in surprise at the seeming absurdity of my statement. “He that told you they were speaketh +a lie.” + +</p> +<p>We spent the night on the summit, and watched the sun drop into the midst of the sea, away to the west. It was cool and delightful +after the moist, heat-laden atmosphere of the lowlands, and a strong breeze freed us from the swarm of tiger mosquitoes that +we had learned to expect as the darkness came on. + +</p> +<p>Where the Ophir of the Bible really is, <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb178" href="#pb178">178</a>]</span>will ever be a question of doubt. To my mind it embraces the entire East—the Malay Peninsula, Ceylon, India, and even China,—Ophir +being merely a comprehensive term, possibly taken from this Mount Ophir of Johore, which signified the most central point +of the region to which Solomon’s ships sailed. For all ages the gold of the Malay Peninsula has been known; from the earliest +times there has been intercourse between the Arabians and the Malays, while the Malayan was the very first of the far Eastern +countries to adopt the Mohammedan religion and customs. + +</p> +<p>All the articles mentioned in the Biblical account of Mount Ophir are found in and about Malacca in abundance, while on the +coast of Africa two of them, peacocks and silver, are missing. + +</p> +<p>If the Hebrew word <i>thukyim</i> is translated peacocks, and not parrots, then Solomon’s ships must have turned east after passing <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb179" href="#pb179">179</a>]</span>the Straits of Bab-el-Mandeb, and not south along the coast of Africa toward Sofala. For peacocks are only found in India +and Malaya. + +</p> +<p>It is a singular fact that in the language of the <i>Orang Bennu</i>, or aborigines of the Malay Peninsula, that word “peacocks,” which in the modern Malay is <i>marrak</i>, is in the aboriginal <i>chim marak</i>, which is the exact termination of the Hebrew <i>tuchim</i>. Their word for bird is <i>tchem</i>, another surprising similarity. + +</p> +<p>The morning sun brought us to our feet long before it was light in the vast spaces beneath our eyes. The jungle held its reddening +rays for a moment; they flamed along the course of a half-hidden river; we stood out clear and distinct in their glorious +effulgence, and then the broken, denuded crags and ragged ravines of the <i>padang-batu</i> absorbed them in its black fastnesses. + +</p> +<p>The gold of Mount Ophir was all about us. <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb180" href="#pb180">180</a>]</span>The air, the stones, the very trees, seemed to have been transformed into the glorious metal that the little fleets of Solomon +and Huram sailed so far to seek. The Aurea Chersonese was a breathing, pulsating reality. + + + + +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb181" href="#pb181">181</a>]</span></p> +</div> +<div id="ch10" class="div1"><span class="pagenum"> +[<a href="#toc">Contents</a>] +</span><h2 class="normal">Busuk</h2> +<h2 class="sub">The Story of a Malayan Girlhood</h2> +<p>They called her Busuk, or “the youngest” at her birth. Her father, the old <i>punghulo</i>, or chief, of the little <i>kampong</i>, or village, of Passir Panjang, whispered the soft Allah Akbar, the prayer to Allah, in her small brown ear. + +</p> +<p>The subjects of the <i>punghulo</i> brought presents of <i>sarongs</i> run with gold thread, and not larger than a handkerchief, for Busuk to wear about her waist. They also brought gifts of rice +in baskets of cunningly woven cocoanut fibre; of bananas, a hundred on a bunch; of <i>durians</i>, that filled the bungalow with so strong an odor that Busuk drew up her wrinkled, tiny face into a quaint frown; and of cocoanuts +in their great green, oval shucks. +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb182" href="#pb182">182</a>]</span></p> +<p>Busuk’s old aunt, who lived far away up the river Maur, near the foot of Mount Ophir, sent a yellow gold pin for the hair; +her husband, the Hadji Mat, had washed the gold from the bed of the stream that rushed by their bungalow. + +</p> +<p>Busuk’s brother, who was a sergeant in his Highness’s the Sultan’s artillery at Johore, brought a tiny pair of sandals all +worked in many-colored beads. Never had such presents been seen at the birth of any other of Punghulo Sahak’s children. + +</p> +<p>Two days later the Imam Paduka Tuan sent Busuk’s father a letter sewn up in a yellow bag. It contained a blessing for Busuk. +Busuk kept the letter all her life, for it was a great thing for the high priest to do. +</p> +<hr class="tb"><p> + +</p> +<p>On the seventh day Busuk’s head was shaven and she was named Fatima; but they called her Busuk in the <i>kampong</i>, and <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb183" href="#pb183">183</a>]</span>some even called her Inchi Busuk, the princess. + +</p> +<p>From the low-barred window of Busuk’s home she could look out on the shimmering, sunlit waters of the Straits of Malacca. +The loom on which Busuk’s mother wove the <i>sarongs</i> for the <i>punghulo</i> and for her sons stood by the side of the window, and Busuk, from the sling in which she sat on her mother’s side, could +see the fishing <i>praus</i> glide by, and also the big lumber <i>tonkangs</i>, and at rare intervals one of his Highness’s launches. + +</p> +<p>Sometimes she blinked her eyes as a vagrant shaft of sunlight straggled down through the great green and yellow fronds of +the cocoanut palms that stood about the bungalow; sometimes she kept her little black eyes fixed gravely on the flying shuttle +which her mother threw deftly back and forth through the many-colored threads; but best of all did she love to watch the <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb184" href="#pb184">184</a>]</span>little gray lizards that ran about on the palm sides of the house after the flies and moths. + +</p> +<p>She was soon able to answer the lizards’ call of “gecho, gecho,” and once she laughed outright when one, in fright of her +baby-fingers, dropped its tail and went wiggling away like a boat without a rudder. But most of the time she swung and crowed +in her wicker cradle under the low rafters. + +</p> +<p>When Busuk grew older, she was carried every day down the ladder of the house and put on the warm white sand with the other +children. They were all naked, save for a little chintz bib that was tied to their necks; so it made no difference how many +mudpies they made on the beach nor how wet they got in the tepid waters of the ocean. They had only to look out carefully +for the crocodiles that glided noiselessly among the mangrove roots. +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb185" href="#pb185">185</a>]</span></p> +<p>One day one of Busuk’s playmates was caught in the cruel jaws of a crocodile, and lost its hand. The men from the village +went out into the labyrinth of roots that stood up above the flood like a huge scaffolding, and caught the man-eater with +ropes of the <i>gamooty</i> palm. They dragged it up the beach and put out its eyes with red-hot spikes of the hard billion wood. + +</p> +<p>Although the varnished leaves of the cocoanuts kept almost every ray of sunlight out of the little village, and though the +children could play in the airy spaces under their own houses, their heads and faces were painted with a paste of flour and +water to keep their tender skins from chafing in the hot, moist air. +</p> +<hr class="tb"><p> + +</p> +<p>At evening, when the fierce sun went down behind the great banian tree that nearly hid Mount Pulei, the <i>kateeb</i> would sound the call to prayer on a hollow log <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb186" href="#pb186">186</a>]</span>that hung up before the little palm-thatched mosque. Then Busuk and her playmates would fall on their faces, while the holy +man sang in a soft, monotonous voice the promises of the Koran, the men of the <i>kampong</i> answering. “<i>Allah il Allah</i>,” he would sing, and “Mohammed is his prophet,” they would answer. + +</p> +<p>Every night Busuk would lie down on a mat on the floor of the house with a little wooden pillow under her neck, and when she +dared she would peep down through the open spaces in the bamboo floor into the darkness beneath. Once she heard a low growl, +and a great dark form stood right below her. She could see its tail lashing its sides with short, whip-like movements. Then +all the dogs in the <i>kampong</i> began to bark, and the men rushed down their ladders screaming, “<i>Harimau! Harimau!</i>” (A tiger! A tiger!) The next morning she found that her pet dog, Fatima, named after <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb187" href="#pb187">187</a>]</span>herself, had been killed by one stroke of the great beast’s paw. Once a monster python swung from a cocoanut tree through +the window of her home, and wound itself round and round the post of her mother’s loom. It took a dozen men to tie a rope +to the serpent’s tail, and pull it out. +</p> +<hr class="tb"><p> + +</p> +<p>Busuk went everywhere astride the <i>punghulo’s</i> broad shoulders as he collected the taxes and settled the disputes in the little village. She went out into the straits in +the big <i>prau</i> that floated the star and crescent of Johore over its stern, to look at the fishing-stakes, and was nearly wrecked by a great +water-spout that burst within a few feet of them. + +</p> +<p>Then she went twice to Johore, and gazed in open-eyed wonder at the palaces of the Sultan and at the fort in which her uncle +was an officer. + +</p> +<p>“Some day,” she thought, “I may see his Highness, and he may notice me and <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb188" href="#pb188">188</a>]</span>smile.<span class="corr" id="xd0e2892" title="Not in source">”</span> For had not his Highness spoken twice to her father and called him a good man? So whenever she went to Johore she put on +her best <i>sarong</i> and <i>kabaya</i>> and in her jetty black hair she put the pin her aunt had given her, with a spray of sweet-smelling <i>chumpaka</i> flower. + +</p> +<p>When she was four years old she went to the <i>penager</i> to learn to read and write. In a few months she could outstrip any one in the class in tracing Arabic characters on the sand-sprinkled +floor, and she knew whole chapters in the Koran. + +</p> +<p>So the days were passed in the little <i>kampong</i> under the gently swaying cocoanuts, and the little Malayan girl grew up like her companions, free and wild, with little thought +beyond the morrow. That some day she was to be married, she knew; for since her first birthday she had been engaged to Mamat, +the son of her father’s friend, the <i>punghulo</i> of Bander Bahru. +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb189" href="#pb189">189</a>]</span></p> +<p>She had never seen Mamat, nor he her; for it was not proper that a Malay should see his intended before marriage. She had +heard that he was strong and lithe of limb, and could beat all his fellows at the game called <i>ragga</i>. When the wicker ball was in the air he never let it touch the ground; for he was as quick with his head and feet, shoulders, +hips, and breast, as with his hands. He could swim and box, and had once gone with his father to the seaports on New Year’s +Day at Singapore, and his own <i>prau</i> had won the short-distance race. + +</p> +<p>Mamat was three years older than Busuk, and they were to be married when she was fifteen. + +</p> +<p>At first she cried a little, for she was sad at the thought of giving up her playmates. But then the older women told her +that she could chew betel when she was married, and her mother showed her a little set of betel-nut boxes, for which she had +sent to Singapore. <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb190" href="#pb190">190</a>]</span>Each cup was of silver, and the box was cunningly inlaid with storks and cherry blossoms. It had cost her mother a month’s +hard labor on the loom. + +</p> +<p>Then Mamat was not to take her back to his father’s bungalow. He had built a little one of his own, raised up on palm posts +six feet from the ground, so that she need not fear tigers or snakes or white ants. Its sides were of plaited palm leaves, +every other one colored differently, and its roof was of the choicest <i>attap</i>, each leaf bent carefully over a rod of rattan, and stitched so evenly that not a drop of rain could get through. + +</p> +<p>Inside there was a room especially for her, with its sides hung with <i>sarongs</i>, and by the window was a loom made of <i>kamooning</i> wood, finer than her mother’s. Outside, under the eaves, was a house of bent rattan for her ring-doves, and a shelf where +her silver-haired monkey could sun himself. +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb191" href="#pb191">191</a>]</span></p> +<p>So Busuk forgot her grief, and she watched with ill-concealed eagerness the coming of Mamat’s friends with presents of tobacco +and rice and bone-tipped <i>krises</i>. Then for the first time she was permitted to open the camphor-wood chest and gaze upon all the beautiful things that she +was to wear for the one great day. + +</p> +<p>Her mother and elder sisters had been married in them, and their children would, one after another, be married in them after +her. + +</p> +<p>There was a <i>sarong</i> of silk, run with threads of gold and silver, that was large enough to go around her body twice and wide enough to hang from +her waist to her ankles; a belt of silver, with a gold plate in front, to hold the <i>sarong</i> in place; a <i>kabaya</i>, or outer garment, that looked like a dressing-gown, and was fastened down the front with golden brooches of curious Malayan +workmanship; a pair of red-tipped sandals; <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb192" href="#pb192">192</a>]</span>and a black lace scarf to wear about her black hair. There were earrings and a necklace of colored glass, and armlets, bangles, +and gold pins. They all dazzled Busuk, and she could hardly wait to try them on. +</p> +<hr class="tb"><p> + +</p> +<p>A buffalo was sacrificed on the day of the ceremony. The animal was “without blemish or disease.” The men were careful not +to break its fore or hind leg or its spine, after death, for such was the law. Its legs were bound and its head was fastened, +and water was poured upon it while the <i>kadi</i> prayed. Then he divided its windpipe. When it was cooked, one half of it was given to the priests and the other half to the +people. + +</p> +<p>All the guests, and there were many, brought offerings of cooked rice in the fresh green leaves of the plantain, and baskets +of delicious mangosteens, and pink mangoes and great jack-fruits. A curry was made from <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb193" href="#pb193">193</a>]</span>the rice that had forty <i>sambuls</i> to mix with it. There were the pods of the moringa tree, chilies and capsicums, prawns and decayed fish, chutneys and onions, +ducks’ eggs and fish roes, peppers and cucumbers and grated cocoanuts. + +</p> +<p>It was a wonderful curry, made by one of the Sultan’s own cooks; for the Punghulo Sahak spared no expense in the marriage +of this, his last daughter, and a great feast is exceedingly honorable in the eyes of the guests. + +</p> +<p>Busuk’s long black hair had to be done up in a marvellous chignon on the top of her head. First, her maids washed it beautifully +clean with the juice of the lime and the lather of the soap-nut; then it was combed and brushed until every hair glistened +like ebony; next it was twisted up and stuck full of the quaint golden and tortoise-shell bodkins, with here and there a spray +of jasmine and <i>chumpaka</i>. +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb194" href="#pb194">194</a>]</span></p> +<p>Busuk’s milky-white teeth had to be filed off more than a fourth. She put her head down on the lap of the woman and closed +her eyes tight to keep back the hot tears that would fall, but after the pain was over and her teeth were blackened, she looked +in the mirror at her swollen gums and thought that she was very beautiful. Now she could chew the betel-nut from the box her +mother had given her! + +</p> +<p>The palms of her hands and the nails of her fingers and toes were painted red with henna, and the lids of her eyes touched +up with antimony. When all was finished, they led her out into the great room, which was decorated with mats of colored palm, +masses of sweet-smelling flowers and maidenhair fern. There they placed her in the chair of state to receive her relatives +and friends. +</p> +<hr class="tb"><p> + +</p> +<p>She trembled a little for fear Mamat would not think her beautiful, but when, <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb195" href="#pb195">195</a>]</span>last of all, he came up and smiled and claimed the bit of betel-nut that she was chewing for the first time, and placed it +in his mouth, she smiled back and was very happy. + +</p> +<p>Then the <i>kadi</i> pronounced them man and wife in the presence of all, for is it not written, “Written deeds may be forged, destroyed, or altered; +but the memory of what is transacted in the presence of a thousand witnesses must remain sacred? <i>Allah il Allah!</i>” And all the people answered, “<i>Suka! Suka!</i>” (We wish it! We wish it!) + +</p> +<p>Then Mamat took his seat on the dais beside the bride, and the <i>punghulo</i> passed about the betel-box. First, Busuk took out a <i>syrah</i> leaf smeared with lime and placed in it some broken fragments of the betel-nut, and chewed it until a bright red liquid oozed +from the corners of her mouth. The others did the same. +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb196" href="#pb196">196</a>]</span></p> +<p>Then the women brought garlands of flowers—red allamandas, yellow convolvulus, and pink hibiscus—and hung them about Busuk +and Mamat, while the musicians outside beat their crocodile-hide drums in frantic haste. + +</p> +<p>The great feast began out in the sandy plaza before the houses. There was cock-fighting and kicking the <i>ragga</i> ball, wrestling and boxing, and some gambling among the elders. + +</p> +<p>Toward night Busuk was put in a rattan chair and carried by the young men, while Mamat and the girls walked by her side, a +mile away, where her husband’s big <i>cadjang</i>-covered <i>prau</i> lay moored. It was to take them to his bungalow at Bander Bahru. The band went, too, and the boys shot off guns and fire-crackers +all the way, until Busuk’s head swam, and she was so happy that the tears came into her eyes and trickled down through the +rouge on her cheeks. + +</p> +<p>So ended Busuk’s childhood. She was <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb197" href="#pb197">197</a>]</span>not quite fifteen when she became mistress of her own little palm-thatched home. But it was not play housekeeping with her; +for she must weave the <i>sarongs</i> for Mamat and herself for clothes and for spreads at night, and the weaving of each cost her twenty days’ hard labor. If +she could weave an extra one from time to time, Mamat would take it up to Singapore and trade it at the bazaar for a pin for +the hair or a sunshade with a white fringe about it. + +</p> +<p>Then there were the shell-fish and prawns on the sea-shore to be found, greens to be sought out in the jungle, and the <i>padi</i>, or rice, to be weeded. She must keep a plentiful supply of betel-nut and lemon leaves for Mamat and herself, and one day +there was a little boy to look after and make tiny <i>sarongs</i> for. +</p> +<hr class="tb"><p> + +</p> +<p>So, long before the time that our American girls are out of school, and about the <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb198" href="#pb198">198</a>]</span>time they are putting on long dresses, Busuk was a woman. Her shoulders were bent, her face wrinkled, her teeth decayed and +falling out from the use of the <i>syrah</i> leaf. She had settled the engagement of her oldest boy to a little girl of two years in a neighboring <i>kampong</i>, and was dusting out the things in the camphor-wood chest, preparatory to the great occasion. + +</p> +<p>I used to wonder, as I wandered through one of these secluded little Malay villages that line the shores of the peninsula +and are scattered over its interior, if the little girl mothers who were carrying water and weaving mats did not sometimes +long to get down on the warm, white sands and have a regular romp among themselves,—playing “Cat-a-corner” or “I spy”; for +none of them were over seventeen or eighteen! + +</p> +<p>Still their lives are not unhappy. Their husbands are kind and sober, and they are never destitute. They have their families +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb199" href="#pb199">199</a>]</span>about them, and hear laughter and merriment from one sunny year to another. + +</p> +<p>Busuk’s father-in-law is dead now, and the last time I visited Bander Bahru to shoot wild pig, Mamat was <i>punghulo</i>, collecting the taxes and administering the laws. + +</p> +<p>He raised the back of his open palm to his forehead with a quiet dignity when I left, after the day’s sport, and said, “<i>Tabek!</i> Tuan Consul. Do not forget Mamat’s humble bungalow.” And Busuk came down the ladder with little Mamat astride her bare shoulders, +with a pleasant “<i>Tabek! Tuan!