Despite my love for Sarawak, there were three great drawbacks to my
comfort, namely, malaria, mosquitoes, and rats.
One knows that the tropics, especially where the moisture is excessive,
are trying to European constitutions. When one remembers the abrupt
transitions from wet to dry, the fierce rays of the sun that beat down
on the vegetation, the exhalation of myriads and myriads of leaves
drawn up by the heat of the day and cast forth again in poisonous
perfumes or evil odours into the atmosphere, all these things must
have a pernicious effect on the health of Europeans. But we now also
know that these things obvious to our senses are not the sole or the
whole cause of some of the worst tropical ailments, but that these
are due to the invisible life teeming in earth, air, and water. For
instance, it is now established that the disease capable of so many
variations, called malaria, is due to the sting of my arch-enemy, the
striped black-and-white mosquito. This discovery had not been made when
I first visited the tropics, but now I do not wonder at my feelings of
repulsion whenever I saw these horrible pests feeding on me.
A short time after my arrival in the country, I was seized with a
somewhat unusual form of malaria. Now the ordinary malaria is known by
almost all Europeans who live in the tropics. The Rajah, for instance,
suffers from this ordinary but very trying and sometimes dangerous
kind of fever, but the way the pest attacked me was of a kind not
often experienced by Europeans. My kind was more prevalent amongst
the natives. Its symptoms are disconcerting to your friends, for you
feel very bad tempered. The palms of your hands get hot and dry, and a
feeling of impending disaster takes hold of you. These preliminaries
are painless. Then, all of a sudden, more often at sunset, you feel
sick: nothing happens, but a band of iron, as it were, presses round
your body, becoming tighter and tighter until you imagine that fingers
of steel are twisting you up inside. You retire to bed, propped by
pillows, for you can neither hold yourself up nor move in any way,
and there you remain gasping for breath until the attack is over. It
may last half an hour, or continue for half a day, when it returns
the next afternoon at the same hour--the attacks resembling those of
angina pectoris. Your complexion turns a bright yellow and your face
is covered with an ugly rash. These attacks have lasted off and on for
two or three months, when life becomes unbearable. You can neither eat
nor drink, and get reduced to a shadow. Our English doctor in Sarawak,
who was clever and intelligent, never understood the disease. He
prescribed leeches, cupping-glasses, poultices, and fed me up with
champagne, brandy, and even port wine, with the result that all these
would-be remedies made me very much worse. I became frightfully thin,
so that after nearly four years’ residence in Sarawak the Rajah decided
to take me home, in order to recover my health.
One morning, during the first years of my residence in Sarawak, my
Malay maid, Ima, rushed into my room and told me that a friend of
hers, living in a house near her own, was lying at the point of death
owing to continuous attacks of this disease. I could well sympathize
with the woman’s sufferings, and although powerless to cure myself in
such emergencies, decided to try what I could do to help Ima’s friend.
I took with me a box of pills, a bottle of meat juice, some milk and
arrowroot, and, accompanied by Ima, sallied forth to the sick woman’s
house. I climbed up the ladder that hencoop fashion led into her room,
and pushing open the dried palm-leaf door saw a woman rolling about
on the floor in paroxysms of agony. Here were the symptoms I knew
so well--the bright yellow complexion and rash all over the face.
The woman was so weak she could hardly move. Ima went up to her, and
lifting her up in her arms said: “Rajah Ranee, who knows of medicines
that will make you well, has come to see you.” The woman looked at me,
and shook her head. I told her I had brought some marvellous remedies,
known only to Europeans, and made her take two pills and a spoonful
of Liebig. When her husband came in, I told him to give her a little
milk every hour, and forbade her to touch or eat anything besides what
I had prescribed for her. She was carried inside her mosquito curtains,
bent double as she was, and gasping for breath. The next morning, when
I visited her, I found her better, for the attack had not lasted so
long as that of the previous day. I was delighted with the result of
my doctoring, and for about a fortnight went to see this woman nearly
every day. She was very poor, the wife of a man who earned his living
by selling fish which he netted in the river and also by doing odd jobs
in neighbouring pine-apple gardens. The woman finally recovered and
remained quite well whilst I stayed in Kuching.
