Gunong Pondok, The Limestone Butte, Twelve Hundred Feet In Nearly
Perpendicular Height, Showed All Its Brilliancy Of Color, And Gunong
Bubu, One Of The Highest Mountains In Perak, Reared His Granite Crest
Above The Forest.
The lotus lake at Bukit Gantang was infinitely more
beautiful than under the grayer sky of Friday; a thousand rosy vases
were drinking in the sunshine, and ten thousand classic leaves were
spreading their blue-green shields below them; all nature smiled and
sang.
I was loath to exchange my good horse for a gharrie, with a Kling
driver draped slightly in Turkey-red cotton sitting on the shafts, who,
statuesque as he was, had a far less human expression than Mahmoud and
Eblis. In the noonday the indigo-colored Hijan hills, with their
swollen waterfall coming down in a sheet of foam, looked cool, but as
we dashed through Taipeng I felt overpowered once more by what seems
the "wearing world," after beautiful, silent Kwala Kangsa, for there
are large shops with gaudy sign-boards, stalls in the streets, tribal
halls, buffalo-carts with buffaloes yoked singly, for the spread of
their huge horns is so great that they cannot be yoked in pairs; trains
of carts with cinnamon-colored, humped bullocks yoked in pairs standing
at shop doors, gharries with fiery Sumatra ponies dashing about, crowds
of Chinese coolies, busy and half-naked, filling the air with the din
of their ceaseless industry, and all the epitomized stir of a world
which toils, and strives, and thirsts for gain.
But I must give these coolies their due, for in some ways they show
more self-respect than the ordinary English laborer, inasmuch as in bad
times they don't become chargeable to anyone, and when the price of the
commodity which they produce falls, as that of tin has done, instead of
"striking" and abusing everybody all round, they accept the situation,
keep quiet, live more frugally, and work for lower wages till things
mend. But I don't intend to hold up the Taipeng Chinese as patterns of
the virtues in other respects, for they are not. They are turbulent;
and crime, growing chiefly out of their passion for gain, is very rife
among them. The first thing I heard on arriving here was that a Chinese
gang had waylaid a revenue officer in one of the narrow creeks, and
that his hacked and mutilated body had drifted down to Permatang this
morning.
Mr. Maxwell tells me that, as he returned from escorting me to Bukit
Gantang, he overtook a gharrie with a Malay woman in it, and
dismounting joined her husband who was walking, but did not speak to
the woman. to-day the man told him that his wife woke the following
night with a scream which was succeeded by a trance; and that, knowing
that a devil had entered into her, he sent for a pawan (a wise man or
sorcerer), who on arriving asked questions of the bad spirit, who
answered with the woman's tongue.
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