Part 7

'O Tungku! Be pleased to come forth if thou desire to avenge the death of Tungku Long, thy cousin. Now is the acceptable time, for thy servant has still some little life left in him. Hereafter thou mayst not avenge thy cousin's death, thy servant being dead. Condescend, therefore, to come forth and fight with thy servant.'

But Tungku Itam, like Gallio, cared for none of these things, and To' Kaya, seeing that his challenge was not answered, cried once more:

'If thou will not take vengeance, the fault is none of thy servant's,' and, so saying, he passed upon his way.

The dawn was breaking grayly, and the cool land breeze was making a little stir in the fronds of the palm trees, as To' Kaya passed up the lane, and through the compounds, whose owners had fled hastily from fear of him. Presently, he came out on the open space before the mosque, and here some four hundred men, fully armed with spears and daggers, were assembled. It was light enough for To' Kaya to see and mark the fear in their eyes. He smiled grimly.

'This is indeed good!' cried he. 'Now at last shall I have my fill of stabbing and fighting,' and, thereupon, he made a shambling, limping charge at the crowd, which wavered, broke, and fled in every direction, the majority rushing into the enclosure of Tungku Ngah's compound, the door of which they barred.

One of the hindermost was a man named Genih, and to him To' Kaya shouted:

'Genih! it profits the _Raja_ little that he gives thou and such as thee food both morning and evening! Thou art indeed a _bitter_ coward.[10] If thou fearest me so greatly, go seek for guns and kill me from afar off!'

[Footnote 10: _Pen-akut pahit._]

Genih took To' Kaya's advice. He rushed to the _Balai_, or State Hall, and cried to Tungku Musa, the Sultan's uncle and principal adviser:

'Thy servant To' Kaya bids us bring guns wherewith to slay him.'

Now, all was not well in the _Balai_ at this moment. When the first news of the _amok_ had reached the Sultan, all the Chiefs had assembled in the palace, and it had been unanimously decided that no action could be taken until the day broke. At dawn, however, it was found that all the Chiefs except Tungku Panglima, To' Kaya Duyong, Panglima Dalam, Imam Prang Losong, and Pahlawan, had sneaked away under the cover of the darkness. Tungku Musa, the Sultan's great uncle, was there to act as the King's mouthpiece, but he was in as great fear as any of them.

At last the Sultan said:

'Well, the day has dawned, why does no one go forth to kill To' Kaya Biji Derja?'

Tungku Musa turned upon Tungku Panglima, 'Go thou and slay him,' he said.

Tungku Panglima said, 'Why dost thou not go thyself or send Pahlawan?'

Pahlawan said, 'Thy servant is not the only Chief in Trengganu. Many eat the King's mutton in the King's _Balai_, why then should thy servant alone be called upon to do this thing?'

Tungku Musa said: 'Imam Prang Losong, go thou then and kill To' Kaya.'

'I cannot go,' said Imam Prang, 'for I have no trousers.'

'I will give thee some trousers,' said Tungku Musa.

'Nevertheless I cannot go,' said Imam Prang, 'for my mother is sick, and I must return to tend her.'

Then the Sultan stood upon his feet and stamped.

'What manner of a warrior is this?' he asked, pointing at Tungku Panglima. 'He is a warrior made out of offal!'

Thus admonished, Tungku Panglima sent about a hundred of his men to kill To' Kaya, but after they had gone some fifty yards they came back to him, and though he bade them go many times, the same thing occurred over and over again.

Suddenly, old Tungku Dalam came hurrying into the palace yard, very much out of breath, for he is of a full habit of body, binding on his _kris_ as he ran. 'What is this that men say about To' Kaya running _amok_ in the palace? Where is he?' he cried.

'At the Mosque,' said twenty voices.

'Ya Allah!' said Tungku Dalam, 'They said he was in the palace! Well, what motion are ye making to slay him?'

No one spoke, and Tungku Dalam, cursing them roundly, sent for about forty guns, and, leading the men himself, he passed out at the back of the palace to Tungku Chik Paya's house near the mosque, where To' Kaya still sat upon the low wall which surrounds that building. When he saw Tungku Dalam, he hailed him, saying:

'Welcome! Welcome! Thy servant has desired the long night through to fight with one who is of noble birth. Come, therefore, and let us see which of us twain is the more skilful with his weapons.'

