day we were placed in the same uncomfortable position, and a man kneeling
behind me was shot in the _back_ of his thigh. Once also the Sikhs made
a determined attack on the men with me as we were trying to outflank the
Malays, and in spite of our shouts only desisted when almost within
touch of us. It is true, of course, that the cover was so dense they
could not see us until the last moment. They were so dispirited by this
waste of effort, that they incontinently left the place and went straight
home in spite of all Plunket’s attempts to stop them. That was in no
sense his fault, for they were not his men, and he had never seen them
before the previous evening. The Penang police had retired _en masse_ at
an even earlier hour, and explained afterwards, with much force, that it
was not for this kind of work that they had engaged.
The enemy’s stockade was a long rampart impenetrable to bullets; it was
faced by a deep and wide ditch cut at right angles to the river, with one
end on the bank and the other in high jungle. The work was backed by a
thick plantation of bananas, affording perfect cover, and those defending
it were commanded by the Maharaja Lela in person, and his father-in-law
Pandak Indut, foremost of Mr. Birch’s murderers.
I am not now concerned with the details of the attack, it is sufficient
to say that it did not take long to prove how serious a mistake had been
made in leaving the howitzers behind. The rockets, an old pattern, were
ineffective, and as they all went over the top of the stockade were
greeted by the jeers of the enemy. We were close enough to hear even what
they said in the intervals between the firing. Experience is usually
costly, and what we learnt on the 7th enabled us, a week later, to carry
this and a succession of other stockades without the loss of a man.
About 1 P.M. (our force being then reduced to the officers, the men of
the 10th, bluejackets, and Malay scouts) Captain Innes gave the order to
charge the stockade. That was done, but without guns to clear the way it
was a hopeless task. We could not get across the ditch in the face of
an unseen, protected enemy, while we were entirely at their mercy. We
had to retire with the loss of Captain Innes killed, both the officers
of the 10th (Lieutenants Booth and Elliott) severely wounded, and other
casualties. If men with weapons of precision and the knowledge to handle
them had held the work, none of our party ought to have escaped. But with
Malays you can take liberties; their weapons take some time to load, but
they are deadly enough at a few yards distance if the men who hold them
would not fire at the tree-tops. The Malay’s idea is to loose off his
piece as often as he can, it makes a noise and that puts heart into the
man who fires, fear into the enemy.
Though we had gained nothing by rushing the place, the enemy did not
like that style of attack and retired, only we did not know it then. We
were engaged in counting the cost, picking up the wounded and organising
an orderly retreat, for it was late, we had some miles to go, and
we expected the Malays would leave their shelter and come after us.
Personally I did not know Captain Innes had been killed, I was in the
centre and he was on the extreme right. My party was hampered by having
to carry a wounded man, and when we got back to the middle of the field
where Abbott and Plunket were waiting, Innes and the others had already
been taken away. We had no surgeon, no stretchers, and the return journey
was one that is not pleasant to recall.
We reached our boats at 3 P.M., and the Residency a quarter of an hour
later.
For some time I was very busy trying to attend to the wounded, but then
my Malay friends asked me for a boat, as they said they must go and
fetch Nakodah Orlong’s body, and see what had become of Alang. A British
soldier was also missing. I gave the boat and they started.
About 8 P.M. they returned with Alang and the body of his chief; they had
met the lad swimming down the river with his master’s body.
When Nakodah Orlong fell, and the rest of us got away behind the great
tree, this boy stayed by the dead man, and as he was right in the line of
the thickest cross-fire, Alang pulled the body as close to the bank as
he could, and there remained from morning till evening, making no sign,
but simply declining to abandon the corpse. A man even came out from the
stockade and attacked him with a _kris_, wounding him on the hand, but
Alang beat him off. After the final charge, when our people passed close
by him, it was he who saw the Malays retire, and he allowed us all to go
away and leave him without giving any indication of his whereabouts.
Then, the coast being clear, unable to carry the body so great a
distance, he dragged it into the river and was swimming down stream with
it when the boat met him.
I went down to the boat to see Nakodah Orlong; he looked just as I had
seen him last, except that his hair and clothes were drenched with water
and there was a great hole in the centre of his forehead, marking, no
doubt, the track of an iron bullet from a swivel-gun. Of that, however,
he could never have been conscious, nor yet of the devotion of the man
whose life had been in extremest peril throughout a long day to guard
his chief’s dead body, without thought of gain or praise, only determined
that none but loving hands should be laid upon the voiceless, pulseless
clay he once called master.
Given a glorious sunny day and a good cause, the idea of ending existence
suddenly and painlessly in the pride of life and in face of the foe has
its attractions, and robs the inevitable of its sting.
But who can hope that after his death there will be one other being whose
love is great enough to offer his own life a willing sacrifice to guard
the thing that was to-day a friend and to-morrow will be corruption?
XXII
EVENING
Phœbus loosens all his golden hair
Right down the sky
ERIC MACKAY
The tale of these little lives is told. If I have failed to bring you
close to the Malay, so that you could see into his heart, understand
something of his life, and perhaps even sympathise with the motives that
will lead him to acts of high courage and self-sacrifice, then the fault
is mine.