</i> (Good-by, my lord.) May Allah’s smile be ever with you.” + + + +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb200" href="#pb200">200</a>]</span></p> +</div> +<div id="ch11" class="div1"><span class="pagenum"> +[<a href="#toc">Contents</a>] +</span><h2 class="normal">A Crocodile Hunt</h2> +<h2 class="sub">At the foot of Mount Ophir</h2> +<p>The little pleasant-faced Malay captain of his Highness’s three-hundred ton yacht <i>Pante</i> called softly, close to my ear, “Tuan—Tuan Consul, Gunong Ladang!” I sprang to my feet, rubbed my eyes, and gazed in the +direction indicated by the brown hand. + +</p> +<p>I saw not five miles off the low jungle-bound coast of the peninsula, and above it a great bank of vaporous clouds, pierced +by the molten rays of the early morning sun. As I looked around inquiringly, the captain, bowing, said: “Tuan,” and I raised +my eyes. Again I saw the lofty mountain peak surmounting the cushion of clouds, standing out bold and clear against the almost +fierce azure of the Malayan sky. +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb201" href="#pb201">201</a>]</span></p> +<p>“Mount Ophir!” burst from my lips. The captain smiled and went forward to listen to the linesman’s “two fathoms, sir, two +and one half fathoms, sir, two fathoms, sir”; for we were crossing the shallow bar that protects the mouth of the great river +Maur from the ocean. + +</p> +<p>The tide was running out like a mill-race. The <i>Pante</i> was backing from side to side, and then pushing carefully ahead, trying to get into the deep water beyond, before low tide. + +</p> +<p>Suddenly there was a soft, grating sound and the captain came to me and touched his hat. + +</p> +<p>“We are on the bar, sir. Will you send a despatch by the steam-cutter to Prince Suliman, asking for the launch? We cannot +get off until the night tide.” + +</p> +<p>The <i>Pante</i> had so swung around that we could plainly see the big red <i>istana</i>, or palace, of Prince Suliman close to the sandy shore, <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb202" href="#pb202">202</a>]</span>surrounded by a grove of graceful palms. With the aid of our glasses the white and red blur farther up the river resolved +itself into the streets and quays of the little city of Bander Maharani, the capital of the province of Maur in dominions +of his Highness Abubaker, Sultan of Johore. Above and overshadowing all both in beauty and historical interest was the famous +old mountain where King Solomon sent his diminutive ships for “gold, silver, peacocks, and apes.” + +</p> +<p>By the time the ladies were astir, the mists had vanished and Gunong Ladang, or as it is styled in Holy Writ Mount Ophir, +presented to our admiring gaze its massive outlines, set in a frame of green and blue. The dense jungle crept halfway up its +sides and at the point where the cloud stratum had rested but an hour before, it merged into a tangled network of vines and +shrubs which in their turn gave place to the black, red rock that shone like burnished brass. +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb203" href="#pb203">203</a>]</span></p> +<p>If our minds wandered away from visions of future crocodile-shooting to dreams of the past wealth that had been taken from +the ancient mines that honeycombed the base of the mountain, it is hardly to be wondered at. If <i>Dato</i> or “Lord” Garlands told us queer stories of woods and masonry that antedated the written history of the country, stories +of mines and workings that were overgrown with a jungle that looked as primeval as the mountain itself, he was to be excused +on the plea that we, waiting on a sandy bar with the metallic glare of the sea in our eyes, were glad of any subject to distract +our thoughts. + +</p> +<p>The Resident’s launch brought out Prince Mat and the Chief Justice, both of whom spoke English with an easy familiarity. Both +had been in Europe and Prince Mat had dined with Queen Victoria. One night at table he related the incidents of that dinner +with a delightful exactness that might have <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb204" href="#pb204">204</a>]</span>pleased her Britannic Majesty could she have listened. + +</p> +<p>I waited only long enough to see the ladies installed in a suite of rooms in the Residency, then donned a suit of white duck, +stepped into a river launch in company with Inchi Mohamed, the Chief Justice, and steamed out into the broad waters of the +Maur. + +</p> +<p>The southernmost kingdom of the great continent of Asia is the little Sultanate of Johore, ruled over by one of the most enlightened +Princes of the East. Fourteen miles from Singapore, just across the notorious old Straits of Malacca, is his capital and the +palace of the Sultan. + +</p> +<p>We had been guests of the State for the past two weeks. Its ruler, among other kind attentions to us, had suggested a visit +to his out province Maur and a crocodile hunt along the banks of the broad river that wound about the foot of Mount Ophir. + +</p> +<p>Fifteen hours’ steam in his beautiful yacht <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb205" href="#pb205">205</a>]</span>along the picturesque shores of Johore brought us to the realization of a long-cherished dream,—the seeing for ourselves the +mountain whose exact location had been a subject of conjecture for so many centuries. Were I a scholar and explorer and not +a sportsman, I might again and more explicitly set forth facts which I consider indubitable proof that the Mount Ophir of +Asia and not the Mount Ophir of Africa is, as I have already claimed, the Mount Ophir of the Bible. But here, I wish only +to narrate the record of a few pleasant days spent at its foot. + +</p> +<p>The Maur River, at its mouth, is a mile across; it is so deep that one can run close up to its muddy banks and peer in under +the labyrinth of mangrove roots that stand like a rustic scaffold beneath its trunks, protecting them from the highest flood-tides. + +</p> +<p>It was some time before I could pick out a crocodile as he lay sleeping in his muddy bath, showing nothing above the slime +except <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb206" href="#pb206">206</a>]</span>the serrated line of his great back, which was so incrusted that, but for its regularity, it might pass for the limb of a +tree or some fantastically shaped root. + +</p> +<p>“There you are!” said the Chief Justice, pointing at the bank almost before we had reached the opposite side. I strained my +eyes and raised the hammer of my “50 x 110” Winchester; for I was to have a shot at my first live crocodile. + +</p> +<p>We drew nearer and nearer the shore and yet I failed to see anything that resembled an animal of any sort. The little launch +slowed down and the crew all pointed toward the bank. I cannot now imagine what I expected then to see, but something must +have been in my mind’s eye that blinded my bodily sight; for there, right before me, was a little fellow not over three feet +long. + +</p> +<p>He had just come up from the river, and his hide was clean and almost a dark birch color. His head was raised and he was <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb207" href="#pb207">207</a>]</span>regarding us suspiciously from his small green eyes. + +</p> +<p>I put down my rifle in disgust, and took up my revolver. I had no idea of wasting a hundred and ten grains of powder on a +baby. I took careful aim and fired. The revolver was a self-cocker, and yet before I could fire again, he had whirled about +and was out of reach. He was gone and I drew a long breath. The Malays said I struck him. If I did, I had no means of proving +it. + +</p> +<p>The only way to bag crocodiles is to kill them outright or nearly so. If they have strength enough to crawl into the river +and die, they will come to the surface again two days later; but the chances are that they will get under a root, or that +in some way you will lose them. Out of forty or fifty big and small ones that we hit only five floated down past the Residency. + +</p> +<p>I also soon found out that my hundred <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb208" href="#pb208">208</a>]</span>and ten grain cartridges were none too large for even the smaller crocodiles. As for those eighteen and twenty feet long, +it was necessary that the Chief Justice and I should fire at the same time and at the same spot in order to arrest the big +saurians in their wild scramble for the water. + +</p> +<p>We had tried some half-dozen good shots at small fellows, varying from two to five feet in length, when I began to lose interest +in the sport; so I turned to watch a colony of little gray, jungle monkeys, that were swinging and chattering and scolding +among the mangrove trees. + +</p> +<p>One of them picked a long dart-shaped fruit off the tree and essayed to drop it on the head of his mate below. I was about +to call my companion’s attention to it, when I heard a crash among the roots near where the missile had fallen, and a crocodile, +so large that I distrusted my senses, turned his great log-like head to one side and gazed up at the <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb209" href="#pb209">209</a>]</span>frightened monkeys. I raised my hand, and the launch paused not over twenty yards from where he lay patiently waiting for +one of the monkeys to drop within reach of his great jaws. + +</p> +<p>The sun had dried the mud on his back until the entire surface reminded me of the beach of a muddy mill-pond that I used to +frequent as a boy. + +</p> +<p>“<i>Boyah besar!</i>” (A royal crocodile) repeated our Malays under their breaths. + +</p> +<p>The Chief Justice and I fired at the same time, and the massive fellow who, but a moment before, had looked to be as stiff +and clumsy as a bar of pig iron, now seemed to be made of india-rubber and steel springs. I should not have been more surprised +had the great <i>timboso</i> tree, beside which he lay, arisen and danced a jig. He seemed to spring from the middle up into the air without the aid of +either his head or his tail. Then he brought his tail around in a circle <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb210" href="#pb210">210</a>]</span>and struck the skeleton roots of the mangrove with such force as to dislodge a small monkey in its top, which fell whistling +with fright into the lower limbs, while the crocodile’s great jaws, which seemed to measure a third of his length, opened +and shut viciously, snapping off limbs and roots like straws. + +</p> +<p>“He sick!” shouted the Chief Justice. “Fire quick.” + +</p> +<p>I threw the cartridge from the magazine into the barrel, and raised the gun to my shoulder just as the huge saurian struck +the water. My bullet caught him underneath, near the back legs. My companion’s must have had more effect, for the crocodile +stopped as though stunned. I had time to drop my gun and snatch up my revolver. + +</p> +<p>It was an easy shot. The bullet sped true to its mark and entered one of the small fiery eyes. The huge frame seemed to quiver +as though a charge of electricity had <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb211" href="#pb211">211</a>]</span>gone through it and then stiffened out,—dead. + +</p> +<p>Our Malay boys got a rope of tough <i>gamooty</i> fibres around the great head, and we towed our prize out into the stream just as the Resident’s launch, bearing the Prince +and the ladies, steamed up the river to watch the sport. + +</p> +<p>A crowd of servants got the crocodile up on the bank near the palace grounds and drew it two hundred yards to their quarters. +Now comes the strangest part of the story. + +</p> +<p>My servants had half completed the task of skinning him, for I wished to send his hide to the Smithsonian, when the muezzin +sounded the call to prayers from the little mosque near by. In an instant the devout Mohammedans were on their faces and the +crocodile in his half-skinned state was left until a more convenient time. At six o’clock the next morning I was awakened +by a knock at my door:— +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb212" href="#pb212">212</a>]</span></p> +<p>“Tuan, Tuan Consul, come see <i>boyah</i> (crocodile).” + +</p> +<p>I got up, wrapped a <i>sarong</i> about me, put my feet into a pair of grass slippers, and followed my guide out of the palace, through the courts to where +the crocodile had been the night before, but no crocodile was to be seen. My guide grinned and pointed to a heavy trail that +looked like the track of a stone-boat drawn by a yoke of oxen. + +</p> +<p>We followed it for a hundred yards in the direction of the river, and came upon the crocodile, covered with blood and mud. +His own hide hung about him like a dress, and his one eye opened and shut at the throng of wondering natives about. It was +not until he had been put out of his misery and his hide taken entirely off that we felt confident of his <i>bona fide</i> demise. + +</p> +<p>One day I had a real adventure while out shooting, which, like many real adventures, <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb213" href="#pb213">213</a>]</span>was made up principally of the things I thought and suffered rather than of the things I did. Hence I hardly know how to write +it out so that it will look like an “adventure” and not a mere mishap. + +</p> +<p>My companion had told me of a trail some thirty miles up the river that led into the jungle about three miles, to some old +gold workings that date back beyond the written records of the State. So one day we drew our little launch close up under +the bank of the river, and I sprang ashore, bent on seeing for myself the prehistoric remains. Contrary to the advice of the +Chief Justice, I only took a heavy hunting-knife with me, and it was more for slashing away thorns and rattans than for protection. + +</p> +<p>It was the heat of the day, and the dense jungle was like a furnace. Before I had gone a mile I began to regret my enthusiasm. +I found the path, but it was so overgrown with creepers, parasites, and rubber-vines <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb214" href="#pb214">214</a>]</span>that I had almost to cut a new one. Had it not been for the company of a small English terrier, Lekas,—the Malay for “make +haste,”—I believe I should have turned back. + +</p> +<p>However, I found the old workings, and spent several hours making calculations as to their depth and course, taking notes +as to the country formation, and assaying some bits of refuse quartz. Rather than struggle back by the path, I determined +to follow the course of a stream that went through the mines and on toward the coast. So I whistled for Lekas and started +on. + +</p> +<p>For the first half-hour everything went smoothly. Then the stream widened out and its clay bottom gave place to one of mud, +which made the walking much more difficult. At last I struck the mangrove belt, which always warns you that you are approaching +the coast. + +</p> +<p>As long as I kept in the centre of the <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb215" href="#pb215">215</a>]</span>channel, I was out of the way of the network of roots; but now the channel was getting deeper and my progress becoming more +labored. It was impossible to reach the bank, for the mangroves on either side had grown so thick and dense as to be impenetrable. + +</p> +<p>When I had perhaps achieved half the distance, the thought suddenly crossed my mind—how very awkward it would be to meet a +crocodile in such a place! One couldn’t run, that was certain, and as for fighting, that would be a lost cause from the first. + +</p> +<p>Right in the midst of these unpleasant cogitations I heard a quiet splash in the water, not far behind, that sent my heart +into my mouth. In a moment I had scrambled on to a mangrove root and had turned to look for the cause of my fears. + +</p> +<p>For perhaps a minute I saw nothing, and was trying to convince myself that my previous thoughts had made me fanciful, when, +not many yards off, I saw distinctly <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb216" href="#pb216">216</a>]</span>the form of a huge crocodile swimming rapidly toward me. I needed no second look, but dashed away over the roots. + +</p> +<p>Before I had gone half a dozen yards I was down sprawling in the mud. I got entangled, and my terror made me totally unable +to act with any judgment. Despair nerved me and I turned at bay with my long hunting-knife in my hand. How I longed for even +my revolver! + + +</p> +<p></p> +<div class="figure"><img border="0" src="images/p216.jpg" alt="A crocodile hunt on the maur" width="466" height="720"><p class="figureHead">A crocodile hunt on the maur</p> +<p>“I turned at bay with my long hunting knife in my hand”</p> +</div><p> + + +</p> +<p>Whatever the issue, it could not be long delayed. The uncouth, hideous form, which as yet I had only seen dimly, was plain +now. I took my stand on one of the largest roots, steadied myself by clasping another with my left hand, and waited. + +</p> +<p>My chances, if it did not seem a mockery to call them such, were small indeed. I might, by singular good luck, deprive my +adversary of sight; but hemmed in as I was by a tangled mass of roots, I felt that even then I should be but little better +off. +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb217" href="#pb217">217</a>]</span></p> +<p>All manner of thoughts came unbidden to my mind. I could see Inchi Mohamed propped up on cushions in the launch reading “A +Little Book of Profitable Tales” that had just been sent me by its author. I started to smile at the tale of <i>The Clycopeedy</i>. Then I caught sight of the peak of Mount Ophir through a notch in the jungle and all sorts of absurd hypotheses in regard +to its authenticity flashed through my mind. All this takes time to relate, but those who have stood in mortal peril will +know how short a time it takes to think. + +</p> +<p>From the moment I left the water, but a few seconds had elapsed and the saurian was not two yards from me. The abject horror +and hopelessness of that moment was something I can never forget. Suddenly Lekas came floundering through the mud; a second +more, and he perceived my enemy when almost within reach of his jaws. + +</p> +<p>Barking furiously, Lekas began to back <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb218" href="#pb218">218</a>]</span>away. One breathless moment, and the reptile turned to follow this new prey. I sank down among the roots regardless of the +slime and watched the crocodile crawl deliberately away, with the gallant little dog retreating before him, keeping up a succession +of angry barks. + +</p> +<p>When I arrived at the mouth of the creek, weak, faint, and covered from head to foot with mud, I found the Chief Justice awaiting +me. The barking of the dog had attracted his attention and he had steamed up to see what was the matter. + +</p> +<p>I had not strength left to stroke the head of the brave little fellow who had thus twice done me a most welcome service. I +had, indeed, but just strength enough to spring in, throw myself down on the cushions, and let my “boys” pull off my clothes +and bring me a suit of clean pajamas and cool grass slippers. + + + +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb219" href="#pb219">219</a>]</span></p> +</div> +<div id="ch12" class="div1"><span class="pagenum"> +[<a href="#toc">Contents</a>] +</span><h2 class="normal">A New Year’s Day in Malaya</h2> +<h2 class="sub">And some of its Picturesque Customs</h2> +<p>My Malay <i>syce</i> came close up to the veranda and touched his brown forehead with the back of his open hand. + +</p> +<p>“<i>Tuan</i>” (Lord), he said, “have got oil for harness, two one-half cents; black oil for <i>cudah’s</i> (horse) feet, three cents; oil, one cent one-half for bits; oil, seven cents for <i>cretah</i> (carriage). Fourteen cents, Tuan.” + +</p> +<p>I put my hands into the pockets of my white duck jacket and drew out a roll of big Borneo coppers. + +</p> +<p>The <i>syce</i> counted out the desired amount, and handed back what was left through the bamboo <i>chicks</i>, or curtains, that reduced the blinding glare of the sky to a soft, translucent gray. I closed my eyes and stretched <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb220" href="#pb220">220</a>]</span>back in my long chair, wondering vaguely at the occasion that called for such an outlay in oils, when I heard once more the +quiet, insistent “Tuan!” I opened my eyes. + +</p> +<p>“No got red, white, blue ribbon for whip.” + +</p> +<p>“<i>Sudah chukup!