Part 7

"Day after day went by while the great man hung like a pariah dog on the words of his haughty captive. She scorned his words of love, laughed at his prayers, and sneered at his devotion. Day after day the sun beat down on the burnished decks of the war praus. Night after night the evening gun in the besieged fort sent forth its mocking challenge: still the Dato made no motion. Oh, but it was pitiful! One by one the praus slipped away,--first those from Acheen, and then those from Johore,--but the valiant Laksamana saw them not. He was blind to all save one. Then she spoke: 'If thou lovest me as thou boastest, and would win my smiles, send me to my father; then go and bring me of this gold of Ophir,--for the Dato had laid his heart bare before her,--enough to sink yon boat. The daughter of a Braganza does not unite herself with a pauper. When the moon is full again, I will expect you.'

"So did the Laksamana, to the everlasting shame of Islam. When the moon was full he returned in his shining prau before the walls of Malacca, He brought from Ophir, of gold more than enough; of the pearls of Ceylon he brought a chupah full to the brim. He robbed his great palace, that he might lay at the feet of the Portuguese a fortune such as Solomon only ever saw. And yet the captains of his fleet cared not for the gold, so long as the mighty Dato saved his honor. When he left for the quay, on which stood the Governor, his daughter, and the priests of their religion, they said not a word, for he passed by with averted face; but each man grasped the jewelled handle of his kris, and swore to Allah under his breath that should but one hair of the mighty Admiral's head be lacking when he returned, they would cut the false heart from the woman and feed it to the dogs.

"So spoke the captains; but ere the breath had passed their lips their chief was a prisoner, and the guns from the fort hurled defiance at the betrayed.

"It was pitiful! Allah was avenged.

"Fiercely raged the battle, and when there was a breach in the walls, and the captain besar had ordered the attack, the Portuguese held the mighty Laksamana over the walls, and reviled the allied fleets with words of derision.

"Not one moved, and all was still. Suddenly the Admiral raised his head, and gazed out and down at his followers. Then he spoke, and the sound of his voice reached far out to the most distant prau that lay becalmed within the shadow of casuarina-shaded Puli.

"'Allah il Allah, I have sinned, and I must die. No more shall my name be known in the land. I am no longer laksamana; neither am I a dato. Allah is just. Tuan Allah Suka!'

"A foreigner smote him in the mouth, and a great cry arose from without the walls.

"The war went on; but day after day did the Governor send a message to the Laksamana in the dungeon. 'Reveal the spot where thy gold is hidden, and thy life and liberty are granted.'

"Day by day the Dato replied, 'My life is a pollution in the nostrils of Allah. Take it.'

"So they laid the great chief on the stones of his cell, bound hand and foot, and one by one did they break the joints of his toes, his fingers, and then the joints of his legs and arms. When they had finished, and he still lived, the woman came to him and mocked him, but the Admiral closed his eyes and prayed. 'O Allah, the all-merciful and the loving kind, forgive me for my erring heart. Thou knowest that it goes out to this woman still. Let not my country suffer for my deeds. I gave unto thy servant Solomon of the gold that has made us great. If thou canst, thou wilt whisper the secret of our nation to one of thy chosen people, that they may have means whereby to fight thy battles.'

"And then the woman raised her hand, and with one stroke of the axe an attendant severed from his body the head of the once mighty Laksamana of the fleets of Johore, Acheen and Maur.

"So died the secret of Ophir. So fell Malacca forever into the hands of the foreigner."

The Tuan Hakim's voice trembled as he closed. During the tragic recital he had dropped into the soft, melodious chant of his nation. At times he would lapse into Malay, and the boatmen would push forward and listen with unconcealed excitement. Then, as he returned to English, they would drop back into their places, but never take their eyes off the face of the speaker. Only our China "boys" took no interest in the past of Maur. It was tiffin time, and they were anxious to set before us our lunch of rice curry, gula Malacca, whiskey and soda.

The sun was directly above us, and the fierce, steely glare of the Malayan sky and water dazzled our eyes. Mount Ophir looked as far ahead as ever. The winding course of the river seemed at times to take us directly away from it.

Just as we had finished our meal, and had lighted our manilas, the steersman turned the little launch sharply about, and headed directly for the shore. In a moment we had shot under and through the deep fringe of mangrove trees, and had emerged into the jungle. On all sides the trees rose, columnar and straight, and the ground was firm, although densely covered with ferns and vines.

The launch stopped, and the chief turned to me. "Now for the climb. We have thirty miles to the base of the mountain. We will push on ten miles, and spend the night at a Malay village. The next day we will try and reach the base of the mountain."

