In Court And Kampong - free ebook by Hugh Charles Clifford

IN COURT AND KAMPONG

BEING TALES &amp; SKETCHES OF NATIVE LIFE IN THE MALAY PENINSULA BY HUGH CLIFFORD LONDON GRANT RICHARDS 48 LEICESTER SQUARE First printed April 1897 Reprinted September 1903 To My Wife H. C....

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PREFACE

The nineteen tales and sketches, which are enclosed within the covers of this Book, relate to certain brown men and obscure things in a distant and very little known corner of the Earth. The Malay Peninsula—that slender tongue of land which projects into the tepid seas at the extreme south of the Asiatic Continent—is but little more than a name to most dwellers in Europe. But, even in the Peninsula itself, and to the majority of those white men whose whole lives have been passed in the Straits o

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THE EAST COAST

The Lotos-Eaters. In these days, the boot of the ubiquitous white man leaves its marks on all the fair places of the Earth, and scores thereon an even more gigantic track than that which affrighted Robinson Crusoe in his solitude. It crushes down the forests, beats out roads, strides across the rivers, kicks down native institutions, and generally tramples on the growths of nature, and the works of primitive man, reducing all things to that dead level of conventionality, which we call civilisati

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THE PEOPLE OF THE EAST COAST

Kipling (adapted). Although the States on the East Coast lie in very close proximity one with another, the people who inhabit them differ widely among themselves, not only in appearance, in costume, and in the dialects which they speak, but also in manners, customs, and character. The Pahang Malay, in his unregenerate state, thinks chiefly of deeds of arms, illicit love intrigues, and the sports which his religion holds to be sinful. He is a cock-fighter, a gambler, and a brawler; he has an over

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THE EXPERIENCES OF RÂJA HAJI HAMID

These things were told me by Râja Haji Hamid, as he and I lay smoking on our mats during the cool, still hours before the dawn. He was a Sĕlângor man who had accompanied me to the East Coast, as chief of my followers, a band of ruffians, who at that time were engaged in helping me to act as 'the bait at the tip of the fish-hook,' in an Independent Malay State—to use the phrase then current among my people. We had passed the evening in the King's Bâlai watching the Chinamen raking in their gains,

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THE BATTLE OF THE WOMEN

Locksley Hall. This is a true story. Also, unlike most of the tales which I have to tell concerning my Malay friends, it is garnished with a moral; and one, moreover, which the Women's Rights Committees would do well to note. I should dearly like to print it as a tract, for distribution to these excellent and loud-talking institutions, but, failing that, I publish it here, among its unworthy companions. To those who live in and around a Malay Court, two things only take rank as the serious matte

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IN COCK-PIT AND BULL-RING

Taking them by and large the Malays have no bowels. Physical pain, even if endured by human beings, excites in them but little sympathy or compassion, and to the beasts that perish they are often almost as wantonly cruel as an English drayman. The theory that men owe any duties to the lower animals, is one which the Malays cannot be readily made to understand; and the idea of cruelty to a beast can only be expressed in their language by a long and roundabout sentence. The Malays can hardly be bl

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THE WERE-TIGER

The Song of the Loup Garou. The Song of the Loup Garou. If you ask that excellent body of savants the Society for Psychical Research, for an opinion on the subject, they will tell you that the belief in ghosts, magic, witchcraft, and the like having existed in all ages, and in every land, is in itself a fact sufficient to warrant a faith in these things, and to establish a strong probability of their reality. It is not for me, or such as I am, to question the opinion of these wise men of the Wes

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THE AMOK OF DÂTO KÂYA BÎJI DĔRJA

The Rhyme of the Joyous Garde. The average stay-at-home Englishman knows very little about the Malay, and cares less. Any fragmentary ideas that he may have concerning him are, for the most part, vague and hopelessly wrong. When he thinks of him at all, which is not often, he conjures up the figure of a wild-eyed, long-haired, blood-smeared, howling and naked savage, armed with what Tennyson calls the 'cursed Malayan crease,' who spends all his spare time running âmok . As a matter of fact, âmok

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THE FLIGHT OF CHÊP, THE BIRD

The Song of the Savage Foeman. The Song of the Savage Foeman. In a large Sâkai camp on the Jĕlai river, at a point some miles above the last of the scattered Malay villages, the annual Harvest Home was being held one autumn night in the Year of Grace 1893. The occasion of the feast was the same as that which all tillers of the soil are wont to celebrate with bucolic rejoicings, and the name, which I have applied to it, calls up in the mind of the exile many a well-loved scene in the quiet countr

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THE VAULTING AMBITION

The Song of the Severed Head. The Song of the Severed Head. When the Portuguese Filibusters descended upon the Peninsula, they employed—so says the native tradition—the time-worn stratagem of the Pious Æneas; and, having obtained, by purchase, as much land as could be enclosed by the hide of a bull, from the Sultân of Malacca, they cut the skin up into such cunning strips that a space large enough to build a formidable fort was won by them. This they erected in the very heart of the capital, whi

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'ONE MORE UNFORTUNATE'