</i>” (Stop talking) I commanded angrily. The <i>syce</i> shrugged his bare shoulders and gave a hitch to his cotton <i>sarong</i>. + +</p> +<p>“Tuan, to-morrow New Year Day. Tuan, <i>mem</i> (lady) drive to Esplanade. Governor, general, all white tuans and mems there. Tuan Consul’s carriage not nice. Shall <i>syce</i> buy ribbons?” + +</p> +<p>“Yes,” I answered, tossing him the rest of the coppers, “and get a new one for your arm.” + +</p> +<p>I had forgotten for the moment that it was the 31st of December. The <i>syce</i> touched his hand to his forehead and salaamed. + +</p> +<p>Through the spaces of the protecting <i>chicks</i> <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb221" href="#pb221">221</a>]</span>I caught glimpses of my Malay <i>kebun</i>, or gardener, squatting on his bare feet, with his bare knees drawn up under his armpits, hacking with a heavy knife at the +short grass. The mottled crotons, the yellow allamanda and pink hibiscus bushes, the clump of Eucharist lilies, the great +trailing masses of orchids that hung among the red flowers of the stately flamboyant tree by the green hedge, joined to make +me forget the midwinter date on the calendar. The time seemed in my half-dream July in New York or August in Washington. + +</p> +<p>Ah Minga, the “boy” in flowing pantalets and stiffly starched blouse, came silently along the wide veranda, with a cup of +tea and a plate of opened mangosteens. I roused myself, and the dreams of sleighbells and ice on window-panes, that had been +fleeting through my mind at the first mention of New Year’s Day by the <i>syce</i>, vanished. + +</p> +<p>Ah Minga, too, mentioned, as he placed <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb222" href="#pb222">222</a>]</span>the cool, pellucid globes before me, “To-mollow New Year Dlay, Tuan!” + +</p> +<p>On Christmas Day, Ah Minga had presented the mistress with the gilded counterfeit presentment of a Joss. The servants, one +and all, from Zim, the cookee, to the wretched Kling <i>dhobie</i> (wash-man), had brought some little remembrance of their Christian master’s great holiday. + +</p> +<p>In respecting our customs, they had taken occasion to establish one of their own. They had adopted New Year’s as the day when +their masters should return their presents and good will in solid cash. + +</p> +<p>At midnight we were awakened by a regular Fourth of July pandemonium. Whistles from the factories, salvos from Fort Canning, +bells from the churches, Chinese tom-toms, Malay horns, rent the air from that hour until dawn with all the discords of the +Orient and a few from Europe. By daylight the thousands of natives from all quarters of the <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb223" href="#pb223">223</a>]</span>peninsula and neighboring islands had gathered along the broad Ocean Esplanade of Singapore in front of the Cricket Club House, +to take part in or watch the native sports by land and sea. + +</p> +<p>The inevitable Chinaman was there, the Kling, the Madrasman, the Sikh, the Arab, the Jew, the Chitty, or Indian money-lender,—they +were all there, many times multiplied, unconsciously furnishing a background of extraordinary variety and picturesqueness. + +</p> +<p>At ten o’clock the favored representatives of the Anglo-Saxon race took their place on the great veranda of the Cricket Club, +and gave the signal that we would condescend to be amused for ten hours. Then the show commenced. There were not over two +hundred white people to represent law and civilization amid the teeming native population. + +</p> +<p>In the centre of the beautiful esplanade or playground rose the heroic statue of Sir <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb224" href="#pb224">224</a>]</span>Stamford Raffles, the English governor who made Singapore possible. To my right, on the veranda, stood a modest, gray-haired +little man who cleared the seas of piracy and insured Singapore’s commercial ascendency, Sir Charles Brooke, Rajah of Sarawak. +A little farther on, surrounded by a brilliant suite of Malay princes, was the Sultan of Johore, whose father sold the island +of Singapore to the British. + +</p> +<p>The first of the sports was a series of foot-races between Malay and Kling boys, almost invariably won by the Malays, who +are the North American Indians of Malaysia—the old-time kings of the soil. They are never, like the Chinese, mere beasts of +burden, or great merchants, nor do they descend to petty trade, like the Indians or Bengalese. If they must work they become +horsemen. + +</p> +<p>Next came a jockey race, in which a dozen long-limbed Malays took each a five-year-old child astride his shoulders, and raced +for <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb225" href="#pb225">225</a>]</span>seventy-five yards. There were sack-races and greased-pole climbing and pig-catching. + +</p> +<p>Now came a singular contest—an eating match. Two dozen little Malay, Kling, Tamil, and Chinese boys were seated at regular +intervals about an open circle by one of the governor’s aids. Not one could touch the others in any way. Each had a dry, hard +ship-biscuit before him. A pistol shot and two dozen pairs of little brown fists went pit-a-pat on the two dozen hard biscuits, +and in an instant the crackers were broken to powder. + +</p> +<p>Then commenced the difficult task of forcing the powdered pulp down the little throats. Both hands were called into full play +during the operation, one for crowding in, the other for grinding the residue and patting the stomach and throat. Each little +competitor would shyly rub into the warm earth, or hide away in the folds of his many-colored <i>sarong</i>, as much as possible, or when <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb226" href="#pb226">226</a>]</span>a rival was looking the other way, would snap a good-sized piece across to him. + +</p> +<p>The little brown fellow who won the fifty-cent piece by finishing his biscuit first simply put into his mouth a certain quantity +of the crushed biscuit, and with little or no mastication pushed the whole mass down his throat by sheer force. + +</p> +<p>The minute the contest was decided, all the participants, and many other boys, rushed to a great tub of molasses to duck for +half-dollars. One after another their heads would disappear into the sticky, blinding mass, as they fished with their teeth +for the shining prizes at the bottom. + +</p> +<p>Successful or otherwise, after their powers were exhausted they would suddenly pull out their heads, reeking with the molasses, +and make for the ocean, unmindful of the crowds of natives in holiday attire who blocked their way. + +</p> +<p>Then came a jinrikisha race, with Chinese <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb227" href="#pb227">227</a>]</span>coolies pulling Malay passengers around a half-mile course. Letting go the handles of their wagons as they crossed the line, +the coolies threw their unfortunate passengers over backward. + +</p> +<p>Tugs of war, wrestling matches, and boxing bouts on the turf finished the land sports, and we all adjourned to the yachts +to witness those of the sea. There were races between men-of-war cutters, European yachts, rowing shells, Chinese sampans, +and Malay <i>colehs</i> with great, dart-like sails, so wide-spreading that ropes were attached to the top of the masts, and a dozen naked natives +hung far out over the side of the slender boat to keep it from blowing over. In making the circle of the harbor they would +spring from side to side of the boat, sometimes lost to our view in the spray, often missing their footholds, and dragging +through the tepid water. + +</p> +<p>Between times, while watching the races, <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb228" href="#pb228">228</a>]</span>we amused ourselves throwing coppers to a fleet of native boys in small dugouts beneath our bows. Every time a penny dropped +into the water, a dozen little bronze forms would flash in the sunlight, and nine times out of ten the coin never reached +the bottom. + +</p> +<p>Last of all came the trooping of the English colors on the magnificent esplanade, within the shadow of the cathedral; the +march past of the sturdy British artillery and engineers, with their native allies, the Sikhs and Sepoys; then the <i>feu-de-joie</i>, and New Year’s was officially recognized by the guns of the fort. + +</p> +<p>That night we danced at Government House,—we exiles of the Temperate Zone,—keeping up to the last the fiction that New Year’s +Day under a tropic sky and within sound of the tiger’s wail was really January first. But every remembrance and association +was, in our homesick thoughts, <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb229" href="#pb229">229</a>]</span>grouped about an open arch fire, with the sharp, crisp creak of sleigh-runners outside, in a frozen land fourteen thousand +miles away. + + + +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb230" href="#pb230">230</a>]</span></p> +</div> +<div id="ch13" class="div1"><span class="pagenum"> +[<a href="#toc">Contents</a>] +</span><h2 class="normal">In the Burst of the Southwest Monsoon</h2> +<h2 class="sub">A Tale of Changhi Bungalow</h2> +<p>We had been out all day from Singapore on a wild-pig hunt. There were eight of us, including three young officers of the Royal +Artillery, besides somewhere between seventy and a hundred native beaters. The day had been unusually hot, even for a country +whose regular record on the thermometer reads 150 degrees in the sun. + +</p> +<p>We had tramped and shot through jungle and <i>lallang</i> grass, until, when night came on, I was too tired to make the fourteen miles back across the island, and so decided to push +on a mile farther to a government “rest bungalow.” I said good-by to my <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb231" href="#pb231">231</a>]</span>companions and the game, and accompanied only by a Hindu guide, struck out across some ploughed lands for the jungle road +that led to and ended at Changhi. + +</p> +<p>Changhi was one of three rest bungalows, or summer resorts, if one can be permitted to mention summer in this land of perpetual +summer. They were owned and kept open by the Singapore Government for the convenience of travellers, and as places to which +its own officials can flee from the cares of office and the demands of society. I had stopped at Changhi Bungalow once for +some weeks when my wife and a party of friends and all our servants were with me. It was lonely even then, with the black +impenetrable jungle crowding down on three sides, and a strip of the blinding, dazzling waters of the uncanny old Straits +of Malacca in front. + +</p> +<p>There were tigers and snakes in the jungle, and crocodiles and sharks in the Straits, <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb232" href="#pb232">232</a>]</span>and lizards and other things in the bungalow. I thought of all this in a disjointed kind of a way, and half wished that I +had stayed with my party. Then I noticed uneasily that some thick oily-looking clouds were blotting out the yellow haze left +by the sun over on the Johore side. A few big hot drops of rain splashed down into my face, as I climbed wearily up the dozen +cement steps of the house. + +</p> +<p>The bamboo <i>chicks</i> were all down, and the shutter-doors securely locked from the inside, but there was a long rattan chair within reach, and +I dropped into it with a sigh of satisfaction, while my guide went out toward the servant-quarters to arouse the Malay <i>mandor</i>, or head gardener, whom H. B. M.’s Government trusted with this portion of her East Indian possessions. + +</p> +<p>As might have been expected, that high functionary was not to be found, and I was forced to content myself, while my guide +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb233" href="#pb233">233</a>]</span>went on to a neighboring native police station to make inquiries. I unbuttoned my stiff <i>kaki</i> shooting-jacket, lit a manila, which my mouth was too dry to smoke, and gazed up at the ceiling in silence. + +</p> +<p>It was stiflingly hot. Even the cicadas in the great jungle tree, that towered a hundred and fifty feet above the house, were +quiet. Every breath I took seemed to scorch me, and the balls of my eyes ached. The sky had changed to a dull cartridge color. + +</p> +<p>A breeze came across the hot, glaring surface of the Straits, and stirred the tops of a little clump of palms, and died away. +It brought with it the smell of rain. + +</p> +<p>For a moment there was a dead stillness,—not even a lizard clucked on the wall back of me; then all at once the thermometer +dropped down two or three degrees, and a tearing wind struck the bamboo curtains and stretched them out straight; the tops +of <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb234" href="#pb234">234</a>]</span>the massive jungle trees bent and creaked; there was a blinding flash and a roar of thunder, and all distance was lost in +darkness and rain. It was one of the quick, fierce bursts of the southwest monsoon. + +</p> +<p>I did not move, although wet to the skin. + +</p> +<p>Presently I could make out three blurred figures fighting their way slowly against the storm across the compound. One was +the guide; the second was the <i>mandor</i>, naked save for a cotton <i>sarong</i> around his waist; the third was a stranger. + +</p> +<p>The trio came up on the veranda—the stranger hanging behind, with an apologetic droop of his head. He was a white man, in +a suit of dirty, ragged linen. It took but one look to place him. I had seen hundreds of them “on the beach” in Singapore,—there +could be no mistake. “Loafer” was written all over him—from his ragged, matted hair to the fringe on the bottom of <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb235" href="#pb235">235</a>]</span>his trousers. He held a broken cork helmet, that had not seen pipe-clay for many a month, in his grimy hands, and scraped +one foot and ducked his dripping head, as I turned toward him with a gruff,— + +</p> +<p>“Well?” + +</p> +<p>“Beg pardon, sir,” he said, in a harsh, rasping voice, “but I heard that the American Consul was here. I am an American.” + +</p> +<p>He looked up with a watery leer in his eyes. + +</p> +<p>“Go on,” I said, without offering to take the hand of my fellow-countryman. + +</p> +<p>He let his arm fall to his side. + +</p> +<p>“I ain’t got any passport; that went with the rest, and I never had the heart to ask for another.” + +</p> +<p>He gave a bad imitation of a sob. + +</p> +<p>“Never mind the side play,” I commented, as he began to rumble in the bottomless pocket of his coat. “I will supply all that +as you go along. What is it you want?” +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb236" href="#pb236">236</a>]</span></p> +<p>He withdrew his hand and wiped his eyes with his sleeve. + +</p> +<p>“Come in out of the rain and you won’t need to do that,” I said, amused at this show of feeling. + +</p> +<p>“I thought as how you might give a countryman a lift,” he whined. + +</p> +<p>I smiled and stepped to the door. + +</p> +<p>“Boy, bring the gentleman a whiskey and soda.” + +</p> +<p>The “boy” brought the liquor, while I commenced to unstrap and dry my Winchester. + +</p> +<p>My fellow-countryman did not move, but stood nervously tottering from one leg to the other, as I went on with my task. He +coughed once or twice to attract my attention. + +</p> +<p>“Beg pardon, sir, but I meant work—good, honest work. Work was what I wanted, to earn this very glass of whiskey for my little +gal. She’s sick, sir, sick—sick in a hut at the station.” +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb237" href="#pb237">237</a>]</span></p> +<p>“Your little what?” I asked in amazement. + +</p> +<p>“My little gal, sir. She’s all that’s left me. If you’ll trust me with the glass, I’ll take it to her. Can’t give you no security, +I’m afraid, only the word of a broken-down old father, who has got a little gal what he loves better than life!” + +</p> +<p>My long experience with tramps and beach-combers was at fault. No words can convey an idea of the pathos and humility he threw +into his tone and actions. The yearning of the voice, the almost divine air of self-abnegation, the subdued flash of pride +here and there that suggested better days, the hopeless droop of the arms, and the irresolute tremble of the corners of his +mouth would have appealed to the heart of a heathen idol. That one of his caste should refuse a glass of “Usher’s Best,” and +be willing to brave the burst of a southwest monsoon to take it to any one—child, mother, or wife—was incredible. +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb238" href="#pb238">238</a>]</span></p> +<p>“Drink it,” I said roughly. “You will need it before you get to the station. Boy, bring me my waterproof and an umbrella. +Now out you go. We’ll see whether this ‘little gal’ is male or female,—seven or seventy.” + +</p> +<p>The loafer snatched up his helmet with an avidity that admitted of no question as to his earnestness. + +</p> +<p>We made a wild rush down across the oozing compound, through a little strip of dripping jungle, over a swaying foot-bridge +that spanned the muddy Sonji Changhi, and along the sandy floor of a cocoanut grove. On the outskirts of a station we came +upon a deserted bungalow, that was trembling in the storm on its rotten supports. + +</p> +<p>We went up its rickety ladder and across its open bamboo floor, to the darkest corner, where, on an old mat under the only +dry spot in the hut, lay a bundle of rags. + +</p> +<p>My companion dropped down among the <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb239" href="#pb239">239</a>]</span>decayed stumps of pineapples and cocoanut refuse, and commenced to croon in a hoarse voice, “Daddy come,—Daddy come,—poor +dearie,” and made a motion as though to put the bottle to a small, dirty white face that I could just make out among the rags. + +</p> +<p>I pushed him aside and gathered the unconscious little burden up into my arms. There was no time for sentiment. Every minute +I expected the miserable old shelter would go over. + +</p> +<p>We made our way as best we could back through the darkness and driving blasts of rain. The loafer followed with a long series +of “God bless you’s.” He essayed once or twice to hold the umbrella over his “little gal’s” head, but each time the wind turned +it inside out, and he gave it up with an air of feeble inconsequence that characterized all his movements. + +</p> +<p>I put my burden down on a couch in the <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb240" href="#pb240">240</a>]</span>dining room, and chafed her hands and feet, while the boy brought a beer bottle filled with hot water. + +</p> +<p>It was a sweet little face, pinched and drawn, with big hazel eyes, that looked up into mine as my efforts sent the blood +coursing through her veins. She was between five and six years old. A mass of dark brown hair, unkempt and matted, fell about +her face and shoulders. + +</p> +<p>I wrapped a rug about her. She was asleep almost before I had finished. + +</p> +<p>A little later I roused her, and she nestled her damp little head against my shoulder as I gave her some soup; but her eyelids +were heavy, and it seemed almost cruel to keep her awake, even for the food she so badly needed. The father had shuffled about +uneasily during my motherly attentions, and seemed relieved when I was through. + +</p> +<p>While the boy brought a steaming hot curry and a goodly supply of whiskey and <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb241" href="#pb241">241</a>]</span>soda, I turned the self-confessed father of the big hazel eyes into the bath-room. + +</p> +<p>With the grime and dirt off his face he was pale and haggard. There were big blue marks under his shifting gray eyes and his +hair hung ragged and singed about his ears. + +</p> +<p>He had discarded his dirty linen for a blue-flannel bathing-suit that some former high official of H. B. M. service had left +behind. There were traces of starvation or dissipation in every movement. His hand trembled as he conveyed the hot soup to +his blue lips. + +</p> +<p>Gradually the color came back to his sunken cheeks, and by the time he had laid in the second plate of curry and drank two +whiskey and sodas he looked comparatively sleek and respectable. Even his anxiety for the little sleeper seemed to fade out +of his weak face. + +</p> +<p>I had been watching him narrowly during the meal. I could not make up my mind <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb242" href="#pb242">242</a>]</span>whether he was a clever actor or only an unfortunate; he might be the latter, and still be what I was certain of,—a scamp. + +</p> +<p>The wind whistled and roared about the great verandas and into the glassless windows with all the vehemence of a New England +snowstorm. It caught our well-protected <i>punkah</i>-lamps, and turned their broad flames into spiral columns of smoke. Ever and again a flash of lightning flared in our eyes, +and revealed the water of the narrow straits lashed into a white fury. + +</p> +<p>I should have been thankful for the company of even a dog on such a night, and think the loafer felt it, for I could see that +he was more at ease with every crash of thunder. I tiptoed over to the “little gal,” and noted her soft, regular breathing +and healthful sleep, undisturbed by the fierce storm outside. + +</p> +<p>I lit a manila, and handed one to my companion. We puffed a moment in silence, while the boy replenished our glasses. +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb243" href="#pb243">243</a>]</span></p> +<p>“Now,” I said, tipping my chair back against the wall, “tell me your story.” + +</p> +<p>My guest’s face at once assumed the expression of the professional loafer. My faith in him began to wane. + +</p> +<p>“I am an American,” he began glibly enough under the combined effects of the whiskey and dinner, “an old soldier. I fought +with Grant in the Wilderness, and—” + +</p> +<p>“Of course,” I interrupted, “and with Sherman in Georgia. I have heard it all by a hundred better talkers than you. Suppose +you skip it.” + +</p> +<p>I did not look up, but I was perfectly familiar with the expression of injured innocence that was mantling his face. + +</p> +<p>He began again in a few minutes, but his voice had lost some of its engaging frankness. + +</p> +<p>“I am the son of a kind and indulgent mother,—God bless her. My father died before I knew him—” + +</p> +<p>I moved uneasily in my chair<span class="corr" id="xd0e3574" title="Not in source">.