I looked about me. We might have been surrounded by prison walls, for all hope there seemed to be of our getting an inch into the jungle.

Our servants gathered up our rather extensive impedimenta, and sprang into the water. We were forced to follow suit, and begin our day's march with wet feet. A few steps up the stream we came upon an old elephant track and plunged boldly in,--and it was in! For three miles we labored through a series of the most elaborate mud-holes that I have ever seen. The elephants in breaking a path through the jungle are extremely timid in their boldness. The second one always steps in the footprints of the first. Year after year it is the same, until in course of time the path is marked by a series of pitfalls, often two feet in depth; and as it rains nearly every day they become a seething, slimy paste of mud.

Our heavy cloth shoes and stockings did not protect us from the attacks of innumerable leeches; for when we at last reached an open bit of forest and sat down to rest, we found dozens of them attached to our legs and even on our bodies. They were small, and beautifully marked with stripes of bright yellow.

It was twilight when we neared the welcome kampong. We had sent a runner ahead to notify the punghulo of our arrival, and as we finished our struggle with the last thorny rattan, and tripped over the last rubber-vine, we could hear the shouting of men and the barking of dogs. Evidently we were expected.

The kampong might have been any other in the kingdom, and the little old weazened punghulo, who came bowing and smiling forward, might have been at the head of any one of a hundred other kampongs,--they were all so much alike. A half-dozen attap bungalows, built under a cocoanut grove, all facing toward a central plaza; a score of dogs for each bungalow; a flock of featherless fowls scratching and wallowing beneath them, and a bevy of half-naked children playing with a rattan ball within the light of a central fire,--made up the details of a little picture of Malayan home life that had become very familiar to me within the last three years.

Our servants at once set about preparing supper before the fire, while we for politeness' sake compounded a mouthful of betel-nut and syrah leaf from the punghulo's state box.

The next morning we set out for our twenty miles' tramp, along a narrow jungle path, accompanied by some ten natives of the village whom my companion had retained to cut a path for us up the mountain. It was a long, tiresome journey, and we were heartily glad when it was ended, and we were encamped on the rocky banks of a fern-hid stream.

Twice during our day's march had we crossed deep, ragged depressions in the earth, which were overgrown with a jungle that seemed to be coequal in age with the surrounding trees. We did not pause to examine them, although our natives pointed them out with the expressive word mas (gold). We promised to do that at a later date. On the border of the creek I found some gold-bearing rock, and while the Tuan Hakim was engaged in securing some superb specimens of the great atlas moth, I sat down and crushed some fragments of it, and obtained enough gold to satisfy me that the rock would run four ounces to the ton.

It was a beautiful night. We lay under our mosquito netting, and gazed up through the interlacing branches of the trees at the star-strewn sky, and smoked our manilas in weary content. The long, full "coo-ee" of the stealthy argus pheasant sounded at intervals in distant parts of the forest. It might have been the call of the orang-utan, or the wild hillmen of the country, for they have imitated the call of this most glorious of birds.

The shrill, never ceasing whir of the cicada hardly attracted our attention; while the whistle and crash of a monkey that was inspecting us from his perch among the trees above caused me to peer upward, in hopes of catching a glimpse of his grayish outlines.

I had not had an opportunity of asking my companion for the details of his tragic story. I turned to him, and found him watching me attentively. "Were you listening to the call of the coo-ee?" he asked.

"Yes," I answered.

"It is the queen of birds. I will get you one. I have never shot one. They only come out at night, and then only to disappear, but we can trap them. It will die in captivity. That is why Solomon could not keep them, and sent for new ones every three years."

"What became of the woman?" I asked.

"The body of the Laksamana was thrown over the walls by the Portuguese," he said moodily. "It was embalmed and laid away. Two months from that day the woman was walking outside the walls. The war was over. There was no more gold. Three of my people sprang upon her and the Portuguese she was to marry." He paused for a moment and looked up at the stars, then went on in a cold, matter-of-fact tone. "They were lashed to the headless body of the man they had murdered, and thrown into the royal tiger-cage, by order of his Highness, Ali, Sultan of Maur."

I raised my curtain and threw the stub of my cigar out into the darkness, a smothered exclamation of horror escaping my lips.

"It was the will of Allah. Good night."

It was nearly nine o'clock the next morning before we started. Our Malays had gone on at daybreak, to cut a path up the base of the mountain to where the open forest began.

We ascended steadily up a moderate slope for several miles, keeping the ravine on our left. It was comparatively easy work after we had left the jungle behind. After crossing a level plateau we once more found ourselves in a forest so dense that our men had to use their parangs again. The heat of the jungle was intense, and we suffered severely from the stings of a fly that is not unlike a cicada in shape.

