Part 8

Busuk went everywhere astride the punghulo's broad shoulders as he collected the taxes and settled the disputes in the little village. She went out into the straits in the big prau that floated the star and crescent of Johore over its stern, to look at the fishing-stakes, and was nearly wrecked by a great water-spout that burst within a few feet of them.

Then she went twice to Johore, and gazed in open-eyed wonder at the palaces of the Sultan and at the fort in which her uncle was an officer.

"Some day," she thought, "I may see his Highness, and he may notice me and smile." For had not his Highness spoken twice to her father and called him a good man? So whenever she went to Johore she put on her best sarong and kabaya> and in her jetty black hair she put the pin her aunt had given her, with a spray of sweet-smelling chumpaka flower.

When she was four years old she went to the penager to learn to read and write. In a few months she could outstrip any one in the class in tracing Arabic characters on the sand-sprinkled floor, and she knew whole chapters in the Koran.

So the days were passed in the little kampong under the gently swaying cocoanuts, and the little Malayan girl grew up like her companions, free and wild, with little thought beyond the morrow. That some day she was to be married, she knew; for since her first birthday she had been engaged to Mamat, the son of her father's friend, the punghulo of Bander Bahru.

She had never seen Mamat, nor he her; for it was not proper that a Malay should see his intended before marriage. She had heard that he was strong and lithe of limb, and could beat all his fellows at the game called ragga. When the wicker ball was in the air he never let it touch the ground; for he was as quick with his head and feet, shoulders, hips, and breast, as with his hands. He could swim and box, and had once gone with his father to the seaports on New Year's Day at Singapore, and his own prau had won the short-distance race.

Mamat was three years older than Busuk, and they were to be married when she was fifteen.

At first she cried a little, for she was sad at the thought of giving up her playmates. But then the older women told her that she could chew betel when she was married, and her mother showed her a little set of betel-nut boxes, for which she had sent to Singapore. Each cup was of silver, and the box was cunningly inlaid with storks and cherry blossoms. It had cost her mother a month's hard labor on the loom.

Then Mamat was not to take her back to his father's bungalow. He had built a little one of his own, raised up on palm posts six feet from the ground, so that she need not fear tigers or snakes or white ants. Its sides were of plaited palm leaves, every other one colored differently, and its roof was of the choicest attap, each leaf bent carefully over a rod of rattan, and stitched so evenly that not a drop of rain could get through.

Inside there was a room especially for her, with its sides hung with sarongs, and by the window was a loom made of kamooning wood, finer than her mother's. Outside, under the eaves, was a house of bent rattan for her ring-doves, and a shelf where her silver-haired monkey could sun himself.

So Busuk forgot her grief, and she watched with ill-concealed eagerness the coming of Mamat's friends with presents of tobacco and rice and bone-tipped krises. Then for the first time she was permitted to open the camphor-wood chest and gaze upon all the beautiful things that she was to wear for the one great day.

Her mother and elder sisters had been married in them, and their children would, one after another, be married in them after her.

There was a sarong of silk, run with threads of gold and silver, that was large enough to go around her body twice and wide enough to hang from her waist to her ankles; a belt of silver, with a gold plate in front, to hold the sarong in place; a kabaya, or outer garment, that looked like a dressing-gown, and was fastened down the front with golden brooches of curious Malayan workmanship; a pair of red-tipped sandals; and a black lace scarf to wear about her black hair. There were earrings and a necklace of colored glass, and armlets, bangles, and gold pins. They all dazzled Busuk, and she could hardly wait to try them on.

A buffalo was sacrificed on the day of the ceremony. The animal was "without blemish or disease." The men were careful not to break its fore or hind leg or its spine, after death, for such was the law. Its legs were bound and its head was fastened, and water was poured upon it while the kadi prayed. Then he divided its windpipe. When it was cooked, one half of it was given to the priests and the other half to the people.