</span> +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb244" href="#pb244">244</a>]</span></p> +<p>He hurried on:— + +</p> +<p>“I fell in bad ways in spite of her saintly love, and ran away to sea.” + +</p> +<p>“Look here, my friend,” I said, “I am sorry to spoil your little tale, but it is an old one. Can’t you give me something new? +Now try again.” + +</p> +<p>He looked at me unsteadily under his thin eyebrows, shuffled restlessly in his seat, and said with something like a sob in +his voice:— + +</p> +<p>“Well, sir, I will. You have been kind to me and taken my little gal in; you saved her life, and, for a change, I’ll tell +you the truth.” + +</p> +<p>He drew himself up a little too ostentatiously, threw his head back, and said proudly:— + +</p> +<p>“I am a gentleman born.” + +</p> +<p>“Good,” I laughed. “Now you are on the right track, and besides you look it.” + +</p> +<p>“Ah! you may sneer,” he retorted, “but I tell you the truth.” +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb245" href="#pb245">245</a>]</span></p> +<p>His face flushed and his lip quivered. He brought his fist down on the table. + +</p> +<p>“I tell you my father,—ah! but never mind my father.” His voice failed him. + +</p> +<p>“Certainly,” I replied. “Only get on with your story.” + +</p> +<p>“I came out to India from Boston as a young man,” he continued, “either in ’66 or ’68, I forget which.” + +</p> +<p>“Try ’67,” I suggested. + +</p> +<p>“It was not ’67,” he exclaimed angrily, “it was either ’66 or ’68.” + +</p> +<p>“Or some other date. However, that’s but a detail. Proceed.” + +</p> +<p>“Sir, you can make sport of me, but what I am telling you is God’s truth. May I be struck dead if one lie passes my lips. +I came out to plant coffee; I thought, like many others, that I had only to cut down the jungle and put in coffee plants, +and make my everlasting fortune.” + +</p> +<p>“And didn’t you?” I asked, glancing at <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb246" href="#pb246">246</a>]</span>his dilapidated old helmet that hung over the corner of the sideboard. + +</p> +<p>“Look at me!” he burst forth, springing upon his feet, his breast heaving under his blue pajamas. + +</p> +<p>“Pardon the question,” I answered. “Go on, you are doing bravely.” + +</p> +<p>He sank back into his chair with a commendable air of dignity. + +</p> +<p>“I had a little money of my own,” he continued, “and opened up an estate. It promised well, but I soon came to the end of +my small capital. I thought I could go to Calcutta and Bombay and Simla, and cultivate my mind by travel and society, while +the bushes were growing. Well it ended in the same old way. I got into the <i>chitties’</i> hands—they are worse than Jews—at two per cent a month on a mortgage on my estate. Then I went back to it with a determination +to pay up my debt, make my estate a success, and after that to see the world. I <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb247" href="#pb247">247</a>]</span>worked, sir, like a nigger, and for a time was able to meet my naked creditor, from month to month, hoping all the time against +hope for a bumper crop.” + +</p> +<p>“I understand,” I said. “Your bumper crop did not come, and your <i>chitty</i> did. Where does she come in?” I nodded in the direction of the little sleeper. + +</p> +<p>He glanced uneasily in the same direction, and a tear gathered in his eye. + +</p> +<p>“I married on credit, sir, the daughter of an English army officer. It was infernal. But, sir, you would have done likewise. +Live under the burning sun of India for four years, struggle against impossibilities and hope against hope, and then have +a pair of great hazel eyes look lovingly into yours and a pair of red lips turned up to yours,—and tell me if you would not +have closed your eyes to the future, and accepted this precious gift as though it were sent from above?” + +</p> +<p>The pale, shrunken face of the speaker <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb248" href="#pb248">248</a>]</span>glowed, and his faded eyes lit up with the light of love. + +</p> +<p>“We were happy for a time, and the little gal was born, but the bumper crop did not come. Then, sir, I sold farm tools and +my horse, and sent the wife to a hill station for her health. I kept the little gal. I stayed to work, as none of my natives +ever worked. It was a gay station to which she went. You know the rest,—she never came back. That ended the struggle. I would +have shot myself but for the little one. I took her and we wandered here and there, doing odd jobs for a few months at a time. +I drifted down to Singapore, hoping to better myself, but, sir, I am about used up. It’s hard—hard.” + +</p> +<p>He buried his head in his long, thin fingers, and sat perfectly still. + +</p> +<p>There was a sound outside above the roar of the wind and the rain. At first faint and intermittent, it grew louder, and continuous, +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb249" href="#pb249">249</a>]</span>and came close. There was no mistaking it,—the march of booted men. + +</p> +<p>“What’s that?” asked my companion, with a start. + +</p> +<p>“Tommy Atkins,” I replied, “the clang of the ammunition boot as big as life.” + +</p> +<p>His face grew ashy white, and he looked furtively around the room. + +</p> +<p>“What’s the matter?” I exclaimed, but as I asked, I knew. + +</p> +<p>I opened the bath-room door and shoved him in. + +</p> +<p>“Go in there” I said, “and compose some more fairy tales.” + +</p> +<p>He was scarcely out of sight when the front door was thrown open, and a corporal’s guard, wet yet happy, marched into the +room. + +</p> +<p>The corporal stood with his back to the door, and gave himself mental words of command,—“Eyes left, eyes right,”—then, as +a last resource,—“eyes under the table.” He had not noticed the little bundle in the <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb250" href="#pb250">250</a>]</span>dark corner. He drew himself up and gave the military salute. + +</p> +<p>“Beg pardon, sir, but we are out for a deserter from the 58th,—Bill Hulish,—we ’ave tracked him ’ere, and with the compliments +of the commanding hofficer, we’ll search the ’ouse.” + +</p> +<p>“Search away,” I answered, as I heard the outside bath-room door open and close softly. + +</p> +<p>They returned empty-handed, but not greatly disappointed. + +</p> +<p>“Wet night, corporal,” I ventured. + +</p> +<p>“One of the worst as ever I knew, sir,” he replied, eying the whiskey bottle and the two half-drained glasses. + +</p> +<p>“’Ad a long march, sir, fourteen miles.” + +</p> +<p>I pushed the bottle toward him, and with a deprecatory salute he turned out a stiff drink. + +</p> +<p>“’Ere’s to yer ’ealth, sir, an’ may ye always ’ave an extra glass ready for a visitor.” + +</p> +<p>I smiled, and motioned for his men to do <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb251" href="#pb251">251</a>]</span>likewise, and then, because he was a man of sweet composure and had not asked any questions as to the extra glass and chair, +told him that his bird had flown. + +</p> +<p>“Bad ’cess to him, sir, ’e’s led us a pretty chase for these last four weeks. If ’e was only a deserter I wouldn’t mind, but +’e’s a kidnapper. Leastways, Tommy Loud’s young’n turned up missin’ the day he skipped, an’ we ain’t seen nothin’ of ’er since.” + +</p> +<p>“Is this she?” I asked, leading him to the cot. + +</p> +<p>Hardly looking at the child, he raised her in his arms and kissed her. + +</p> +<p>“God be praised, sir,” he said with a show of feeling. “We ’ave got her back. I think her mother would ’ave died if we ’ad +come back again without her,—but, O my little darlin’, you look cruel bad. Drugged, sir, that’s what she is. Drugged to keep +’er quiet and save food. The blag’ard!” +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb252" href="#pb252">252</a>]</span></p> +<p>“But what did he take her for?” I asked. + +</p> +<p>“Bless you, sir,” replied the corporal, “she was his stock in trade. I reckon she’s drawn many dibs out of other people’s +pockets that would ’ave been nestlin’ there to-day if it ’adn’t ’a’ bin for ’er.” + +</p> +<p>Then a broad grin broke over his ruddy features, and he looked at me quizzically. + +</p> +<p>“But ’e was a great play hactor, sir.” + +</p> +<p>“And a poet,” I added enthusiastically. + +</p> +<p>“’E could beat Kipling romancin’, sir.” He checked himself, as though ashamed of awarding such meed of praise to his ex-colleague. + +</p> +<p>“But we must be goin’; orders strict. With your permission, sir, I will leave her with a guard of one man for to-night, and +send the ambulance for her in the morning.” + +</p> +<p>He drew up his little file, saluted, and marched out into the rain and wind, with all the cheerfulness of a duck. + +</p> +<p>I could hear them singing as they crossed <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb253" href="#pb253">253</a>]</span>the compound and struck into the jungle road:— + + +</p> +<div class="
 poem
 "> +<p class="line" style=""><span>“Oh, it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ ‘Tommy, go away’; +</span></p> +<p class="line" style=""><span>But it’s ‘Thank you, Mister Atkins,’ when the band begins to play, +</span></p> +<p class="line" style=""><span>The band begins to—”</span></p> +</div> +<p>A peal of thunder that shook the bungalow from its <i>attap</i> roof to its <i>nebong</i> pillars drowned the melody and drove me inside. + + + + +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb254" href="#pb254">254</a>]</span></p> +</div> +<div id="ch14" class="div1"><span class="pagenum"> +[<a href="#toc">Contents</a>] +</span><h2 class="normal">A Pig Hunt</h2> +<h2 class="sub">In the Malayan Jungle</h2> +<p>The thermometer stood at 155 degrees in the sun. The dry <i>lallang</i> grass crackled and glowed and returned long irregular waves of heat to the quivering metallic dome above. + +</p> +<p>The sensitive mimosa, at our feet, had long since surrendered to the fierce wooing of the sun-god, submissively folding its +leaves and then its branches and putting aside its morning dress of green for one more in keeping with the color of the earth +and sky. Even the clamorous cicada had hushed its insistent whir. + +</p> +<p>We were dressed in brown <i>kaki</i> suits. Wide-spreading cork helmets were filled with the stiff varnished leaves of the mango, and wet handkerchiefs were draped +from underneath <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb255" href="#pb255">255</a>]</span>their rims; yet, after an hour of exposure, our flesh ached—it was tender to the touch. The barrel of my Express scorched +my hand, and I wrapped my <i>camerabuna</i> about it. But then it was no hotter than any other day. In fact, we never gave a thought to the weather. + +</p> +<p>We were formed in a line, perhaps two miles in length, in a deserted pepper plantation, fronting a jungle of <i>timboso</i> trees and rubber-vines. I squatted patiently under the checkered shade of a neglected coffee tree and kept my eyes fixed +on the seemingly impenetrable walls of the jungle. A hundred feet to the right and the left, under like protection, were two +of my companions, determined like myself to be successful in three points,—to have the first shot at the pigs, to avoid getting +shot, or shooting a neighbor. But our minds rose above mental cautions with the first faint halloos of the Hindu <i>shikaris</i> on the opposite side of the jungle. <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb256" href="#pb256">256</a>]</span>In another moment the babel gave place to a confusion of shrieks, howls, yells, laughs, barking of dogs, beating of tins, +blowing of horns, explosions of crackers, and a din that represents all that is wild and untamable in three nations. It is +a weird, almost appalling prologue. Those laughs!—they are a study—they fairly chill the blood—they would make the fortune +of a comic actor—so intense, thrilling, surprising, and seemingly filled with a ghoulish glee. Over and over they would break +out clear and distinct above the <i>tintamarre</i>. I have never been able to find out whether it belongs to the Malay or the Kling or the Tamil. + +</p> +<p>The yelling became more distinct. A troop of brown and silver <i>wah-wahs</i> swung with their long arms out to the very edge of the jungle and then up to the tops of the highest trees, the while uttering +the full, clear note from which they take their name; followed by a troop of gray little jungle <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb257" href="#pb257">257</a>]</span>monkeys, whistling and scolding at the unwonted disturbance. A colony of cicadas on the limbs of a great <i>gutta</i> tree awoke into life and pierced our ears with buzz-saw strains. + +</p> +<p>In an instant we were all alert,—the heat was forgotten. At any minute a herd of pigs might dart out and on to us, or possibly +our drivers might rouse a tiger. The screaming ascended to a delirious pitch—the pigs were discovered! I threw my cartridge +from the magazine into the barrel. It was a 50×95 Express and I had perfect confidence that one ball to a pig was sufficient. + +</p> +<p>The yelling grew nearer until, with a sudden deploy, one hundred Klings and Malays dashed out into the open, close on the +heels of a dozen wild pigs. We could just see their black backs above the grass, as they broke down a little ravine in single +file, led by a big, hoary boar with tusks. They were <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb258" href="#pb258">258</a>]</span>three hundred yards off, but I could not resist the temptation. I brought my rifle to my shoulder and fired twice in rapid +succession. Two or three more shots were heard beyond. I threw out the shells as the herd lunged on me. It was so sudden that +I was dazed, but fortunately so were the pigs, with the exception of a wary old leader, who made into the jungle behind, almost +between my legs. One little fellow threw himself on his haunches for an instant and stared at me. I came to my senses first +and put a ball into his wondering eyes. My second shot was so near that it tore away a pound of meat from his shoulder and +killed him instantly. + + +</p> +<p></p> +<div class="figure"><img border="0" src="images/p258.jpg" alt="A pig hunt in the jungle" width="458" height="720"><p class="figureHead">A pig hunt in the jungle</p> +<p>“The wary old leader made into the jungle behind”</p> +</div><p> + + +</p> +<p>The firing had opened up all along the line. The drivers were pushing in nearer and nearer, beating the grass and clumps of +bushes, seemingly regardless of the widely flying balls. I suspect they held our prowess in contempt. I know they looked it, +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb259" href="#pb259">259</a>]</span>when it was discovered that out of the dozen pigs they had raised, we had allowed over half to escape. Then, too, their lives +were insured, in a way; for they knew that their deaths would cost us twenty big Mexican dollars. + +</p> +<p>Pig-hunting is the one big-game hunt that can be indulged in on the Malay Peninsula without great preparation and danger. +Deer and tapirs are scarce. Tigers, or <i>harimau</i> as the Malays call them, abound, but live in the depths of the almost inaccessible jungle, and come forth only at rare intervals, +except in the case of the man-eaters, who are usually ignominiously caught in pitfalls, very seldom affording true sport. +Elephants are still hunted in the native states north of Singapore, but the sport is too expensive for the generality of sportsmen. +One of the peculiar attributes of the Malayan tiger is his decided <i>penchant</i> for Chinese flesh, repeatedly striking down Chinese <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb260" href="#pb260">260</a>]</span>coolies in the fields to the exclusion of the Malays or Europeans who are working by their side. Perhaps once a month, a tiger +or his skin will be brought into the city by natives, and several times at night I have heard them in the jungle; but to my +knowledge only three have been shot by European sportsmen during my residence in the island. So wild pigs really remain the +one item of big game. + +</p> +<p>The pigs live in the jungle bordering plantations in which they can range for pineapples, sweet potatoes, and tapioca root. +They are the ordinary wild hog, black in color, and fleet of foot. The older ones have good-sized tusks and show fight when +cornered. The lone sportsman has very little chance of obtaining a shot, so they are hunted in large companies of from five +to fifteen guns. Such parties generally organize a hunt at least once a week and leave Singapore early in the morning for +an all-day shoot. +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb261" href="#pb261">261</a>]</span></p> +<p>The pig hunts organized by the officers of the Royal Artillery are the largest, and as a description of one is a description +of all, I will take one up in regular order, rather than quote from many. + +</p> +<p>We left Singapore at six o’clock in the morning in a four-horse dray. As the sun had not reached the tops of the trees, the +atmosphere was mild and pleasant. A half-hour took us outside the great cosmopolitan city, of three hundred thousand inhabitants. +The low, cool bungalows with their wide-spreading lawns gave place to the grass-thatched huts of the Chinese coolies, and +the omnipresent eating-stalls. A hard-packed road carried us through almost endless cocoanut groves. At intervals a Malay +<i>kampong</i>, or village, was revealed in the heart of the grove, its queer <i>attap</i>-thatched houses raised a man’s height from the ground, and connected with it by rickety ladders. Dozens of nude little children +played under the <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb262" href="#pb262">262</a>]</span>shadow of the palms, while the comely faces and <i>syrah</i>-stained teeth of their mothers peeped at us from behind low barred windows. The cocoanut groves were superseded by tapioca, +pepper, and coffee plantations. At regular distances were neat stations, manned by Malay and Sikh police. The roads over which +we dashed were in perfect repair. In another hour we were nine miles from Singapore and near our first “beat.” + +</p> +<p>Major Rich had sent his <i>shikaris</i> on the night before to collect beaters, so that when we arrived we were welcomed by a small army of Klings, Tamils, and Malays, +and the usual sprinkling of pariah dogs. A wild, strange set are these beaters. They toil not, neither do they spin. Their +wives do that occasionally, making a few <i>sarongs</i> for home use and an odd one for the market. Cocoanuts, pineapples, a little patch of paddy with a dozen half-wild chickens, +and perchance, if they are not Mohammedans, a pig with its <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb263" href="#pb263">263</a>]</span>litter, afford them sustenance. For their day’s beating they were to receive fifteen cents apiece. They were all ranged in +line and counted, after which we took up our march through a plantation of tapioca, the brush standing about level with our +heads. Chinese coolies were working about its roots keeping down the great pest of Malayan farmers,—<i>lallang</i> grass. The tapioca was broken in places by a few acres of pepper vines and again by neglected coffee shrubs. + +</p> +<p>Our procession was truly formidable. Fifty or more natives went on ahead making a path. Then we followed, fifteen in number, +each with a native to carry his gun. The rear was brought up by twoscore more and half as many dogs. Three-quarters of an +hour’s walk brought us to our first beat. The head <i>shikaris</i> placed us in an open position, from fifty to one hundred yards apart, facing the jungle. The beaters, in the meantime, had +gone by a long detour <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb264" href="#pb264">264</a>]</span>around the jungle to drive whatever it contained within reach of our guns. + +</p> +<p>In the second of these beats (I described the first in the opening of this chapter) a deer ran out far in advance of the pigs. +We caught but a fleeting glimpse of it above the grass. My gun and that of my neighbor went off simultaneously. The deer disappeared. +We rushed to the spot and found the leaves dyed with blood. Then commenced a chase, which, although fruitless, was well worth +the exertion. All the panorama of tropical life seemed to lay in our tracks. For an half-hour we traversed the rolling plain +with its burden of grass. Some smoker dropped a match in it, and in an instant it was all ablaze, spreading away like a whirlwind, +burning only the very tips, toward a distant jungle. Then we dove into a bosky wood by a narrow winding path, and through +a stream of water. The path was like a tunnel, the dense foliage <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb265" href="#pb265">265</a>]</span>shutting it in on both sides and above. The thorns of the rattans reached down and tore our clothes, and long trailing rubber-vines +caught up our helmets and held our feet. In a marshy bit of jungle, a small colony of unwieldy sago palms found root, while +pitcher-plants and orchids hung from almost every limb. Clumsy gray iguanas and long-tailed lizards of a brilliant green rushed +up the trunks of lichen-covered trees. Troops of monkeys went scattering away on all sides, and black squirrels chattered +on in the perfect security of the dim