# The Further Side of Silence/The Flight of Chêp, the Bird
## THE FLIGHT OF CHÊP, THE BIRD

INA large Sâkai camp on the banks of the upper reaches of the Jělai 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, when the year's crop has been got in; and the name which I have applied to it awakens the perennial nostalgia of the exile by conjuring up the picture of many a long summer day in the quiet country at Home. Again, in imagination, he watches the loaded farm-wains labouring over the grass or lumbering down the leafy lanes; again the scent of the hay is in his nostrils, and the soft English gloaming—so delicious by contrast with the short-lived twilight of the tropics—is lingering over the land. The reapers astride upon the load exchange their barbarous badinage with those who follow afoot; the pleasant glow of health, that follows upon a long day of hard work in the open air, warms the blood; and in the eyes of all is the light of expectation, born of the thought of the good red meat, and the lashings of ale and cider, awaiting them at the farmhouse two miles across the meadows.
​But in the distant Sâkai country the harvest home has little in common with such scenes as these. The rice-crop planted in the clearing in the forest, hard by the spot in which the camp is pitched, has been reaped laboriously in the native fashion, each car being severed from its stalk separately and by hand. Then, after many days, the grain has at last been stored in the big circular boxes, formed of the bark of a giant tree, and securely thatched with palm leaves; and the Sakai women, who throughout have performed the lion's share of the work, are set to husk some portions of it for the evening meal. This they do with clumsy wooden pestels, held as they stand around a troughlike mortar fashioned from the same material, the ding-dong-ding of the pounders carrying far and wide through the forest. At the joyful sound, all wanderers from the eamp- whose inhabitants have for months been subsisting upon roots and berries -turn their faces homeward with the eagerness bred of empty stomachs and the prospect of a long-expected surfeit. The rice is boiled in cooking-pots, manufactured in Europe and sold to them by the Malays, if the tribe be so fortu- nate as to possess such luxuries; otherwise a length of bamboo is used, for that marvellous vegetable growth is made to serve every conceivable purpose by the natives of the far interior of the Peninsula.
The fat, new rice is sweet to eat, for when freshly reaped, its natural, oleaginous properties have not yet evaporated. It differs as widely from the parched and arid stuff you know in Europe as does the butter ​in a cool Devonshire dairy from the liquid, yellow train oil we pour out of tins and dignify by that name in the sweltering tropics. The Sâkai devour it ravenously and in incredible quantities, for not only does it afford them their first full meal for months, but they are eating against time, since they know that in a day or two the Malays will come up- stream to "barter" with them, and that then the bulk of the priceless stuff will be taken from them, almost by force, in exchange for a few axe heads, flints and steels, and the blades of native wood- knives. Therefore, they pack themselves while the opportunity is still with them, and so long as their distended stomachs will bear the strain of a few ad- ditional mouthfuls.
Thus, while the darkness is shutting down over the forest, is the harvest supper devoured in a Sâkai camp, with gluttony and beast noises of satisfaction and repletion; but when the meal has been finished, the sleep of the full-fed may not fall upon the people. The Sakai, who quail before the appalling strength of Nature, at whose hands they have suf- fered an eternal defeat, lie in perpetual terror of the superhuman beings by whom they believe Nature to be animated. Before rest can be sought, the spirits of the forest and of the streams, and the demons of the grain ust be thanked for their gifts, and pro- pitiated for such evil as has been done to them. The inviolate jungle has been felled to make the clearing, its virgin growths being ravaged with axe head and fire brand. The rice has been reaped and brought ​into store. Clearly the spirits stand in need of com- fort and reparation for the injury which has been wrought, and for the loss which. they have sustained. An apologetic mood is felt by the tribe to be appro- priate upon their part, and Sakai custom-well-nigh as ancient as the hills in which these people live- provides for such emergencies.
The house of the headman or of the local wizard- and the Sakai, as the Malays will tell you, are deeply versed in magic arts is filled to the roof with the sodden green growths of the jungle. The Sâkai, having trespassed upon the domain of the spirits, now invite the demons of the woods and of the grain to share with them the dwellings of men. Then, when night has fallen, the whole tribe of Sakai- men, women, and little children-casting aside their bark loin-clouts, creep into the house, stark naked and entirely unarmed. Grovelling together in the darkness, anid the leaves and branches with which the place is crammed, they raise their voices in a weird chant, which peals skyward till the dawn has come again.
