Tales of the Malayan Coast
to satisfy me that the rock would run four ounces to the ton.
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.
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.
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 coo-ee?" he asked.
"Yes," I answered.
"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."
"What became of the woman?" I asked.
"The body of the Laksamana 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."
I raised my curtain and threw the stub of my cigar out into the
darkness, a smothered exclamation of horror escaping my lips.
"It was the will of Allah. Good night."
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.
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
parangs 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.
From the jungle we emerged into an immense stone field,--padang-batu,
the Malays called it. It extended along the mountain 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 Dipteris Horsfieldi and Matonia
pectinala, 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.
Beyond the padang-batu 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 canon.
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.
The scramble down the one side of the canon, 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.
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
that I had brought with me I waved frantically above my head, much
to the amusement of my attendants.
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.
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.
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.
"It is beautiful!"
He shrugged his shoulders.
"But not equal to the view from our own Mount Washington."
"Then why take so much trouble to secure it? Mount Pulei is as high,
and there is a good road to its top."
I laughed. "Mount Pulei or Mount Washington is not Ophir."
"True!" he answered, opening his eyes in surprise at the seeming
absurdity of my statement. "He that told you they were speaketh a lie."
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.
Where the Ophir of the Bible really is, 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.
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.
If the Hebrew word thukyim is translated peacocks, and not parrots,
then Solomon's ships must have turned east after passing 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.
It is a singular fact that in the language of the Orang Bennu, or
aborigines of the Malay Peninsula, that word "peacocks," which in the
modern Malay is marrak, is in the aboriginal chim marak, which is the
exact termination of the Hebrew tuchim. Their word for bird is tchem,
another surprising similarity.
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 padang-batu
absorbed them in its black fastnesses.
The gold of Mount Ophir was all about us. 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.
BUSUK
The Story of a Malayan Girlhood
They called her Busuk, or "the youngest" at her birth. Her father,
the old punghulo, or chief, of the little kampong, or village, of
Passir Panjang, whispered the soft Allah Akbar, the prayer to Allah,
in her small brown ear.
The subjects of the punghulo brought presents of sarongs 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 durians,
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.
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.
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.
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.
On the seventh day Busuk's head was shaven and she was named Fatima;
but they called her Busuk in the kampong, and some even called her
Inchi Busuk, the princess.
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 sarongs for the punghulo 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 praus glide by,
and also the big lumber tonkangs, and at rare intervals one of his
Highness's launches.
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 little gray lizards that ran about on the palm
sides of the house after the flies and moths.
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.
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.
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 gamooty
palm. They dragged it up the beach and put out its eyes with red-hot
spikes of the hard billion wood.
Although the varnished leaves of the cocoanuts kept almost every ray