The SarongThe Malay’s Chief GarmentNo one knows who invented thesarong. 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 thesarong. 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 fishermanof a squalidkampongon the muddy banks of a mangrove-hidden stream, religiously wears thesarong.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 thekris, 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 anothersarongthat 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 theform of a long, narrow slit, showing only her coal-black eyes and thinly pencilled eyebrows.In style or design thesarongnever 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 noattap-thatched home is complete without its hand-loom.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 littlepunghuloor 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 asarongon a hand-loom. She looked up pleasantly with a soft “Tabek” (Greeting), and went on throwing her shuttle deftly through the brilliantly colored threads. The sharp bang of the dark, kamooning-wood bar drove thethread 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.“How long does it take to finish it?” I asked in Malay.“Twenty days,” she answered, with a broad smile, showing her black, filed teeth andsyrah-stained lips.The red and brownsarongwhich 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.I had not the heart to take the one that she offered the mistress, but insisted on givingin exchange a pearl-handled penknife, which the chief took, with many a touch of his forehead, “as a remembrance of the condescension of theOrang American Rajah.”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 thePunghulo of Pulo Seneng(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 andchumpaka. Under her silkensarongwould 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,called thekabaya, 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.Wahpering, too, might have added to hissaronga thin vest, buttoned close up to the neck, a light dimitybaju, 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.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-thatchedbungalow 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 theirsarongsmore 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.Thesarongis more to the Malay than isthe 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.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.Thesarongandkrisare 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.A history of one, like the history of the other, embraces all that is tragical or romantic in Malayan story.The KrisAnd how the Malays use itIn an old dog-eared copy of Monteith’s Geography, I remember a picture of a half-dozen pirateprahusattacking 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.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. Littledid 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.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 spelledkrisand pronouncedcreese.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-likekriseslies on the table before me. It is a handsomerkristhan those used by the actors in that much-studied picture of my youth. The sheath and handle are of solid gold—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 ofuntil some mutilated survivor returned with a harrowing tale of Malay piracy and of the lightning-like work of the dreadedkris.I do not know whether mykrishas ever taken life or not. Had it done so, I do not think the Sultan would have given it to me, for akrisbecomes 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 thekrisis the most sacred thing the Malay possesses. He regards it with an almost superstitious reverence. Mykrisis 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.The making of the krisThe making of the kris“He fashions it from well-hammered and well-tempered Celebes iron”The maker of thekrisis a person of importance among the Malays, and ofttimes heis made by his grateful Rajah aDato, 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. Finallyit 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 thekampong, or village, and stab the first person he met.The sheath of thekrisis generally made ofkamooningwood, 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.Thekris, too, has its etiquette. It is always worn on the left side stuck into the folds of thesarong, 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, thekrisis exposed, and the point of the handle turned the reverse way.Thekrisas 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.It is to be hoped that the record of thekrisis 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.The White Rajah of BorneoThe Founding of SarawakIn 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.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.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.There is no one man in all history with whom you may compare Rajah Brooke. Hiscareer 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.One morning in Singapore, as I sipped my tea and broke open one cool, delicious mangosteen after another, I was reading in the dailyStraits Timesan account of the descent of a band of head-hunting Dyaks from the jungles of the Rejang River in Borneo on an isolated fishingkampong, 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 inthe harbor below caused me to drop my paper.In a moment the great guns from Fort Canning answered. I counted—seventeen—and turned inquiringly to the nakedpunkah-wallah, who stood just outside in the shade of the wide veranda, listlessly pulling the rattan rope that moved the stiff fan above me.His brown, open palm went respectfully to his forehead.“His Highness, the Rajah of Sarawak,” he answered proudly in Malay. “He come in gunboatRaneéto theGymkhanaraces,—bring gold cup for prizes and fast runners. Come every year, Tuan.”I had forgotten that it was the first day of the long-looked-forGymkhanaraces. A few hours later I met this remarkable man, whose thrilling exploits had commanded my earliest boyish admiration.The kindly old Sultan of Johore, the oldrebel 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.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 decoratedrailing with the eagerness of a boy, as he watched his own colors in the thick of the race.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.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 sanguinaryscenes through which he and his great uncle, the elder Rajah Brooke, had gone when fighting for their lives and kingdom.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.“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.”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, clearedthe Borneo and Java seas of their thousands of piratepraus, 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.We became better acquainted later at balls and dinners, and he was never tired of thanking me for my country’s kindness.In 1819, when the English took Malacca and the Malay peninsula from the Dutch,they agreed to surrender all claims to the islands south of the pirate-infested Straits of Malacca.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.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, hehad 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.He had spied those great tropical islands that touched the equator, and he coveted them.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.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.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.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 dayand summarily dismissed the native Rajah and proclaimed the young Englishman Rajah of Sarawak.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.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.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.To-day head-hunting is practically stamped out, as is running amok among the Malays, although cases of each occur from time to time.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 goto 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.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.The fierce Suloos and Illanums became his fast friends. He left their chiefs in power, but punished every outbreak with a merciless hand.One of the many incidents of his checkered career shows that his spirit was all-powerful among them. He had invited the Chinesefrom 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.