No man can say how ancient are these annual orgies, nor trace with certainty the beginnings in which they originated. Perhaps they date back to a period when huts, and garments even of bark, were newly acquired things, and when the Sâkai suffered both ungladly, after the manner of all wild jungle creatures. It may be that, in those days, they cast aside their bark loin-cloths to revel once more in pristine nakedness, amid the green boughs of the ​jungle, on occasions of rejoicing, and at such times. thrust behind them all memory of the more or less decorous mating of man with the maid of his choice. and of the bars of close consanguinity which ex- perience was teaching them to rear up between mem- bers of the opposite sexes. Be that how it may, the same ceremony is performed, to the immense scandal of the Malays, in every camp scattered throughout the broad Sakai country, and the same ancient chant is sung during the long, still night which follows the garnering of the rice crop. The Malays call this cus- tom ber-jermun-which more or less literally means "to pig it" because they trace a not altogether fanci- ful resemblance between the huts stuffed with jungle, in which these orgies are held, and the jermun, or nestlike shelters which wild boars construct for their protection and comfort.
But though the Malays, very properly, despise the Sakai, and reprobate all their heathenish ways and works, upon the occasion of which I write. Sentul- a man of the former race-was not only present, but was debasing himself to the extent of taking an active part in the demon worship and the unclean ceremonies of the infidels.
He was a Malay of the Malaysa Muhammadan who, in his saner moments, hated all who prayed to devils (other than those enshrined in the traditions of his own people) or who bowed down to stocks and stones. But for the time being, he was mad. He Irad come upstream, a few weeks earlier, to trade with the forest-dwellers, and when his companions had ​returned to the Malay villages, he had remained behind. Since then he had shared the life of the inmates of the Sâkai camp, forgetful of his superiority of religion and of race, and to-night was herding naked, amid the green stuff, with the chanting jungle people. And all this had befallen him because the flashing glance from a pair of pretty eyes,, set in the face of a slender Sakai girl, had blinded him and deprived him of reason.
The wife of his own race, and the child whom he had left with her in the hul downriver, troubled him not at all. All considerations of honour and duty and of the public opinion, which in the matter of a haison with an infidel woman can, among Malays, be uncommonly rigid, were forgotten. He only knew that life no longer seemed to hold for him anything of good unless Chép, the Bird, as her people named her, could be his. In the abstract, he despised the Sakai even more vehemently than of old; but for this girl's sake he smothered his feelings, dwelt among her kinsfolk as one of themselves, losing thereby the last atom of his self-respect, and consciously risking his soul's salvation. Yet all this sacrifice of his ideals had hitherto been unavailing, for Chêp was the wife of a Sakai named Ku-ish the Porcupine---- who had not only declined to sell her at even the extravagant price which the Malay had offered for her, but guarded her jealously, and gave Sentul no opportunity of prosecuting his intimacy.
On her side, she had quickly divined Sentul's pas- sion for her; and as he was younger and richer than ​Ku-ish, better favoured in his person, and more- over a Malay-a man of the dominant race-she was both pleased and flattered by his admiration. Such exotic notions as a distinction between right and wrong boiled themselves down in her intelligence into a desire to be well fed and clothed, and a reluctance to risk a severe whipping at the hands of the muscular Ku-ish. She knew that Seutul, who also attracted her physically, could provide her with hitherto un- attainable luxuries. She hoped he would be able to protect her from the wrath and violence of her hus- band, since there are few Sâkai who dare to defy a Malay; and having thus thought the matter out, so far as such a process was possible to her, she now merely awaited a fitting opportunity to clope with her lover.
Their chance came on the night of the harvest home. In the darkness Sentul crept close to Chép, and when the chant was at its loudest, he whispered. in her ear that his dugout canoe lay ready yonder, moored to the river bank, and that he loved her. Together they stole out of the hut, unobserved by the Sakai folk, who sang and grovelled in the darkness. The boat was speedily found, and the lovers, stepping into it, pushed noiselessly out into the stream.
