Malay people have a great reverence for age, and Datu Isa’s many
years apparently endeared her still more to the younger generation at
Kuching. Her children, grandchildren, and I, were delighted when she
would tell us about her early life, and also about the superstitions
and legends of her country. Her conversation was always interesting,
and I wish I could give an impression of her manner when relating these
tales. When sixteen years of age, she, together with several Malay
women of Kuching, had been liberated from captivity by the menacing
guns of James Brooke’s yacht, turned on to the Palace of her captor,
Rajah Muda Hassim, who had intended to carry her off to Brunei for the
Sultan’s harem. This personal reminiscence invariably served as the
prelude to other interesting tales. The story of the Pontianak ghost,
for instance, was the one which perhaps thrilled us most. Malays almost
sing as they talk, and their voices quaver, become loud or soft, or die
off in a whisper, the words being interspersed with funny little nasal
noises, together with frowns, sighs, or smiles. When about to relate a
dramatic incident, Datu Isa became silent for a moment, looked at us
with knitted brows, although she did not see us, so intent was she on
her story.
This is the story of the Pontianak. When a baby is about to be born,
the father walking under the flooring of his house hears a low chuckle
behind him. He turns round, and sees a beautiful woman looking at him.
Her face is like the moon, her eyes are like stars, her mouth is like
a half-open pomegranate, her complexion is white, her hair intensely
red. She wears a sarong round her waist, and no jacket covers her
shoulders. Should the husband have neglected to set fire to the bunch
of onions, tuba roots, and other ingredients, the smoke of which keeps
evil spirits away, the woman stands there for some moments without
uttering a sound. Then she opens her mouth, giving vent to peals of
laughter. By this time the husband is so frightened that he can think
of no spell by which to combat her evil intentions. After a while, her
feet rise an inch or two from the ground, and as she flies swiftly past
him, her hair flows straight behind her like a comet’s tail, when he
sees between her shoulder blades the large gaping wound, signifying
that she is a Pontianak. After this apparition, there is no hope for
the woman or the babe about to be born, they are doomed to die, so that
the Pontianak is one of the most dreaded ghosts haunting Malay houses.
As Datu Isa finished the Pontianak story, we all clamoured for more.
The old lady loved to see our interest, and went on telling us many
other superstitions: Unless you cover the heads of sleeping children
with black cloth, and put a torn fishing net on the top of their
mosquito curtains, the birds, Geruda, Dogan, and Konieh (supposed to be
eagles), will come close to them and cause convulsions. You must put
knives or pinang cutters near your babies, and when walking out with
them you must take these instruments with you, until your babies can
walk alone. Then turning to me, Datu Isa would say: “I hope you will
never see the sun set under the fragment of a rainbow, Rajah Ranee,
for that is a certain portent that the Rajah’s wife must die, although
rainbows in other portions of the sky do not matter if you know how
to address them. When my children and grandchildren are out in the
garden, and a rainbow arches over the sky, we pluck the heads off the
more gaily coloured flowers and place them on the children’s heads, and
say: ‘Hail, King of the Sky, we have come out to meet you in our finest
clothes.’”
It is unlucky for a child to lie on its face and kick up its legs, this
being a sure sign the father or mother will fall sick. When a woman
expects a baby, the roof of her house must not be mended, nor must her
husband cut his hair or his nails. During this time a guest must not
be entertained for one night only; they must stay two. When a woman
dies in childbirth, during the fasting month of the Muhammadans, she
becomes an “orang alim” (a good spirit), and all the sins she may have
committed are forgiven her.
Datu Isa had great faith in a bangle I possessed, made of a kind of
black seaweed found on the Sarawak coast, and she was anxious I should
take care not to break it. It was given me in this way: During the
first years of my stay in Sarawak, an old gardener employed at the
Palace, having in some way misbehaved himself, was dismissed. Shortly
afterwards, I met the old man in a state of great depression during
one of my walks the other side of the river, and he begged me to use
my influence with the Rajah and get him taken back again, promising
he would behave better in the future. He was a lazy old man, but as
I felt sorry for him, I asked the Rajah to give him another trial.
The Rajah agreed, and the man resumed work in the Astana garden in
his own desultory way. I often used to watch him pulling up the weeds
from the paths; he would sit on his haunches, stare at the river, and
take some minutes’ rest after every weed he extracted. Notwithstanding
these drawbacks, he was a grateful soul, and on the morning of his
reinstalment amongst the Rajah’s gardeners he brought me a bangle
made of this black seaweed. It was very small and I had difficulty in
getting it over my hand, so the old man put it into boiling water to
make it more elastic, and, after some little trouble, it was forced
over my hand. “Lightning, snake bites, and antus can never harm you,”
he said, “as long as you keep the bangle round your wrist, but should
it ever break, it would bring you bad luck!” The bangle is on my wrist
now, and I dread lest anything should happen to it, for should it ever
get broken, I should feel just as nervous of the result as would any of
my Malay women friends.
Some of the Malays in Sarawak use somewhat disconcerting methods to
frighten away evil spirits on the occasion of very bad storms. After a
frightful gale, accompanied by incessant lightning and thunder, that
occurred in Kuching, two or three owners of plantations in the suburbs
of the town came to the Rajah and complained that some of their Malay
neighbours had cut down all their fruit trees during the hurricane, in
order to propitiate the spirit of the storm. Nowadays these drastic
measures to other people’s property are seldom heard of, because the
Rajah has his own methods of dealing with such superstitious and
undesirable proceedings. It took some time to eradicate these curious
and unneighbourly customs, but I believe they are now a thing of the
past.
[Illustration: INCHI BAKAR--SCHOOL MASTER, KUCHING]
I must tell one more curious belief existing amongst Malays. Just
before I left for England, a Malay woman from one of our out-stations
brought me a cocoa-nut, very much larger than the ordinary fruit of
the Archipelago. I believe these huge cocoa-nuts are only to be found
growing in the Seychelles Islands, and the natives call them “cocoa de
mer” The woman told me she had brought me this fruit on account of the
luck it brought its possessor; at the same time assuring me it came
from fairyland. I asked her to tell me its story, when she informed
me that, as every one knows, in the middle of the world is a place
called “The navel of the sea.” In this spot, guarded by two dragons,
is a tree on which these large cocoa-nuts grow, known as Pau Jinggeh.
The dragons feed on the fruit, and when they have partaken too freely
of it, have fits of indigestion, causing them to be sea-sick; thus
the fruit finds its way into the ocean, and is borne by the current
into all parts of the world. These enormous nuts are occasionally met
with by passing vessels, and in this manner some are brought to the
different settlements in the Malayan Archipelago. The fruit brought
for my acceptance had been given to the woman by a captain of a Malay
schooner, who had rescued it as it was bobbing up and down in the water
under the keel of his boat. “I thought you would like to have it, Rajah
Ranee,” she said, “because it cannot be bought for love nor money.” The
fruit now occupies a prominent position in our drawing-room at Kuching,
and is a source of great interest to the natives.
With our ideas of European wisdom, we may be inclined to smile
superciliously at these beliefs, but we should not forget that a great
many of us do not like seeing _one_ magpie, we avoid dining thirteen
at table, we hate to see the new moon through glass, we never walk
under a ladder, or sit in a room where three candles are burning; and
how about people one meets who assure us they have heard the scream
of a Banshee, foretelling the death of some human being? Putting all
these things together, I do not think either Malays or Dyaks show much
more superstition than we Europeans do; after all, we are not so very
superior to primitive races, although we imagine that on account of our
superior culture we are fit to govern the world.