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.The homeless king knelt in the bottom of theprauand 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.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.They listened silently, and then their scarred old chief stepped forward and placed a nakedkrisin the white man’s hand and kissed his feet.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.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,Doctor of Laws by Oxford, and was the lion of the hour.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.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.His nephew, Sir Charles Brooke, who had also been his faithful companion for many years, succeeded him.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,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.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.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 adventurewill find them by going to the library and asking for the “Life of the Rajah of Sarawak.”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.One evening we were pacing back and forth on the deck of the Rajah’s magnificent gunboat, theRaneé. 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.Chinese insampansand Malays inprauswere gliding about our bows and back and forth between the great foreign men-of-warthat 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.“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.”“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,the Dato Imaum fought to reinstate him as his master.“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.”An hour later I stepped into my launch, which was lying alongside. The American flag at the peak came down, and the guns of theRaneébelched forth the consular salute.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.Amok!A Malayan StoryIf 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 bekrissedlike 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.Just where the great river Maur empties its vast volume of red water across a shifting bar into the Straits of Malacca, stands thekampongof Bander Maharani.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.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.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 hisTuan Penager, or Teacher, dozed beneath his yellow umbrella; and often, at their play, his Excellency would pause and watch them, smiling kindly.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.”Then he would go back to his work, polishing the brass on the railings of his boat, regardless of the watchful eyes thatblinked at him from the mud beneath the wharf.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 ahadjiand then some day—who knows—Noa might become akateebin theattap-thatched mosque back of the palace.And Noa, unmindful of his father’s dreaming, played with the little Prince, kicking theraggaball, or sailing miniatureprausout 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 takingtheir small, cruel eyes off the brown faces that peered down at them.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!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.“But who cares,” he thought. “It is the will of Allah! The Prince will surely remember us when he returns.”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 silkensarongthat Noa’s father had given her the day she was betrothed to his son.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.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.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, thesyrah-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.“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 weavingsarongsfor Noa.”She shuddered, she knew not why, and went slowly across the elastic bamboo strips of the floor and down the ladder.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 thesyrahleaf, 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 aquestion, 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 ahadji; and besides, the captain of the launch and the oldpunghulo, or chief, Anak’s father, were fast friends. The marriage meant little more to the man.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!A featherless hen was scratching in the yellow sand at her feet, and a brood offeatherless chicks were following each cluck with an intensity of interest that left them no time to watch the actions of the lovers.“Why did you come?” she asked in the soft liquid accents of her people.There was an eagerness in the question that suggested its own answer.“To bring a message to thepunghulo,” he replied, not noticing the coquetry of the look.“Oh! then you are in haste. Why do you wait? My father is at the canal.”“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.”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 lightsdancing 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.“When is the Prince coming?” she questioned, ignoring his clumsy attempt to take her hand.“During the feast of Hari Raya Hadji,” he replied, smiling.She kicked some sand with her bare toes, amongst the garrulous chickens.“Tell me about the Prince.”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?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 soonto go to London, where he would be entertained by the Queen.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.The girl noted the clusters of berries showing redly against the dark green of some pepper-vines that clambered up the blacknebongposts 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.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 ancestorswho 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 theattapbungalow, 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.“You have never asked me whether I love!”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.“Of course you love me. Is it not so written in the Koran,—a wife shall reverence her husband?”“Why?” she questioned angrily.He paused a moment, trying dimly to comprehend the question, and then answered slowly,—“Because it is written.”She did not draw away when he took her hand; he had chosen his answer better than he knew.“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.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?A gray lizard darted from out its hiding-place in theattapat a great atlas moth which worked its brilliant wings; clumsily it tore their delicate network until the air was full of a golden dust.“I am the moth,” she said softly, and raised her hand too late to save it from its enemy.The Sultan’s own yacht, thePante, brought the Prince back to Maur, and as it was low tide, the Governor’s launch went out beyond the bar and met him.The band played the national anthem when he landed on the pier, and Inchi Mohammed, the Tuan Hakim, or Chief Justice, made a speech.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.Johore and British flags hung in greatfestoons from the deep verandas of the palace, and the brass guns from the fort gave forth the royal salute.Anak was in the crowd with her father, the old chief, and her affianced, Noa. She had put on her silksarongandkabaya, and some curious gold brooches that were her mother’s. In her coal-black hair she had stuck some sprays of the sweet-smellingchumpakaflower. On her slender bare feet were sandals cunningly wrought in colored beads. Her soft brown eyes glowed with excitement, and she edged away from thepunghulo’sside until she stood close up in front, so near that she could almost touch thesarongof the Tuan Hakim as he read.The Prince had grown so since he left that she scarcely knew him, and save for the narrow silksarongabout 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 ofJohore set in diamonds, exactly as his father, the Governor, wore them. He paused and smiled as he thanked the cringing Tuan Hakim.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 herkabaya, wishing her to go with him to see the bungalow that his father was building for them.“The posts are to be of polishednebong”he was saying, “the wood-work ofmarantiwood from Pahang; and there is to be a cote, ever so cunningly woven of green and yellow bamboo, for your ring-doves, under theattapof the great eaves above the door.”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 hersarongin place.