At this, Mat, one of Tungku Dalam's men, leaped forward and said, 'Suffer thy servant to fight with him, it is not fitting, Tungku, that thou shouldst take part in such a business.'

But Tungku Dalam said: 'Have patience. He is a dead man. Why should we, who are alive, risk death or hurt at his hands?' Then he ordered a volley to be fired, but when the smoke had cleared away, To' Kaya was still sitting unharmed on the low wall of the mosque. A second volley was fired, with a like result, and then To' Kaya cast away the spear he still held in his hand, and cried out: 'Perchance this spear is a charm against bullets, try once more, and I pray thee end this business, for it has taken over long in the settling.'

A third volley was then fired, and one bullet struck To' Kaya, but did not break the skin. He rubbed the place, and leaped up crying: 'Oh! but that hurts me, I will repay thee!' and, as he rushed at them, the men fell back before him. With difficulty Tungku Dalam succeeded in rallying them, and, this time, a volley was fired, one bullet of which took effect, passing in at one armpit and out at the other. To' Kaya staggered back to the wall, and sank upon it, rocking his body to and fro. Then a final volley rang out, and a bullet passing through his head, he fell forward upon his face. The cowardly crowd surged forward, but fell back again in confusion, for the whisper spread among them that To' Kaya was feigning death in order to get at close quarters. At length a boy named Samat, who was related to the deceased Ma' Chik, summoned courage to run in and transfix the body with his spear. Little cared the Dato' Kaya Biji Derja, however, for his soul had 'past to where beyond these voices there is peace.'

He had killed his wife, Che' Long, the Kelantan man Abdul Rahman, Pa' Pek, Ma' Pek, Tungku Long Pendekar, Ma' Chik, Haji Mih, and Semail; and had wounded his baby child, his mother-in-law, Che' Long's daughter Esah, and Saleh. This is a sufficiently big butcher's bill for a single man, and he had done all this because he had had words with his wife, and, having gone further than he had intended in the beginning, felt that it would be an unclean thing for him to continue to live upon the surface of a comparatively clean planet. A white man who had stabbed his wife in the heat of the moment might not improbably have committed suicide in his remorse, which would have been far more convenient for his neighbours; but that is one of the many respects in which a white man differs from a Malay.

THE FLIGHT OF CHEP, THE BIRD

When my foe is in my hands, When before me pale he stands, When he finds no means to fight, When he knows that death awaits him At the hands of one who hates him, And his looks are wild with fright; When I stare him in the eyes, Watch the apple fall and rise In the throat his hard sobs tear; O, I'll mark his pain with pleasure, And I'll slay him at my leisure, But I'll kill, and will not spare.

_The Song of the Savage Foeman._

In a large Sakai camp on the Jelai river, at a point some miles above the last of the scattered Malay villages, the annual Harvest Home was being held one autumn night in the Year of Grace 1893. The occasion of the feast was the same as that which all tillers of the soil are wont to celebrate with bucolic rejoicings, and the name, which I have applied to it, calls up in the mind of the exile many a well-loved scene in the quiet country land at Home. Again he sees the loaded farm carts labouring over the grass or rolling down the leafy lanes, again the smell of the hay is in his nostrils, and the soft English gloaming is stealing over the land. The more or less intoxicated reapers astride upon the load exchange their barbarous badinage with those who follow on foot; the pleasant glow of health, that follows upon a long day of hard work in the open air, warms the blood; and in the eyes of all is the light of expectation, born of a memory of the good red meat, and the lashings of sound ale and sour cider, awaiting them at the farmhouse two miles across the meadows.