The river at this point hustles its shallow waters, with much fuss and uproar, down a long, sloping bed of shingle, and the noise swallowed up the sound. of the paddles. Chêp, seated in the stern, held the steering oar, and Sentul, squatting in the bows, pro- pelled the boat downstream with rapid and vigorous ​strokes. Thus they journeyed on in silence through a shadowy world. The wonderful virgin forest-im- mense banks of vegetation rising sheer from the river's brink on either hand-made of the stream a narrow defile between lowering walls of darkness. The boughs and tree-tops overhead, converging closely, reduced the sky to a slender, star-bespangled ribbon. A steel-like glint played here and there upon the surface of the running water, and its insistent roar. sinking now and again to a mere murmur, was bleut with mysterious whisperings. Once in a long while an argus pheasant would yell its ringing chal- lenge from its drumming-ground on a neighbouring hill-cap or the abrupt bark of a spotted deer, or the cry of some wild beast would momentarily break in upon the stillness. Sentul and Chêp were travelling on a half-freshet, and this, in the far upper country, where the streams tear over their beds of rocks or pebbles through the gorges formed by their high banks, and where each drains a big catchment area, means that their boat was tilted downriver at a head- long pace. The dawn was breaking when the fugi- tives reached their destination-the Malay village in which Sentul had his home; and by then a good fifty miles separated them from the Sâkai camp, and they felt themselves to be safe from pursuit.
To understand this, you must realize what the Sakai of the interior is. Men of the aboriginal race who have lived for years surrounded by Malay habi- Latious are as different from him as are the fallow deer in an English park from the sambhur of the ​jungles. Sakai who have spent all their lives among Malays, who have learned to wear clothes, to count up to ten, or it may be even twenty, are hardly to be distinguished from their neighbours, the other primitive upcountry natives. They are not afraid to wander through the Malay villages; they do not rush into the jungle or hide behind trees at the ap- proach of strangers; a water-buffalo does not inspire them with as much terror as a tiger; and they do not hesitate to make, comparatively speaking, long jour- neys from their homes if occasion requires. In all this they are immeasurably more sophisticated than their kinsmen, the semi-wild Sakai of the centre of the Peninsula. These folk trade with the Malays, it is true; but the traffic has to be carried on by visitors who penetrate for the purpose into the Sâkai coun- try. Most of them have learned to speak Malay, though many are familiar only with their own jerky, monosyllabic jargon, and when their three numerals have been used, fall back, for further arithmetical expression, upon the word kerp", which means "many." For clothes they wear the narrow loin- clout, fashioned of the prepared bark of certain trees a form of garment which only very partially covers their nudities; they go, not without reason, in great terror of the Malays, and are as shy as the beasts of the forest; and never willingly do they quit that portion of the country which is still exclusively inhabited by the aboriginal tribes. It was to semi- savage Sâkai such as these that Chêp and her people belonged.
​There are tribes of other and wilder jungle-dwellers living in the fastnesses of the forests of the broad Sakai country--men who fly at the approach of even the lamer tribesmen. Their camps may occasion- ally be seen, on a clear day, far up the hillsides on the jungle-covered uplands of the remote interior; their tracks are sometimes met with, mixed with those of the bison and rhinoceros, the deer and the wild swine; but the people themselves are but rarely encountered, and when glimpsed for an instant, van- ish like shadows. The tamer Sakai trade with them in the silent fashion of the aborigines, depositing the articles of barter at certain spots in the forest, whence they are removed by the wild men and replaced by various kinds of jungle produce. Of these, the inost valued are the long, straight reeds, found only in the more remote parts of the forest, which are used by the will men and by the tamer tribes folk alike to form the inner casings of their blowpipes. All these aborigines are straight-haired peoples, the colour of whose skins is, if anything, somewhat fighter than is usual among their Malayan neighbours; but the jungles of the Peninsula harbour also a race of negrits -little sturdy black men with jutting, prognathous features, and short curly hair that clings closely to their scalps. They resemble an African negro seen through the wrong end of a field-glass; they live in improvised shelters, and are nomadic hunters; and through some of the tamer among them curb their restlessness sufficiently to plant an occasional eateh- crop. their civilization is somewhat lower than that ​of the Sakai, and they prefer to wander about in small family groups rather than to dwell together in village communities.