From the jungle we emerged into an immense stone field,--padang-batu, the Malays called it. It extended along the mountain side as far as we could see, in places quite bare, at others deeply fissured and covered with a most luxuriant vegetation. We tramped at times waist deep through ferns, some green, some dark red, and some lined with yellow, clumps of the splendid Dipteris Horsfieldi and Matonia pectinala, with their slender stems and wide-spreading palmate fronds towering two feet above our heads. The delicate maidenhair lay like a rich carpet beneath our feet, while hundreds of magnificent climbing pitcher-plants doused us with water as we knocked against them. Our sympiesometer showed us that we were twenty-eight hundred feet above the sea.

Beyond the padang-batu we entered a forest of almost Alpine character, dwarfed and stunted. For several hours we worked along ridges, descended into valleys, and ascended almost precipitous ledges, until we finally reached a peak that was separated from the true mountain by a deep, forbidding cañon.

Several of the older men of the party gave out, and we were forced to leave them with half our baggage and what water was left: there was a spring, they told us, near the summit.

The scramble down the one side of the cañon, and up the other, was a hard hour's work. Its rocky, almost perpendicular sides were covered with a bushy vegetation on top of a foundation of mosses and dead leaves, so that it afforded us more hindrance than help.

Just below the summit we came to where a projecting rock gave us shelter, and a natural basin contained flowing water. Dropping my load, and hardly waiting to catch my breath, I was on my way up the fifty feet that lay between us and the top. In another moment I had mounted the small, rocky, rhododendron-covered platform, and stood, the first of my party, on the summit of Mount Ophir. The little American flag that I had brought with me I waved frantically above my head, much to the amusement of my attendants.

Four thousand feet below, to the east, stretched the silver sheen of the Indian Ocean. The smoke of a passing steamer lay like a dark stain on the blue and white of the sky. Close into the shore was the little capital town of Bander Maharani, connecting itself with us by a long, snake-like ribbon of shimmering light,--the great river Maur.

To the north and west successive ranges of hill and valley, divided by the glistening river, and all covered by an interminable jungle of vivid green, fell away until lost in the cloudless horizon.

For a moment I stood and gazed out over the vast expanse that lay before me, my mind filled with the wild, unwritten poetry of its jungles and its people; then I turned to my companion.

"It is beautiful!"

He shrugged his shoulders.

"But not equal to the view from our own Mount Washington."

"Then why take so much trouble to secure it? Mount Pulei is as high, and there is a good road to its top."

I laughed. "Mount Pulei or Mount Washington is not Ophir."

"True!" he answered, opening his eyes in surprise at the seeming absurdity of my statement. "He that told you they were speaketh a lie."

We spent the night on the summit, and watched the sun drop into the midst of the sea, away to the west. It was cool and delightful after the moist, heat-laden atmosphere of the lowlands, and a strong breeze freed us from the swarm of tiger mosquitoes that we had learned to expect as the darkness came on.

Where the Ophir of the Bible really is, will ever be a question of doubt. To my mind it embraces the entire East--the Malay Peninsula, Ceylon, India, and even China,--Ophir being merely a comprehensive term, possibly taken from this Mount Ophir of Johore, which signified the most central point of the region to which Solomon's ships sailed. For all ages the gold of the Malay Peninsula has been known; from the earliest times there has been intercourse between the Arabians and the Malays, while the Malayan was the very first of the far Eastern countries to adopt the Mohammedan religion and customs.

All the articles mentioned in the Biblical account of Mount Ophir are found in and about Malacca in abundance, while on the coast of Africa two of them, peacocks and silver, are missing.

If the Hebrew word thukyim is translated peacocks, and not parrots, then Solomon's ships must have turned east after passing the Straits of Bab-el-Mandeb, and not south along the coast of Africa toward Sofala. For peacocks are only found in India and Malaya.

It is a singular fact that in the language of the Orang Bennu, or aborigines of the Malay Peninsula, that word "peacocks," which in the modern Malay is marrak, is in the aboriginal chim marak, which is the exact termination of the Hebrew tuchim. Their word for bird is tchem, another surprising similarity.

The morning sun brought us to our feet long before it was light in the vast spaces beneath our eyes. The jungle held its reddening rays for a moment; they flamed along the course of a half-hidden river; we stood out clear and distinct in their glorious effulgence, and then the broken, denuded crags and ragged ravines of the padang-batu absorbed them in its black fastnesses.