But in the distant Sakai country the Harvest Home has little in common with such scenes as these. The _padi_ planted in the clearing, hard by the spot in which the camp is pitched, has been reaped painfully and laboriously in the native fashion, each ripe ear being severed from its stalk separately and by hand. Then, after many days, the grain has at last been stored in the big bark boxes, under cover of the palm leaf thatch, and the Sakai women, who have already performed the lion's share of the work, are set to husk some portions of it for the evening meal. This they do with clumsy wooden pestles, held as they stand erect round a sort of trough, the ding-dong-ding of the pounders carrying far and wide through the forest, and, at the sound, all wanderers from the camp turn their faces homeward with the eagerness born of empty stomachs and the prospect of a good meal. The grain is boiled in cooking pots, if the tribe possess any, or, if they are wanting, in the hollow of a bamboo, for that marvellous jungle growth is used for almost every conceivable purpose by natives of the far interior. The fat new rice is sweet to eat. It differs as much from the parched and arid stuff you know in Europe, as does the creamy butter in a cool Devonshire dairy from the liquid yellow train oil which we dignify by that name in the sweltering tropics, and the cooked grain is eaten ravenously, and in incredible quantities by the hungry, squalid creatures in a Sakai camp. These poor wretches know that, in a day or two, the Malays will come up stream to 'barter' with them, and that the priceless rice will be taken from them, almost by force, in exchange for a few axe-heads and native wood knives. Therefore, the Sakai eat while there is yet time, and while distended stomachs will still bear the strain of a few additional mouthfuls.

Thus is the harvest home supper devoured in a Sakai camp, with gluttony and beast noises of satisfaction, while the darkness is falling over the land; but, when the meal has been completed, the sleep of repletion may not fall upon the people. The Spirits of the Woods and of the Streams, and the Demons of the grain must be thanked for their gifts, and propitiated for such evil as has been done them. The forests have been felled to make the clearing, the crop has been reaped, and the rice stored by the tribe. Clearly the Spirits stand in need of comfort for the loss they have sustained, and the Sakai customs provide for such emergencies. The house of the Chief or the Medicine Man--the largest hut in the camp--is filled to the roof with the sodden green growths of the jungle. The Sakai have trespassed on the domains of the Spirits, and now the Demons of the Woods are invited to share the dwellings of men. Then, when night has fallen, the Sakai, men, women, and little children, creep into the house, stark naked and entirely unarmed, and sitting huddled together in the darkness, under the shelter of the leaves and branches with which the place is crammed, raise their voices in a weird chant, which peals skyward till the dawn has come again.

No man can say how ancient is this custom, nor yet the beginnings in which it had its origin. Does it date back to a period when huts and garments, even of bark, were newly acquired things, and when the Sakai suffered both ungladly after the manner of all wild jungle creatures? Did they, in those days, cast aside their bark loin clothes, and revel once more in pristine nakedness, and in the green things of the forest, on all occasions of rejoicing? We can only speculate, and none can tell us whether we guess aright. But year after year, in a hundred camps throughout the broad Sakai country, the same ceremony is performed, and the same ancient chant goes up through the still night air, on the day which marks the bringing home of the harvest. The Malays call this practice _ber-jermun_, because they trace a not altogether fanciful resemblance between the sheds stuffed with jungle and the _jermun_ or nest-like huts which wild boars construct for their shelter and comfort. But although the Malays, as a race, despise the Sakai, and all their heathenish ways, on the occasion of which I write, Kria, a man of their nation, was present, and taking an active part in the demon-worship of the Infidels.

What was he doing here, in the remote Sakai camp, herding naked among the green stuff with the chanting jungle people? He was a Malay of the Malays, a Muhammadan, who, in his sane moments, hated all who prayed to devils, or bowed down to stocks and stones, but, for the moment, he was mad. He had come up stream a few weeks before to barter with the forest dwellers, and the flashing glance from a pair of bright eyes, set in the pale yellow face of a slender Sakai girl, had blinded him, and bereft him of reason. Life no longer seemed to hold anything of good for him unless Chep, the Bird, as her people called her, might be his. In the abstract he despised the Sakai as heartily as ever, but, for the sake of this girl, he smothered his feelings, dwelt among her people as one of themselves, losing thereby the last atom of his self-respect, and finally consented to risk his soul's salvation by joining in their superstitious ceremonies. Yet all this sacrifice had hitherto been unavailing, for Chep was the wife of a Sakai named Ku-ish, or the Porcupine, who guarded her jealously, and gave Kria no opportunity of prosecuting his intimacy with the girl.

