"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 Johore, which
signified the most central point of the region to which Solomon's
ships 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, peacocks and silver, are missing.
If the Hebrew word thukyim is translated peacocks, and not parrots,
then Solomon's ships must have turned east after passing the Straits
of Bab-el-Mandeb, and not south along the coast of Africa toward
Sofala. For peacocks 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 "peacocks," 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 spaces 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.