As I was sitting writing inside my mosquito house in my morning-room,
one day, I heard a fuss going on outside. Our sentry was evidently
trying to keep back a visitor who wished to see me. I told Ima to let
the visitor in, whoever he might be, when an old and wizened personage,
without a jacket, and with garments dripping with mud and water, came
in, carrying a net bag in which were a number of crawling things. He
ran up to me, deposited the bag at my feet, and catching hold of both
my knees, said: “Rajah Ranee pitied my wife, made her well with her
medicines and incantations. These shrimps are for Rajah Ranee. I caught
them in the river. I nothing else to give. Cook make them into curry.”
I thought this touching on the part of the affectionate husband, and
thanked him many times. The sight of the shrimps crawling about in the
net, however, greatly disturbed me, for I cannot bear to see animals
uncomfortable. I therefore got rid of my grateful friend as soon as I
could, and, directly he had left, told Ima (I could not do it myself,
for there was a blazing sun outside) to carry the shrimps back to the
river whence they had come. I watched her go down the garden path,
carrying the net bag, but I question whether she did as I told her. I
rather think that she and her husband, Dul, enjoyed shrimp curry that
evening. However, I asked no questions--“What the eye does not see the
heart does not grieve over!”
This story of the sick woman has a sad ending, for during one of my
absences from Sarawak she was again seized with the illness, and died.
I was afterwards told that she often used to say: “If Rajah Ranee were
here, with her medicines, her visits, and incantations, I should get
over it, but I hope no more now, and I know I must die.” Until the day
of her death, she never wearied extolling my medical skill, and this
cure of mine led to some embarrassing situations, for whenever there
were serious cases of illness, the people sent for me, begging that
I would cure them as I did the fisherman’s wife. On one occasion, a
poor woman in the Malay town gave birth to twins, both children being
born with hare-lips. The morning of their arrival, Ima came to me
with an urgent message from the father of the twins, requesting me
to go directly to their house and put the babies’ mouths straight. I
was sorry to have to refuse, but--unlike a good many medical men and
women--I realized my limitations in certain cases!
Now for mosquitoes. Nothing one can say or write can give any idea
of the tortures one undergoes by the actual biting of mosquitoes. A
great many people imagine that these pests only begin to torment one
at sunset. This is a mistaken idea. A certain kind of black mosquito,
striped with white, is a most pernicious pest. By day and night it
harassed me so much that if I wanted to do anything at all, I had to
retire behind the shelter of a mosquito house. My Malay friends did not
seem to care whether mosquitoes stung them or not; indeed, they seemed
to enjoy the heavy slaps they administered on their faces, hands,
or legs, in their attempts to kill the foe. Their methods, however,
required a certain amount of skill. The results of their slaps were not
pleasant to witness, and when imitating their methods of slaughter, I
always had, close by, a basin containing a weak solution of carbolic
acid, and a towel. After a bite, the spot was washed, the remains of
the mosquito disposed of, and I was ready for another onslaught. Malay
women were not so particular, for after killing a mosquito, they would
rub off all traces with their coloured handkerchiefs. My paraphernalia
of basin, sponge, and towel elicited from them various grunts.
They made funny noises in their throats and appealed to Allah at my
extraordinary patience in taking these precautions.
I now come to rats, which were a far more serious business. A Malay
woman once told me she had watched a detachment of rats, four or five
in number, trying to get at some fowls’ eggs she had laid by for
cake-making. She was inside her house (Malay houses are often rather
dark), and in the dim light she saw these swift-gliding creatures
hovering near the place where the eggs were stored. She waited to
see what would happen, and saw a large rat--large as are Norwegian
rats--somehow or other get hold of an egg, roll over on its back,
holding the egg firmly on its stomach with its four paws, when the
other rats took hold of its tail, and by a series of backward jerks
dragged their companion to a hole in the leafy walling of the store,
where it disappeared from sight. I believe this particular story is
told with variations all over the world.
