Malay Days

BY WILLIAM BEEBE

I

I SQUATTED cooliewise on a fallen tree-trunk, poised gingerly on my toes, for the leaves about me were all aquiver with hungry leeches. Behind me was the rose-covered dâk bungalow on the crest of the Malay mountain range.¹ In the compound the mail-lorry smoked and snorted and resented every attention which the Chinaboy mechanic paid to the reluctant engine. Before me, and far beyond intervening valleys, stretched the bamboos and tree-ferns of the Pahang hinterland, whither I was bound.

At this very moment, across the ranges, far to the eastward of my fallen tree, a sultan and his court and nobility, armed with kris and knife, and clad in silks and satins of rose and blue and emerald, were making their way slowly to the central square of their town, eager to begin the day of topspinning. Nearer to my dâk, close under the lofty jungled heights, deep within a blind, hanging valley, six white men weltered in the stifling heat and planned the impossible — the combatting of virulent cholera among superstitious Malays. And still nearer were wild men of the mountains, Sakais, almost monkey-like in their life, and wandering lepers with dissolving surfaces which once were faces.

And in the same country with all these people whose lives were respectively so incongruous, so hopelessly altruistic, and so pitifully hopeless, threading the bamboos and the treeferns, were wonderful pheasants, indescribable argus, and green peacocks in flocks. These I sought, and of these alone I thought as the hectic horn of the mail-motor gave forth a cracked, blatant blast. I rose, flicked off a few threadlike leeches hastening over my puttees, and made my way back to the dâk compound, the little level acre balanced on the shoulders of the mountain pass, filled with roses and the odor of burning oil and ill-mixed gasoline. Kuala Lipis is very near to one’s visualization of Hades, so it was appropriate that the mail-lorry should always arrive in weltering heat, with blistered rubber tires and boiling engine.

Far behind, as we left the higher altitudes, the last tree-ferns and bamboos disappeared, and here we found dense jungle tangles, warped and woofed with thorny rotans and climbing canes, while every open spot was self-sown with coarse elephant grass.

From the small shadow of the dâk veranda I looked through the glaring heat across to a few scattered hospital buildings. A dozen yards down the white dusty road was the single store, and behind was the inevitable clubhouse. Beyond these, in all directions, rose the irregular heights of mountains, admitting two small rivers but no air or coolness. The heat and humidity seemed to gather in trembling waves over the steep jungle-slopes, and all day to roll downward, making of Kuala Lipis a furnace, a nerve-destroying place of dust and silence. Two dozen Malays, a scattering of Chinese, and six white people existed in this valley cauldron.

At daybreak a chorus of dyal birds awakened me, and the distant crow of a wild jungle-cock brought me to my feet with a leap. Then came a dismal clank of iron links, and a half-dozen convicts, all lugging balls and chains, filed up, under an armed Sikh guard, and proceeded to do chambermaid, janitor, and gardener duty. It was an experience worthy of this weird Malay land to have one’s room swept by a leering, villainous-mouthed Chinese murderer, with his ball rolling about the floor after him, and getting tangled in bed-legs and chair-legs. Finally, laden with garbage and weeds, the anvil chorus died away in the distance. Later, we saw two members of the gang painfully rolling the tennis-court, carrying their iron balls over their shoulders so as not to damage the court.

I made a short, unsuccessful trip to the jungle, and returned well torn by thorns and with no hint of pheasants heard or seen. Then I called on the three white men, made arrangements to go down river on the government houseboat, and was invited to a formal dinner the coming evening. I shall never forget that entertainment — because of its sincere hospitality, its discomfort, and the element of tragedy which ever played and flickered so near the surface. In breathless heat we donned full evening dress, and soon there arrived the half-broken rickshaw which was the only vehicle Kuala Lipis possessed. By dint of one man pulling and another pushing, we accomplished a hundred yards or so, and then had to walk the rest of the way through dense reeds to the house of the Government Agent. The air was still and saturated. Crickets chirped, and once an elephant trumpeted far in the distance. The smoking lantern covered the narrow path with a tapestry of shooting lights and shadows. Once the pulling convict shied, and we stood still while a big black cobra undulated slowly away into the reeds.

We dined on a full-course English dinner, with heating alcoholic drinks, waited on by a quartette of turbaned Indians, with the perspiration pouring down their shining faces. The lamps were gratefully dim, the servants stood silent as ghosts. The atmosphere was tense with an undercurrent of racked nerves. We had heard rumors of nervebroken men, and we found only four of the six white people to greet us. Something, and something petty and unreasonable, had kept the other man and woman away.