“Anak,” he said softly, as they left thehot, red streets, filled with lumbering bullock-carts and omnipresentrickshas, “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?”But the girl was not listening.He looked at her keenly, and as he saw the red blood mantle her cheek, he smiled and went on:—“It was good of you to wear thesarongI gave you, and your bestkabayaand 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.”“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?”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.“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.Sudah!”“Tuan Allah Suka!” (The Lord Allah has willed it), she murmured, and they plodded on through the hot sand in silence.After his return they saw the Prince often, and once when Anak came down to the wharf to bring adurianto the captain of the launch from her father, the oldpunghulo, 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.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.And once the Prince passed by thepunghulo’shome 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.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 ownhopes 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:—“That is no concern of ours. Is your father, the captain, displeased with my father’s, thepunghulo’s,dowry?”And yet Noa felt that Anak knew what he would have said.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.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.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.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 withhenna. She showed no interest in the arranging of her glossy black hair with jewelled pins andchumpakaflowers, or in the draping of hersarongandkabaya. Only her lacerated gums ached until one tear after another forced its way from between her blackened lids down her rouged cheeks.There had been feasting all day outside under the palms, and the youths, her many cousins, had kicked theraggaball, while the elders sat about and watched and talked and chewed betel-nut. There were great rice curries on brass plates, with fortysambuls> within easy reach of all, luscious mangosteens, creamyduriansand mangoes, and betel-nuts with lemon leaves and lime andspices. Fires burned about among the graceful palms at night, and lit up the silkensarongsand polishedkrishandles of the men, and gold-runkabayasof the women.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.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 fullimport. He ground his teeth together, and his hand worked uneasily along the scabbard of hiskris.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 asyrahleaf 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.There was no love-light in the droopingbrown eyes before him. Thesyrah-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.“Anak!” he said slowly, drawing closer to her side. “Anak, I will be a true husband to you. You shall be my only wife—”He paused, expecting some response, but she only gazed stolidly up at the smoke-begrimedattapof the roof.“Anak—” he repeated, and then a shudder passed through him, and his eyes lit up with a wild, frenzied gleam,A moment he paused irresolute, and then with a spring he grasped the golden handle of hiskrisand with one bound was across the floor, and on the sand below among the revellers.For an instant the snake-like blade of thekrisshone 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.The hot life-blood spurted out over his hand and naked arm, and dyed the creamy silk of his weddingbajua dark red.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.Then the fierce sinister yell of “Amok! amok!” drowned the woman’s moans, and sent every Malay’s hand to the handle of hiskris.“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.With the rapidity of a Malayan tiger, thecrazed 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.“O Allah, the all-merciful and loving kind!” he sang, as the blows rained upon his face and breast. “O Allah, the compassionate.”The golden handle of hiskrisshone 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.“Sudah!—It is finished,” and a Malay raised his steel-bladedlimbingto thrust it into the bare breast of the dying man.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.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.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 oldpenagerdozing in the sun,—the raft they built together, and the birch-colored crocodiles that lay among the sinuous mangrove roots.“Noa,” he whispered, as he imperiously motioned the crowd back.The dying man’s lips moved. The Prince bent lower.“She—loved—you. Yes—” Noa muttered, striving to hold his failing breath,—“love is from—Allah. But not for—me;—for English—and—Princes.”They threw his body without the circle of the fires.The tense feline growl of the tiger grew more distinct. The Prince’s hand sought the jewelled handle of hiskris. There was a swift rush in the darkness, a crashing among the rubber-vines, a short, quick snarl, and then all was still.If you run amok in Malaya, you may kill your enemy or your dearest friend, but you will bekrissedin 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.The laws are as immutable as fate.
The SarongThe Malay’s Chief GarmentNo one knows who invented thesarong. 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 thesarong. 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 fishermanof a squalidkampongon the muddy banks of a mangrove-hidden stream, religiously wears thesarong.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 thekris, 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 anothersarongthat 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 theform of a long, narrow slit, showing only her coal-black eyes and thinly pencilled eyebrows.In style or design thesarongnever 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 noattap-thatched home is complete without its hand-loom.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 littlepunghuloor 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 asarongon a hand-loom. She looked up pleasantly with a soft “Tabek” (Greeting), and went on throwing her shuttle deftly through the brilliantly colored threads. The sharp bang of the dark, kamooning-wood bar drove thethread 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.“How long does it take to finish it?” I asked in Malay.“Twenty days,” she answered, with a broad smile, showing her black, filed teeth andsyrah-stained lips.The red and brownsarongwhich 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.I had not the heart to take the one that she offered the mistress, but insisted on givingin exchange a pearl-handled penknife, which the chief took, with many a touch of his forehead, “as a remembrance of the condescension of theOrang American Rajah.”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 thePunghulo of Pulo Seneng(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 andchumpaka. Under her silkensarongwould 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,called thekabaya, 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.Wahpering, too, might have added to hissaronga thin vest, buttoned close up to the neck, a light dimitybaju, 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.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-thatchedbungalow 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 theirsarongsmore 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.Thesarongis more to the Malay than isthe 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.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.Thesarongandkrisare 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.A history of one, like the history of the other, embraces all that is tragical or romantic in Malayan story.
No one knows who invented thesarong. 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 thesarong. 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 fishermanof a squalidkampongon the muddy banks of a mangrove-hidden stream, religiously wears thesarong.
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 thekris, 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 anothersarongthat 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 theform of a long, narrow slit, showing only her coal-black eyes and thinly pencilled eyebrows.