On her side, she had quickly divined that Kria had fallen a victim to her charms, and, as he was younger than Ku-ish, richer, and, moreover, a Malay, a man of a superior race, she was both pleased and flattered. No one who knows what a Sakai's life is, nor of the purely haphazard manner in which they are allowed to grow up, would dream of looking for principle in a Sakai woman, or would expect her to resist a temptation. The idea of right and wrong, as we understand it, never probably occurred to Chep, and all she waited for was a fitting time at which to elope with her Malay lover.

Their chance came on the night of the Harvest Home. In the darkness Kria crept close to Chep, and, when the chant was at its loudest, he whispered in her ear that his dug-out lay ready by the river bank, and that he loved her. Together they stole out of the hut, unobserved by the Sakai folk, who sang and grovelled in the darkness. The boat was found, and the lovers, stepping into it, pushed noiselessly out into the stream. The river at this point runs furiously over a sloping bed of shingle, and the roar of its waters soon drowned the splashing of the paddles. Chep held the steering oar, and Kria, squatting in the bows, propelled the boat with quick strong strokes. Thus they journeyed on in silence, save for an occasional word of endearment from one to the other, until the dawn had broken, and a few hours later they found themselves at the Malay village at which Kria lived. They had come down on a half freshet, and that, in the far upper country, where the streams tear over their pebbly or rocky beds through the gorges formed by the high banks, means travelling at a rushing headlong pace. When the fugitives finally halted at Kria's home, fifty miles separated them from the Sakai camp, and they felt themselves safe from pursuit.

To understand this, you must realise what the Sakai of the interior is. Men of his race who have lived for years surrounded by Malay villages are as different from him, as the fallow-deer in an English park from the Sambhur of the jungles. Sakai who have spent all their lives among Malays, who have learned to wear clothes, and to count up to ten, or may be twenty, are hardly to be distinguished from their neighbours, the other ignorant up country natives. They are not afraid to wander through the villages, they do not rush into the jungle or hide behind trees at the approach of strangers, a water-buffalo does not inspire them with as much terror as a tiger, and they do not hesitate to make, comparatively speaking, long journeys from their homes if occasion requires. In all this they differ widely from the semi-wild Sakai of the centre of the Peninsula. These men trade with the Malays, it is true, but the trade has to be carried on by visitors who penetrate into the Sakai country for the purpose. Most of them have learned to speak Malay, though many know only their own primitive language, and when their three numerals, _na-nu_, _nar_, and _ne_--one, two, and three--have been used, fall back for further expression of arithmetical ideas on the word _Kerpn_, which means 'many.' For clothes they wear, the narrow loin cloth, fashioned from the bark of certain trees, which only partially covers their nakedness; they are as shy as the beasts of the forest, and never willingly do they quit that portion of the country which is still exclusively inhabited by the aboriginal tribes. It was to semi-wild Sakai such as these that Chep and her people belonged.

There are tribes of other and more savage jungle-dwellers living in the forests of the broad Sakai country, men who fly to the jungles even when approached by the tamer tribesmen. Their camps may be seen, on a clear day, far up the hillsides on the jungle-covered uplands of the remote interior; their tracks are occasionally to be met with mixed with those of the bison and the rhinoceros, the deer and the wild swine, but the people themselves are but rarely encountered. The tamer Sakai trade with them, depositing the articles of barter at certain spots in the forest, whence they are removed by the wild men and replaced by various kinds of jungle produce. Of these, the most valued are the long straight reeds, found only in the most distant fastnesses of the forest, which are used by the tamer tribes to form the inner casing of their blow-pipes.