All knew that a deadly epidemic of cholera was surely working its way up river, and preparation for this added to the ghastly climatic and isolated conditions of their daily life. The sight of evening dress brought the memory of the outside world vividly to mind and intensified the terrible trials of this breathless hell. First one, then another, snapped out angrily from time to time, then looked ashamed but never apologized; that would have been to recognize the deadly overwrought nerves, which must not be spoken of. The strain of the breaking-point rose and fell, throbbing like the heat-waves. Once a man smashed in and flatly disputed an assertion. For five minutes there was silence heavy with embarrassment and attempts at control. The only sounds were the pattering of the Malay’s feet over the split bamboo, and the squeaking of the punkah-rope, dim jungle sounds, and the rustling of a gecko or snake in the roof. Then I spoke of some casual thing in the outside world, and all leaped hysterically to answer; someone swore at a servant, and again the thread of normal conversation was mended. They begged us to talk, talk, of the coast, of Singapore, of England; but the conversation always settled back to cholera. A woman decided — and changed her mind three times in two courses — to clear out to KualaLumpur, then to stick by her husband.

The club was a cheery little building, which gave an impression of coolness that its thermometer refused to second. There were old magazines, an interesting little library, a tennis-court a bit weedy and aslant, and a fifty-yard golf-course, besides an abundance of whiskey and soda-pop. When I visited it next day, I found three Englishwomen — the two who had dined with us the night before, and a third reading by herself.

The third day fever descended quickly upon me, and as the white physicians had gone down river in an attempt to head off the cholera, I sent for the Bengali doctor left in charge of the hospital. He took several hours to dress up in honor of attending a white Sahib, and appeared with hair shining with grease and a collar and necktie, whereas Kuala Lipis etiquette demanded only an undervest. With him he brought a large, black, locked bag, as shining as his hair. From this he took a pair of goggles, and began a series of questions more appropriate to the victim of a census-taker than to a fever-stricken Sahib. I lost patience at this juncture, and demanded a certain definite specific which my kit lacked. Rather crestfallen, from the very bottom of the bag he fished out the powders I wished, and when he went to mix them, my sense of humor and curiosity overcame my excess of temperature, and I opened the bag and found that it was empty. My specific had exhausted the dusky physician’s resources. It was true Bengali philosophy— an inverted Christian Science!

II

After another day, the Kuala Lipis cauldron began actually to steam; for the monsoon set in and rain came down in torrents all night and was drawn up again through the heated air all day. My fever vanished, and in spite of dismal warnings I got my possessions aboard the tiny houseboat and stretched out full length in my water-line berth, waiting for the retinue of servants-of-all-nations who were at the village bar, absorbing cholera medicine. As I rested, dabbling my hand in the tepid, muddy stream, the houseboat swung out a little, leaving a ribbon of open water between me and the shore. This tiny separation gave me sudden perspective. For the past week I had been in this fever-ridden station and of it. Now, as if the six inches of water which separated us had been as many hundred miles, I saw these splendid British men and women in the true perspective of their terrible isolation: their pluck in preparing for the oncoming fight against cholera, their holding true to the best traditions of their race. I remembered the justice and fairness of government of tiny Indian villages, of Burmese hinterland hamlets, of Sarawak Dyaks, and I thanked God that, next to my own country, I could claim blood-relationship with and loyalty to the other great English-speaking people.

Cleopatra was addicted to houseboating of sorts, and she was supreme in beauty, tact, and courage; house-boating gave freest play to Mark Twain’s humor; Moses knew the delights of quiet drifting through reeds and rushes, and great wisdom was his portion. Whenever I go a-houseboating, — and I go whenever I can, — I also attain supremacy — in contentment. Volplaning earthwards from eight-thousand-foot levels, running before a steady breeze in a catamaran — these are smooth, efficient, but tense methods of progress. But to lie in canoe or houseboat and let the current of some stream drift you where it will is a mastery of relaxation. You become a veritable corpuscle in an artery of Mother Earth, one with the drifting leaves all about, and a worthy member of the little company which acquires merit at the shrine of kindly Jabim.

When tearing across the face of the earth in a train, or surging ahead in a great steamer, I usually have a boding feeling of finality: this little farmhouse or that crow-dotted clump of trees I shall surely never see again; the distant island must be dropping irrevocably below the horizon. Drifting, however, engenders a peculiarly optimistic frame of mind; I am complacently confident of coming cycles; I am conscious of a close spiral of reincarnation. Like the drops of water which support and drift with me, I pass mighty tacubas and fallen trees, masses of brilliant bloom and peering monkeys, with a satisfied conviction that, like the drops of water, I shall again return to drift down this stream, and again rejoice in all its beauty and mystery.