obscurity. In a bit of sandy bottom, a silken-haired, zebra-striped tapir scuttled away +ere we were half alive to his presence. + +</p> +<p>Outside was the metallic glare of the Malayan sun once more, now at its height, and another march was before us, over the +burning hot <i>mésa</i>. At one o’clock we came upon a half-neglected plantation. The bloody trail of the deer led through it. In the <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb266" href="#pb266">266</a>]</span>centre of the plantation we found a huge wedge-shaped <i>attap</i> house for drying pepper, and there we rested. + +</p> +<p>Our tiffin baskets were six miles away in the dray, and sending after them was out of the question. So we foraged for eatables. +Cocoanuts were easily obtained from trees all about, and a little whiskey mixed with its milk made a very refreshing drink. +Pineapples, small oranges, limes, papayas, custard apples, and bananas were in large quantities. Our drivers added to this +bill of fare by roasting the sweet-potato-like roots of the tapioca. After this impromptu lunch they compounded their quids +of areca-nut and lime, and were ready once more to beat up an adjacent jungle for deer, pig, or tiger. + +</p> +<p>As before, we were soon in position in the open before the jungle and the beaters were yelling at the top of their voices. + +</p> +<p>I was half dozing in the sun, trying to smoke a Manila cigar that my mouth was <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb267" href="#pb267">267</a>]</span>too dry to draw, when I was aroused by my neighbor, who called my attention to a file of pigs at the extreme end of the line. +I could just see what was going on from the knoll on which I was standing. They were received by Major Rich, one of his subalterns, +and his Hindu gun-carrier. One of the file fell at the first volley, two more broke through the line, and the remaining six +or seven, led by a fierce old fellow, from whose long tusks the foam dripped, turned up the line and charged point-blank on +the next gunner, who fired and missed, but succeeded in keeping them between the line and the jungle. The fourth gun brought +down the second pig and wounded the boar in the shoulder. Frantic with rage and pain, the old fellow tore up the ground and +grass with his tusks and then, seeming to give up all idea of escape, wheeled sharply around and with his back bristles standing +erect and his mouth open, charged directly on to the fifth, who was in <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb268" href="#pb268">268</a>]</span>the act of throwing the cartridge into the barrel. Taken completely by surprise, the officer gave one lusty yell and started +to run in line with the gun on his right. The boar was gaining on him at every step when he tripped and fell. The report of +No. 6’s Winchester Express rang out almost simultaneously. For an instant we held our breaths, wondering whether the man or +boar had been hit. It was a splendid shot and took a steady hand. The boar’s shoulder was shattered and his heart reached. +Two or three angry grunts and he lay quiet. He weighed close to three hundred pounds. The bristles on his back were white +with age. All in all, he was not nice to look at. + +</p> +<p>As half of our beaters were <span class="corr" id="xd0e3870" title="Source: Mohammedams">Mohammedans</span> and so forbidden to touch pork, the burden of carrying our pigs the six miles through <i>lallang</i> grass, jungle and swamp land, came hard on our Brahmists. We knew that the only way to make them work <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb269" href="#pb269">269</a>]</span>was to call them “Sons of dogs” and walk off and leave them with a parting injunction to “get in by the time we did if they +wanted their wages.” + +</p> +<p>This we did without deigning to notice their pathetic gestures, heart-rending appeals and protestations to the “Sons of the +Heaven-Born” that they could not lift one hundredth part of such burdens. + + + +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb270" href="#pb270">270</a>]</span></p> +</div> +<div id="ch15" class="div1"><span class="pagenum"> +[<a href="#toc">Contents</a>] +</span><h2 class="normal">In the Court of Johore</h2> +<h2 class="sub">The Crowning of a Malayan Prince</h2> +<p>Tunku Ibrahim was just past seventeen when his father, the Sultan Abubaker, chose to recognize him as his heir and Crown Prince +of Johore. + +</p> +<p>From the day when the little prince had been deemed old enough to leave his mother and the women’s palace until the day he +had entered the native artillery as a lieutenant, he had been schooled and trained by the English missionaries and the Tuan +Kadi, or Mohammedan high priest, as becomes a son of so illustrious a father. + +</p> +<p>Tunku Ibrahim had made one trip to England when he was fifteen years old, and with his little cousin, the <i>Tunku</i>, or Prince, Othman, had dined with the Queen at Windsor. +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb271" href="#pb271">271</a>]</span></p> +<p>So, when the Sultan returned from a long stay at Carlsbad and found that the Sultana was dead and that Ibrahim had shot up +into a man, he said:— + +</p> +<p>“I am getting to be an old man and may die at any time. I will call all my nobles and people to the palace, and they shall +see me place the crown on Ibrahim’s head. Then if I die, he will rule, and the British will not take his country from him +as long as he is wise and kingly.” + +</p> +<p>Whereupon his Highness sent out invitations to the Governor and all the foreign consuls in Singapore to be his guests and +witness the crowning of his son. + +</p> +<p>We started in quaint little box-like carriages, called <i>gharries</i>, long before the fierce Malayan sun had risen above the palms, accomplishing the fourteen miles across the beautiful island +in little over an hour. + +</p> +<p>The diminutive Deli ponies, not larger than Newfoundland dogs, broke into a run the <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb272" href="#pb272">272</a>]</span>moment we closed the lattice doors, and it was all their half-naked drivers could do to keep their perches on the swaying +shafts. + +</p> +<p>When we arrived at the little half-Malay, half-Chinese village of Kranji, on the shores of the famous old Straits of Malacca, +our ponies were panting with heat, and the sun beat down on our white cork helmets with a quivering, naked intensity. + +</p> +<p>Close up to the shore we found a long, keel boat manned by a dozen Malays in canary-colored suits. An aide-de-camp in a gorgeous +uniform of gold and blue came forward and touched his forehead with the back of his brown palm and said in good English:— + +</p> +<p>“His Highness awaits your excellencies.” + +</p> +<p>We stepped into the boat. The men lightly dipped their spear-shaped paddles in the tepid water, the rattan oarlocks squeaked +shrilly, and the light prow shot out into the strait. We could see the <i>istana</i>, <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb273" href="#pb273">273</a>]</span>or palace, close down to the opposite shore, with the royal standard of white, with black star and crescent in centre, floating +above it. + +</p> +<p>For a moment I felt as though I had invaded some dreamland of my childhood. + +</p> +<p>As our boat drew up to the iron pier that extended from the broad palace steps out into the straits, the guns from the little +fort on the hill above the town boomed out a welcome and the flags of our several countries were run to the tops of the poles. +A squad of native soldiers presented arms, and we were conducted up the stone steps, to the cool, dim corridors of the reception +or waiting room. Malays in red fezzes and silken <i>sarongs</i> that hung about their legs like skirts conducted us along a marble hall to our rooms in a wing of the palace. Crowds were +already gathering outside on the palace grounds, and we could look down from our windows and watch them as we bathed, dressed, +and drank tea. +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb274" href="#pb274">274</a>]</span></p> +<p>The Chinese in their holiday pantaloons and shirts of pink, lavender, and blue silk: outnumbered all the other races; for, +strange as it may seem, this Malay Sultan numbers among his 250,000 or 300,000 subjects 175,000 Chinamen. They are as loyal +and a great deal more industrious than the Malays, and many of them, styled <i>Baboos</i>, do not even know their native tongue. + +</p> +<p>The Malays, dressed in gayly colored <i>sarongs</i> and <i>bajus</i> (jackets), with little rimless caps on their heads, squatted on their heels and chewed betel-nut, with eyes half closed and +mouths distended. + +</p> +<p>The Arab traders and shopkeepers were grouped about in little knots, gravely conversing and watching the files of <i>gharries</i> or carriages, and even rickshaws, that were bringing Malay <i>unkus</i> (princes not of the royal blood), <i>patos</i> (peers), holy men, and rich Chinese mandarins to the steps that led up to the plaza before the throne-room. +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb275" href="#pb275">275</a>]</span></p> +<p>The palace was two stories high, long and narrow. The interior rooms were separated from the outer walls by wide, airy corridors. +The lattice-work windows were without glass and were arranged to admit the breezes from the ocean and ward off the searching +rays of the equatorial sun. In these dusky corridors were long rattan chairs, divans, and tables covered with refreshments, +and along its walls were arranged weapons of war and chase, Japanese suits of straw armor, Javanese shields, and Malay <i>krises</i> and <i>limbings</i>. + +</p> +<p>In a little court at the end of our corridor, where a fountain splashed over a clump of lotus flowers and blue water lilies, +a long-armed silver <i>wah-wah</i> monkey played with a black Malay cat that had a kink in its tail like the joint in a stovepipe, and chased the clucking little +gray lizards up the polished walls. + +</p> +<p>The gorgeous aide stared in poorly concealed wonderment, when he entered to conduct <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb276" href="#pb276">276</a>]</span>us to the grand salon, at my plain evening dress suit, destitute of gold lace or decorations, but he was too polite to say +anything, and I humbly followed my uniformed colleagues through the long suite of rooms. It would have been useless for me +to have tried to explain the great American doctrine of “Jeffersonian simplicity.” He would have shrugged his narrow shoulders, +which would have meant, “When you are among Romans, you should do as Romans do.” + +</p> +<p>In the grand salon, more than in any other part of the palace, one feels that he is in the home of an Oriental prince whose +tastes far outrun his own dominions. + +</p> +<p>Velvet carpets from Holland, divans from Turkey, rugs from Bokhara, tapestries from Persia, and lace from France mingle with +embroideries from China, cut glass from England, and rare old Satsuma ware from Japan. On a grand square German piano <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb277" href="#pb277">277</a>]</span>is a mass of music in which the masterpieces of all countries have equal rights with the national anthem of Johore. + +</p> +<p>Going directly through a mass of Oriental drapery, we are in the throne-room, where are gathered the nobility of the little +Sultanate. + +</p> +<p>Amid the crash of music and the booming of guns the Sultan took his seat in one of the gilded chairs on the dais, with the +English Governor on his left. Ranged about the burnished walls of the great room, several files deep, were the nobility of +the kingdom, the ministers of state, and officers of the army and navy, the space back of them being filled with Chinese mandarins +and <i>towkoys</i>, and rich native merchants in their picturesque costumes. In front of the nobility, standing in the form of a square, were +the sons of the <i>datos</i> each bearing golden, jewel-studded <i>chogans</i>, spears, <i>krises,</i> and maces. Inside the square stood the fifteen <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb278" href="#pb278">278</a>]</span>consuls. Back of the throne were four young princes, two bearing each the golden bejewelled <i>kris</i> of the Malay, another the golden sword of state, and the fourth the cimeter of the Prophet. + +</p> +<p>Up to the steps of the throne came the young prince, dressed in the uniform of a lieutenant of artillery, with the royal order +of Darjah Krabat ablaze with jewels on his breast. He was slightly taller than his father, the Sultan, straight, graceful, +and handsome, with big, brown eyes and strongly marked features. He was nervous and agitated, and his lips trembled as he +bent on one knee and kissed his Highness’s hand. + +</p> +<p>Above our heads in the gilded walls, behind a grated opening, were Inche Kitega, the Sultan’s beautiful Circassian wife, and +the women of the court. We could see their black eyes as they peered curiously down. It was only when the Dato Mentri, or +Prime Minister, stood up and asked his <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb279" href="#pb279">279</a>]</span>people if they wished the young <i>Tunku</i> to be their future lord that we could hear their shrill voices mingling with the “<i>Suku, suku</i>” (“We wish it, we wish it”), of the men. + +</p> +<p>It is only the wives of the nobles that are secluded in the <i>istana isaras</i>, or women palaces, according to Mohammedan law; the women of the poor are as free as the more civilized countries of Europe. +They bask in the sun with their brown babies on their laps, or wander among the cocoanuts that always surround their palm-thatched +homes, happy and contented, with no thought for the morrow. The trees furnish them their food, and a few hours before their +looms of dark <i>kamooning</i> wood each week keep them supplied with their one article of dress—the <i>sarong</i>. They never heard of the Bible, but they are very religious, and at sunrise and sunset, at the deep-toned boom of the hollow +log that hangs before their <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb280" href="#pb280">280</a>]</span>little thatched mosques, they fall on their faces and pray to “Allah, the All Merciful and Loving Kind.” + +</p> +<p>When the Crown Prince had stepped modestly back among his brothers and cousins, a holy man in green robes and turban came +forward and read an address in Arabic. He recited the glories of the Prophet, the promises of the Koran, and then told of +the ancient greatness of Johore,—how it once ruled the great peninsula that forever points like a lean, disjointed finger +down into the heart of the greatest archipelago of the world,—how its ruler was looked up to and made treaties with, by the +kings of Europe,—of the coming of the thieving Portuguese and the brutal Dutch,—of the dark, bloody years when the deposed +descendants of the once proud Emperors of Johore turned to piracy,—of the new days that commenced when that great Englishman, +Sir Stamford Raffles, founded Singapore,—down <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb281" href="#pb281">281</a>]</span>to the glorious reign of the present just ruler, Abubaker. + +</p> +<p>Our eyes wandered from time to time out through the cool marble courts and tried vainly to pierce the botanic chaos that crowded +close up to the palace grounds. Banian and sacred waringhan trees covered great stretches of ground, and dropped their fantastic +roots into the steaming earth like living stalactites. The fan-shaped, water-hoarding traveller’s palm formed a background +for the brilliant magenta-colored bougainvillea. The dim, translucent depths of an orchid-house lured us on, or a great pond +covered with the sacred lotus, blue lilies, and the flush-colored cups of the superb Victoria regia commanded our admiration. +Palms, flowering shrubs, ferns, and creepers rioted on all sides. Monkeys swung above in the ropelike tendrils of the rubber-vines, +and spotted deer gamboled beneath the shade of mango trees. + +</p> +<p>The brilliant audience listened with bated <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb282" href="#pb282">282</a>]</span>breath to the dramatic recital of their nation’s story. Even we, who did not understand a word, were impressed by their flushed +faces and eager attention, and when the band in the columned corridors beyond broke forth into the national anthem of Johore +and the vast concourse outside took up the shouts of fealty that began within, I, for one, felt an almost irresistible desire +to join in the shouts and do honor to the kindly old Sultan and his graceful son. + +</p> +<p>After his Highness, the Sultan, had spoken, through the mouth of his Prime Minister, to the nobles, and commended his son +to their care, we crowded forward and congratulated him in the names of our respective countries. + +</p> +<p>We filed through the grand salon, with its luxurious medley of divans, tapestries, and rugs, through a great hall whose walls +were hung with heroic-sized paintings of the English royal family, down a flight of steps, <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb283" href="#pb283">283</a>]</span>across the marble reception room, and into the open doors of the royal dining room. + +</p> +<p>From its polished ceiling of black billion wood hung great white <i>punkahs</i>, which half-nude Indians on the outside kept gently swaying back and forth. + +</p> +<p>In the centre of the vast table stood a golden urn filled with delicate maidenhair ferns and dragon orchids. Against a great +plate-glass mirror, at the far end, rested massive salvers of gold, engraven with the arms of Johore, and in its flawless +depths shone the jewels that decked the entering throng and the splendid service of plate that dazzled our eyes. + +</p> +<p>Around his Highness’s throat was a collar of diamonds and on his hands and in the decorations that covered his breast were +diamonds, emeralds, and rubies, of almost priceless value. Each button of his coat and low-cut vest was a diamond, and from +the front of his rimless cap waved a plume of <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb284" href="#pb284">284</a>]</span>diamonds. On his wrists were heavy gold bracelets of Malayan workmanship, and his fingers were cramped with almost priceless +rings. In his buttonhole blazed a diamond orchid. The handle and scabbard of his sword were a solid mass of precious stones. +Altogether this little known Oriental potentate possessed $10,000,000 worth of diamonds, the second largest collection on +earth. + +</p> +<p>In personal appearance his Highness compared favorably with the best representatives of the Anglo-Saxon race. He was five +feet eight in height, well built, with clean-cut, kindly features, in color nearer the Spanish type than the Indian. His hands +and feet were small, forehead high and full, lips thin, and nose aquiline, his hair and mustache iron gray. He spoke good +English, and was able to converse in French and German. In every-day dress he affected the English Prince Albert suit, to +which he added a narrow silk <i>sarong</i> and a rimless black cap. +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb285" href="#pb285">285</a>]</span></p> +<p>Besides being a lover of jewels, his Highness was a lover of good horseflesh and of yachts. His stud comprised two hundred +horses, among which were fleet Arabians, sturdy little Deli ponies, thoroughbred Australians, and Indian galloways. Twice +a year he offered a cup at the Singapore jockey races, and entered a half dozen of his best runners. At his tent on the grounds +he dispensed champagne, ices, and cakes, and his native band of thirty pieces played alternately with the regimental band +from the English barracks. + +</p> +<p>His three hundred ton steam-launch was built on the Clyde. Besides the Sultan’s saloon on the lower deck, which was furnished +befitting a king, there were cabins for ten people. The promenade deck was under an awning, and was furnished with a heavy +rosewood dining-table and long chairs. She carried four guns of long range. + +</p> +<p>The revenue of Johore amounts to six million dollars a year, to which the Sultan’s <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb286" href="#pb286">286</a>]</span>private property in Singapore adds nearly a half million more. The bulk of the national revenue is raised from opium, spirits, +and gambling. The scheme of taxation is simple, but most effective. Any Chinaman who has a longing for the pipe pays into +his Highness’s treasury one dollar a month, and is granted a permit to buy and smoke opium; another monthly dollar and he +is licensed to drink. + +</p> +<p>The gambling privilege is given to the highest bidder, and he has the monopoly for the kingdom. There is also a small export +tax on gambier and tin. On the other hand, any immigrant that wishes to settle and open a farm of any kind is given all the +ground he can work, rent free, to have and to hold as long as he keeps it under cultivation. Should he leave, it reverts with +all its improvements to the crown. + +</p> +<p>The government is autocratic, but tempered and kept in sympathy with the English <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb287" href="#pb287">287</a>]</span>ideas of justice as seen in the great colonies that surround it. + +</p> +<p>The dinner throughout was European, save for the one national dish, curry. Every Malay, from the poorest fisherman