In style or design thesarongnever 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 noattap-thatched home is complete without its hand-loom.
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 littlepunghuloor 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 asarongon a hand-loom. She looked up pleasantly with a soft “Tabek” (Greeting), and went on throwing her shuttle deftly through the brilliantly colored threads. The sharp bang of the dark, kamooning-wood bar drove thethread 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.
“How long does it take to finish it?” I asked in Malay.
“Twenty days,” she answered, with a broad smile, showing her black, filed teeth andsyrah-stained lips.
The red and brownsarongwhich 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.
I had not the heart to take the one that she offered the mistress, but insisted on givingin exchange a pearl-handled penknife, which the chief took, with many a touch of his forehead, “as a remembrance of the condescension of theOrang American Rajah.”
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 thePunghulo of Pulo Seneng(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 andchumpaka. Under her silkensarongwould 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,called thekabaya, 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.
Wahpering, too, might have added to hissaronga thin vest, buttoned close up to the neck, a light dimitybaju, 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.
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-thatchedbungalow 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 theirsarongsmore 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.
Thesarongis more to the Malay than isthe 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.
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.
Thesarongandkrisare 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.
A history of one, like the history of the other, embraces all that is tragical or romantic in Malayan story.
The KrisAnd how the Malays use itIn an old dog-eared copy of Monteith’s Geography, I remember a picture of a half-dozen pirateprahusattacking 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.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. Littledid 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.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 spelledkrisand pronouncedcreese.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-likekriseslies on the table before me. It is a handsomerkristhan those used by the actors in that much-studied picture of my youth. The sheath and handle are of solid gold—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 ofuntil some mutilated survivor returned with a harrowing tale of Malay piracy and of the lightning-like work of the dreadedkris.I do not know whether mykrishas ever taken life or not. Had it done so, I do not think the Sultan would have given it to me, for akrisbecomes 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 thekrisis the most sacred thing the Malay possesses. He regards it with an almost superstitious reverence. Mykrisis 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.The making of the krisThe making of the kris“He fashions it from well-hammered and well-tempered Celebes iron”The maker of thekrisis a person of importance among the Malays, and ofttimes heis made by his grateful Rajah aDato, 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. Finallyit 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 thekampong, or village, and stab the first person he met.The sheath of thekrisis generally made ofkamooningwood, 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.Thekris, too, has its etiquette. It is always worn on the left side stuck into the folds of thesarong, 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, thekrisis exposed, and the point of the handle turned the reverse way.Thekrisas 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.It is to be hoped that the record of thekrisis 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.
In an old dog-eared copy of Monteith’s Geography, I remember a picture of a half-dozen pirateprahusattacking 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.
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. Littledid 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.
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 spelledkrisand pronouncedcreese.
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-likekriseslies on the table before me. It is a handsomerkristhan those used by the actors in that much-studied picture of my youth. The sheath and handle are of solid gold—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 ofuntil some mutilated survivor returned with a harrowing tale of Malay piracy and of the lightning-like work of the dreadedkris.
I do not know whether mykrishas ever taken life or not. Had it done so, I do not think the Sultan would have given it to me, for akrisbecomes 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 thekrisis the most sacred thing the Malay possesses. He regards it with an almost superstitious reverence. Mykrisis 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.
The making of the krisThe making of the kris“He fashions it from well-hammered and well-tempered Celebes iron”
The making of the kris
“He fashions it from well-hammered and well-tempered Celebes iron”
The maker of thekrisis a person of importance among the Malays, and ofttimes heis made by his grateful Rajah aDato, 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. Finallyit 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 thekampong, or village, and stab the first person he met.
The sheath of thekrisis generally made ofkamooningwood, 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.
Thekris, too, has its etiquette. It is always worn on the left side stuck into the folds of thesarong, 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, thekrisis exposed, and the point of the handle turned the reverse way.
Thekrisas 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.
It is to be hoped that the record of thekrisis 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.
