Part 16

But while these things were being done at Pekan and at Pasir Tambang, Wan Lingga, who, as I have related, had remained behind in the upper country when To' Raja was carried to Pekan, was sparing no pains to seduce the faithful natives of the interior from their loyalty to their hereditary Chief. In all his efforts, however, he was uniformly unsuccessful, for, though he had got rid of To' Raja, there remained in the Lipis Valley the aged Chief of the District, the Dato' Kaya Stia-wangsa, whom the people both loved and feared. He had been a great warrior in the days of his youth, and a series of lucky chances and hair-breadth escapes had won for him an almost fabulous reputation, such as among a superstitious people easily attaches itself to any striking and successful personality. It was reported that he bore a charmed life, that he was invulnerable alike to lead bullets and to steel blades, and even the silver slugs which his enemies had fashioned for him had hitherto failed to find their billet in his body. From the first this man had thrown in his lot with his kinsman To' Raja, and, unlike him, he had declined to allow himself to be persuaded to visit the capital when the war came to an end. Thus he continues to live at the curious little village of Penjum, on the Lipis river, and, so long as he was present in person to exert his influence upon the people, Wan Lingga found it impossible to make any headway against him.

These things were reported by Wan Lingga to To' Gajah, and by the latter to the Bendahara. The result was an order to Wan Lingga, charging him to attack To' Kaya Stia-wangsa by night, and to slay him and all his house. With To' Kaya dead and buried, and To' Raja a State prisoner at the capital, the game which To' Gajah and Wan Lingga had been playing would at least be won. The Lipis would fall to the former, and the Jelai to the latter as their spoils of war; and the people of these Districts, being left 'like little chicks without the mother hen,' would acquiesce in the arrangement, following their new Chiefs as captives of their bows and spears.

Thus all looked well for the future when Wan Lingga set out, just before sun-down, from his house at Atok to attack To' Kaya Stia-wangsa at Penjum. The latter village was at that time inhabited by more Chinese than Malays. It was the nearest point on the river to the gold mines of Jalis, and at the back of the squalid native shops, that lined the river bank, a well-worn footpath led inland to the Chinese alluvial washings. Almost in the centre of the long line of shops and hovels which formed the village of Penjum, stood the thatched house in which To' Kaya Stia-wangsa lived, with forty or fifty women, and about a dozen male followers. The house was roofed with thatch. Its walls were fashioned from plaited laths of split bamboo, and it was surrounded by a high fence of the same material. This was the place which was to be Wan Lingga's object of attack.

A band of nearly a hundred men followed Wan Lingga from Atok. Their way lay through a broad belt of virgin forest, which stretches between Atok and Penjum, a distance of about half a dozen miles. The tramp of the men moving in a single file through the jungle, along the narrow footpath, worn smooth by the passage of countless naked feet, made sufficient noise to scare all living things from their path. The forests of the Peninsula, even at night, when their denizens are afoot, are not cheerful places. Though a man lie very still, so that the life of the jungle is undisturbed by his presence, the weird night noises, that are borne to his ears, only serve to emphasise the solitude and the gloom. The white moonlight straggles in patches through the thick canopy of leaves overhead, and makes the shadows blacker and more awful by the contrast of light and shade. But a night march through the forest is even more depressing, when the soft pat of bare feet, the snapping of a dry twig, a whispered word of warning or advice, the dull deep note of the night-jar, and the ticking of the tree insects alone break the stillness. Nerves become strung to a pitch of intensity which the circumstances hardly seem to warrant, and all the chances of evil, which in the broad light of day a man would laugh to scorn, assume in one's mind the aspect of inevitable certainties.

I speak by the book; for well I know the depression, and the fearful presentiment of coming evil, which these night marches are apt to occasion; and well can I picture the feelings and thoughts which must have weighed upon Wan Lingga, during that four hours' silent tramp through the forest.

He was playing his last card. If he succeeded in falling upon To' Kaya unawares, and slaying him on the spot, all that he had longed for and dreamed of, all that he desired for himself and for those whom he held dear, all that he deemed to be of any worth, would be his for all his years. And if he failed?--He dared not think of what his position would then be; and yet it was this very thought that clung to him with such persistence during the slow march. He saw himself hated and abhorred by the people of the interior, who would then no longer have reason to fear him; he saw himself deserted by To' Gajah, in whose eyes, he was well aware, he was merely regarded as a tool, to be laid aside when use for it was over; he saw himself in disgrace with the King, whose orders he had failed to carry out; and he saw himself a laughing stock in the land, one who had aspired and had not attained, one who had striven and had failed, with that grim phantom of hereditary madness, of which he was always conscious, stretching out its hand to seize him. All these things he saw and feared, and his soul sank within him.