along the +mangrove-fretted lagoon to the chef of his Highness’s kitchen, justly boasts of the excellence of his curry and the number +of <i>sambuls</i> he can make. + +</p> +<p>First came a golden bowl filled with rice, as white and as light as snow; then another, in which was a gravy of yellow curry +powder, choice bits of fowl, and plump, fresh slices of egg-plant. Then came the <i>sambuls</i>, or condiments, more than forty varieties, in little circular dishes of Japanese ware on big silver trays. There were fish-roes, +ginger, and dried fish, or “Bombay duck,” duck’s eggs hashed with spices, chutney, peppers, grated cocoanut, anchovies, browned +crumbs, chicken livers, fried bananas, barley sprouts, onions, and many more, that were mixed and <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb288" href="#pb288">288</a>]</span>stirred into the spongy rice until your taste was baffled and your senses bewildered. + +</p> +<p>We knew that the curry was coming, so we passed courses that were as expensive and rare in this equatorial land as the fruit +of the <i>durians</i> would be in New York,—mutton from Shanghai, turkey from Siam, beef from Australia, and oysters from far up the river Maur. +We felt that besides being a pleasure to ourselves it was a compliment to our royal host to partake generously of his national +dish. + +</p> +<p>“This service,” said the old Tuan Hakim, or chief justice, pointing to the gold plate off which we were dining, “is the famous +Ellinborough plate that once belonged to that strange woman, Lady Ellinborough. His Highness attended the auction of her things +in Scotland. Do you see the little Arabic character on the rim of each? It is the late Sultana’s name. His Highness telegraphed +to her for the money to pay for it, and she <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb289" href="#pb289">289</a>]</span>telegraphed back two hundred thousand dollars, with the request that her name be engraved on each. Then she presented them +to her husband. The Sultana was very rich in her own right, and left the Sultan over two million dollars when she died.” + +</p> +<p>Throughout the long dinner the native band played the airs of Europe and America, intermixed with bits of weird Malayan song. +After we had lighted our cigars from the golden censer, the British Governor arose and proposed the health of the Sultan and +the young heir apparent. His Highness raised his glass of pineapple juice to his lips in acknowledgment, and said smilingly +to me as the Prime Minister said the magic word that stirs every Englishman’s heart,— + +</p> +<p>“The Queen!” + +</p> +<p>“Your people think all Orientals very bad.” + +</p> +<p>I protested. + +</p> +<p>“Oh, yes, you do; that is why you send so many missionaries among us. But,” he <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb290" href="#pb290">290</a>]</span>went on pleasantly, “look around my table. Not one of my court has touched the wine. A Mohammedan never drinks. Can you say +as much for your people?” + +</p> +<p>Then he raised his glass once more to his lips and said quietly, while his eyes twinkled at my confusion:— + +</p> +<p>“Tell your great President that Abubaker, Sultan of Johore, drank his health in simple pineapple juice.” + +</p> +<p>As the sun sank behind the misty dome of Mount Pulei we embarked once more at the broad palace steps in the royal barges, +amid the booming of guns and the strains of the international “God Save the Queen,” “My Country, ’tis of Thee,” and bared +our heads to the royal standard of Johore that floated so proudly above the palace, thankful for this short peep into the +heart of an Oriental court. +</p> +<hr class="tb"><p> + +</p> +<p>So the young Prince received the crown from the hands of his father. To-day, the <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb291" href="#pb291">291</a>]</span>bones of that grand old statesman, the Sultan of Johore, rest beside those of his royal fathers within the shadow of the mosque. + +</p> +<p>In 1819 when Sir Stamford Raffles purchased the island on which Singapore now stands from the father of the late Sultan of +Johore, the royal palace was a palm-thatched bungalow, the country an unbroken jungle, and the inhabitants pirates and fishermen +by turns; the notorious Strait of Malacca was infested with long, keen, swift pirate <i>praus</i>, and the snake-like <i>kris</i> menaced the merchant marine of the world. + +</p> +<p>The advancement of the United States has not been more rapid since that date than the advancement of Johore. The <i>attap istana</i>, or palace, has given place to a series of palaces that rival those of many a much better-known country; the jungle has given +place to plantations of gambier, tea, coffee, and pepper; the few elephant tracks and forest paths, to a network of macadamized +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb292" href="#pb292">292</a>]</span>roads and projected railways; and the native <i>praus</i>, to English-built barks and deeply laden cargo steamers. + +</p> +<p>Two hundred thousand hard-working, money-making Chinese have been added to the thirty-five thousand Malay aborigines, and +the revenue of this remnant of an empire is far greater than was the revenue of the original state. + +</p> +<p>It remains to be seen whether the young Sultan will follow in the footsteps of his father and preserve to Johore the distinction +of being, with the one exception of Siam, the only independent native kingdom in southern Asia. One misstep and he will become +but a dependency of the great British Empire, a king only in name. + + + +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb293" href="#pb293">293</a>]</span></p> +</div> +<div id="ch16" class="div1"><span class="pagenum"> +[<a href="#toc">Contents</a>] +</span><h2 class="normal">In the Golden Chersonese</h2> +<h2 class="sub">A Peep at the City of Singapore</h2> +<p>Could an American boy, like a prince in the Arabian Nights, be taken by a genie from his warm bed in San Francisco or New +York and awakened in the centre of Raffles Square, in Singapore, I will wager that he would be sadly puzzled to even give +the name of the continent on which he had alighted. + +</p> +<p>Neither the buildings, the people, or the vehicles would aid him in the least to decide. + +</p> +<p>Enclosing the four sides of the little banian-tree shaded park in which he stands are rows of brick, white-faced, high-jointed +go-downs. Through their glassless windows great white <i>punkahs</i> swing back and forth with a ceaseless regularity. Standing outside of each window, a tall, graceful <i>punkah-wallah</i> <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb294" href="#pb294">294</a>]</span>tugs at a rattan withe, his naked limbs shining like polished ebony in the fierce glare of the Malayan sun. + +</p> +<p>For a moment, perhaps, the boy thinks himself in India, possibly at Simla, for he has read some of Rudyard Kipling’s stories. + +</p> +<p>Back under the portico-like verandas, whose narrow breadths take the place of sidewalks, are little booths that look like +bay windows turned inside out. On the floor of each sits a Turk, cross-legged, or an Arab, surrounded by a heterogeneous assortment +of wares, fez caps, brass finger-bowls, a praying rug, a few boxes of Japanese tooth-picks, some rare little bottles of Arab +essence, a betel-nut box, and a half dozen piles of big copper cents, for all shopkeepers are money-changers. + +</p> +<p>The merchant gathers his flowing party-colored robes about him, tightens the turban head, and draws calmly at his water-pipe +while a bevy of Hindu and Tamil <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb295" href="#pb295">295</a>]</span>women bargain for a new stud for their noses, a showy amulet, or a silver ring for their toes. + +</p> +<p>Squatting right in the way of all passers is a Chinese travelling restaurant that looks like two flour barrels, one filled +with drawers, the other containing a small charcoal fire. The old <i>cookee</i>, with his queue tied neatly up about his shaven head, takes a variety of mixtures from the drawers,—bits of dried fish, seaweed, +a handful of spaghetti, possibly a piece of shark’s fin, or better still a lump of bird’s nest, places them in the kettle, +as he yells from time to time, “<i>Machen, machen</i>” (eating, eating). + +</p> +<p>Next to the Arab booth is a Chinese lamp shop, then a European dry-goods store, an Armenian law office, a Japanese bazaar, +a foreign consulate. + +</p> +<p>A babble of strange sounds and a jargon of languages salute the astonished boy’s ears. + +</p> +<p>In the broad well-paved streets about him a Malay <i>syce</i>, or driver, is trying to urge his <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb296" href="#pb296">296</a>]</span>spotted Deli pony, which is not larger than a Newfoundland dog, in between a big, lumbering two-wheeled bullock-cart, laden +with oozing bags of vile-smelling gambier, and a great patient water buffalo that stands sleepily whipping the gnats from +its black, almost hairless hide, while its naked driver is seated under the trees in the square quarrelling and gambling by +turns. + +</p> +<p>The <i>gharry</i>, which resembles a dry-goods box on wheels, set in with latticed windows, smashes up against the ponderous hubs of the bullock-cart. +The meek-eyed bullocks close their eyes and chew their cuds, regardless of the fierce screams of the Malay or the frenzied +objurgations of their driver. + +</p> +<p>But no one pays any attention to the momentary confusion. A party of Jews dressed in robes of purple and red that sweep the +street pass by, without giving a glance at the wild plunging of the half-wild pony. A Singhalese jeweller is showing his rubies +and <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb297" href="#pb297">297</a>]</span>cat’s-eyes to a party of Eurasian, or half-caste clerks, that are taking advantage of their master’s absence from the godown +to come out into the court to smoke a Manila cigarette and gossip. The mottled tortoise-shell comb in the vender’s black hair, +and his womanish draperies, give him a feminine aspect. + +</p> +<p>An Indian <i>chitty</i>, or money-lender, stands talking to a brother, supremely unconscious of the eddying throng about. These <i>chitties</i> are fully six feet tall, with closely shaven heads and nude bodies. Their dress of a few yards of gauze wound about their +waists, and red sandals, would not lead one to think that they handle more money than any other class of people in the East. +They borrow from the great English banks without security save that of their caste name, and lend to the Eurasian clerks just +behind them at twelve per cent a month. If a <i>chitty</i> fails, he is driven out of the caste and becomes a pariah. The caste make up his losses. +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb298" href="#pb298">298</a>]</span></p> +<p>Dyaks from Borneo idle by. Parsee merchants in their tall, conical hats, Chinese rickshaw runners and cart coolies, Tamil +road-menders, Bugis, Achinese, Siamese, Japanese, Madras serving-men, negro firemen, Lascar sailors, throng the little square,—the +agora of the commercial life of the city. + +</p> +<p>Such is Singapore, embracing all the races of Asia and Europe. Is it any wonder that the American boy is bewildered, standing +there under the great banian tree with a Malay in <i>sarong</i> and <i>kris</i> by his side, singing with his <i>syrah</i>-stained lips the glorious promises of the Koran? +</p> +<hr class="tb"><p> + +</p> +<p>Look on the map of Asia for the southernmost point of the continent, and you will find it at the tip of the Malay Peninsula,—a +giant finger that points down into the heart of the greatest archipelago in the world. At the very end of this peninsula, +like a sort of cut-off joint of the finger, is the little island <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb299" href="#pb299">299</a>]</span>of Singapore, which is not over twenty-five miles from east to west, and does not exceed fifteen miles in width at its broadest +point. + +</p> +<p>The famous old Straits of Malacca, which were once the haunts of the fierce Malayan pirates, separate the island from the +mainland and the Sultanate of Johore. + +</p> +<p>The shipping that once worked its way through these narrow straits, in momentary fear that its mangrove-bound shores held +a long, swift pirate <i>prau</i>, now goes further south and into the island-guarded harbor before Singapore. + +</p> +<p>Nothing can be more beautiful than the sea approach to Singapore. As you enter the Straits, the emerald-green of a bevy of +little islands obstructs the vision, and affords a grateful relief to the almost blinding glare of the Malayan sky, and the +metallic reflections of the ocean. + +</p> +<p>Some seem only inhabited by a graceful waving burden of strange, tropical foliage, and <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb300" href="#pb300">300</a>]</span>by a band of chattering monkeys; on others you detect a Malay <i>kampong</i>, or village, its umbrella-like houses of <i>attap</i>, close down to the shore, built high up on poles, so that half the time their boulevards are but vast mud-holes, the other +half—Venice, filled with a moving crowd of <i>sampans</i> and fishing <i>praus</i>. A crowd of bronzed, naked little figures sport within the shadow of a maze of drying nets, and flee in consternation as +the black, log-like head and cruel, watchful eyes of a crocodile glide quietly along the mangrove roots. + +</p> +<p>On another island you discern the grim breastworks and the frowning mouth of a piece of heavy ordnance. + +</p> +<p>Soon the island of Singapore reveals itself in a long line of dome-like hills and deep-cut shadows, whose stolid front quickly +dissolves. The tufted tops of a sentinel palm, the wide-spreading arms of the banian, clumps of green and yellow bamboo, and +the fan-shaped <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb301" href="#pb301">301</a>]</span>outlines of the traveller’s palm become distinguishable. As the great, red, tropical sun rises from behind the encircling +hills, the monotony of the foliage is relieved in places by objects which it all but hid from view. The granite minaret of +the Mohammedan mosque, the carved dome of a Buddhist temple, the slender spire of an English cathedral, the bold projections +of Government House, and the wide, white sides of the Municipal buildings all hold the eye. + +</p> +<p>Then a maze of strange shipping screens the nearing shore—the military masts and yards of British and Dutch men-of-war, the +high-heeled, shoe-like lines of Chinese junks, innumerable Malay and Kling <i>sampans</i>, and great, unwieldy Borneo <i>tonkangs</i>. + +</p> +<p>For six miles along the wharves and for six miles back into the island extend the municipal limits of the city. Two hundred +thousand people live within these limits; while outside, over the rest of the island <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb302" href="#pb302">302</a>]</span>along the sea-coast, in fishing villages, and in the interior on plantations of tapioca and pepper, live a hundred thousand +more. Of these three hundred thousand over one hundred and seventy thousand are Chinese and only fifteen hundred are Europeans. + +</p> +<p>Grouped about Raffles Square, and facing the Bund, are the great English, German, and Chinese houses that handle the three +hundred million dollars’ worth of imports and exports that pass in and out of the port yearly, and make Singapore one of the +most important marts of the commercial world. + +</p> +<p>Beyond, and back from the Square, is Tanglin, or the suburbs, where the government officials and the heads of these great +firms live in luxurious bungalows, surrounded by a swarm of retainers. + +</p> +<p>Let us drive from Raffles Square through this cosmopolitan city and out to Tanglin. Beginning at Cavanagh Bridge, at one end +of which stands the great Singapore Club <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb303" href="#pb303">303</a>]</span>and the Post Office, is the ocean esplanade,—the pride of the city. It encloses a public playground of some fifteen acres, +reclaimed from the sea at an expense of over two hundred thousand dollars. Every afternoon when the heat of the day has fallen +from 150° to 80°, the European population meets on this esplanade park to play tennis, cricket, and football, and to promenade, +gossip, and listen to the music of the regimental or man-of-war band. + +</p> +<p>The drive from the sea, up Orchard Road to the Botanic Gardens, carries you by all the diversified life of the city. The Chinese +restaurant is omnipresent. By its side sits a naked little bit of bronze, with a basket of sugar-cane—each stick, two feet +long, cleaned and scraped, ready for the hungry and thirsty rickshaw coolies, who have a few quarter cents with which to gratify +their appetites. On every veranda and in every shady corner are the Kling and <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb304" href="#pb304">304</a>]</span>Chinese barbers. They carry their barber-shops in a kit or in their pockets, and the recipient of their skill finds a seat +as best he may. The barber is prepared to shave your head, your face, trim your hair, braid your queue, and pull the hairs +out of your nose and ears. + +</p> +<p>There is no special quarter for separate trades. Madras tailor shops rub shoulders with Malay blacksmith shops, while Indian +wash-houses join Manila cigar manufactories. + +</p> +<p>Once past the commercial part of the ride, the great bungalows of the European and Chinese merchants come into view. The immediate +borders of the road itself reveal nothing but a dense mass of tropical verdure and carefully cut hedges, but at intervals +there is a wide gap in the hedge, and a road leads off into the seeming jungle. At every such entrance there are posts of +masonry, and a plate bearing the name of the manor and its owner. +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb305" href="#pb305">305</a>]</span></p> +<p>At the end of a long aisle of palms and banians you see a bit of wide-spreading veranda, and the full-open doors of a cool, +black interior. Acres of closely shaven lawns, dotted with flowering shrubs of the brightest reds, deepest purples, and fieriest +solferinos, beds of rich-hued foliage plants, and cool, green masses of ferns meet your eye. + +</p> +<p>Perhaps you spy the inevitable tennis-court, swarming with players, and bordered with tables covered with tea and sweets. +Red-turbaned Malay <i>kebuns</i>, or gardeners, are chasing the balls, and scrupulously clean Chinese “boys” are passing silently among the guests with trays +of eatables. + +</p> +<p>Dozens of <i>gharries</i> dodge past. Hundreds of rickshaws pull out of the way. + +</p> +<p>A great landau, drawn by a pair of thoroughbred Australian horses, driven by a Malay <i>syce</i>, and footman in full livery, and containing a bare-headed Chinese merchant, in the simple flowing garments of his nation, +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb306" href="#pb306">306</a>]</span>dashes along. The victoria and the dog-cart of the European, and the universal palanquin of the Anglo-Indian, form a perfect +maze of wheels. + +</p> +<p>Suddenly the road is filled with a long line of bullock-carts. You swing your little pony sharply to one side, barely escaping +the big wooden hub of the first cart. The <i>syce</i> springs down from behind, and belabors the native bullock driver, who, paying no attention to the blows rained upon his naked +back, belabors his beasts in turn, calling down upon their ungainly humps the curses of his religion. The scene is so familiar +that only a “globe-trotter” would notice it. Yet to me there is nothing more truly artistic, or more typically Indian in India, +than a long line of these bullock-carts, laden with the products of the tropics,—pineapples, bananas, gambier, coffee,—urged +on by a straight, graceful driver, winding slowly along a palm and banian shaded <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb307" href="#pb307">307</a>]</span>road. We would meet such processions at every turning, but never without recalling glorious childish pictures of the Holy +Land and Bible scenery as we painted them, while our father read of a Sunday morning out of the old “Domestic Bible,”—we children +pronounce it “<i>Dom</i>-i-stick,”—how the Lord said unto Moses, “Go take twenty fat bullocks and offer them as a sacrifice.” As we would see these +“twenty fat bullocks” time and again, I confess, with a feeling of reluctance, that some of the gilt and rose tint was rubbed +from our childish pictures, and that a realistic artist drawing from the life before him would not deck out the patient subject +in quite our extravagant colors. + +</p> +<p>The color of the Indian bullock varies. Some are a dirty white, some a cream color, some almost pink, and a few are of the +darker shades. They are about the size of our cows, seldom as large as a full-grown <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb308" href="#pb308">308</a>]</span>ox. Their horns, which are generally tipped with curiously carved knobs, and often painted in colors, are as diversified in +their styles of architecture as are the horns of our cattle, though they are more apt to be straight and V-shaped. Their necks +are always “bowed to the yoke,” to once more use biblical phraseology, and seem almost to invite its humiliating clasp. Above +their front legs is the mark