Chêp, of course, was deeply embued with the tradi- tions of her people, and her fancy for Sentul, her ap- preciation of the material comfort with which he would be able to surround her, and her confidence in his ability to protect her, had alone succeeded in nerving her to leave her tribe and to turn back upon the forest country with which she was familiar. A great fear fell upon her when, the last of her known landmarks having been left far behind, she found herself floating downstream through cluster after cluster of Malay villages. The instinct of her race, which bids the Sâkai plunge headlong into the forest at the approach of a stranger, was strong upon her, and her heart beat violently, like that of some wild bird held in the human hand. All her life the Malays, who preyed upon her people, had been spoken of with fear and suspicion by the simple Sâkai grouped at night-time around the fires in their squalid camps. Now she found herself alone in the very heart--for such to her it seemed--of the Malayan country. She gazed with awe and admiration at the primitive houses around her, which were poor enough speci- mens of their kind, but which revolutionized her notions as to the possibilities of architectural achieve- ment. The groves of palms and fruit trees were another marvel, for her experience of agriculture had hitherto been confined to a temporary clearing in the forest. She felt, as the Malays put it, like a ​deer astray in a royal city. Sentul, moreover, was changed in her sight. While he had lived among her people as one of themselves, he had seemed to her to be merely a superior sort of Sâkai. Now she realized, seeing him in his proper environment, that he was, in truth, a Malay-a man of the dominant, foreign race which, from time imeniorial, had enslaved her people; and at that thought her spirit sank. Pur- suit. which she had feared during the earlier hours of the night, became now for her a hope. It meant, in spite of the very workmanlike whipping which would accompany recapture, a possibility of deliverance- escape from this strangers' land, and a return to the peaceful forest she had so foolishly quitted. But in her eyes the prospect was infinitely remote. She knew how hearty was the fear with which hier people regarded the Malays; how averse they were from being lured out of the jungles with which they were familiar; and Sentul, who had acquired a fairly intimate knowledge of the ways and character of the Sâkai, fully shared her conviction that he and the girl he had abducted were now out of the reach of the tribesmen.
Accordingly Chêp and her lover halted at the latter's village, and took up their abode in his house. Of that homecoming I possess no details. Sentul's Malay wife, who was the mother of his children. must have regarded the new importation from up river with peculiar disfavour. A co-wife is always a disagreeable accretion, but when she chances to belong to the despised Sâkai race, the natural dis​content which her arrival in the household occasions is inevitably transformed into a blazing indignation. Malay women, however, can sometimes patch up a modus virendi with the obviously intolerable as well as any of their sex, when circumstances are too strong for them; and Sentul's lawful wife did not carry her opposition farther than to stipulate that Chêp and she should be accommodated in separate buts.
The Sâkai girl was delighted with her new home. In her eyes it was a veritable palace compared with the miserable shacks which contented her own people; and the number and variety of the cooking-pots, the large stock of household stores, the incredibly luxurious flock sleeping mat, and above all the pretty Malayan garments of silk and cotton of which she had suddenly become the bewildered possessor filled her woman's soul with pleasure. Also, Sentul was kind to her, and she ate good boiled rice twice daily, which was to her an mndreamed-of content. Sooner or later the irresistible longing for the jungle, which is bred in the very marrow of the forest-dwell- ers, would awaken in her, and drive her back to her own people; but of this she knew nothing as yet, and for the time she was happy.
In the Sakai camp it was not until the day had lawned that the devil-worshippers, looking at one another's tired and pallid faces through heavy, sleep- less eyes, as they crawled forth from the sodden, draggled tangle of vegetation in the house, noted that two of their number were missing. The quick sight ​of the jungle-people at once spied the trail left by the passage of the man and woman, and following it, they crowded down to the place where the dugout had been moored. Here they squatted on the ground and began to smoke.
“Rěj-ň-rēj!” they exclaimed, in the barbarous jargon of the jungle-folk. “Lost!" and then relapsed into silence.
"May she be devoured by a tiger!" snarled Ku-ish, the Porcupine, who was making guttural noises deep down in his throat; and at the word all his hearers. shuddered, and drew closer one to another. The curse is the most terrible that the jungle-people know; and if you shared your home with the great cats, as they do, you also would regard it with fear and respect. To speak of a tiger openly, in such a fashion, is moreover extraordinarily unlucky, as the monster, hearing itself mentioned, may look upon it. as an invitation to put in an immediate appearance.
Ku-ish said little more, for the Sâkai, when prey to emotion, make but a slight use of the meagre vocabulary at their command. He presently rose, however, and went back to the camp and unslung an exceedingly ancient matchlock, which was sus- pended from a beam in the roof of the headman's hut. It was the only gun which the tribe possessed, and was their most precious possession; but no one interfered with the Porcupine or tried to stay him when, musket on shoulder, he slipped into the forest. heading downstream.
