The Third,
Mr. Innes, Superintendent Of Lower Perak, Whose Wife So Nearly Lost Her
Life In The Horrible Affair At Pulo Pangkor, Was In Dejected Spirits,
As If The Swamps Of Durion Sabatang Had Been Too Much For Him.
The little cabin below was frightfully hot, and I shared it not only
with two nice Malay boys, sons of the exiled Abdullah, the late Sultan,
who are being educated at Malacca, but with a number of large and
rampant rats.
Finding the heat and rats unbearable, I went on deck in
the rosy dawn, just as we were entering the Larut river, a muddy
stream, flowing swiftly between dense jungles and mangrove swamps, and
shores of shining slime, on which at low water the alligators bask in
the sun - one of the many rivers of the Peninsula which do not widen at
their mouths.
The tide was high and the river brimming full, looking as if it must
drown all the forest, and the trestle-work roots on which the mangroves
are hoisted were all submerged. It is a silent, lonely land, all
densely green. Many an uprooted palm with its golden plumes and wealth
of golden husked nuts came floating down on the swirling waters, and
many a narrow creek well suited for murder, overarched with trees, and
up which one might travel far and still be among mangrove swamps and
alligators, came down into the Larut river; and once we passed a small
clearing, where some industrious Chinamen are living in huts on some
festering slime between the river and the jungle; and once a police
station on stilts, where six policemen stood in a row and saluted as we
passed, and at seven we reached Teluk Kartang, with a pier, a long
shed, two or three huts, and some officialism, white and partly white,
all in a "dismal swamp." A small but very useful Chinese trading
steamer, the Sri Sarawak, was lying against the pier, and we landed
over her filthy deck, on which filthy Chinese swine, among half-naked
men almost as filthy, were wrangling for decomposing offal. Dismal as
this place looks, an immense trade in imports and exports is done
there; and all the tin from the rich mines of the district is sent
thence to Pinang for transhipment.
While my friends transacted business, I waited for an age in an empty
office where was one chair, a table dark with years of ink splotches, a
mouldy inkstand, a piece of an old almanac, and an empty gin bottle.
Outside, cockle-shells were piled against the wall; then there were
ditches or streamlets cutting through profuse and almost loathsome
vegetation, and shining slime fat and iridescent, swarming with
loathsome forms of insect and reptile life all rioting under the fierce
sun, and among them, almost odious by proximity to such vileness, were
small crabs with shells of a heavenly blue. The strong vegetable stench
was nearly overpowering, but I wrote to you and worked at your
embroidery a little, and so got through this detention pleasantly, as
through many a longer, though never a hotter one.
After a time three gharries arrived, and Mr. Innes and I went in one,
the two other gentlemen in another, and Sultan Abdullah's boys in the
third. No amount of world-wide practice in the getting in and out of
strange vehicles is any help to the tortuous process necessary for
mounting and dismounting from a Larut gharrie. A gharrie is a two-
wheeled cart with a seat across it for two people and a board in front
on which the driver sits when he is not running by his horse. This
board and the low roof which covers the whole produce the complication
in getting in and out. The bottom of the cart is filled up with grass
and leaves, and you put your feet on the board in front, and the little
rats of fiery Sumatra ponies, which will run till they drop, jolt you
along at great speed. Klings, untroubled by much clothing, own and
drive these vehicles, which are increasing rapidly. The traffic on the
road of heavy buffalo carts, loaded with tin, cuts it up so badly that
without care one might often be thrown upon the pony's back at the
river end of it.
Near the port we met three elephants, the centre one of great size,
rolling along, one of them with a mahout seated behind his great
flapping ears. These are part of the regalia of the deposed Sultan, and
were sent down from the interior for me and my baggage. The smallest of
them would have carried me and my "Gladstone bag" and canvas roll. The
first sight of "elephants at home" is impressive, but they are
fearfully ugly, and their rolling gait does not promise well for the
ease of my future journey.
We passed through a swampy, but busy-looking Chinese village, masculine
almost solely, where Chinamen were building gharries and selling all
such things as Chinese coolies buy, just the same there as everywhere,
and at home there as everywhere; yellow, lean, smooth-shaven, keen,
industrious, self-reliant, sober, mercenary, reliable, mysterious,
opium-smoking, gambling, hugging clan ties, forming no others, and
managing their own matters even to the post and money-order offices,
through which they are constantly sending money to the interior of
China. I hope that it is not true that they look at us, as a singularly
able and highly educated Chinaman lately said to me that they do, as
"the incarnation of brute force allied to brute vices!" This is a
Chinese region, so the degression is excusable.
It was bright and hot, the glorious, equable equatorial heat, and when
we got out of the mangrove swamps through which the road is causewayed,
there was fine tropical foliage, and the trees were festooned with a
large, blue Thunbergia of great beauty. It is eight miles from the
landing at Teluk Kartang to Taipeng, where the British Residency is.
The road crosses uninteresting level country, but every jolt brings one
nearer to the Hijan mountains, which rise picturesquely from the plain
to a height of over three thousand feet.
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