At last Penjum was reached, and To' Kaya's house was ringed about by Wan Lingga's men. The placid moonlight fell gently on the sleeping village, and showed Wan Lingga's face white with eagerness and anxiety, as he gave the word to fire. In a moment all was noise and tumult. Wan Lingga's men raised their war-yell, and shrieking 'By order of the King!' fired into To' Kaya's house. Old To' Kaya, thus rudely awakened, set his men to hold the enemy in check, and himself passed out of the house in the centre of the mob of his frightened women-folk. He was not seen until he reached the river bank, when he leaped into the stream, and, old man that he was, swam stoutly for the far side. Shot after shot was fired at him, and eight of them, it is said, struck him, though none of them broke the skin, and he won to the far side in safety. Here he stood for a moment, in spite of the hail of bullets with which his enemy greeted his landing. He shook his angry old arm at Wan Lingga, shouted a withering curse, took one sad look at his blazing roof-tree, and then plunged into the forest.

When the looting was over, Wan Lingga's people dispersed in all directions. Nothing, they knew, fails like failure, and the Lipis people, who would have feared to avenge the outrage had Wan Lingga been successful, would now, they feared, wreak summary punishment on those who had dared to attack their Chief. Wan Lingga, finding himself deserted, fled down stream, there to suffer all that he had foreseen and dreaded during that march through the silent forests. His mind gave way under the strain put upon it by the misery of his position at Pekan. The man who had failed was discredited and alone. His former friends stood aloof, his enemies multiplied exceedingly. So when the madness, which was in his blood, fell upon him at Pekan, he was thrust into a wooden cage, where he languished for years, tended as befits the madman whom the Malay ranks with the beasts.

When he regained his reason, the politics of the country had undergone a change, and his old ambitious dreams had faded away for ever. His old enemy To' Raja, whom he had sought to displace, was now ruling the Jelai, and enjoying every mark of the King's favour. Domestic troubles in the royal household had led the King to regard the friendship of this Chief as a matter of some importance, and Wan Lingga's chances of preferment were dead and buried.

He returned to his house at Atok, where he lived, discredited and unhonoured, the object of constant slights. He spent his days in futile intrigues and plots, which were too impotent to be regarded seriously, or as anything but subjects for mirth, and, from time to time, his madness fell upon him, and drove him forth to wallow with the kine, and to herd with the beasts in the forest.

At last, in 1891, he resolved to put away the things of this world, and set out on the pilgrimage to Mecca. All was ready for his departure on the morrow, and his brethren crowded the little house at Atok to wish him god-speed. But in the night the madness fell upon him once more, and rising up he ran _amok_ through his dwelling, slaying his wife and child, and wounding one of his brothers. Then he fled into the forest, and after many days was found hanging dead in the fork of a fruit-tree. He had climbed into the branches to sleep, and in his slumbers had slipped down into the fork where he had become tightly wedged. With his impotent arms hanging on one side of the tree, and his legs dangling limply on the other, he had died of exhaustion, alone and untended, without even a rag to cover his nakedness.

It was a miserable, and withal a tragic death, but not ill fitted to one who had staked everything to gain a prize he had not the strength to seize; one whom Fate had doomed to perpetual and inglorious failure.

UN MAUVAIS QUART D'HEURE

Ere the moon has climbed the mountain, ere the rocks are ribbed with light, When the downward-dipping tails are dank and drear, Comes a breathing hard behind thee, _snuffle-snuffle_ through the night-- It is Fear, O Little Hunter, it is Fear! On thy knees and draw the bow; bid the shrilling arrow go; In the empty mocking thicket plunge the spear; But thy hands are loosed and weak, and the blood has left thy cheek-- It is Fear, O Little Hunter, it is Fear!

RUDYARD KIPLING'S _Song of the Little Hunter._

We had been sitting late in the verandah of my bungalow of Kuala Lipis, which overlooks the long and narrow reach, formed by the combined waters of the Lipis and the Jelai. The moon had risen some hours earlier, and the river ran white between the dark banks of jungle which seemed to fence it in on all sides. The ill-kept garden, with the tennis-ground, that never got beyond the stage of being dug up, and the rank grass behind the bamboo fence, were flooded with the soft light, every tattered detail of its ugliness showing as clearly as though it was noon. The night was very still, and the soft, scented air blew coolly round our faces.