Chep had the traditions of her people, and her great love for Kria had alone served to nerve her to leave her tribe, and the forest country that she knew. A great fear fell upon her when, the familiar jungles being left far behind, she found herself floating down stream through cluster after cluster of straggling Malay villages. The knowledge that Kria was at hand to protect her tended to reassure her, but the instinct of her race was strong upon her, and her heart beat violently, like that of some wild bird held in a human hand. All her life the Malays, who preyed upon her people, had been spoken of with fear and terror by the simple Sakai at night time round the fires in their squalid camps. Now she found herself alone in the very heart--so it seemed to her--of the Malay country. Kria, while he lived among her people as one of themselves, had seemed to her merely a superior kind of Sakai. Now she realised that he was in truth a Malay, one of the dominant foreign race, and her spirit sank within her. None the less, it never occurred to her to fear pursuit. She knew how much her tribesmen dreaded the Malays, and how strongly averse they were to quitting the forest lands with which they were familiar, and Kria, who had recently acquired a considerable knowledge of the Sakai ways and customs, felt as confident as she.

So Chep and her lover halted at the latter's village, and took up their abode in his house. The girl was delighted with her new home, which, in her eyes, seemed a veritable palace, when compared with the miserable dwelling places of her own people; and the number and variety of the cooking pots, and the large stock of household stores filled her woman's soul with delight. Also, Kria was kind to her, and she eat good boiled rice daily, which was a new and a pleasant experience. Sooner or later the importunate longing for the jungle, which is born in the hearts of all forest dwellers, would rise up and drive her back to her own people, but of this she knew nothing, and for the time she was happy.

In the Sakai camp it was not until day had dawned that the demon-worshippers, looking at one another through heavy sleepless eyes, set in pallid faces, among the draggled greenery in the house, noted that two of their number were missing. The quick sight of the jungle people soon spied the trail of a man and a woman, and, following it, they crowded down to the place where the boat had been moored. Here they squatted on the ground and began to smoke. '_Rej-a-roj!_'--'She is lost!'--they said laconically, in the barbarous jargon of the jungle people, and then relapsed into silence.

'May they be devoured by a tiger!' snarled Ku-ish, the Porcupine, deep down in his throat, and, at the word, all his hearers shuddered. The curse is the most dreadful that the jungle people know, and if you shared your home with the great cats, as they do, you would regard it with equal fear and respect. Ku-ish said little more, but he went back to the camp and unslung an exceedingly ancient match-lock, which hung from a beam of the roof in the Chief's hut. It was the only gun in the camp, and was the most precious possession of the tribe, but no man asked him what he was doing, or tried to stay him when he presently plunged into the jungle heading down stream.

Two days later, in the cool of the afternoon, Kria left Chep in the house busy with the evening's rice, and, accompanied by a small boy, his son by a former marriage, he went to seek for fish in one of the swamps at the back of the village. These marshy places, which are to be found in the neighbourhood of many Malay _Kampongs_, are ready-made rice fields, but since the cultivation of a _padi_ swamp requires more exacting labour than most Malays are prepared to bestow upon it, they are often left to lie fallow, while crops are grown in clearings on the neighbouring hills. In dry weather the cracked, parched earth, upon which no vegetation sprouts, alone marks the places which, in the rainy season, are pools of stagnant water, but so sure as there is a pond, there also are the little muddy fish which the Malays call _ruan_ and _sepat_. Where they vanish to when the water in which they live is licked up by the sunrays, or how they support life during a long season of drought, no man clearly knows, but it is believed that they burrow deep into the earth, and live in the moist mud underfoot until better times come with the heavy tropic rain.

Kria carried two long _joran_, or native fishing rods, over his shoulder, and his little naked son pattered along at his heels, holding a tin containing bait in his tiny hands. The boy crooned to himself, after the manner of native children, but his father walked along in silence. Arrived at the swamp, which was now a broad pool of water, with here and there a tuft of rank rushes showing above the surface, Kria and his child each took a rod and began patiently angling for the little fish. The sun crept lower and lower down the western sky, till its slanting rays painted the surface of the pool to the crimson hue of blood. The clouds were dyed with a thousand gorgeous tints, and the soft light of the sunset hour mellowed all the land. Kria had seen the same sight many a hundred times before, and he looked on it with the utter indifference to the beauties of nature, which is one of the least attractive characteristics of Malays. If the reddened pool at his feet suggested anything to him, it was only that the day was waning, and that it was time to be wending his way homeward.