of their antiquity, the great clumsy, flabby, fleshy, tawny hump, always swaying from side to +side, keeping time to every plodding step of its sleepy owner. This seemingly useless mountain of flesh serves as a cushion +against which rests a yoke. Not the natty yoke of our rural districts, but a simple pole, with a pin of wood through each +end, to ride on the outside of the bullocks’ necks. The burden comes against the projecting hump when the team pulls. To the +centre of this yoke is tied, with strong withes of rattan, <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb309" href="#pb309">309</a>]</span>the pole of a cart, that in this nineteenth century is generally only to be seen in national museums, preserved as a relic +of the first steps in the art of wagon building. And yet as a cart it is not to be despised: all the heavy traffic of the +colonies is done within its rude board sides. It has two wheels, with heavy square spokes that are held on to a ponderous +wooden axle-tree by two wooden pins. A platform bottom rests on the axle-tree, and two fence-like sides. + +</p> +<p>The genie of the cart, the hewer of wood and drawer of water, is a tall, wiry, bronze-colored Hindu. He has a yard of white +gauze about his waist, and another yard twisted up into a turban on his head. The dictates of fashion do not interest him. +He does not plod along year in and year out behind his team for the pittance of sixty cents per day, to squander on the outside +of his person. Not he. He has a wife up near Simla. He hopes to go back next year, and buy a bit <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb310" href="#pb310">310</a>]</span>of ground back from the hill on the Allabadd road from his father-in-law, old Mohammed Mudd. They have cold weather up in +Simla, and he knows of a certain gown he is going to buy of a Chinaman in the bazaar. But his bullocks lag, and he saws on +the <i>gamooty</i> rope that is attached to their noses, and beats them half consciously with his rattan whip. Ofttimes he will stand stark +upright in the cart for a full half-hour, with his rattan held above his head in a threatening attitude, and talk on and on +to his animals, apotheosizing their strength and patience, telling them how they are sacred to Buddha, how they are the companions +of man, and how they shall have an extra <i>chupa</i> of paddy when the sun goes down, and he has delivered to the merchant <i>sahib</i> on the quay his load of gambier; or he reproves them for their slowness and want of interest, and threatens them with the +rod, and tells them to look how he <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb311" href="#pb311">311</a>]</span>holds it above them. If in the course of the harangue one of the dumb listeners pauses to pick a mouthful of young <i>lallang</i> grass by the roadside, the softly crooning tones give place to a shriek of denunciation. + +</p> +<p>The agile Kling springs down from his improvised pulpit, and rushes at the offender, calls him the offspring of a pariah dog, +shows him the rattan, rubs it against his nose, threatening to cut him up with it into small pieces, and to feed the pieces +to the birds. Then he discharges a volley of blows on the sleek sides of the offender, that seem to have little more effect +than to raise a cloud of tiger gnats, and to cause the recipient to bite faster at the tender herbs. + +</p> +<p>As the bullock-cart that has blocked our way, and at the same time inspired this description, shambles along down the shady +road, and out of the reach of the <i>syce’s</i> arms, the driver slips quietly up the pole of the cart until a hand rests on <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb312" href="#pb312">312</a>]</span>either hump, and commences to talk in a half-aggrieved, half-caressing tone to his team. Our <i>syce</i> translates. “He say bullock very bad to go to sleep before the palanquin of the Heaven-Born. If they no be better soon, their +souls will no become men. He say he sorry that they make the great American <i>sahib</i> angry.” + +</p> +<p>The singular trio passes on, the driver praising and reprimanding by turns in the soft, musical tongue of his people, the +historic beasts swinging lazily along, regardless of their illustrious past, all unconscious of the fact that their names +are embalmed in sacred writ and Indian legend, and rounding a corner of the broad, red road, are lost to view amid the olive-green +shadows of a clump of gently swaying bamboo. To me, for the moment, they seem to disappear, like phantoms, into the mists +of the dim centuries, from out of which my imagination has called them forth. +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb313" href="#pb313">313</a>]</span></p> +<p>Soon you are at the wide-open gates of the Botanic Garden. A perfect riot of strange tropical foliage bursts upon the view. +The clean, red road winds about and among avenues of palms, waringhans, dark green mangosteens, casuarinas, and the sweet-smelling +hibiscus, all alike covered with a hundred different parasitic vines and ferns. Artificial lakes and moats are filled with +the giant pods of the superb Victoria regia, and the flesh-colored cups of the lotus. + +</p> +<p>In the translucent green twilight of the flower-houses a hundred varieties of the costly orchids thrive—not costly here. A +shipload can be bought of the natives for three cents apiece. + +</p> +<p>Walks carry you out into the dim aisles of the native jungle. Monkeys, surprised at your footsteps, spring from limb to limb, +and swing, chattering, out of sight in a mass of rubber-vines. Splendid macadamized roads, that are kept in perfect repair +by a <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb314" href="#pb314">314</a>]</span>force of naked Hindus and an iron roller drawn by six unwilling, hump-backed bullocks, spread out over the island in every +direction. Leave one at any point outside the town, and plunge into the bordering jungle, and you are liable to meet a tiger +or a herd of wild boar. The tigers swim across the straits from the mainland, and occasionally strike down a Chinaman. It +is said that if a Chinaman, a Malay, and a European are passing side by side through a field, the tiger will pick out the +Chinaman to the exclusion of the other two. + +</p> +<p>Acres upon acres of pineapples stretch away on either hand, while patches of bananas and farms of coffee are interspersed +with spice trees and sago swamps. + +</p> +<p>This road system is the secret of the development of the agriculture, and one of the secrets of the rapid growth of the great +English colonies. Were it not for the great black python, that lies sleeping in the road <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb315" href="#pb315">315</a>]</span>in front of you, or the green iguana that hangs in a <i>timboso</i> tree over your head, or a naked runner pulling a rickshaw, you might think you were travelling the wide asphaltum streets +of Washington. + +</p> +<p>The home of the European in Singapore is peculiar to the country. The parks about their great bungalows are small copies of +the Botanic Gardens—filled with all that is beautiful in the flora of the East. From five to twenty servants alone are kept +to look after its walks and hedges and lawns. + +</p> +<p>A bungalow proper may consist of but a half-dozen rooms, and yet look like a vast manor house. It is the generous sweep of +the verandas running completely around the house that lends this impression. Behind its bamboo <i>chicks</i> you retire on your return from the office. The Chinese “boy” takes your pipe-clayed shoes and cork helmet, and brings a pair +of heelless grass slippers. If a friend drop in, you never think of inviting <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb316" href="#pb316">316</a>]</span>him into your richly furnished drawing-room, but motion him to a long rattan chair, call “Boy, bring the master a cup of tea,” +and pass a box of Manila cigars. + +</p> +<p>Bungalows are one story high, with a roof of palm thatch, and are raised above the ground from two to five feet by brick pillars, +leaving an open space for light and air beneath. Nearly every day it rains for an hour in torrents. The hot, steaming earth +absorbs the water, and the fierce equatorial sun evaporates it, only to return it in a like shower the next day. So every +precaution must be taken against dampness and dry-rot. + +</p> +<p>In every well-ordered bungalow seven to nine servants are an absolute necessity, while three others are usually added from +time to time. The five elements, if I may so style them, are the “boy,” or boys, the cook and his helpers, the horseman, the +water-carrier, the gardener, and the maid. The adjuncts <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb317" href="#pb317">317</a>]</span>are the barber, the wash man, the tailor, and the watchman. In a mild way, you are at the mercy of these servants. Their duties +are fixed by caste, one never intruding on the work of another. You must have all or none. Still this is no hardship. Only +newcomers ever think, of trying to economize on servant bills. The record of the thermometer is too appalling, and you speedily +become too dependent on their attentions. + +</p> +<p>The Chinese “boy”—he is always the “boy” until he dies—is the presiding genius of the house. He it is who brings your tea +and fruit to the bedside at 6 <span class="smallcaps">A.M.</span>, and lays out your evening suit ready for dinner, puts your studs in your clean shirt, brings your slippers, knows where +each individual article of your wardrobe is kept, and, in fact, thinks of a hundred and one little comforts you would never +have known of, had he not discovered them. He is your <i>valet de chambre</i>, your <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb318" href="#pb318">318</a>]</span>butler, your steward and your general agent, your interpreter and your directory. He controls the other servants with a rod +of iron, but bows to the earth before the mem, or the master. For his ten Mexican dollars a month he takes all the burdens +from your shoulders, and stands between you and the rude outside polyglot world. He is a hero-worshipper, and if you are a +<i>Tuan Besar</i>—great man—he will double his attentions, and spread your fame far and wide among his brother majordomos. + +</p> +<p>But a description of each member of the <i>ménage</i> and their duties would be in a large measure the description of the odd, complex life of the East. + +</p> +<p>The growth of Singapore since its founding by Sir Stamford Raffles in 1819 would do honor to the growth of one of our Western +cities. + +</p> +<p>Within three months after the purchase of the ground from the Sultan of Johore, <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb319" href="#pb319">319</a>]</span>Raffles wrote to Lord Warren Hastings, the Governor:— + +</p> +<p>“We have a growing colony of nearly five thousand souls,” and a little later one of his successors wrote apologetically to +Lord Auckland, discussing some project relating to Singapore finance;— + +</p> +<p>“These details may appear to your Lordship petty, but then everything connected with these settlements is petty, except their +annual surplus cost to the Government of India.” + +</p> +<p>To-day the city and colony has a population of over one million, and a revenue of five million dollars—a magnificent monument +to its founder’s foresight! + +</p> +<p>From a commercial and strategic stand-point, the site of the city is unassailable. When the English and the Dutch divided +the East Indies by drawing a line through the Straits of Malacca,—the English to hold all north, the Dutch all south,—the +crafty <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb320" href="#pb320">320</a>]</span>Dutchman smiled benignly, with one finger in the corner of his eye, and went back to his coffee and tobacco trading in the +beautiful islands of Java and Sumatra, pitying the ignorance of the Englishman, who was contented with the swampy jungles +of an unknown and savage neck of land, little thinking that inside of a half century all his products would come to this same +despised district for a market, while his own colonies would retrograde and gradually pass into the hands of the English. + +</p> +<p>Singapore is one of the great cities of the world, the centre of all the East Indian commerce, the key of southern Asia, and +one of the massive links in the armored chain with which Great Britain encircles the globe. + + + +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb321" href="#pb321">321</a>]</span></p> +</div> +<div id="ch17" class="div1"><span class="pagenum"> +[<a href="#toc">Contents</a>] +</span><h2 class="normal">A Fight with Illanum Pirates</h2> +<h2 class="sub">The Yarn of a Yankee Skipper</h2> +<p>The <i>Daily Straits Times</i> on the desk before me contained a vivid word picture of the capture of the British steamship <i>Namoa</i> by three hundred Chinese pirates, the guns of Hong Kong almost within sight, and the year of our Lord 1890 just drawing to +a close. The report seemed incredible. + +</p> +<p>I pushed the paper across the table to the grizzled old captain of the <i>Bunker Hill</i> and continued my examination of the accounts of a half-dozen sailors of whom he was intent on getting rid. By the time I +had signed the last discharge and affixed the consular seal he had finished the article and put it aside with a contemptuous +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb322" href="#pb322">322</a>]</span>“Humph!” expressive of his opinion of the valor of the crew and officers. I could see that he was anxious for me to give him +my attention while he related one of those long-drawn-out stories of perhaps a like personal experience. I knew the symptoms +and <span class="corr" id="xd0e4447" title="Source: somtimes">sometimes</span> took occasion to escape, if business or inclination made me forego the pleasure. To-day I was in a mood to humor him. + +</p> +<p>There is always something deliciously refreshing in a sailor’s yarn. I have listened to hundreds in the course of my consular +career, and have yet to find one that is dull or prosy. They all bear the imprint of truth, perhaps a trifle overdrawn, but +nevertheless sparkling with the salt of the sea and redolent of the romance of strange people and distant lands. In listening, +one becomes almost dizzy at the rapidity with which the scene and personnel change. The icebergs and the aurora borealis of +the Arctic give place to the torrid waters and the Southern <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb323" href="#pb323">323</a>]</span>Cross of the South Pacific. A volcanic island, an Arabian desert, a tropical jungle, and the breadth and width of the ocean +serve as the theatre, while a Fiji Islander, an Eskimo, and a turbaned Arab are actors in a half-hour’s tale. In interest +they rival Verne, Kingston, or Marryat. All they lack is skilled hands to dress them in proper language. + + +</p> +<div class="div2"> +<h3 class="label">I</h3> +<h3 class="normal">The Captain’s Yarn</h3> +<p>The captain helped himself to one of my manilas and began:— + +</p> +<p>I’ve nothing to say about the fate of the poor fellows on the <i>Namoa</i>, seeing the captain was killed at the first fire, but it looks to me like a case of carelessness which was almost criminal. +The idea of allowing three hundred Chinese to come aboard as passengers without searching them for arms. Why! it is an open +bid to pirates. Goes to show <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb324" href="#pb324">324</a>]</span>pretty plain that these seas are not cleared of pirates. Sailing ships nowadays think they can go anywhere without a pound +of powder or an old cutlass aboard, just because there is an English or Dutch man-of-war within a hundred miles. I don’t know +what we’d have done when I first traded among these islands without a good brass swivel and a stock of percussion-cap muskets. + +</p> +<p>Let me see; it was in ’58, I was cabin boy on the ship <i>Bangor</i>. Captain Howe, hale old fellow from Maine, had his two little boys aboard. They are merchants now in Boston. I’ve been sailing +for them on the <i>Elmira</i> ever since. We were trading along the coast of Borneo. Those were great days for trading in spite of the pirates. That was +long before iron steamers sent our good oaken ships to rot in the dockyards of Maine. Why, in those days you could see a half-dozen +of our snug little crafts in any port of the world, and I’ve seen more <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb325" href="#pb325">325</a>]</span>American flags in this very harbor of Singapore than of any other nation. We had come into Singapore with a shipload of ice +(no scientific ice factories then), and had gone along the coast of Java and Borneo to load with coffee, rubber, and spices, +for a return voyage. We were just off Kuching, the capital of Sarawak, and about loaded, when the captain heard that gold +had been discovered somewhere up near the head of the Rejang. The captain was an adventurous old salt, and decided to test +the truth of the story; so, taking the long-boat and ten men, he pulled up the Sarawak River to Kuching and got permission +of Rajah Brooke to go up the Rejang on a hunting expedition. The Rajah was courteous, but tried to dissuade us from the undertaking +by relating that several bands of Dyaks had been out on head-hunting expeditions of late, and that the mouth of the Rejang +was infested by Illanum pirates. <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb326" href="#pb326">326</a>]</span>The captain only laughed, and jokingly told Sir James that if the game proved scarce he might come back and claim the prize +money on a boat-load of pirate heads. + +</p> +<p>We started at once,—for the captain let me go; we rowed some sixty miles along the coast to the mouth of the Rejang; then +for four days we pulled up its snakelike course. It was my first bit of adventure, and everything was strange and new. The +river’s course was like a great tunnel into the dense black jungle. On each side and above we were completely walled in by +an impenetrable growth of great tropical trees and the iron-like vines of the rubber. The sun for a few hours each day came +in broken shafts down through the foliage, and exposed the black back of a crocodile, or the green sides of an iguana. Troops +of monkeys swung and chattered in the branches above, and at intervals a grove of cocoanut broke the monotony of the scenery. +Among them <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb327" href="#pb327">327</a>]</span>we would land and rest for the day or night, eat of their juicy fruit, and go on short excursions for game. A roasted monkey, +some baked yams, and a delicious rice curry made up a royal bill of fare, and as the odor of our tobacco mixed with the breathing +perfume of the jungle, I would fall asleep listening to sea-yarns that sometimes ran back to the War of 1812. + + +</p> +</div> +<div class="div2"> +<h3 class="label">II</h3> +<p>At the end of the fifth day we arrived at the head of the Rejang. Here the river broke up into a dozen small streams and a +swamp. A stockade had been erected, and the Rajah had stationed a small company of native soldiers under an English officer +to keep the head-hunting Dyaks in check. I don’t remember what our captain found out in regard to the gold fields, at least +it was not encouraging; for he gave up the search and joined the English lieutenant <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb328" href="#pb328">328</a>]</span>in a grand deer-hunt that lasted for five days, and then started back accompanied by two native soldiers bearing despatches +to the Rajah. + +</p> +<p>It was easy running down the river with the current. One man in each end of the boat kept it off roots, sunken logs, and crocodiles, +and the rest of us spent the time as best our cramped space allowed. Twice we detected the black, ugly face of a Dyak peering +from out the jungle. The men were for hunting them down for the price on their heads, but the captain said he never killed +a human being except in self-defence, and that if the Rajah wanted to get rid of the savages he had better give the contract +to a Mississippi slave-trader. Secretly, I was longing for some kind of excitement, and was hoping that the men’s clamorous +talk would have some effect. I never doubted our ability to raid a Dyak village and kill the head-hunters <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb329" href="#pb329">329</a>]</span>and carry off the beautiful maidens. I could not see why a parcel of blacks should be such a terror to the good Rajah, when +Big Tom said he could easily handle a dozen, and flattered me by saying that such a brawny lad as I ought to take care of +two at least. + +</p> +<p>In the course of three days we reached the mouth of the river, and prepared the sail for the trip across the bay to the <i>Bangor</i>. Just as everything was in readiness, one of those peculiar and rapid changes in the weather, that are so common here in +the tropics near the equator, took place. A great blue-black cloud, looking like an immense cartridge, came up from the west. +Through it played vivid flashes of lightning, and around it was a red haze. “A nasty animal,” I heard the bo’s’n tell the +captain, and yet I was foolishly delighted when they decided to risk a blow and put out to sea. The sky on all sides grew +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb330" href="#pb330">330</a>]</span>darker