A great many stories might be related of rats, but the most
extraordinary thing I ever saw regarding these animals was a migration
which took place one evening at dusk through my bedroom. I was just
getting better from a severe attack of malaria, and was lying on the
bed inside my mosquito house half awake and half asleep, with my Malay
Ayah sitting against the wall in a corner of my room. Suddenly, I saw
two or three long objects moving across the middle of the room, their
black bodies standing out against the pale yellow matting. My room
opened on to verandahs from all sides (as every one who is acquainted
with the architecture of tropical houses will understand), and it was
easy for any animal to climb over the outer verandah and pass through
the screened doors leading to the opposite verandah. I watched these
crawling creatures, and, being only half awake, wondered what they
were. At first I thought it was the result of malaria, making me see
things which did not exist, but when the rats were joined by others
coming in at one door and going out of the other, in numbers of tens,
of twenties, of sixties, then it must have been hundreds, for the
floor was one mass of moving objects, I called to the Ayah, who sat
motionless the other side of the room. “Don’t move,” she said; “they
are the rats.” I was too frightened not to move, and I screamed out to
the Rajah, who I knew was in the room next to mine. As he came in, the
rats ran up one side of him, and I remember the dull thud they made as
they jumped off his shoulder to the floor. Some fortmen, hearing my
screams, also appeared. The Rajah told me to make as little noise as
possible, so I had to remain still whilst thousands and thousands of
rats passed through my room. This abnormal invasion lasted for about
ten or fifteen minutes, when the rats began to diminish in number,
until there were only a few stragglers left to follow the main body.
It appears that such migrations are well known all over Sarawak, and
that people fear them because they are accompanied by a certain amount
of danger. It is said by the natives that if any one should kill one
of these rats, his companions would attack the person in such large
numbers that his body would be almost torn to pieces. Looking deeper
into the matter, one wonders why these creatures should so migrate, and
where they go; but this no one seems to know. Their area of operations
is a restricted one, for it appears that on this occasion my bedroom
was the only human habitation through which they went.
By the time the last rat passed through my room, and I began to
breathe freely again, darkness had come. My room was lit by the dim
light of a wick floating in a tumbler of cocoa-nut oil, enclosed in a
lantern of glass. The Ayah took up her position again and squatted by
the wall without saying a word, nearly petrified with terror at what
had happened. I pictured this mass of swiftly-moving, crafty-looking
creatures, under the influence of some mysterious force unknown to
ourselves, and remembered Cuvier, that great Frenchman, who wrote
that when one thinks of the family life of even the most loathsome of
creatures, one is inclined to forget any repulsion one may feel towards
them.
Rats, however, were a great trouble to me. I have recognized individual
rats visiting me on different occasions. I don’t know whether they
wanted to make friends, one will never know, but they frightened me
dreadfully. I often pitied the way the poor creatures were trapped,
poisoned, and killed, when after all they were only trying to keep
their place in the world, just as we do.
On another occasion, I was fast asleep when I woke up feeling a sort of
nip. I opened my eyes and saw a large rat sitting on my arm. I shook
it off, and it fell to the ground. Being in my mosquito house, I was
curious to discover how the rat had got in, and lighting a candle,
found that it had gnawed a hole through the muslin to get at some food
placed on a table for me to eat during the night.
As luck would have it, these rat visitations invariably took place
when I was ill, so perhaps it magnified the disgust I felt towards
these creatures. But thinking on the matter many times since, I have
largely got over my loathing for rats, and I do not think nowadays, I
should mind their migrating through my room, because I have become more
familiar with animals and their ways.