The White Rajah of BorneoThe Founding of SarawakIn 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.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.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.There is no one man in all history with whom you may compare Rajah Brooke. Hiscareer 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.One morning in Singapore, as I sipped my tea and broke open one cool, delicious mangosteen after another, I was reading in the dailyStraits Timesan account of the descent of a band of head-hunting Dyaks from the jungles of the Rejang River in Borneo on an isolated fishingkampong, 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 inthe harbor below caused me to drop my paper.In a moment the great guns from Fort Canning answered. I counted—seventeen—and turned inquiringly to the nakedpunkah-wallah, who stood just outside in the shade of the wide veranda, listlessly pulling the rattan rope that moved the stiff fan above me.His brown, open palm went respectfully to his forehead.“His Highness, the Rajah of Sarawak,” he answered proudly in Malay. “He come in gunboatRaneéto theGymkhanaraces,—bring gold cup for prizes and fast runners. Come every year, Tuan.”I had forgotten that it was the first day of the long-looked-forGymkhanaraces. A few hours later I met this remarkable man, whose thrilling exploits had commanded my earliest boyish admiration.The kindly old Sultan of Johore, the oldrebel 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.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 decoratedrailing with the eagerness of a boy, as he watched his own colors in the thick of the race.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.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 sanguinaryscenes through which he and his great uncle, the elder Rajah Brooke, had gone when fighting for their lives and kingdom.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.“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.”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, clearedthe Borneo and Java seas of their thousands of piratepraus, 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.We became better acquainted later at balls and dinners, and he was never tired of thanking me for my country’s kindness.In 1819, when the English took Malacca and the Malay peninsula from the Dutch,they agreed to surrender all claims to the islands south of the pirate-infested Straits of Malacca.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.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, hehad 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.He had spied those great tropical islands that touched the equator, and he coveted them.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.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.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.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 dayand summarily dismissed the native Rajah and proclaimed the young Englishman Rajah of Sarawak.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.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.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.To-day head-hunting is practically stamped out, as is running amok among the Malays, although cases of each occur from time to time.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 goto 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.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.The fierce Suloos and Illanums became his fast friends. He left their chiefs in power, but punished every outbreak with a merciless hand.One of the many incidents of his checkered career shows that his spirit was all-powerful among them. He had invited the Chinesefrom 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.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.The homeless king knelt in the bottom of theprauand 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.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.They listened silently, and then their scarred old chief stepped forward and placed a nakedkrisin the white man’s hand and kissed his feet.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.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,Doctor of Laws by Oxford, and was the lion of the hour.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.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.His nephew, Sir Charles Brooke, who had also been his faithful companion for many years, succeeded him.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,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.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.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 adventurewill find them by going to the library and asking for the “Life of the Rajah of Sarawak.”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.One evening we were pacing back and forth on the deck of the Rajah’s magnificent gunboat, theRaneé. 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.Chinese insampansand Malays inprauswere gliding about our bows and back and forth between the great foreign men-of-warthat 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.“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.”“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,the Dato Imaum fought to reinstate him as his master.“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.”An hour later I stepped into my launch, which was lying alongside. The American flag at the peak came down, and the guns of theRaneébelched forth the consular salute.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.
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.
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.
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.
There is no one man in all history with whom you may compare Rajah Brooke. Hiscareer 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.
One morning in Singapore, as I sipped my tea and broke open one cool, delicious mangosteen after another, I was reading in the dailyStraits Timesan account of the descent of a band of head-hunting Dyaks from the jungles of the Rejang River in Borneo on an isolated fishingkampong, 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 inthe harbor below caused me to drop my paper.
In a moment the great guns from Fort Canning answered. I counted—seventeen—and turned inquiringly to the nakedpunkah-wallah, who stood just outside in the shade of the wide veranda, listlessly pulling the rattan rope that moved the stiff fan above me.
His brown, open palm went respectfully to his forehead.
“His Highness, the Rajah of Sarawak,” he answered proudly in Malay. “He come in gunboatRaneéto theGymkhanaraces,—bring gold cup for prizes and fast runners. Come every year, Tuan.”
I had forgotten that it was the first day of the long-looked-forGymkhanaraces. A few hours later I met this remarkable man, whose thrilling exploits had commanded my earliest boyish admiration.
The kindly old Sultan of Johore, the oldrebel 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.
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 decoratedrailing with the eagerness of a boy, as he watched his own colors in the thick of the race.
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.
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 sanguinaryscenes through which he and his great uncle, the elder Rajah Brooke, had gone when fighting for their lives and kingdom.
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.
“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.”
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, clearedthe Borneo and Java seas of their thousands of piratepraus, 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.
We became better acquainted later at balls and dinners, and he was never tired of thanking me for my country’s kindness.
In 1819, when the English took Malacca and the Malay peninsula from the Dutch,they agreed to surrender all claims to the islands south of the pirate-infested Straits of Malacca.
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.
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, hehad 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.
He had spied those great tropical islands that touched the equator, and he coveted them.
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.
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.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.
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 dayand summarily dismissed the native Rajah and proclaimed the young Englishman Rajah of Sarawak.
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.
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.
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.
To-day head-hunting is practically stamped out, as is running amok among the Malays, although cases of each occur from time to time.
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 goto 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.
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.
The fierce Suloos and Illanums became his fast friends. He left their chiefs in power, but punished every outbreak with a merciless hand.
One of the many incidents of his checkered career shows that his spirit was all-powerful among them. He had invited the Chinesefrom 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.
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.
The homeless king knelt in the bottom of theprauand 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.
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.
They listened silently, and then their scarred old chief stepped forward and placed a nakedkrisin the white man’s hand and kissed his feet.
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.
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,Doctor of Laws by Oxford, and was the lion of the hour.
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.
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.
His nephew, Sir Charles Brooke, who had also been his faithful companion for many years, succeeded him.
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,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.
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.
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 adventurewill find them by going to the library and asking for the “Life of the Rajah of Sarawak.”
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.
One evening we were pacing back and forth on the deck of the Rajah’s magnificent gunboat, theRaneé. 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.
Chinese insampansand Malays inprauswere gliding about our bows and back and forth between the great foreign men-of-warthat 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.
“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.”
“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,the Dato Imaum fought to reinstate him as his master.
“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.”
An hour later I stepped into my launch, which was lying alongside. The American flag at the peak came down, and the guns of theRaneébelched forth the consular salute.
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.