The glory of the Eastern morning, the freshness and the fragrance of the
forest, the sultry heat of these plains and slopes of eternal green on
which the moisture-charged clouds unceasingly pour fatness—these are the
home of the Malay, the background against which he stands.
Come, we have done with it all; let us leave the plain, seething in the
heat of early afternoon, and ride up this mountain path, through all the
wealth and the magnificence of tropical jungle, and look down on the
land for the last time.
Our callous eyes—surfeited with years of gazing on brilliant colours,
great stretches of sea and forest, huge trees, a bewildering luxury of
foliage, beasts measured by the elephant and rhinoceros, birds by the
argus pheasant and the peacock—are blind to the infinite beauty of our
surroundings. This path, by which we slowly rise to cooler altitudes
and a new flora, would excite in the stranger feelings of wonder and
rapturous delight.
The road itself is cut through soil of a deep shade of _terra cotta_,
the colour all the more vivid by reason of the hues of green by which
it is environed. The sunlight strikes in rays of brilliant light across
this path, falling on red soil, granite boulder and massive tree-trunk,
intensifying colour and deepening shadow. Here and there are seen
glimpses of the plains below, the distant sea, the peaks and valleys of
other hill ranges, and the ear constantly catches the delightful sound
of falling water, the voices of numerous streams dashing down the steep
mountain sides in cascades of sparkling foam.
The path twists and winds, often by sharp zigzags, up the face of the
hill, across a narrow saddle and then by an even steeper ascent, till at
last we gain the summit of the mountain.
Stand here. The limit of vision is wide; you will scarce find a grander
spectacle in this Peninsula. We are nearly 5,000 feet above the sea,
and from north to south the eye travels over a distance not far short
of two hundred miles. Eastward, those distant hills are fully a hundred
miles away, and soon on the western horizon the sun will meet the sea in
a blaze of glory, as though kindling at the touch of loving arms long
waiting for his coming.
That faint blue peak in the north, hazy and indistinct, is Gûnong Jerai
in Kĕdah, and the island to the westward, which smiles through a golden
veil, is Penang. A grey streak of water shot with gleams of sunlight
divides it from the mainland, and the forty miles of country thence to
the foot of this hill, and far south again to those blue islets off the
Dinding coast, lie flat and fertile, a feast for the eyes. Vivid green
patches mark thousands of acres of sugar-cane and rice-field, but the
general effect is an unbroken expanse of dark jungle, mostly mangrove,
for all this land from hill-base to sea-shore is of comparatively
recent formation, the erosion from the hills carried down seawards and
covered with a wealth of foliage ever renewed by the excessive heat and
excessive moisture of this forcing tropical climate. No rocks, no bare
hills, no arid plains, everything covered with vegetation: new graves
look old in a month, the buildings of a year, for all their seeming,
might have stood for half a century.
Only at our feet does the hand of man make any mark on the landscape.
There, amid trees and gardens, nestle the red roofs of Taiping. You might
cover the place with a tablecloth for all its many inhabitants, its long
wide streets, open spaces, and public buildings.
And those pools of water all around the town, what are those?
They are abandoned tin-mines, alluvial workings from which the ore has
been removed, and water mercifully covers, in part, this desolation of
gaping holes and upturned sand.
The shore, due west and distant some twenty miles from the foot of the
range on which we stand, is deeply indented by three great bays. They
are the mouths of three rivers, short, shallow and insignificant in
themselves; it is difficult to understand why they should make such an
imposing entry on the sea. A mile or two inland from the coast the eye
is caught by twenty little lakes, on which the sun loves to linger,
burnishing them to gold when the setting in which these jewels lie has
turned to purple. They are fragments of estuaries, deep waveless lagoons
winding through the mangroves, and showing to the distant spectator only
broken reaches, glimpses of bay and headland.
The shore-line is a ribbon of glistening light, bordering the wide
expanse of forest trees, whose roots stand deep in water when the tide is
high. The mangrove cannot live beyond the reach of the brine from which
it seems to draw the sap of life, and these mud flats, in their gradual
accretion, are as yet scarcely above the level of the sea.
Turning to the north-east, a deep valley lies beneath us, the source of a
long river, the Kurau. Miles and miles beyond rise range after range of
lofty mountains, Biong and Inas and Bintang, running into the heart of
the Peninsula. Further eastward is the country near the sources of the
Perak River, and across the narrow valley, through which its upper waters
dance in a succession of rapids, may be discerned peaks of the main range
which look down on the China Sea.
Now we are facing the south-east and the valley of the Perak River. The
ridge on which we stand divides it from the Province of Larut, and surely
there are few fairer sights in the East than this same valley through
which the river, plainly visible twenty miles away, winds in a silver
streak. On the right stands Gûnong Bubu, the isolated mass terminating
in a needle-like point nearly 6000 feet high. The spurs of this mountain
spread out in every direction, north to the Pass from Larut into the
Perak Valley, east to the Perak River, and southwards nearly to the
coast. In the south-east, across the Perak River, rise five or six ranges
of hills of ever-increasing height. Over the first range can be seen the
valley of the Kinta, with its many fantastic limestone cliffs standing
clearly out; then follow Chabang, Korbu, and finally the mountains
dividing Perak from Păhang. Those hills fading out of sight in the
far-away south are near the borders of Perak and Selangor.