Two days later, in the cool of the afternoon, Sentul ​left Chêp, the Bird, in her new house, busying herseli with the preparation of the evening meal, and ac- companied by his small son-the child of his out- raged wife went forth to catch fish in one of the swamps at the back of the village. These marshy places, which are to be found in the neighbourhood of so many Malay habitations, are ready-made rice- fields; but as the cultivation of a pada swamp de- mands more exacting labour than most Malays are willing to expend upon it, they are often left to lie fallow, while crops are grown in clearings on the hills round about. In dry weather the cracked, parched earth, upon which no vegetation sprouts, alone marks the places which, in the rainy season, are pools of stagnant water; but so surely as these ponds re- appear, the little muddy fishes, which the Malays call rúan and sepat, are to be found in them. What is the manner of their subterranean existence during the months of drought, or how they then contrive to support life, no man clearly knows, but a heavy shower suffices to bring them once more to the sur- face, and they never appear to be any the worse for their temporary interment.
Sentul carried two long joran, or Malayan fishing- rods, over his shoulder, and his small naked son pattered along at his heels bearing in his hands a tin containing bait. The child erooned to himself, after the manner of native children, but his father paced ahead of him in silence. He was in a contented and comfortable mood, for the satisfaction of his desire for Chép had soothed him body and soul.
​Arrived at the swamp, which was now a broad pool of water with here and there a tuft or two of rank rushes showing above the surface, Sentul and his son each took a rod and began patiently angling for the little fishes. The sun crept lower and lower, quick- ening its pace as it neared the western horizon, till its slanting rays flooded the surface of the pool with the crimson hue of blood. The sky overhead was dyed a thousand gorgeous tints, and the soft light of the sunset hour in Malaya mellowed all the land. Sen- tul had watched many a hundred times the miracle of beauty which, in these latitudes, is daily wrought by the rising and the setting sun, and he looked now upon the colour-drenched landscape about him with the complete indifference to the glories of nature which is one of the least attractive qualities of the Malays. If the orgy of splendour above and the reddened pool at his feet suggested anything to him, it was only that the day was waning, and that it was time to be wending his way homeward.
He set to work to gather up his fishing-tackle while his son, squatting on the ground at his side, passed a rattan cord through the fishes' gills to their mouths, so that the take might be carried with greater case. While they were thus engaged a slight rustle in the high grass behind them caused both father and son to start and look round. Not a breath of wind was blowing; but none the less, a few feet away from lemn, the spear-shaped grass tufts were agitated slightly, as though the stalks were being rushed against by the passage of some wild animal.
​"Hasten, little one," said Sentul uneasily. "Per- chance it is the striped one."
But as he spoke the words the grass was parted by human hands, and Sentul found himself gazing into the wild and bloodshot eyes of Ku-ish, the Por- cupine, along the length of an ancient gun-barrel. He had time to note the rust upon the dulled metal, the fantastic shape of the clumsy sight, and the blue tattoo-marks on the nose and forehead of his enemy. All these things he saw mechanically, in an instant of time; but ere he could move hand or foot the world around him seemed to be shattered into a thou- sand fragments to the sound of a deafening explosion, and he lay dead upon the grass, with his skull blowu to atomis.
At the sight Sentul's son fled screaming along the edge of the pool; but Ku-ish's blood was up, and lie started in pursuit. The little boy, finding flight itseless, flung himself down in the long grass, and cowering there, raised his arms above his head, shrieking for mercy in his childish treble. Ku-îsh, for answer, plunged his spear again and again into the writhing body at his feet; and at the second blow the distortions of terror faded from his victim's face and was replaced by that expression of perfect peace that is only to be seen in its completeness in the coun- tenance of a sleeping child.
Ku-ish gathered up the fish and took all the to- bacco that he could find upon Sentul's body; for a Sakai never quite loses sight of those perennial cravings of appetite which he is doomed never alto​gether to satisfy. Then, when the darkness had shut down over the land, he crept softly to Chêp's house, and bade her come forth and join him. She came at once, and without a word; for your Sâkai woman holds herself to be the chattel of whatever man chances at the moment to have possessed him- self of her, forcibly or otherwise. She wept furtively when Ku-ish told her, in a few passionless sentences, of how he had killed Sentul and his child; and she bewailed herself at the top of her voice when, at the first convenient halting-place, she received the hand- some trouncing which Sentul dealt out to her, with no grudging hand, as her share in the general chastise- ment. But when the welting was over she followed him meekly enough, with the tears still wet upon her cheeks, and made no effort to escape. Thus Ku-ish, the Porcupine, and Chêp, the Bird, made their way back through the strange forests, until they had once more regained the familiar Sakai country, and were safe among their own people.