I had been holding forth, to the handful of men who had been dining with me, on Malay beliefs and superstitions, while they manfully stifled their yawns. When a man has a smattering knowledge of anything, which is not usually known to his neighbours, it is a temptation to lecture on the subject, and, looking back, I fear that I had been on the rostrum during the best part of that evening. I had told them of the _Penangal_, that horrible wraith of a woman who has died in child-birth, and who comes to torment small children, in the guise of a fearful face and bust, with many feet of bloody trailing entrails flying in her wake; of that weird little white animal the _Mati-anak_, that makes beast noises round the graves of children; and of the familiar spirits that men raise up from the corpses of babes who have never seen the light, the tips of whose tongues they bite off and swallow, after the child has been brought back to life by magic agencies. It was at this point that young Middleton began to cock up his ears, and I, finding that one of my listeners was at last inclined to show some interest, launched out with renewed vigour, until my sorely tried companions had, one by one, gone off to bed, each to his own quarters.

Middleton was staying with me at the time, and he and I sat in silence looking at the light upon the river, and each thinking his own thoughts. Middleton was the first to speak.

'That was a curious myth you were telling us, about the _Polong_, the Familiar Spirits,' he said. 'I have heard of it before from natives, but there is a thing I have never spoken of, and always swore that I would keep to myself, that I have a good mind to tell you now, if you will promise not to call me a liar.'

'That is all right,' said I. 'Fire away.'

'Well,' said Middleton, puffing at his pipe, 'you remember Juggins, of course? He was a naturalist, you know, and he came to stay with me during the close season[13] last year. He was hunting for bugs and that sort of thing, and he used to fill my bungalow with all sorts of rotting green stuff, that he brought in from the jungle. He stopped with me for about ten days, and when he heard that I was bound for a trip up into the Sakai country, he said he would come too. I did not mind much, as he was a decent beggar enough, in spite of his dirty ways, so I said all right, and we started up together. When we got well up into the Sakai country, we had to leave our boats behind at the foot of the rapids, and leg it for the rest of the time. We had not enough bearers with us to take any food, and we lived pretty well on what we could get, yams, and tapioca, and Indian corn, and soft stuff of that sort. It was new to Juggins, and it used to give him awful gripes, but he stuck to it like a man.

[Footnote 13: Close season = From November to February, when the rivers on the East Coast are closed to traffic by the North-East Monsoon.]

'Well, one evening, when the night was shutting down pretty fast, Juggins and I got to a fairly large camp of Sakai in the middle of a clearing, and of course all the beggars bolted into the jungle when we approached. We went on up to the largest hut of the lot, and there we found a woman lying by the side of her dead child. It was as stiff as Herod, though it had not been born more than half an hour, I should say, and I went up into the house thinking I might be able to do something for the poor, wretched mother. She did not seem to see it, however, for she bit and snarled at me like a wounded animal, so I let her be, and Juggins and I took up our quarters in a smaller hut near by, which seemed fairly new, and was not so filthy dirty as most Sakai lairs.

'Presently, when the beggars who had run away found out who it was, they began to come back again. You know their way. First a couple of men came and looked at us. Then I gave them some baccy, and spoke a word or two to them in _Se-noi_, that always reassures them. Then they went back and fetched the others, and presently we were as comfortable as possible, though we _had_ a dozen Sakai to share our hut with us. Juggins complained awfully about the uneven flooring of boughs, which you know is pretty hard lying, and makes one's bones ache as though they were coming out at the joints, but we had had a tough day of it and I slept in spite of our hosts. I wonder why it is that Sakai never sleep the whole night through like Christians. I suppose it is their animal nature, and that, like the beasts, they are most awake by night. You know how they lie about in the warm ashes of the fireplaces till they are black as sweeps, and then _how_ they jabber. It is always a marvel to me what they find to yarn about. Even we white men run short of our stock of small-talk unless something happens to keep things going, or unless we have a beggar like you to jaw to us. They say that Englishmen talk about their tubs, when they run dry on all other subjects of conversation, but the Sakai cannot talk about washing, for they never bathe by any chance, it makes that filthy skin disease they are covered with itch so awfully. It had rained a bit that night, when they were hiding away in the jungle, and I could hear their nails going on their dirty hides whenever I woke, and Juggins told me afterwards that they kept him awake by their jabber, and that each time he thought they had settled down for the night, he was disgusted to find that it was only another false start. Juggins tried to get a specimen of the bacillus that causes the skin disease, but I don't know whether he succeeded. I fancy it is due to want of blood. The poor brutes have never had enough to eat for a couple of hundred generations, and what food they do get is bloating beastly stuff. They do not get enough salt either, and that generally leads to skin disease. I have seen little brats, hardly able to stand, covered with it, the skin peeling off in flakes, and I used to frighten Juggins out of his senses by telling him that he had caught it, when his nose peeled with the sun.