All the guests, and there were many, brought offerings of cooked rice in the fresh green leaves of the plantain, and baskets of delicious mangosteens, and pink mangoes and great jack-fruits. A curry was made from the rice that had forty sambuls to mix with it. There were the pods of the moringa tree, chilies and capsicums, prawns and decayed fish, chutneys and onions, ducks' eggs and fish roes, peppers and cucumbers and grated cocoanuts.

It was a wonderful curry, made by one of the Sultan's own cooks; for the Punghulo Sahak spared no expense in the marriage of this, his last daughter, and a great feast is exceedingly honorable in the eyes of the guests.

Busuk's long black hair had to be done up in a marvellous chignon on the top of her head. First, her maids washed it beautifully clean with the juice of the lime and the lather of the soap-nut; then it was combed and brushed until every hair glistened like ebony; next it was twisted up and stuck full of the quaint golden and tortoise-shell bodkins, with here and there a spray of jasmine and chumpaka.

Busuk's milky-white teeth had to be filed off more than a fourth. She put her head down on the lap of the woman and closed her eyes tight to keep back the hot tears that would fall, but after the pain was over and her teeth were blackened, she looked in the mirror at her swollen gums and thought that she was very beautiful. Now she could chew the betel-nut from the box her mother had given her!

The palms of her hands and the nails of her fingers and toes were painted red with henna, and the lids of her eyes touched up with antimony. When all was finished, they led her out into the great room, which was decorated with mats of colored palm, masses of sweet-smelling flowers and maidenhair fern. There they placed her in the chair of state to receive her relatives and friends.

She trembled a little for fear Mamat would not think her beautiful, but when, last of all, he came up and smiled and claimed the bit of betel-nut that she was chewing for the first time, and placed it in his mouth, she smiled back and was very happy.

Then the kadi pronounced them man and wife in the presence of all, for is it not written, "Written deeds may be forged, destroyed, or altered; but the memory of what is transacted in the presence of a thousand witnesses must remain sacred? Allah il Allah!" And all the people answered, "Suka! Suka!" (We wish it! We wish it!)

Then Mamat took his seat on the dais beside the bride, and the punghulo passed about the betel-box. First, Busuk took out a syrah leaf smeared with lime and placed in it some broken fragments of the betel-nut, and chewed it until a bright red liquid oozed from the corners of her mouth. The others did the same.

Then the women brought garlands of flowers--red allamandas, yellow convolvulus, and pink hibiscus--and hung them about Busuk and Mamat, while the musicians outside beat their crocodile-hide drums in frantic haste.

The great feast began out in the sandy plaza before the houses. There was cock-fighting and kicking the ragga ball, wrestling and boxing, and some gambling among the elders.

Toward night Busuk was put in a rattan chair and carried by the young men, while Mamat and the girls walked by her side, a mile away, where her husband's big cadjang-covered prau lay moored. It was to take them to his bungalow at Bander Bahru. The band went, too, and the boys shot off guns and fire-crackers all the way, until Busuk's head swam, and she was so happy that the tears came into her eyes and trickled down through the rouge on her cheeks.

So ended Busuk's childhood. She was not quite fifteen when she became mistress of her own little palm-thatched home. But it was not play housekeeping with her; for she must weave the sarongs for Mamat and herself for clothes and for spreads at night, and the weaving of each cost her twenty days' hard labor. If she could weave an extra one from time to time, Mamat would take it up to Singapore and trade it at the bazaar for a pin for the hair or a sunshade with a white fringe about it.

Then there were the shell-fish and prawns on the sea-shore to be found, greens to be sought out in the jungle, and the padi, or rice, to be weeded. She must keep a plentiful supply of betel-nut and lemon leaves for Mamat and herself, and one day there was a little boy to look after and make tiny sarongs for.

So, long before the time that our American girls are out of school, and about the time they are putting on long dresses, Busuk was a woman. Her shoulders were bent, her face wrinkled, her teeth decayed and falling out from the use of the syrah leaf. She had settled the engagement of her oldest boy to a little girl of two years in a neighboring kampong, and was dusting out the things in the camphor-wood chest, preparatory to the great occasion.