Amok!A Malayan StoryIf 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 bekrissedlike 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.Just where the great river Maur empties its vast volume of red water across a shifting bar into the Straits of Malacca, stands thekampongof Bander Maharani.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.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.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 hisTuan Penager, or Teacher, dozed beneath his yellow umbrella; and often, at their play, his Excellency would pause and watch them, smiling kindly.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.”Then he would go back to his work, polishing the brass on the railings of his boat, regardless of the watchful eyes thatblinked at him from the mud beneath the wharf.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 ahadjiand then some day—who knows—Noa might become akateebin theattap-thatched mosque back of the palace.And Noa, unmindful of his father’s dreaming, played with the little Prince, kicking theraggaball, or sailing miniatureprausout 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 takingtheir small, cruel eyes off the brown faces that peered down at them.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!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.“But who cares,” he thought. “It is the will of Allah! The Prince will surely remember us when he returns.”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 silkensarongthat Noa’s father had given her the day she was betrothed to his son.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.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.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, thesyrah-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.“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 weavingsarongsfor Noa.”She shuddered, she knew not why, and went slowly across the elastic bamboo strips of the floor and down the ladder.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 thesyrahleaf, 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 aquestion, 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 ahadji; and besides, the captain of the launch and the oldpunghulo, or chief, Anak’s father, were fast friends. The marriage meant little more to the man.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!A featherless hen was scratching in the yellow sand at her feet, and a brood offeatherless chicks were following each cluck with an intensity of interest that left them no time to watch the actions of the lovers.“Why did you come?” she asked in the soft liquid accents of her people.There was an eagerness in the question that suggested its own answer.“To bring a message to thepunghulo,” he replied, not noticing the coquetry of the look.“Oh! then you are in haste. Why do you wait? My father is at the canal.”“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.”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 lightsdancing 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.“When is the Prince coming?” she questioned, ignoring his clumsy attempt to take her hand.“During the feast of Hari Raya Hadji,” he replied, smiling.She kicked some sand with her bare toes, amongst the garrulous chickens.“Tell me about the Prince.”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?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 soonto go to London, where he would be entertained by the Queen.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.The girl noted the clusters of berries showing redly against the dark green of some pepper-vines that clambered up the blacknebongposts 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.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 ancestorswho 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 theattapbungalow, 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.“You have never asked me whether I love!”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.“Of course you love me. Is it not so written in the Koran,—a wife shall reverence her husband?”“Why?” she questioned angrily.He paused a moment, trying dimly to comprehend the question, and then answered slowly,—“Because it is written.”She did not draw away when he took her hand; he had chosen his answer better than he knew.“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.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?A gray lizard darted from out its hiding-place in theattapat a great atlas moth which worked its brilliant wings; clumsily it tore their delicate network until the air was full of a golden dust.“I am the moth,” she said softly, and raised her hand too late to save it from its enemy.The Sultan’s own yacht, thePante, brought the Prince back to Maur, and as it was low tide, the Governor’s launch went out beyond the bar and met him.The band played the national anthem when he landed on the pier, and Inchi Mohammed, the Tuan Hakim, or Chief Justice, made a speech.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.Johore and British flags hung in greatfestoons from the deep verandas of the palace, and the brass guns from the fort gave forth the royal salute.Anak was in the crowd with her father, the old chief, and her affianced, Noa. She had put on her silksarongandkabaya, and some curious gold brooches that were her mother’s. In her coal-black hair she had stuck some sprays of the sweet-smellingchumpakaflower. On her slender bare feet were sandals cunningly wrought in colored beads. Her soft brown eyes glowed with excitement, and she edged away from thepunghulo’sside until she stood close up in front, so near that she could almost touch thesarongof the Tuan Hakim as he read.The Prince had grown so since he left that she scarcely knew him, and save for the narrow silksarongabout 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 ofJohore set in diamonds, exactly as his father, the Governor, wore them. He paused and smiled as he thanked the cringing Tuan Hakim.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 herkabaya, wishing her to go with him to see the bungalow that his father was building for them.“The posts are to be of polishednebong”he was saying, “the wood-work ofmarantiwood from Pahang; and there is to be a cote, ever so cunningly woven of green and yellow bamboo, for your ring-doves, under theattapof the great eaves above the door.”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 hersarongin place.“Anak,” he said softly, as they left thehot, red streets, filled with lumbering bullock-carts and omnipresentrickshas, “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?”But the girl was not listening.He looked at her keenly, and as he saw the red blood mantle her cheek, he smiled and went on:—“It was good of you to wear thesarongI gave you, and your bestkabayaand 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.”“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?”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.“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.Sudah!”“Tuan Allah Suka!” (The Lord Allah has willed it), she murmured, and they plodded on through the hot sand in silence.After his return they saw the Prince often, and once when Anak came down to the wharf to bring adurianto the captain of the launch from her father, the oldpunghulo, 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.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.And once the Prince passed by thepunghulo’shome 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.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 ownhopes 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:—“That is no concern of ours. Is your father, the captain, displeased with my father’s, thepunghulo’s,dowry?”And yet Noa felt that Anak knew what he would have said.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.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.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.