Atalanta in Calydon. In writing of the âmok , which Dâto’ Kâya Bîji Dĕrja ran in the streets of Kuâla Trĕnggânu, I have spoken of suicide as being of very rare occurrence among Malays of either sex, and, indeed, I know of no authenticated case in which a man of these people has taken his life with his own hand. A Chinaman, who has had a difference of opinion with a friend, or who conceives that he has been ill-treated by the Powers that be, betakes himself to his dwelling, and there deliberately

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AMONG THE FISHER FOLK

The Song of the Fisher Folk. This is a land of a thousand beauties. Nature, as we see her in the material things which delight our eyes, is straight from the hand of God, unmarred by man's deforming, a marvellous creation of green growths and brilliant shades of colour, fresh, sweet, pure, an endless panorama of loveliness. But it is not only the material things which form the chief beauties of the land in which we dwell. The ever-varying lights of the Peninsula, and the splendid Malayan sky tha

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THE STORY OF BÂYAN THE PAROQUET

Omar Khayya’m. Life—meaning the life which animates the bodies of other people—is not priced high by the natives of the East Coast; but eight or nine years ago, it was held even more lightly than it is at present. Murder was frequently done for the most trivial causes, and a Malay often drew a knife, when an Englishman would have been content to drop a damn. Young Chiefs were wont to take a life or two from pure galeté de cœur , merely to show that they were beginning to feel their feet, and wer

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A TALE OF A THEFT

The Very Bitter Cry of the Unprotected. The Very Bitter Cry of the Unprotected. I have said that the Malays, taken by and large, have no bowels. The story I am about to tell, illustrates this somewhat forcibly. The incident related happened on the East Coast, and I know it to be a fact. It is not a pleasant story, and any one who has a proud stomach, would do well not to read it, as it is calculated to make the gorge rise rebelliously. In one of the States on the East Coast, there lived a Râja ,

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IN A CAMP OF THE SĔMANGS

The Song of the Last Sĕmangs. The night was closing in apace as I and my three Malay companions pushed our way through the underwood which overgrew the narrow wood path. We were marching through the wide jungles of the Upper Pêrak valley, which are nearer to the centre of the Malay Peninsula than any point to which most men are likely to penetrate. Already the noisy crickets and tree beetles were humming in the boughs above our heads, and the voices of the bird folk had died down one by one unti

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'HIS HEART'S DESIRE'

The Song of the Lost Soul. — Anon. Where and when these things happened does not signify at all. The East Coast is a long one, and the manners of the Malay Râjas who dwell thereon have suffered but little change for centuries. Thus, both in the matter of time and of space, there is a wide choice, and plenty of exercise may be given to the imagination. The facts anyway are true, and they were related, in the watches of the night, to a White Man—whose name does not matter—by two people, with whose

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A NIGHT OF TERROR

If you put your finger on the map of the Malay Peninsula an inch or two from its exact centre, you will find a river in Pahang territory which has its rise in the watershed that divides that State from Kĕlantan and Trĕnggânu. This river is called the Tĕmbĕling, and it is chiefly remarkable for the number of its rapids and the richness of its gutta-bearing forests. Its inhabitants are a ruffianly lot of Malays, who are preyed upon by a family of Wans , a semi-royal set of nobles who do their best

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IN THE DAYS WHEN THE LAND WAS FREE

The Song of the Fettered Folk. In 1873 the people of Pahang who, then as now, were ever ready to go upon the war-path, poured over the cool summits of the range that forms at once the backbone of the Peninsula and the boundary between Pahang and Sĕlângor. They went, at the invitation of the British Government, to bring to a final conclusion the protracted struggles, in which Malay Râjas , foreign mercenaries, and Chinese miners had alike been engaged for years, distracting the State of Sĕlângor,

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UN MAUVAIS QUART D'HEURE

Rudyard Kipling's Song of the Little Hunter. We had been sitting late in the verandah of my bungalow of Kuâla Lĭpis, which overlooks the long and narrow reach, formed by the combined waters of the Lĭpis and the Jĕlai. The moon had risen some hours earlier, and the river ran white between the dark banks of jungle which seemed to fence it in on all sides. The ill-kept garden, with the tennis-ground, that never got beyond the stage of being dug up, and the rank grass behind the bamboo fence, were f

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UP COUNTRY

A Parody. It has been said that a white man, who has lived twelve consecutive months in complete isolation, among the people of an alien Asiatic race, is never wholly sane again for the remainder of his days. This, in a measure, is true; for the life he then learns to live, and the discoveries he makes in that unmapped land, the gates of which are closed, locked, barred, and chained against all but a very few of his countrymen, teach him to love many things which all right-minded people very pro

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L'ENVOI

THE END Printed by R. R. Clark, Limited , Edinburgh . BY THE SAME AUTHOR. " SINCE THE BEGINNING. " A Tale of an Eastern Land. Crown 8vo, Cloth. 6s. The Sun. —"The author deals skilfully with a people still uncivilised, still swayed by primeval passions. His characters are well defined, and the tragedy which underlies the lives of the three principals is poignant and impressive by reason of his simple directness." St. James's Gazette .—"Mr. Hugh Clifford's knowledge of Malay life and of the Mal

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