from hour to hour. A smell of sulphur came to our nostrils. It was oppressively hot; not a breath of wind was stirring. +The sail flapped uselessly against the mast, and the men labored at the oars, while streams of sweat ran from their bodies. + +</p> +<p>The captain had just taken down the mast, when, without a moment’s warning, the gale struck us and the boat half filled with +water. We managed to head it with the wind, and were soon driving with the rapidity of a cannon-ball over the boiling and +surging waters. It was a fearful gale; we blew for hours before it, ofttimes in danger of a volcanic reef, again almost sunk +by a giant wave. I baled until I was completely exhausted. But the long-boat was a stanch little craft, and there were plenty +of men to manage it, so as long as we could keep her before the wind, the captain felt no great anxiety as to our safety. + + +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb331" href="#pb331">331</a>]</span></p> +</div> +<div class="div2"> +<h3 class="label">III</h3> +<p>At about six bells in the afternoon, the wind fell away, and the rain came down in torrents, leaving us to pitch about on +the rapidly decreasing waves, wet to the skin and unequal to another effort. We were within a mile of a rocky island that +rose like a half-ruined castle from the ocean. The Dyak soldiers called it Satang Island, and I have sailed past it many a +time since. Without waiting for the word, we rowed to it and around it, before we found a suitable beach on which to land. +One end of the island rose precipitous and sheer above the beach a hundred feet, and ended in a barren plateau of some two +dozen acres. The remainder comprised some hundred acres of sand and rocks, on which were half a dozen cocoanut trees and a +few yams. Along the beach we found a large number of turtles’ eggs. +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb332" href="#pb332">332</a>]</span></p> +<p>The captain, remembering the Rajah’s caution in regard to pirates, decided not to make a light, but we were wet and hungry +and overcame his scruples, and soon had a huge fire and a savory repast of coffee, turtles’ eggs, and yams. At midnight it +was extinguished, and a watch stationed on top of the plateau. Toward morning I clambered grumblingly up the narrow, almost +perpendicular sides of the rift that cut into the rocky watch-tower. I did not believe in pirates and was willing to take +my chances in sleep. I paced back and forth, inhaling deep breaths of the rich tropical air; below me the waves beat in ripples +against the rugged beach, casting off from time to time little flashes of phosphorescent light, and mirroring in their depths +the hardly distinguishable outline of the Southern Cross. The salt smell of the sea was tinged with the spice-laden air of +the near coast. Drowsiness came over me. I picked up a <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb333" href="#pb333">333</a>]</span>musket and paced around the little plateau. The moon had but just reached its zenith, making all objects easily discernible. +The smooth storm-swept space before me reflected back its rays like a well-scrubbed quarter-deck; below were the dark outlines +of my sleeping mates. I could hear the light wind rustling through the branches of the casuarina trees that fringed the shore. +I paused and looked over the sea. Like a charge of electricity a curious sensation of fear shot through me. Then an intimation +that some object had flashed between me and the moon. I rubbed my eyes and gazed in the air above, expecting to see a night +bird or a bat. Then the same peculiar sensation came over me again, and I looked down in the water below just in time to see +the long, keen, knife-like outline of a pirate <i>prau</i> glide as noiselessly as a shadow from a passing cloud into the gloom of the island. Its great, wide-spreading, dark red +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb334" href="#pb334">334</a>]</span>sails were set full to the wind, and hanging over its sides by ropes were a dozen naked Illanums, guiding the sensitive craft +almost like a thing of life. Within the <i>prau</i> were two dozen fighting men, armed with their alligator hide buckler, long, steel-tipped spear, and ugly, snake-like <i>kris</i>. A third <i>prau</i> followed in the wake of the other two, and all three were lost in the blackness of the overhanging cliffs. +</p> +<hr class="tb"><p> + +</p> +<p>With as little noise as possible, I ran across the plain and warned my companion, then picked my way silently down the defile +to the camp. The captain responded to my touch and was up in an instant. The men were awakened and the news whispered from +one to another. Gathering up what food and utensils we possessed, we hurried to get on top of the plateau before our exact +whereabouts became known. The captain hoped that when they discovered <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb335" href="#pb335">335</a>]</span>we were well fortified and there was no wreck to pillage, they would withdraw without giving battle. They had landed on the +opposite side of the island from our boat and might leave it undisturbed. We felt reasonably safe in our fortress from attacks. +There were but two breaks in its precipitous sides, each a narrow defile filled with loose boulders that could easily be detached +and sent thundering down on an assailant’s head. On the other hand, our shortness of food and water made us singularly weak +in case of siege. But we hoped for the best. Two men were posted at each defile, and as nothing was heard for an hour, most +of us fell asleep. + + +</p> +</div> +<div class="div2"> +<h3 class="label">IV</h3> +<p>It was just dawn, when we were awakened by the report of two muskets and the terrific crashing of a great boulder, followed +by groans and yells. With one accord we rushed to the head of the cañon. The <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb336" href="#pb336">336</a>]</span>Illanums, naked, with the exception of party-colored <i>sarongs</i> around their waists, with their bucklers on their left arms and their gleaming knives strapped to their right wrists, were +mounting on each other’s shoulders, forcing a way up the precipitous defile, unmindful of the madly descending rocks that +had crushed and maimed more than one of their number. They were fine, powerful fellows, with a reddish brown skin that shone +like polished ebony. Their hair was shorn close to their heads; they had high cheek bones, flat noses, <i>syrah</i>-stained lips, and bloodshot eyes. In their movements they were as lithe and supple as a tiger, and commanded our admiration +while they made us shudder. We knew that they neither give nor take quarter, and for years had terrorized the entire Bornean +coast. + +</p> +<p>We were ready to fire, but a gesture from the captain restrained us; our ammunition was low, and he wished to save it until +we <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb337" href="#pb337">337</a>]</span>actually needed it. By our united efforts we pried off two of the volcanic rocks, which, with a great leap, disappeared into +the darkness below, oftentimes appearing for an instant before rushing to the sea. Every time an Illanum fell we gave a hearty +American cheer, which was answered by savage yells. Still they fought on and up, making little headway. We were gradually +relaxing our efforts, thinking that they were sick of the affair, when the report of a musket from the opposite side of the +island called our attention to the bo’s’n, who had been detailed to guard the other defile. + +</p> +<p>The bo’s’n and one native soldier were fighting hand to hand with a dozen pirates who were forcing their way up the edge of +the cliff. Half of the men dashed to their relief just in time to see the soldier go over the precipice locked in the arms +of a giant Illanum. One volley from our muskets settled the hopes of the invaders. +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb338" href="#pb338">338</a>]</span></p> +<p>Our little party was divided, and we were outnumbered ten to one. One of the sailors in dislodging a boulder lost his footing +and went crashing down with it amid the derisive yells of the pirates. Suddenly the conflict ceased and the pirates withdrew. +In a short time we could see them building a number of small fires along the beach, and the aroma of rice curry came up to +us with the breeze. The captain, I could see, was anxious, although my boyish feelings did not go beyond a sense of intoxicating +excitement. I heard him say that nothing but a storm or a ship could save us in case we were besieged; that it was better +to have the fight out at once and die with our arms in our hands than to starve to death. + +</p> +<p>Giving each a small portion of ship biscuit and a taste of water, he enjoined on each a careful watchfulness and a provident +use of our small stock of provisions. + +</p> +<p>I took mine in my hand and walked out <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb339" href="#pb339">339</a>]</span>on the edge of the cliff somewhat sobered. Directly below me were the pirates, and at my feet I noticed a fragment of rock +that I thought I could loosen. Putting down my food, I foolishly picked up a piece of timber which I used as a lever, when, +without warning, the mass broke away, and with a tremendous bound went crashing down into the very midst of the pirates, scattering +them right and left, and ended by crushing one of the <i>praus</i> that was drawn up on the sand. + +</p> +<p>In an instant the quiet beach was a scene of the wildest confusion. A surging, crowding mass of pirates with their <i>krises</i> between their teeth dashed up the cañon, intent on avenging their loss. I dropped my lever and rushed back to the men, nearly +frightened to death at the result of my temerity. There was no time for boulders; the men reached the brink of the defile +just in time to welcome the assailants with a broadside. Their lines wavered, but fresh men took the <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb340" href="#pb340">340</a>]</span>places of the fallen, and they pushed on. Another volley from our guns, and the dead and wounded encumbered the progress of +the living. A shower of stones and timbers gave us the light, and they withdrew with savage yells to open the siege once more. +Only one of our men had been wounded,—he by an arrow from a blowpipe. + + +</p> +</div> +<div class="div2"> +<h3 class="label">V</h3> +<p>All that night we kept watch. The next morning we were once more attacked, but successfully defended ourselves with boulders +and our cutlasses. Yet one swarthy pirate succeeded in catching the leg of the remaining native soldier and bearing him away +with them. With cessation of hostilities, we searched the top of the island for food and water. At one side of the tableland +there was a break in its surface and a bench of some dozen acres lay perhaps twenty feet below our retreat. We cautiously +worked <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb341" href="#pb341">341</a>]</span>our way down to this portion and there to our delight found a number of fan-shaped traveller’s palms and monkey-cups full +of sweet water, which with two wild sago palms we calculated would keep us alive a few days at all events. + +</p> +<p>We were much encouraged at this discovery, and that night collected a lot of brush from the lower plain and lit a big fire +on the most exposed part of the rocks. We did not care if it brought a thousand more pirates as long as it attracted the attention +of a passing ship. Two good nine-pounders would soon send our foes in all directions. We relieved each other in watching during +the night, and by sunrise we were all completely worn out. The third day was one of weariness and thirst under the burning +rays of the tropical sun. That day we ate the last of our ship biscuit and were reduced to a few drops of water each. Starvation +was staring us in the face. There was but one <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb342" href="#pb342">342</a>]</span>alternative, and that was to descend and make a fight for our boat on the beach. The bo’s’n volunteered with three men to +descend the defile and reconnoitre. Armed only with their cutlasses and a short axe, they worked their way carefully down +in the shadow of the rocks, while we kept watch above. + +</p> +<p>All was quiet for a time; then there arose a tumult of cries, oaths, and yells. The captain gave the order, and pell-mell +down the rift we clambered, some dropping their muskets in their hurried descent, one of which exploded in its fall. The bo’s’n +had found the beach and our boat guarded by six pirates, who were asleep. Four of these they succeeded in throttling. We pushed +the boat into the surf, expecting every moment to see one of the <i>praus</i> glide around the projecting reef that separated the two inlets. We could plainly hear their cries and yells as they discovered +our escape, and with a “heigh-ho-heigh!” our long-boat shot out into the <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb343" href="#pb343">343</a>]</span>placid ocean, sending up a shower of phosphorescent bubbles. We bent our backs to the oars as only a question of life or death +can make one. With each stroke the boat seemed almost to lift itself out of the water. Almost at the same time a long dark +line, filled with moving objects, dashed out from the shadow of the cliffs, hardly a hundred yards away. + +</p> +<p>It was a glorious race over the dim waters of that tropical sea. I as a boy could not realize what capture meant at the hands +of our cruel pursuers. My heart beat high, and I felt equal to a dozen Illanums. My thoughts travelled back to New England +in the midst of the excitement. I saw myself before the open arch fire in a low-roofed old house, that for a century had withstood +the fiercest gales on the old Maine coast, and from whose doors had gone forth three generations of sea-captains. I saw myself +on a winter night relating this very story of adventure <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb344" href="#pb344">344</a>]</span>to an old gray-haired, bronzed-faced father, and a mother whose parting kiss still lingered on my lips, to my younger brother, +and sister. I could feel their undisguised admiration as I told of my fight with pirates in the Bornean sea. It is wonderful +how the mind will travel. Yet with my thoughts in Maine, I saw and felt that the Illanums were gradually gaining on us. Our +men were weary and feeble from two days’ fasting, while the pirates were strong, and thirsting for our blood. + +</p> +<p>The captain kept glancing first at the enemy and then at a musket that lay near him. He longed to use it, but not a man could +be spared from the oars. Hand over hand they gained on us. Turning his eyes on me as I sat in the bow, the captain said, while +he bent his sinewy back to the oar, “Jack, are you a good shot?” + +</p> +<p>I stammered, “I can try, sir.” + +</p> +<p>“Very well, get the musket there in the <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb345" href="#pb345">345</a>]</span>bow. It is loaded. Take good aim and shoot that big fellow in the stern. If you hit him, I’ll make you master of a ship +some day.” + +</p> +<p>Tremblingly I raised the heavy musket as directed. The boat was unsteady, I hardly expected to hit the chief, but aimed low, +hoping to hit one of the rowers at least. I aimed, closed my eyes, and fired. With the report of the musket the tall leader +sprang into the air and then fell head fore-most amid his rowers. I could just detect the gleam of the moonlight on the jewelled +handle of his <i>kris</i> as it sank into the waters. I had hit my man. The sailors sent up a hearty American cheer and a tiger, as they saw the <i>prau</i> come to a standstill. + +</p> +<p>Our boat sprang away into the darkness. We did not cease rowing until dawn,—then we lay back on our oars and stretched our +tired backs and arms. I had taken my place at the oar during the night. +<span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb346" href="#pb346">346</a>]</span></p> +<p>Away out on the northern horizon we saw a black speck; on the southern horizon another. The captain’s glass revealed one to +be the pirate <i>prau</i> with all sails set, for a wind had come up with the dawn. The other we welcomed with a cheer, for it was the <i>Bangor</i>. Enfeebled and nearly famishing, we headed toward it and rowed for life. How we regretted having left our sails on the island. +The <i>prau</i> had sighted us and was bearing down in full pursuit; we soon could distinguish its wide-spreading, rakish sails almost touching +the water as it sped on. Then we made out the naked forms of the Illanums hanging to the ropes, far out over the water, and +then we could hear their blood-curdling yell. It was too late; their yell was one of baffled rage. It was answered by the +deep bass tones of the swivel on board the <i>Bangor</i> sending a ball skimming along over the waters, which, although it went wide of its mark, caused the <span class="pagenum">[<a id="pb347" href="#pb347">347</a>]</span>natives on the ropes to throw themselves bodily across the <i>prau</i>, taking the great sail with them. + +</p> +<p>In another instant the red sail, the long, keen, black shell, the naked forms of the fierce Illanums, were mixed in one undefinable +blot on the distant horizon. + +</p> +<p>And that was the skipper’s yarn. + + + +</p> +</div> +</div> +</div> +<div class="back"> +<div class="transcribernote"> +<h2>Colophon</h2> +<h3>Availability</h3> +<p>This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give +it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/">www.gutenberg.org</a>. + +</p> +<p>This eBook is produced by Jeroen Hellingman and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at <a href="http://www.pgdp.net/">www.pgdp.net</a>. + +</p> +<p>Scans of this book are available from: + +</p> +<ol class="lsoff"> +<li>The <a href="http://www.archive.org/details/talesofmalayanco00wildrich">Internet Archive</a>, (used for the illustrations). + +</li> +<li><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=tXCl-mwsJ_MC">Google Books</a>, University of Michigan. (used for the illustrations of the author and admiral Dewey, and page images for proofreading; <a href="http://www.archive.org/details/talesmalayancoa00wildgoog">TIA Copy</a>) + +</li> +<li><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=E8u3hPdn4fwC">Google Books</a>, Harvard University. (<a href="http://www.archive.org/details/talesmalayancoa01wildgoog">TIA Copy</a>) +</li> +</ol><p> + + +</p> +<h3>Encoding</h3> +<p></p> +<h3>Revision History</h3> +<ol class="lsoff"> +<li>2009-01-06 Started. + +</li> +</ol> +<h3>External References</h3> +<p>This Project Gutenberg eBook contains external references. These links may not work for you.</p> +<h3>Corrections</h3> +<p>The following corrections have been applied to the text:</p> +<table width="75%"> +<tr> +<th>Page</th> +<th>Source</th> +<th>Correction</th> +</tr> +<tr> +<td width="20%"><a class="pageref" href="#xd0e127"></a></td> +<td width="40%">Hong-Kong</td> +<td width="40%">Hong Kong</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td width="20%"><a class="pageref" href="#xd0e742">32</a></td> +<td width="40%">Changi</td> +<td width="40%">Changhi</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td width="20%"><a class="pageref" href="#xd0e1213">65</a></td> +<td width="40%"> +[<i>Not in source</i>] + +</td> +<td width="40%">.</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td width="20%"><a class="pageref" href="#xd0e1480">83</a></td> +<td width="40%">Gymkahna</td> +<td width="40%">Gymkhana</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td width="20%"><a class="pageref" href="#xd0e1485">83</a></td> +<td width="40%">Gymkahna</td> +<td width="40%">Gymkhana</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td width="20%"><a class="pageref" href="#xd0e2560">163</a></td> +<td width="40%">casurina</td> +<td width="40%">casuarina</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td width="20%"><a class="pageref" href="#xd0e2892">188</a></td> +<td width="40%"> +[<i>Not in source</i>] + +</td> +<td width="40%">”</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td width="20%"><a class="pageref" href="#xd0e3574">243</a></td> +<td width="40%"> +[<i>Not in source</i>] + +</td> +<td width="40%">.</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td width="20%"><a class="pageref" href="#xd0e3870">268</a></td> +<td width="40%">Mohammedams</td> +<td width="40%">Mohammedans</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td width="20%"><a class="pageref" href="#xd0e4447">322</a></td> +<td width="40%">somtimes</td> +<td width="40%">sometimes</td> +</tr> +</table> +</div> +</div> + + + + + + + +<pre> + + + + + +End of Project Gutenberg's Tales of the Malayan Coast, by Rounsevelle Wildman + +*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TALES OF THE MALAYAN COAST *** + +***** This file should be named 27784-h.htm or 27784-h.zip ***** +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: + http://www.gutenberg.org/2/7/7/8/27784/ + +Produced by Jeroen Hellingman and the Online Distributed +Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This book was +produced from scanned images of public domain material +from the Google Print project.) + + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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