So, when my motley crew was gathered, I gave Matsam, the Malay captain, orders to drift, not paddle. But even when the six inches of open water between boat and shore had increased to as many yards, I found that I was still within the British sphere of kindly influence, and the District Officer ran down and tossed across to me a big green hand-grenade-looking thing, shouting that he had just picked it from his garden — the biggest cucumber ever grown in Malaysia.

If there was a Lloyd’s rating of houseboats, my craft would occupy an intermediate position. It was far superior to an ark of bulrushes, daubed with slime and pitch; but, on the other hand, it was not of beaten gold, or provided either with silver oars, or purple, perfumed sails. But the Strander, as I called it, from its chief occupation, had a jolly little cabin amidships, with storeroom and kitchen aft, and men’s deck and paddling-space forward. Overhead was a tiny awninged nook just large enough for a steamer-chair; while over the storeroom sat the captain, with a tiller-end which wandered aimlessly but effectively down and back to a rudder far below.

My cabin was a magic cabin; and just as magicians of old wrought their spells by necromantic passes, so I controlled the metamorphosis of my cabin by posture. When I lay in my bunk it was bedroom, when I sat up, my head boy Aladdin wafted in a tiny table from somewhere, and it became dining-room. With the curtains lowered, I stood and leaned over my various trays and graduates, and my cabin became dark-room. And finally, when my rookha chair was brought and an erring member of the crew summoned, the dignity of a courtroom descended upon the lowly little place.

So began days of drifting, and never in my experience was a crew more enthusiastic about a mode of travel. Only for occasional meals and more frequent strandings did they break their slumber. One of them I doomed to stand continual watch because he snored unpleasantly. I could not find the Malay word for snore, so to this day he never knows why I picked on him. An extra allowance of pay, however, palliated my linguistic ignorance. Even if I could have made my motive clear, I should have been in difficulty; for another paddler also snored, but in a minor, inoffensive key, his timbre and rhythm partaking of the quality of natural sounds around us. In fact, for several days I mistook his rouflement for the sound of a gentle wind, or water rippling beneath the bow.

Day after day I drifted down the Jelai, sometimes stranding on a sandbar, which would be so interesting that I spent the day. At evening we would tie up to an overhanging branch beyond the reach of mosquitos and leeches, and swing slowly at the hest of wind and current. In the heart of one of the wildest regions of the world, with elephants and tigers, fierce black leopards, and equally dangerous wild cattle in the surrounding forest, it was a joy to lie in pyjamas full length in my bunk in the cool air, dabbling my hand in the water, and listening to the night sounds of the Malay jungle. My dabbling was intermittent and rather conscious, and always on the shore side of the boat, for crocodiles were too abundant in mid-stream to permit of carelessness, although I had just taken a plunge and a good swim.

I clapped twice, and my Cinghalese boy Aladdin appeared with a limesquash; and as I sipped it, I thought of envious friends at home. But I wondered how many of them would have enjoyed earning this luxurious hour by the day’s tramp through swamps, crawling through leech-infested thorn thickets, with heat and gnats and crackling leaves hindering the noiseless approach to a flock of peafowl, or a solitary argus, or a family of peacock pheasants. Only aching muscles and excited memory of new facts achieved could make perfect the enjoyment of such an evening.

From the front of the boat came the sound of low, minor singing, my Malay paddlers droning weird falsetto songs or sleepily chanting proverbs in turn. A great fish, perhaps crocodile-chased, leaped frantically into the air, so close that a shower of drops fell on me. From a long distance away came two sounds, low and of short duration, but powerful in their appeal to the imagination: the brazen trumpet of an elephant and the penetrating cry of a male argus pheasant on its dancing-ground. Then arose a muffled, palpitating series of vocal waves, which rolled in, rising higher, clearing to a crisp utterance, and finally reaching the full swell and power of a rollicking chorus of wa-was or gibbons — great ape-like monkeys which fill the Malay jungles with the exuberance of their emotions.

No imaginable sound would seem less fitted to the wilderness — it was so unsophisticated, so youthful, so full of joy and laughter. It recalled the words of Dunsany’s frightened Man: ‘Rock should not walk. . . . Rock should not walk in the evening.’ And here in my swaying houseboat I listened and said over and over again, ‘Children should not laugh in the jungle. — They should not laugh in the jungle at night.’

At last the wa-was died down to a low, sleepy mumbling, with now and then an individual, ringing, staccato whoop, like the final dying flares of the fire-music. Soothed and rested, I turned over and had almost found slumber, when I heard a suspicious swashing forward. I sat up, reached for the electric light which lay with my revolver, and leaning far out over the water, suddenly flashed it along the boat. There was the villainous Chinaboy cook in sharp silhouette, washing a handful of forks, knives, and spoons in the river. I leaned back and clapped for Aladdin.