Pursuit in such a place is hopeless; for a Sâkai comes and goes like a shadow, and can efface himself utterly if he desire so to do. Thus, though Sentul's relatives clamoured for vengeance, little could be done. I was at that time in charge of the district where these things occurred, and it was only with the greatest difficulty, and after pledging myself to guarantee their personal immunity, that I was able to induce the various Sakai headmen to meet me near the confines of their country. My request that Ku-ish should be handed over to me for trial was ​received by the assembled elders as a suggestion that was manifestly ridiculous. Ku-ish, they observed sententiously, was in the jungle, the portals of which were closed to all save the Sâkai. Unaided by them, neither white man nor Malay could ever hope to set hands upon him. They would take no part in the hunt. I could not bring any material pressure to bear, as I had undertaken that no harm should befall them at the meeting, and when we had once separated they could vanish quite as effectively as Ku-ish had done. They were fully aware of all this, and were irritatingly placid and happy. It looked like an absolute impasse.
At length a very aged man, the principal Sâkai elder present, a wrinkled and unimaginably dirty old savage, scarred by encounters with wild beasts, and gray with skin diseases and wood-ashes, lifted up his voice and spoke, shaking his straggling mop of grizzled hair in time to the cadence of his words.
"There is a custom, Tian," he said. "There is a custom when such things befall. The Porcupine hath killed the Gob, and our tribe must repay sevenfold. Seven lives for the life of a Gob. It is the custom."
He spoke in Malay, which gave him an unusual command of numerals, and he had attained to a degree of civilization and experience which enabled him to perform the brain-cracking feat of counting up to ten.
The proposal sounded generous, but a little in- quiry presently revealed the old chief's real inten-
* Gob-Stranger, i. ., any person who is not a Såkai. ​tions. His suggestion was that the blood-money
to be exacted from his tribe should take the form of seven human beings, who were to be duly delivered to the relatives of the dead man as slaves. These seven unfortunates were not to be members of his own or Ku-ish's tribe, but were to be captured by them from among the really wild people of the hills, who had had no share in the ill-doing, which it was my object to punish. The Porcupine and his brethren, he explained, would run some risk, and would be put to a considerable amount of trouble and exertion before the seven wild Sâkai could be caught, and this was to be the measure of their punishment. The blameless savages of the moun- tains I was, moreover, assured, were not deserving of any pity, as they had obviously been created in order to provide the wherewithal to meet such emier- gencies, and to supply their more civilized neighbours with a valuable commodity for barter. The old chief went on to tell me that his tribe would be merci- fully free from all fear of reprisals as owing to some incomprehensible but providential superstition, the wild Sakai never pursued a raiding party beyond a spot where the latter had left a spear sticking up- right in the ground. This, he said, was well known to the marauders, who took care to avail themselves of the protection thus afforded to them as soon as ever their captives had been secured. The assembled Sakai were unable to account for the paralysis with which the sight of this abandoned spear invariably smote the wild folk, but the extraordinary conven ​ience of the thing evidently appealed strongly to their utilitarian minds.
Blood-money in past times, I was assured by Ma- lays and Sâkai alike, had always been paid in this manner when it was due from the semi-wild tribes of the interior. It was the custom; and Sentul's relatives were urgent in their prayers to me to accept the proposal. Instead, I exacted a heavy fine of getah* and other jungle produce from the tribe to which Ku-ish, the Porcupine, belonged. This was regarded as a monstrous injustice by the Sakai, and as an inadequate indemnity by the Malays; and I thus gave complete dissatisfaction to all parties concerned, as is not infrequently the fate of the adjudicating white man. However, as the Oriental proverb has it, "an order is an order till one is strong enough to lisobey it"; so the fine was paid by the Sakai and accepted by the Malays with grumblings of which I only heard the echoes.
The really remarkable features of the incidents related are that Ku-ish ever plucked up the courage to quit the jungles with which he was familiar and to penetrate alone into the Malayan country, and that he, the son of a down-trodden race, dared for once to pay a portion of the heavy debt of vengeance for long years of grinding cruelty and wicked wrong which the Sakai owe to the Malays.
* Ch Gutta-reha.