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 withhenna. She showed no interest in the arranging of her glossy black hair with jewelled pins andchumpakaflowers, or in the draping of hersarongandkabaya. Only her lacerated gums ached until one tear after another forced its way from between her blackened lids down her rouged cheeks.There had been feasting all day outside under the palms, and the youths, her many cousins, had kicked theraggaball, while the elders sat about and watched and talked and chewed betel-nut. There were great rice curries on brass plates, with fortysambuls> within easy reach of all, luscious mangosteens, creamyduriansand mangoes, and betel-nuts with lemon leaves and lime andspices. Fires burned about among the graceful palms at night, and lit up the silkensarongsand polishedkrishandles of the men, and gold-runkabayasof the women.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.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 fullimport. He ground his teeth together, and his hand worked uneasily along the scabbard of hiskris.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 asyrahleaf 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.There was no love-light in the droopingbrown eyes before him. Thesyrah-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.“Anak!” he said slowly, drawing closer to her side. “Anak, I will be a true husband to you. You shall be my only wife—”He paused, expecting some response, but she only gazed stolidly up at the smoke-begrimedattapof the roof.“Anak—” he repeated, and then a shudder passed through him, and his eyes lit up with a wild, frenzied gleam,A moment he paused irresolute, and then with a spring he grasped the golden handle of hiskrisand with one bound was across the floor, and on the sand below among the revellers.For an instant the snake-like blade of thekrisshone 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.The hot life-blood spurted out over his hand and naked arm, and dyed the creamy silk of his weddingbajua dark red.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.Then the fierce sinister yell of “Amok! amok!” drowned the woman’s moans, and sent every Malay’s hand to the handle of hiskris.“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.With the rapidity of a Malayan tiger, thecrazed 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.“O Allah, the all-merciful and loving kind!” he sang, as the blows rained upon his face and breast. “O Allah, the compassionate.”The golden handle of hiskrisshone 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.“Sudah!—It is finished,” and a Malay raised his steel-bladedlimbingto thrust it into the bare breast of the dying man.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.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.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 oldpenagerdozing in the sun,—the raft they built together, and the birch-colored crocodiles that lay among the sinuous mangrove roots.“Noa,” he whispered, as he imperiously motioned the crowd back.The dying man’s lips moved. The Prince bent lower.“She—loved—you. Yes—” Noa muttered, striving to hold his failing breath,—“love is from—Allah. But not for—me;—for English—and—Princes.”They threw his body without the circle of the fires.The tense feline growl of the tiger grew more distinct. The Prince’s hand sought the jewelled handle of hiskris. There was a swift rush in the darkness, a crashing among the rubber-vines, a short, quick snarl, and then all was still.If you run amok in Malaya, you may kill your enemy or your dearest friend, but you will bekrissedin 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.The laws are as immutable as fate.
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 bekrissedlike 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.
Just where the great river Maur empties its vast volume of red water across a shifting bar into the Straits of Malacca, stands thekampongof Bander Maharani.
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.
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.
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 hisTuan Penager, or Teacher, dozed beneath his yellow umbrella; and often, at their play, his Excellency would pause and watch them, smiling kindly.
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.”
Then he would go back to his work, polishing the brass on the railings of his boat, regardless of the watchful eyes thatblinked at him from the mud beneath the wharf.
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 ahadjiand then some day—who knows—Noa might become akateebin theattap-thatched mosque back of the palace.
And Noa, unmindful of his father’s dreaming, played with the little Prince, kicking theraggaball, or sailing miniatureprausout 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 takingtheir small, cruel eyes off the brown faces that peered down at them.
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!
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.
“But who cares,” he thought. “It is the will of Allah! The Prince will surely remember us when he returns.”
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 silkensarongthat Noa’s father had given her the day she was betrothed to his son.
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.
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.
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, thesyrah-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.
“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 weavingsarongsfor Noa.”
She shuddered, she knew not why, and went slowly across the elastic bamboo strips of the floor and down the ladder.
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 thesyrahleaf, 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 aquestion, 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 ahadji; and besides, the captain of the launch and the oldpunghulo, or chief, Anak’s father, were fast friends. The marriage meant little more to the man.
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!
A featherless hen was scratching in the yellow sand at her feet, and a brood offeatherless chicks were following each cluck with an intensity of interest that left them no time to watch the actions of the lovers.
“Why did you come?” she asked in the soft liquid accents of her people.
There was an eagerness in the question that suggested its own answer.
“To bring a message to thepunghulo,” he replied, not noticing the coquetry of the look.
“Oh! then you are in haste. Why do you wait? My father is at the canal.”
“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.”
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 lightsdancing 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.
“When is the Prince coming?” she questioned, ignoring his clumsy attempt to take her hand.
“During the feast of Hari Raya Hadji,” he replied, smiling.
She kicked some sand with her bare toes, amongst the garrulous chickens.
“Tell me about the Prince.”
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?
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 soonto go to London, where he would be entertained by the Queen.
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.
The girl noted the clusters of berries showing redly against the dark green of some pepper-vines that clambered up the blacknebongposts 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.
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 ancestorswho 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 theattapbungalow, 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.
“You have never asked me whether I love!”
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.
“Of course you love me. Is it not so written in the Koran,—a wife shall reverence her husband?”
“Why?” she questioned angrily.
He paused a moment, trying dimly to comprehend the question, and then answered slowly,—
“Because it is written.”
She did not draw away when he took her hand; he had chosen his answer better than he knew.
“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.
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?
A gray lizard darted from out its hiding-place in theattapat a great atlas moth which worked its brilliant wings; clumsily it tore their delicate network until the air was full of a golden dust.
