Tales of the Malayan Coast Part 12

I raised my curtain and threw the stub of my cigar out into the darkness, a smothered exclamation of horror escaping my lips.

"It was the will of Allah. Good night."

It was nearly nine o'clock the next morning before we started. Our Malays had gone on at daybreak, to cut a path up the base of the mountain to where the open forest began.

We ascended steadily up a moderate slope for several miles, keeping the ravine on our left. It was comparatively easy work after we had left the jungle behind. After crossing a level plateau we once more found ourselves in a forest so dense that our men had to use their parangs again. The heat of the jungle was intense, and we suffered severely from the stings of a fly that is not unlike a cicada in shape.

From the jungle we emerged into an immense stone field,--padang-batu, the Malays called it. It extended along the mountain side as far as we could see, in places quite bare, at others deeply fissured and covered with a most luxuriant vegetation. We tramped at times waist deep through ferns, some green, some dark red, and some lined with yellow, clumps of the splendid Dipteris Horsfieldi and Matonia pectinala, with their slender stems and wide-spreading palmate fronds towering two feet above our heads. The delicate maidenhair lay like a rich carpet beneath our feet, while hundreds of magnificent climbing pitcher-plants doused us with water as we knocked against them. Our sympiesometer showed us that we were twenty-eight hundred feet above the sea.

Beyond the padang-batu we entered a forest of almost Alpine character, dwarfed and stunted. For several hours we worked along ridges, descended into valleys, and ascended almost precipitous ledges, until we finally reached a peak that was separated from the true mountain by a deep, forbidding canon.

Several of the older men of the party gave out, and we were forced to leave them with half our baggage and what water was left: there was a spring, they told us, near the summit.

The scramble down the one side of the canon, and up the other, was a hard hour's work. Its rocky, almost perpendicular sides were covered with a bushy vegetation on top of a foundation of mosses and dead leaves, so that it afforded us more hindrance than help.

Just below the summit we came to where a projecting rock gave us shelter, and a natural basin contained flowing water. Dropping my load, and hardly waiting to catch my breath, I was on my way up the fifty feet that lay between us and the top. In another moment I had mounted the small, rocky, rhododendron-covered platform, and stood, the first of my party, on the summit of Mount Ophir. The little American flag that I had brought with me I waved frantically above my head, much to the amus.e.m.e.nt of my attendants.

Four thousand feet below, to the east, stretched the silver sheen of the Indian Ocean. The smoke of a pa.s.sing steamer lay like a dark stain on the blue and white of the sky. Close into the sh.o.r.e was the little capital town of Bander Maharani, connecting itself with us by a long, snake-like ribbon of s.h.i.+mmering light,--the great river Maur.

To the north and west successive ranges of hill and valley, divided by the glistening river, and all covered by an interminable jungle of vivid green, fell away until lost in the cloudless horizon.

For a moment I stood and gazed out over the vast expanse that lay before me, my mind filled with the wild, unwritten poetry of its jungles and its people; then I turned to my companion.

"It is beautiful!"

He shrugged his shoulders.

"But not equal to the view from our own Mount Was.h.i.+ngton."

"Then why take so much trouble to secure it? Mount Pulei is as high, and there is a good road to its top."

I laughed. "Mount Pulei or Mount Was.h.i.+ngton is not Ophir."

"True!" he answered, opening his eyes in surprise at the seeming absurdity of my statement. "He that told you they were speaketh a lie."

We spent the night on the summit, and watched the sun drop into the midst of the sea, away to the west. It was cool and delightful after the moist, heat-laden atmosphere of the lowlands, and a strong breeze freed us from the swarm of tiger mosquitoes that we had learned to expect as the darkness came on.

Where the Ophir of the Bible really is, will ever be a question of doubt. To my mind it embraces the entire East--the Malay Peninsula, Ceylon, India, and even China,--Ophir being merely a comprehensive term, possibly taken from this Mount Ophir of Joh.o.r.e, which signified the most central point of the region to which Solomon's s.h.i.+ps sailed. For all ages the gold of the Malay Peninsula has been known; from the earliest times there has been intercourse between the Arabians and the Malays, while the Malayan was the very first of the far Eastern countries to adopt the Mohammedan religion and customs.

All the articles mentioned in the Biblical account of Mount Ophir are found in and about Malacca in abundance, while on the coast of Africa two of them, peac.o.c.ks and silver, are missing.

If the Hebrew word thukyim is translated peac.o.c.ks, and not parrots, then Solomon's s.h.i.+ps must have turned east after pa.s.sing the Straits of Bab-el-Mandeb, and not south along the coast of Africa toward Sofala. For peac.o.c.ks are only found in India and Malaya.

It is a singular fact that in the language of the Orang Bennu, or aborigines of the Malay Peninsula, that word "peac.o.c.ks," which in the modern Malay is marrak, is in the aboriginal chim marak, which is the exact termination of the Hebrew tuchim. Their word for bird is tchem, another surprising similarity.

The morning sun brought us to our feet long before it was light in the vast s.p.a.ces beneath our eyes. The jungle held its reddening rays for a moment; they flamed along the course of a half-hidden river; we stood out clear and distinct in their glorious effulgence, and then the broken, denuded crags and ragged ravines of the padang-batu absorbed them in its black fastnesses.

The gold of Mount Ophir was all about us. The air, the stones, the very trees, seemed to have been transformed into the glorious metal that the little fleets of Solomon and Huram sailed so far to seek. The Aurea Chersonese was a breathing, pulsating reality.