‘ Bring cookie, lantern, pail of boiling water, dishes.’

‘ Going, marster.’

Cookie appeared and salaamed, rather yellow-white and trembling; Aladdin’s eyes were big with excitement.

‘I told him always cook spoons.’ (Aladdin always allied himself with the side of right early in any dramatic situation.)

‘On your knees, cookie, and wash each fork carefully in boiling water.’ (This he had been told to do at the beginning of the trip.)

‘If ever not do so again, will throw overboard to crocodiles.’

Cookie, whiter, mumbles to Aladdin, who whispers officiously aside, ‘Tink will never do again, marster’ (as one Supreme Court Justice confers with another).

Each night afterward, however, there occurred the rite of ‘visible spoon-washing.’ Often I would not be there, but would come in from the jungle to find cookie on his knees washing to an empty cabin ; and once, coming softly, I surprised Aladdin, sitting in my rookha chair, receiving the obeisance of the ritual in solemn state. He was extolling ‘Marster’s’ lenience in not throwing cookie to the crocodiles; so I pretended not to see him, and, coughing, gave him a chance to seem making ready the bed for the night, although the clothes were already turned down.

With dead cholera victims floating past, children and others, and two hundred cases dying down river out of every two hundred, I dared take no risk. Our drink was the universal Japanese mineral water Tan-san, or thrice-boiled river water.

III

Another evening and its following day — the day of peacocks — stand out even among a month of wonderful Malay days. We tied up in some unknown reach of the Pahang on a moonless evening, when men came softly and, talking to my boatmen, wished to be hired. I needed some extra help, so called ashore to engage three. Before I slept I looked out and tried to pierce the blackness; but the jungle rose, a solid wall of jet, sending to my strained senses only an occasional fragrant wave of perfume from nocturnal blossoms, a shrill monotone of insect, or the sinister sighing of some small animal. Once a half-submerged tree drifted past, scraping the sides with its withered foliage, and flicking off a beautiful tree-cricket, which awakened me by crawling over my face. After its capture the night passed quietly.

To wake in a tent, open the flaps, and look out is good; to sit up in one’s blanket cocoon in a hammock and see the jungle dawn is better; but best of all is opening one’s eyes in a houseboat bunk, and without further movement seeing water and jungle and sky, and the exciting early morning doings of fish, crocodiles, birds, and monkeys. One feels as yet unburdened with a human frame; and for an hour I am only a pair of disembodied eyes, which search and record, begrudging even the interruption of winks, and viewing all through fresh-colored sidewise vision.

As one wakes slowly from slumber, so came the dawn, gradually, in these tropical lowlands. The glare of the sudden leap of the sun above the horizon was dimmed, delayed, diluted, by the thick morning mist — mist whose grayness I loved to think of as the exact shade of ‘elephant’s breath.’ As I looked out over the side of the boat, the swift current became more and more distinct through the fog, which drifted slowly downward like a sluggish, aerial river flowing gently over the denser one below. As the light grew and the mist lifted and frayed upward, a brown line quartered the fore-glow in the sky and masses of foliage took shape and color beyond the sand-banks. Here and there white-barked trunks gleamed like ghosts; the saturated air was heavy with the odor of plume-blossoms, and the eddies were filled with their petals. A pair of great hornbills crossed high overhead, hidden by cloud-mist, but registering every wing-beat in a loud, deep, whoof! whoof! Bulbuls burst into song, drongos sent down their hoarse cries from the tree-tops, with showers of drops which pattered on my cabin roof.

Another veil of mist was drawn aside, and I sat up, breathless and tense, for on a sand-bar up-river and up-wind four great black forms became dimly visible — giant, statuesque sladang, the biggest bull standing at least six feet at the shoulder. Even against the pale sand their cream-colored stockings showed clearly, and their magnificent curved horns lay far back as they stood with nostrils outstretched toward me, striving to make out by sight what the wind refused to explain. We seemed harmless — some huge tree stranded during the night; but with wilderness folk, vague suspicion is interpreted as proved danger, and the wonderful jungle cattle, still headed our way, moved slowly through the shallows around and behind an arm of foliage.

The other end of the sand-bar held for me even greater interest. Resting my stereo glasses on the edge of the bunk, I was fairly in the midst of five green peafowl. They had me under surveillance, but were too confident of their powers to think of leaving. Two had sweeping trains which cleared the damp sand as they walked. Now and then a bird stood quiteerect and flapped his wings vigorously, to rid the feathers of excess of moisture. I could even see the others shake their heads as the drops flew over them. Two young of the year were very active, running about, chasing one another, or stopping to scratch among the gravel.

