The Children Of Both Sexes Are Very Pretty, But With Strangers They Are
Very Shy And Timid.
They look very innocent, and are docile, gentle and
obedient, spending much of their time in taming their pets and playing
with them, and in playing games peculiar to their age.
Except in one or
two cases in Sungei Ujong, I have not seen a child with eye or skin
disease, or any kind of deformity.
There have been Rajahs all day in the veranda, and their followers
sitting on the steps, all received by Mr. Low with quiet courtesy, and
regaled with tea or coffee and cigarettes. A short time ago the
reigning prince, who does not appear to be a cypher, came with a great
train of followers, some of them only wearing sarongs, a grandson, to
whom he is much attached, and the deposed Sultan's two boys, of whom I
told you before. They are in Malay clothing, and seem to have lost
their vivacity, or at least it is in abeyance. Before I came here, I
understood from many people that "His Highness" is very generally
detested. So, also, says Sir Benson Maxwell in _Our Malay Conquests_.
Major M'Nair in his amusing book on Perak says: "He is a man over
middle age, and is described as being of considerable ability, feared
and hated by many of the chiefs, and as being of a fierce and cruel
disposition, but he was a proved man as to his loyalty" (to British
interests), "and there being no desire on the part of the Government to
annex the State of Perak, his appointment was the wisest course that,
under the circumstances, could be pursued." This is all that the
greatest apologist for British proceedings in Perak has to say.
I was not prepossessed in his favor before I came, for among other
stories of his cruel disposition, I was told that it was "absolutely
true" that three years ago he poured boiling water down the back of a
runaway female slave who had been recaptured, and then put a red ant's
nest upon it. If "piracy" is to be the term applied to levying
blackmail, he was certainly a pirate, for he exacted a tenth of the
cargo of every boat which passed up his river, a Rajah higher up doing
the same thing. He is said to have a very strong character, to be
grasping, and to be a "brute;" but Mr. Low gets on very well with him
apparently. He is an elderly man, wearing a sort of fez on a shaven
head. He has a gray mustache. His brow is a fine one, and his face has
a look of force, but the lower part of it is coarse and heavy. He was
fanning himself with his fez, and when I crossed the veranda and gave
him a fan, he accepted it without the slightest gesture of thanks, as
if I had been a slave. When Mr. Low told him that I had been at
Koto-lamah, he said that the chief in whose house I had rested deserved
to be shot, and ought to be shot. He and Mr. Low talked business for an
hour; but all important matters are transacted in what is called a
native council.
I wrote that I believed myself to be the only European in Kwala Kangsa,
but I find that there was another at the time when I wrote thus - a
young man of good family, who came out here seeking an appointment. He
was sun-stricken three days ago, and violent fever and delirium set in,
during the height of which he overpowered four Sikhs who were taking
care of him, rushed out of doors, fell down exhausted, was carried
home, and died at four in the morning, his last delirious dreams being
of gambling and losing heavily.
The lamentable burial took place in the evening as the shadows fell.
This sums up the story - a career of dissipation, death at twenty-one, a
rough, oblong box, no one to be sorry. It made my heart ache for the
mother, who would have given much to be where I was, and see "the
dreary death train" move slowly to the dreary inclosure on a hill-top,
where the grass grows rank and very green round a number of white
wooden crosses, which mark the graves of the officers and soldiers who
fell in 1876. The Union Jack was thrown over the coffin, which was
carried by six Sikhs, and Mr. Low, Major Swinburne, Rajah Dris and some
followers, and Sultan Abdullah's two boys, who had nothing better to
do, followed it. By the time the grave was reached torches were
required, and the burial service was read from my prayer-book. It was
all sad and saddening.
The weather is still glorious, the winding Perak still mirrors in
scarcely rippled blue the intensely blue sky, "never wind blows
loudly," but soft airs rustle the trees. One could not lead a more
tropical life than this, with apes and elephants about one under the
cocoa-palms, and with the mercury ranging from 80 degrees to 90
degrees! Gorgeous, indeed, are the birds and butterflies and flowers;
but often when the erythrina and the Poinciana regia are strewing the
ground with their flaming blossoms, I think with a passionate longing
of the fragile Trientalis Europae, of crimson-tipped lichens, of faint
odors of half-hidden primroses, of whiffs of honey and heather from
purple moorlands, and of all the homely, fragrant, unobtrusive flowers
that are linked with you! I should like a chance of being "cold to the
bone!"
I have wasted too much of my time to-day upon the apes. They fascinate
me more daily. They look exactly like familiar demons, and certainly
anyone having them about him two hundred years ago would have been
burned as a wizard. When Mr. Low walks down the veranda, these two
familiars walk behind him with a stealthy tread.
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