BUSUK

The Story of a Malayan Girlhood

They called her Busuk, or "the youngest" at her birth. Her father, the old punghulo, or chief, of the little kampong, or village, of Pa.s.sir Panjang, whispered the soft Allah Akbar, the prayer to Allah, in her small brown ear.

The subjects of the punghulo brought presents of sarongs run with gold thread, and not larger than a handkerchief, for Busuk to wear about her waist. They also brought gifts of rice in baskets of cunningly woven cocoanut fibre; of bananas, a hundred on a bunch; of durians, that filled the bungalow with so strong an odor that Busuk drew up her wrinkled, tiny face into a quaint frown; and of cocoanuts in their great green, oval shucks.

Busuk's old aunt, who lived far away up the river Maur, near the foot of Mount Ophir, sent a yellow gold pin for the hair; her husband, the Hadji Mat, had washed the gold from the bed of the stream that rushed by their bungalow.

Busuk's brother, who was a sergeant in his Highness's the Sultan's artillery at Joh.o.r.e, brought a tiny pair of sandals all worked in many-colored beads. Never had such presents been seen at the birth of any other of Punghulo Sahak's children.

Two days later the Imam Paduka Tuan sent Busuk's father a letter sewn up in a yellow bag. It contained a blessing for Busuk. Busuk kept the letter all her life, for it was a great thing for the high priest to do.

On the seventh day Busuk's head was shaven and she was named Fatima; but they called her Busuk in the kampong, and some even called her Inchi Busuk, the princess.

From the low-barred window of Busuk's home she could look out on the s.h.i.+mmering, sunlit waters of the Straits of Malacca. The loom on which Busuk's mother wove the sarongs for the punghulo and for her sons stood by the side of the window, and Busuk, from the sling in which she sat on her mother's side, could see the fis.h.i.+ng praus glide by, and also the big lumber tonkangs, and at rare intervals one of his Highness's launches.

Sometimes she blinked her eyes as a vagrant shaft of sunlight straggled down through the great green and yellow fronds of the cocoanut palms that stood about the bungalow; sometimes she kept her little black eyes fixed gravely on the flying shuttle which her mother threw deftly back and forth through the many-colored threads; but best of all did she love to watch the little gray lizards that ran about on the palm sides of the house after the flies and moths.

She was soon able to answer the lizards' call of "gecho, gecho," and once she laughed outright when one, in fright of her baby-fingers, dropped its tail and went wiggling away like a boat without a rudder. But most of the time she swung and crowed in her wicker cradle under the low rafters.

When Busuk grew older, she was carried every day down the ladder of the house and put on the warm white sand with the other children. They were all naked, save for a little chintz bib that was tied to their necks; so it made no difference how many mudpies they made on the beach nor how wet they got in the tepid waters of the ocean. They had only to look out carefully for the crocodiles that glided noiselessly among the mangrove roots.

One day one of Busuk's playmates was caught in the cruel jaws of a crocodile, and lost its hand. The men from the village went out into the labyrinth of roots that stood up above the flood like a huge scaffolding, and caught the man-eater with ropes of the gamooty palm. They dragged it up the beach and put out its eyes with red-hot spikes of the hard billion wood.

Although the varnished leaves of the cocoanuts kept almost every ray of sunlight out of the little village, and though the children could play in the airy s.p.a.ces under their own houses, their heads and faces were painted with a paste of flour and water to keep their tender skins from chafing in the hot, moist air.

At evening, when the fierce sun went down behind the great banian tree that nearly hid Mount Pulei, the kateeb would sound the call to prayer on a hollow log that hung up before the little palm-thatched mosque. Then Busuk and her playmates would fall on their faces, while the holy man sang in a soft, monotonous voice the promises of the Koran, the men of the kampong answering. "Allah il Allah,"

he would sing, and "Mohammed is his prophet," they would answer.

Every night Busuk would lie down on a mat on the floor of the house with a little wooden pillow under her neck, and when she dared she would peep down through the open s.p.a.ces in the bamboo floor into the darkness beneath. Once she heard a low growl, and a great dark form stood right below her. She could see its tail las.h.i.+ng its sides with short, whip-like movements. Then all the dogs in the kampong began to bark, and the men rushed down their ladders screaming, "Harimau! Harimau!" (A tiger! A tiger!) The next morning she found that her pet dog, Fatima, named after herself, had been killed by one stroke of the great beast's paw. Once a monster python swung from a cocoanut tree through the window of her home, and wound itself round and round the post of her mother's loom. It took a dozen men to tie a rope to the serpent's tail, and pull it out.

Busuk went everywhere astride the punghulo's broad shoulders as he collected the taxes and settled the disputes in the little village. She went out into the straits in the big prau that floated the star and crescent of Joh.o.r.e over its stern, to look at the fis.h.i.+ng-stakes, and was nearly wrecked by a great water-spout that burst within a few feet of them.

Then she went twice to Joh.o.r.e, and gazed in open-eyed wonder at the palaces of the Sultan and at the fort in which her uncle was an officer.

"Some day," she thought, "I may see his Highness, and he may notice me and smile." For had not his Highness spoken twice to her father and called him a good man? So whenever she went to Joh.o.r.e she put on her best sarong and kabaya> and in her jetty black hair she put the pin her aunt had given her, with a spray of sweet-smelling chumpaka flower.