As we turn our faces back to the setting sun, the great disc, now grown
a deep crimson, is sinking through a bank of clouds into a sea of flame.
The waters beyond the influence of the sun’s light are a brilliant
sapphire, a reflection of the sky above. There is only one long, low bank
of cloud, and that is on the horizon.
A moment later and the sun itself has gone, but from the spot where it
disappeared is radiating a lurid glow which kindles the clouds into fire
and shoots rays of gold over Penang in the north and the Dinding Islands
in the south, seventy miles apart. This golden light spreads for a space
upward through the bank of clouds, till, paling into a belt of grey that
again deepens into blue, and ever gaining in intensity, it rises to the
zenith and fills the empyrean.
Meanwhile the darkness which seemed to be settling over the distant
eastern ranges is gradually suffused with soft tints of _rose dorée_,
transfiguring peak after peak and clearly defining every ridge and
valley. This aftermath of day, wherein the sun returns to kiss the hills
with one last lingering caress, fills the whole atmosphere with a rosy
effulgence, then fades reluctantly away. ’Twixt western sea and eastern
hill lies that great sea-indented plain over which night settles slowly
but surely, while still the sky and hills are vivid with colour. But even
the plain assumes its night garb with no less grace and beauty. A faint
mist has risen from swamp and river, and, spreading itself over the land,
takes soft hues of opal and heliotrope deepening into purple, while only
the pools and river-reaches shine out, like scraps of mirror stealing
borrowed glory from the sky.
Soon this light wanes; purple turns to grey, the colours fade from sky
and sea, only the shore-line keeps its sheen. Then this too dies, and
great white clouds, coming from out the mines and marshes like a troop
of giant spectres risen in their grave-clothes, stalk slowly round the
foothills of the mountain, through the Pass into the valley of the Perak
River.
Here, at this elevation, the night is not quite yet.
Close around us still the jungle, but the trees are dwarfed, the boughs
are covered with moss and lichen, orchids and ferns flourish in the
forks, gorgeously blossomed creepers twine round the branches and hang
from tree to tree. The air is full of the scent of the magnolia, the
moss-carpeted ground is gay with a myriad flowers, some brilliantly
plumaged songless birds flit silently between the trees, and a great bat
sails aimlessly across the waning light. The shrill scream of the cicada
is but faintly heard far down the height, and night comes, like a closing
hand grasping in resistless darkness all things visible. The only sound
to break the silence is the fitful and plaintive croak of a wood-frog.
If night treads closely on the heels of day, there is no need for
regret. The darkness is but for a moment, and over the eastern peaks
spreads a silvery sheen, herald of that great orb of splendour which,
rising rapidly, clears the mountain and sheds a flood of wonderful,
indescribable, mellow radiance over forest, plain, and sea, softening
what is crude, pointing with brilliance the most striking features,
and casting into a fathomless shadow the dark valleys of the western
slopes. There is nothing cold about this Eastern moon. Seen, half-risen,
against the dark foliage of the mountain, it glitters like molten silver,
dazzling the eyes, and as it soars serenely upward seems the very
perfection of beauty, light, and purity.
Strange that the delight and glory of mankind since ever the earth was
peopled, the emblem of unattainable longing, should be only a gigantic
cinder.
FOOTNOTES
[1] The attitude is that obtained by transferring the body directly from
a kneeling to a sitting position.
[2] “The Heavenly Twins,” book iii., chap. iii.
[3] The _Sârong_ is the Malay national garment, a sort of skirt, usually
in tartan, worn by men and women alike.
NOTE ON THE COVER DESIGN
_The colours used on the cover of this book are those recognised as
“Royal” colours in one or other of the Malay States. Throughout the
Peninsula yellow is the special colour worn or used by those of Raja
birth. By the ancient Malay sumptuary laws the lower classes were not
allowed to wear yellow garments, nor to use this colour in the decoration
of furniture of their houses. These laws are no longer rigidly observed,
but in most Malay States the use of yellow fabrics is confined to the
Raja class._
_It is a universal practice to put letters addressed to Malay rulers
(when they are of Raja birth) into covers of yellow cotton cloth or
yellow satin, while those addressed to Rajas who have no official
position, or to chiefs of importance but not of Raja birth, are stitched
into covers of white cotton._
_In some of the States the royal flag is yellow, in others it is white or
black, while in several of the more important States of Sumatra (as for
instance in Acheen), black garments are the special privilege of the Raja
class._
_In Perak the three highest native authorities in the State, the Sultan,
his heir (styled Raja Muda), and his Wazîr (the Raja Bĕndahâra), fly
flags of white, yellow, and black respectively, and these three colours
united have, for the last twenty years, been adopted as the Perak State
flag._
_The three daggers on the cover are good types of the Malay “kris,” the
favourite national weapon. The originals of these particular specimens
are in the Perak museum and were photographed for this design._
_F. A. S._
_Xmas day, 1895._