A passing log drew the attention of the peafowl, and they all stood motionless, watching it, until they were certain it was wood, not crocodile. The sun shone brightly for a moment, and the mists swirled away, showing distant hills. Peal after peal of rollicking laughter came from a family of seriousfaced wa-was. Then a rush of wind and fog blotted out the sun, and a sudden shower pitted the smooth water. From the depths of this renewed twilight rang the piercing, unrestrained cry of a wild peacock; and when I plunged in and swam swiftly to the bar, I found only tracks — cloven and tripartite — to hint of the rare vision which this fortunate dawn offered to me.

Returning, I clapped for breakfast and prepared for a long day’s matching of my poor senses and wood-craft against those of the wary peafowl. I went ashore and was balancing my ammunition, when a face suddenly appeared, more horrible than any beast, more inhuman than the lowest monkey. It was but the memory of a face, and should have belonged to a corpse long since buried; but, instead, it surmounted a living, well-made body. Then I saw three men, and realized that I had engaged, ‘sight unseen,’ three lepers. I gave them money and food and sent them on their way swiftly, with Aladdin to escort them well beyond the limits of our explorations — a duty over which he was not enthusiastic.

This horrible shock, together with a brief but sharp return of fever, made that forenoon a nerve-fashioned mirage. I felt the change as soon as I was within the hot, steaming shade. The heat and humidity pressed upon me like material substance. I listened, yet dreaded to hear sounds, fearing them only less than the endless silence which framed them. When I squatted on a log, the rhythm of the hosts of advancing leeches would sometimes seem to merge into a thousand endless, undulating lines of vermin, closing in on all sides, and the feel of their measured loopings on neck or wrist or hat-rim was almost unendurable. The windless shush, shush of leaves under their combined movement increased, until it became a veritable bellowing. Once I stood up and fired both barrels of my gun into the tree-tops, and for a while my mind cleared. Then I watched a small python stalking a lizard—watched without interest, until I realized that I was observing a real tragedy and not a heat-induced mirage of the mind.

I longed to return, but knew I must not. I could not give in to this terror of jungle things which usually aroused only interest. Then came the climax. I had the chance of my life, — ten peacocks at close range, — and for a while was pulling myself together, when I fairly screamed and dropped my gun, leaping from my hiding-place and climbing ten feet into a tree tenanted by fireants, in a trembling sweat of fear. A tiny squirrel — one of the little dwarfs scarcely as long as one’s hand — had jumped on my back, and I had reacted as from the charge of a buffalo.

The fever seemed simultaneously to have broken, and although weak and dizzy, I set out to achieve something definite before I gave in and returned to my bunk. The peacocks had taken refuge in distant, tall dead trees, high above the jungle; and clearing my neck and ankles of the abominable leeches, I began a stalk. I shifted my firing lever to the third, a rifle-barrel, and changed the .303 soft-nose to a steel-jacket. Only occasionally could I see my bird, a beauty in full plumage, who shared the bleached, lightning-struck giant with a trio of courting drongos. I dared not approach too close, and the last twenty yards I crept forward from the blind side, from which the bird’s head was hidden by a splintered branch. When I first aimed, the gun-barrel wavered like wheat in the wind; but after sitting quietly for a few moments, I felt myself steadying, I thought of limesquashes to come, and fired. The bird leaped a yard or two into the air, then spread wings and train and came down in a veritable tail-spin which awoke shuddering memories. Marking down the compass direction, I stepped heedlessly forward and went myself into a nose-dive of sorts. I fell and fell, and ended in a shower of sparks of physical pain. I had stepped off the edge of a sheer bank into a hidden gully, and hung suspended in mid-air in a cruel netting of rotan thorns. There was still eight feet more to solid ground, and for fifteen memorable minutes I was the plaything of gravitation and all the needle-thorns in the world. Every strand of barbed wire which I cut would gain me a few inches of descent and a score more scratches. I could only defend my eyes with handkerchiefwrapped hand, as I descended that awful round of purgatory, and rested at last, leech-regardless, on the wet moss.

Retrieving my gun, I was fortunate enough to find my bird on the second circle cast; and taking it under my arm, with the jeweled train streaming far behind, I trudged slowly back. I am sure that old-fashioned cupping and bleeding must have miraculous powers, for between the leeches and the thorns I had been thoroughly treated, and no ill effects followed. The following day I had to rest; but when again I made my way through this same jungle, I saw it only as a place of wonder, of keen delight, and of deepest interest.