The gold of Mount Ophir was all about us. The air, the stones, the very trees, seemed to have been transformed into the glorious metal that the little fleets of Solomon and Huram sailed so far to seek. The Aurea Chersonese was a breathing, pulsating reality.

BUSUK

The Story of a Malayan Girlhood

They called her Busuk, or "the youngest" at her birth. Her father, the old punghulo, or chief, of the little kampong, or village, of Passir Panjang, whispered the soft Allah Akbar, the prayer to Allah, in her small brown ear.

The subjects of the punghulo brought presents of sarongs run with gold thread, and not larger than a handkerchief, for Busuk to wear about her waist. They also brought gifts of rice in baskets of cunningly woven cocoanut fibre; of bananas, a hundred on a bunch; of durians, that filled the bungalow with so strong an odor that Busuk drew up her wrinkled, tiny face into a quaint frown; and of cocoanuts in their great green, oval shucks.

Busuk's old aunt, who lived far away up the river Maur, near the foot of Mount Ophir, sent a yellow gold pin for the hair; her husband, the Hadji Mat, had washed the gold from the bed of the stream that rushed by their bungalow.

Busuk's brother, who was a sergeant in his Highness's the Sultan's artillery at Johore, brought a tiny pair of sandals all worked in many-colored beads. Never had such presents been seen at the birth of any other of Punghulo Sahak's children.

Two days later the Imam Paduka Tuan sent Busuk's father a letter sewn up in a yellow bag. It contained a blessing for Busuk. Busuk kept the letter all her life, for it was a great thing for the high priest to do.

On the seventh day Busuk's head was shaven and she was named Fatima; but they called her Busuk in the kampong, and some even called her Inchi Busuk, the princess.

From the low-barred window of Busuk's home she could look out on the shimmering, sunlit waters of the Straits of Malacca. The loom on which Busuk's mother wove the sarongs for the punghulo and for her sons stood by the side of the window, and Busuk, from the sling in which she sat on her mother's side, could see the fishing praus glide by, and also the big lumber tonkangs, and at rare intervals one of his Highness's launches.

Sometimes she blinked her eyes as a vagrant shaft of sunlight straggled down through the great green and yellow fronds of the cocoanut palms that stood about the bungalow; sometimes she kept her little black eyes fixed gravely on the flying shuttle which her mother threw deftly back and forth through the many-colored threads; but best of all did she love to watch the little gray lizards that ran about on the palm sides of the house after the flies and moths.

She was soon able to answer the lizards' call of "gecho, gecho," and once she laughed outright when one, in fright of her baby-fingers, dropped its tail and went wiggling away like a boat without a rudder. But most of the time she swung and crowed in her wicker cradle under the low rafters.

When Busuk grew older, she was carried every day down the ladder of the house and put on the warm white sand with the other children. They were all naked, save for a little chintz bib that was tied to their necks; so it made no difference how many mudpies they made on the beach nor how wet they got in the tepid waters of the ocean. They had only to look out carefully for the crocodiles that glided noiselessly among the mangrove roots.

One day one of Busuk's playmates was caught in the cruel jaws of a crocodile, and lost its hand. The men from the village went out into the labyrinth of roots that stood up above the flood like a huge scaffolding, and caught the man-eater with ropes of the gamooty palm. They dragged it up the beach and put out its eyes with red-hot spikes of the hard billion wood.

Although the varnished leaves of the cocoanuts kept almost every ray of sunlight out of the little village, and though the children could play in the airy spaces under their own houses, their heads and faces were painted with a paste of flour and water to keep their tender skins from chafing in the hot, moist air.

At evening, when the fierce sun went down behind the great banian tree that nearly hid Mount Pulei, the kateeb would sound the call to prayer on a hollow log that hung up before the little palm-thatched mosque. Then Busuk and her playmates would fall on their faces, while the holy man sang in a soft, monotonous voice the promises of the Koran, the men of the kampong answering. "Allah il Allah," he would sing, and "Mohammed is his prophet," they would answer.

Every night Busuk would lie down on a mat on the floor of the house with a little wooden pillow under her neck, and when she dared she would peep down through the open spaces in the bamboo floor into the darkness beneath. Once she heard a low growl, and a great dark form stood right below her. She could see its tail lashing its sides with short, whip-like movements. Then all the dogs in the kampong began to bark, and the men rushed down their ladders screaming, "Harimau! Harimau!" (A tiger! A tiger!) The next morning she found that her pet dog, Fatima, named after herself, had been killed by one stroke of the great beast's paw. Once a monster python swung from a cocoanut tree through the window of her home, and wound itself round and round the post of her mother's loom. It took a dozen men to tie a rope to the serpent's tail, and pull it out.