Sir Hugh Charles Clifford

“ All who have listened to the tiger in his forest freedom know that he has many voices wherewith to speak. He can give a barking cry, which is not unlike that of a deer; he can grunt like a startled boar, and squeak like the monkeys cowering at his approach in the branches overhead; he can shake the earth with a vibrating, resonant purr, like the sound of faint thunder in the foot-hills; he can mew and snarl like an angry wildcat; and he can roar like a lusty lion cub. But it is when he lifts up his voice in the long-drawn moan that the jungle chiefly fears him. ”

“ That is really the whole secret of governing natives. A quick perception of their Point of View, under all conceivable circumstances, a rapid process by which a European places himself in the position of the native, with whom he is dealing, an instinctive and instantaneous apprehension of the precise manner in which he will be affected, and a clear vision of the man, his feelings, his surroundings, his hopes, his desires, and his sorrows,—these, and these alone, mean that complete sympathy, without which the white man among Malays, is but as a sounding brass and as a tinkling cymbal. ”

“ The insects are awake all night, and the little workman bird sits on a tree close by you and drives coffin nails without number. With the dawn, the tree beetles again raise their chorus; the birds sing and trill more sweetly than in the evening; the monkeys bark afresh as they leap through the branches; and the leaves of the forest glisten in the undried dew. Then, as the sun mounts, and the dew dries, the sounds of the jungle die down one by one, until the silence of the forest is once more unbroken for the long hot day. ”

“ When they have at last been fairly beaten by the monsoon, the fisher folk betake themselves to the scattered coast villages, which serve to break the monotonous line of jungle and shivering casuarina trees that fringe the sandy beach and the rocky headlands of the shore. Here under the cocoa-nut palms, amid chips from boats that are being repaired, and others that still lie upon the stocks, surrounded by nets, and sails, and masts, and empty crafts lying high and dry upon the beach out of reach of the tide, the fishermen spend the months of their captivity. ”

“ A new white man, speaking to him in an unknown tongue, seems to lift him for the time out of their lives. The stranger jars on the natives, who are the exile's people, and he, looking through the native eyes which are no longer strange to him, sees where his race-mate offends, and in his turn is jarred, until he begins to hate his own countrymen. Coming out of the groove hurts badly, and going back into it is almost worse, but when a man is once well set in the rut of native life, these do not disturb him, for he is happy, and has no need of other and higher things. This is the exile's Heaven. ”

“ As you crush your way out of the crowded roadstead of Singapore, and skirting the red cliffs of Tânah Mêrah, slip round the heel of the Peninsula, you turn your back for a space on the seas in which ships jostle one another, and betake yourself to a corner of the globe where the world is very old, and where conditions of life have seen but little change during the last thousand years. ”

“ All of us have, at one time or another, experienced in nightmares, the agony of attempting to fly from some pursuing phantom, when our limbs refuse to serve us. This, I fancy, is much what a fox suffers, only his pains are intensified by the grimness of stern reality. If he stops, he loses his life, therefore he rolls, and flounders, and creeps along when every movement has become a fresh torture. The cock, quail, dove, bull, ram, or fish, on the other hand, fights because it is his nature to do so, and when he has had his fill he stops. ”

“ Just as the forests of the Peninsula teem with a life that is strangely prodigal in its profusion, and in the infinite variety of its forms, so do the waters of the China sea defy the naturalist to classify the myriad wonders of their denizens. The shores are strewn with shells of all shapes and sizes, which display every delicate shade of prismatic colour, every marvel of dainty tracery, every beauty of curve and spiral that the mind of man can conceive. ”

“ The background is the same, but the colour of the scene is less intense, though the dark waves have rosy lights in them reflected from the ruddy sky of the dawn. A slowly paling fire shines here and there upon the shore, and the cool land breeze blows seaward. Borne upon the wind come stealing out a hundred graceful, noiseless fishing smacks. The men aboard them are cold and sleepy. They sit huddled up in the stern, with their sârongs drawn high about their shoulders, under the shadow of the palm-leaf sail, which shows dark above them in the faint light of early morning. ”

“ That evening, as the short twilight was going out in the sky, and the flakes of scarlet-dyed clouds were paling overhead, a body of men crept, with noiseless feet, through the clump of long grass in which Wan Bong was hiding. They saw him sitting on the earth, bent double over his folded arms, rocking his body to and fro, in the agony of the opium smoker, when the unsatisfied craving for the drug is strong upon him. There was a rustle in the grass behind him, the sharp fierce clang of a rifle rang out through the forest, and a bullet through Wan Bong's back ended his pains for ever. ”

“ The mothers snatch up their little ones and carry them hurriedly away, casting a look of hate and fear over their shoulders as they run. The children scream and yell, clutch their mothers' garments, or trip and fall, howling dismally the while, in their frantic efforts to fly his presence. He is Frankenstein's monster, yearning for love and fellowship with his kind, longing to feel the hand of a friend in his, and yet knowing, by the unmistakable signs which a sight of him causes, that he is indescribably repulsive to the people among whom he lives. ”

“ Just as the old smugglers, in the Isle of Man, were wont to hear the sea calling to them; go where he may, do what he will, the voice of the jungle, and of the people who dwell in those untrodden places, sounds in the ears of one who has lived the life. Ever and anon it cries to him to come back, come back to the scenes, the people, the life which he knows and understands, and which, in spite of all its hardships, he has learned to love. ”

“ Save for this, there is nothing to show that white men ever visit these seas, and, sailing up the coast in a native craft, you may almost fancy yourself one of the early explorers skirting the lovely shores of some undiscovered country. As you sprawl on the bamboo decking under the shadow of the immense palm leaf sail—which is so ingeniously rigged that, if taken aback, the boat must turn turtle, unless, by the blessing of the gods, the mast parts asunder—you look out through half-closed eyelids at a very beautiful coast. ”