“I am the moth,” she said softly, and raised her hand too late to save it from its enemy.
The Sultan’s own yacht, thePante, brought the Prince back to Maur, and as it was low tide, the Governor’s launch went out beyond the bar and met him.
The band played the national anthem when he landed on the pier, and Inchi Mohammed, the Tuan Hakim, or Chief Justice, made a speech.
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.
Johore and British flags hung in greatfestoons from the deep verandas of the palace, and the brass guns from the fort gave forth the royal salute.
Anak was in the crowd with her father, the old chief, and her affianced, Noa. She had put on her silksarongandkabaya, and some curious gold brooches that were her mother’s. In her coal-black hair she had stuck some sprays of the sweet-smellingchumpakaflower. On her slender bare feet were sandals cunningly wrought in colored beads. Her soft brown eyes glowed with excitement, and she edged away from thepunghulo’sside until she stood close up in front, so near that she could almost touch thesarongof the Tuan Hakim as he read.
The Prince had grown so since he left that she scarcely knew him, and save for the narrow silksarongabout 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 ofJohore set in diamonds, exactly as his father, the Governor, wore them. He paused and smiled as he thanked the cringing Tuan Hakim.
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 herkabaya, wishing her to go with him to see the bungalow that his father was building for them.
“The posts are to be of polishednebong”he was saying, “the wood-work ofmarantiwood from Pahang; and there is to be a cote, ever so cunningly woven of green and yellow bamboo, for your ring-doves, under theattapof the great eaves above the door.”
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 hersarongin place.
“Anak,” he said softly, as they left thehot, red streets, filled with lumbering bullock-carts and omnipresentrickshas, “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?”
But the girl was not listening.
He looked at her keenly, and as he saw the red blood mantle her cheek, he smiled and went on:—
“It was good of you to wear thesarongI gave you, and your bestkabayaand 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.”
“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?”
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.
“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.Sudah!”
“Tuan Allah Suka!” (The Lord Allah has willed it), she murmured, and they plodded on through the hot sand in silence.
After his return they saw the Prince often, and once when Anak came down to the wharf to bring adurianto the captain of the launch from her father, the oldpunghulo, 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.
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.
And once the Prince passed by thepunghulo’shome 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.
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 ownhopes 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:—
“That is no concern of ours. Is your father, the captain, displeased with my father’s, thepunghulo’s,dowry?”
And yet Noa felt that Anak knew what he would have said.
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.
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.
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.
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 withhenna. She showed no interest in the arranging of her glossy black hair with jewelled pins andchumpakaflowers, or in the draping of hersarongandkabaya. Only her lacerated gums ached until one tear after another forced its way from between her blackened lids down her rouged cheeks.
There had been feasting all day outside under the palms, and the youths, her many cousins, had kicked theraggaball, while the elders sat about and watched and talked and chewed betel-nut. There were great rice curries on brass plates, with fortysambuls> within easy reach of all, luscious mangosteens, creamyduriansand mangoes, and betel-nuts with lemon leaves and lime andspices. Fires burned about among the graceful palms at night, and lit up the silkensarongsand polishedkrishandles of the men, and gold-runkabayasof the women.
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.
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 fullimport. He ground his teeth together, and his hand worked uneasily along the scabbard of hiskris.
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 asyrahleaf 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.
There was no love-light in the droopingbrown eyes before him. Thesyrah-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.
“Anak!” he said slowly, drawing closer to her side. “Anak, I will be a true husband to you. You shall be my only wife—”
He paused, expecting some response, but she only gazed stolidly up at the smoke-begrimedattapof the roof.
“Anak—” he repeated, and then a shudder passed through him, and his eyes lit up with a wild, frenzied gleam,
A moment he paused irresolute, and then with a spring he grasped the golden handle of hiskrisand with one bound was across the floor, and on the sand below among the revellers.
For an instant the snake-like blade of thekrisshone 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.
The hot life-blood spurted out over his hand and naked arm, and dyed the creamy silk of his weddingbajua dark red.
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.
Then the fierce sinister yell of “Amok! amok!” drowned the woman’s moans, and sent every Malay’s hand to the handle of hiskris.
“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.
With the rapidity of a Malayan tiger, thecrazed 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.
“O Allah, the all-merciful and loving kind!” he sang, as the blows rained upon his face and breast. “O Allah, the compassionate.”
The golden handle of hiskrisshone 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.
“Sudah!—It is finished,” and a Malay raised his steel-bladedlimbingto thrust it into the bare breast of the dying man.
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.
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.
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 oldpenagerdozing in the sun,—the raft they built together, and the birch-colored crocodiles that lay among the sinuous mangrove roots.
“Noa,” he whispered, as he imperiously motioned the crowd back.
The dying man’s lips moved. The Prince bent lower.
“She—loved—you. Yes—” Noa muttered, striving to hold his failing breath,—“love is from—Allah. But not for—me;—for English—and—Princes.”
They threw his body without the circle of the fires.
The tense feline growl of the tiger grew more distinct. The Prince’s hand sought the jewelled handle of hiskris. There was a swift rush in the darkness, a crashing among the rubber-vines, a short, quick snarl, and then all was still.
If you run amok in Malaya, you may kill your enemy or your dearest friend, but you will bekrissedin 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.
The laws are as immutable as fate.