'Well, in the morning we got up just in time to see the poor little dead baby, that I told you about, put into a hole in the ground. They fitted it into a piece of bark, and stuck it in the grave they had made for it on the edge of the clearing, and they put a flint and steel, and a wood-knife, and some food and things in with it, though no living baby could have had any use for half of them, let alone a dead one. Then the old medicine man of the tribe recited the ritual over the grave. I took the trouble to translate it once. It goes something like this:--

"O Thou who hast gone forth from among those who dwell upon the surface of the earth, and hast taken for thy dwelling-place the land which is beneath the earth! Fire have we given thee to light thy fires, raiment wherewith thou mayest be clothed, food to fill thy belly, and a knife to clear thy way. Go then and make unto thyself friends among those who dwell beneath the earth, and come back no more to trouble or molest those who live upon the earth's surface."

'It was short and sweet, and then they stamped down the soil, while the mother whimpered about the place like a cat that has lost its kittens. A mangy, half starved dog came and smelt hungrily about the grave, until it was sent howling away by a kick from one of the human animals near it; and a poor little brat, who set up a piping song, a few minutes later, was kicked, and cuffed, and knocked about, by every one who could reach him, with hand, foot, or missile. The Sakai think it unlucky to sing or dance for nine days after a death, so the tribesmen had to give the poor little urchin, who had done the wrong, a fairly bad time of it to propitiate the dead baby.

'Then they began to pack up all their household gods, and in about an hour the last of the laden women, who was carrying so many babies, and cooking pots, and rattan bags and things, that she looked like the outside of a gipsy's cart at home, had filed out of the clearing, and Juggins and I, with our three or four Malays, were left in possession. The Sakai always shift camp like that when a death occurs, because they think the ghost haunts the place where the body died, though what particular harm the ghost of a mite of a baby could do, I cannot pretend to say. When there is an epidemic among the Sakai, they are so busy shifting camp, and building new huts, that they have not time to get proper food, and half those who do not die of the disease die of semi-starvation. They are a queer lot.

'Well,' continued young Middleton, whose pipe had gone out, and who was fairly into his stride now, 'Well, Juggins and I were left alone, and all that day we hunted through the jungle to try and get a shot at a _seladang_,[14] but we saw nothing, and we came back to the empty Sakai camp at night, my Malays fairly staggering under the weight of the rubbish that Juggins used to call his botanical specimens. We got a meal of sorts, and I was lying off smoking, and thinking how lucky it was that the Sakai had cleared out, when suddenly old Juggins sat up with his eyes fairly snapping at me.

[Footnote 14: _Seladang_ = wild buffalo.]

'"I say," he said, "I must have that baby. It would make a ripping specimen."

'"It would make a ripping stink," I answered. "Go to sleep, Juggins, old man, the tapioca has gone to your head."

'"No, but I am serious," said Juggins, "I mean to have that baby whether you like it or no, and that is flat."

'"Yes," said I, "that is flat enough in all conscience, but I wish you would give it up. People do not like having their dead tampered with."

'"No," said Juggins again, rising as he spoke, and reaching for his shoes, "No, I am going to dig it up now."

'"Juggins," said I sharply, "sit down! You are a lunatic of course, but I was another to bring you up here with me, knowing as I did the particular species of crank you are; and if you really are set on this beastly thing, I suppose I must not leave you in the lurch; though upon my word I do _not_ like the notion of turning resurrection man in my old age."

'"You are a brick!" cried Juggins, jumping up again and fumbling at his boot laces, "Come along!"

'"Sit down, man!" said I in a tone which cooled his enthusiasm for the moment. "I have said that I will see you through, and that is enough. But mind this, you have to do what I tell you. I know more about the people and the country than you do, and I am not going to lose caste with my Malays, and perhaps get stranded in this god-forsaken jumping-off place, just because you choose to do a fool's deed in a fool's own way. These Malays of mine here have no particular love for the exhumed bodies of dead babies, and they would not understand what any sane man could want fooling about with such a thing. They have not been educated up to that pitch of interest in the secrets of science which seems to have made a lunatic of you. If they could understand what we are saying now, they would think that you wanted the kid's body for some devilry or witchcraft business, and we should as like as not get left by them. Then who would carry your precious specimens back to the boats? I would not lift a finger to help you, and I am not over sure that I could even guide you back, if it came to that. No, this thing cannot be done until my people are all asleep, so lie still and wait till I give you the word."

'Juggins groaned, and tried to persuade me to let him go at once, but I replied that nothing would induce me to go before one o'clock, and, so saying, I turned over on my side, and lay reading and smoking, while Juggins fumed and fretted, as he watched the slow hands creeping round the dial of his watch.

'I always take books with me, as you know, when I go into the jungle, and I remember that that evening I lay reading Miss Florence Montgomery's _Misunderstood_, with the tears running down my nose. When at last Juggins whispered that time was up, that pretty story of child life had made me more sick with Juggins and his disgusting scheme than ever.