“ The hard sand which the tide has left is pitted with tiny holes, the lairs of a million crabs and sea insects. The beaches are covered with a wondrous diversity of animal and vegetable growths thrown up and discarded by the tide. Seaweed of strange varieties, and of every fantastic shape and texture, the round balls of fibrous grass, like gigantic thistledowns, which scurry before the light breeze, as though endued with life, the white oval shells of the cuttle-fish, and the shapeless hideous masses of dead medusæ, all lie about in extricable confusion on the sandy shores of the East Coast. ”

“ In the matter of fighting, however, the women—who are as often as not the cause—act usually as mere spectators, taking no active part themselves, though they join in a shrill chorus of applause when a shrewd blow is given, and delight greatly in the brave doings of their men. Nevertheless, the warlike atmosphere, with which she is surrounded all the days of her life, sometimes infects a young Malay Princess, and urges her to do some daring deed which shall emulate the exploits of her brothers, and shall show her admirers how dashing a spirit, and how great a courage are hers. ”

“ The winds blow strong, and the rain falls heavily. The frogs in the marshes behind the village fill the night air with the croakings of a thousand mouths, and the little bull-frogs sound their deep see-saw note during all the hours of darkness. The sun is often hidden by the heavy cloud-banks, and a subdued melancholy falls upon the moist and steaming land. The people, whom the monsoon has robbed of their occupation, lounge away the hours, building boats, and mending nets casually and without haste or concentrated effort. ”

“ I wonder why it is that Sâkai 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. ”

“ 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 [100] 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 Sâkai girl, had blinded him, and bereft him of reason. Life no longer seemed to hold anything of good for him unless Chêp, the Bird, as her people called her, might be his. ”

“ The sun which beats upon it bakes the sand almost to boiling point, and the heat-haze dances above it, like some restless phantom above a grave. And who shall say that ghosts of the dead and gone do not haunt this sandbank far away in the heart of the Peninsula? If native report speaks true, the spot is haunted, for the sand, they say, is 'hard ground' such as the devils love to dwell upon. ”

“ Most birds fight more or less; from the little fierce quail, to the sucking doves which ignorant Europeans, before their illusions have been dispelled by a sojourn in the East, are accustomed to regard as the emblems of peace and purity; but no bird, or beast, or fish, or human being fights so well, or takes such pleasure in the fierce joy of battle, as does a plucky, lanky, ugly, hard-bit old fighting-cock. ”

“ They plant a little rice, when the season comes, in the swamps behind the village. They work a little jungle produce, when the pinch of poverty drives them to it, but, like all Malays, they take life sufficiently easily. If you chance to go into the village of Ranggul, during any of the hot hours of the day, you will find most of its occupants lying about in their dark, cool houses, engaged upon such gentle mental tasks as may be afforded by whittling a stick, or hacking slowly at the already deeply scored threshold-block, with their clumsy wood-knives. ”

“ From the beginning of November to the end of February the North-East monsoon whips down the long expanse of the China Sea, fenced as it is by the Philippines and Borneo on the one hand, and by Cochin China and Cambodia on the other, until it breaks in all its force and fury on the East Coast of the Peninsula. It raises breakers mountain high upon the bars at the river mouths, it dashes huge waves against the shore, or banks up the flooded streams as they flow seaward, until, on a calm day, a man may drink sweet water a mile out at sea. ”

“ The cheek-bones were so prominent that they resembled the sharp edges of a sĕlâdang's [11] skull, and his temples stood out like the bosses on the forehead of a fighting ram. The dirt of ages clung in the thousand wrinkles and creases of his skin; and he hardly moved save to scratch himself fiercely, as a monkey tears at his flea-infested hide. A small ration of rice and fish was brought to him daily by an old and wrinkled hag,—his wife of other years,—who made a meagre living for him and for herself, by selling sweet-stuff from door to door. ”

“ Malays love many people, and many things, and one of the latter is the sound of their own voices. When they are excited—and in the bull-ring they are always wild with excitement—they wax very noisy indeed, and, as they all talk, and no one listens to what any one else is saying, the green sward, on which the combat is to take place, speedily becomes a pandemonium, compared with which the Tower of Babel was a quiet corner in Sleepy Hollow. ”

“ All these bitter memories crowd into our minds, when we find ourselves in a Malay bull-ring, and we should be more than human if we felt any keen sympathy for the combatant buffaloes. We are apt to experience also an intense sense of relief at the thought that the brutes are about to fight one another, and will be too busy to waste any of their energies in persecuting the European spectators, with the amiable intention of putting them to the shame of open shame, and generally taking a rise out of them. ”

“ This time the leap of Him of the Hairy Face had been of truer aim, and a crash overhead, a shower of leaflets of thatch, and an ominous creaking of the woodwork told the cowering people in the house that their enemy had effected a landing on the roof.
The miserable thready cheer, which Che’ Sĕman exhorted his fellows to raise in answer to the charge song of the tiger, died down in their throats. All looked upwards in deadly fascination as the thatch was torn violently apart by the great claws of their assailant. ”

“ It seems to cherish a peculiar spite against all Europeans; for a buffalo, that is as mild as a lamb with the most unattractive native, cannot be brought to tolerate the proximity of the most refined, and least repulsive of white men. Which one is there amongst us, who does not bear a grudge against the water-buffalo as a class, and against some one black or pink bully in particular? Which of us is there, who has not passed moments in the company of these brutes, such as might well 'score years from a strong man's life'? ”

“ 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. ”