I used to wonder, as I wandered through one of these secluded little Malay villages that line the shores of the peninsula and are scattered over its interior, if the little girl mothers who were carrying water and weaving mats did not sometimes long to get down on the warm, white sands and have a regular romp among themselves,--playing "Cat-a-corner" or "I spy"; for none of them were over seventeen or eighteen!

Still their lives are not unhappy. Their husbands are kind and sober, and they are never destitute. They have their families about them, and hear laughter and merriment from one sunny year to another.

Busuk's father-in-law is dead now, and the last time I visited Bander Bahru to shoot wild pig, Mamat was punghulo, collecting the taxes and administering the laws.

He raised the back of his open palm to his forehead with a quiet dignity when I left, after the day's sport, and said, "Tabek! Tuan Consul. Do not forget Mamat's humble bungalow." And Busuk came down the ladder with little Mamat astride her bare shoulders, with a pleasant "Tabek! Tuan! (Good-by, my lord.) May Allah's smile be ever with you."

A CROCODILE HUNT

At the foot of Mount Ophir

The little pleasant-faced Malay captain of his Highness's three-hundred ton yacht Pante called softly, close to my ear, "Tuan--Tuan Consul, Gunong Ladang!" I sprang to my feet, rubbed my eyes, and gazed in the direction indicated by the brown hand.

I saw not five miles off the low jungle-bound coast of the peninsula, and above it a great bank of vaporous clouds, pierced by the molten rays of the early morning sun. As I looked around inquiringly, the captain, bowing, said: "Tuan," and I raised my eyes. Again I saw the lofty mountain peak surmounting the cushion of clouds, standing out bold and clear against the almost fierce azure of the Malayan sky.

"Mount Ophir!" burst from my lips. The captain smiled and went forward to listen to the linesman's "two fathoms, sir, two and one half fathoms, sir, two fathoms, sir"; for we were crossing the shallow bar that protects the mouth of the great river Maur from the ocean.

The tide was running out like a mill-race. The Pante was backing from side to side, and then pushing carefully ahead, trying to get into the deep water beyond, before low tide.

Suddenly there was a soft, grating sound and the captain came to me and touched his hat.

"We are on the bar, sir. Will you send a despatch by the steam-cutter to Prince Suliman, asking for the launch? We cannot get off until the night tide."

The Pante had so swung around that we could plainly see the big red istana, or palace, of Prince Suliman close to the sandy shore, surrounded by a grove of graceful palms. With the aid of our glasses the white and red blur farther up the river resolved itself into the streets and quays of the little city of Bander Maharani, the capital of the province of Maur in dominions of his Highness Abubaker, Sultan of Johore. Above and overshadowing all both in beauty and historical interest was the famous old mountain where King Solomon sent his diminutive ships for "gold, silver, peacocks, and apes."

By the time the ladies were astir, the mists had vanished and Gunong Ladang, or as it is styled in Holy Writ Mount Ophir, presented to our admiring gaze its massive outlines, set in a frame of green and blue. The dense jungle crept halfway up its sides and at the point where the cloud stratum had rested but an hour before, it merged into a tangled network of vines and shrubs which in their turn gave place to the black, red rock that shone like burnished brass.

If our minds wandered away from visions of future crocodile-shooting to dreams of the past wealth that had been taken from the ancient mines that honeycombed the base of the mountain, it is hardly to be wondered at. If Dato or "Lord" Garlands told us queer stories of woods and masonry that antedated the written history of the country, stories of mines and workings that were overgrown with a jungle that looked as primeval as the mountain itself, he was to be excused on the plea that we, waiting on a sandy bar with the metallic glare of the sea in our eyes, were glad of any subject to distract our thoughts.

The Resident's launch brought out Prince Mat and the Chief Justice, both of whom spoke English with an easy familiarity. Both had been in Europe and Prince Mat had dined with Queen Victoria. One night at table he related the incidents of that dinner with a delightful exactness that might have pleased her Britannic Majesty could she have listened.

I waited only long enough to see the ladies installed in a suite of rooms in the Residency, then donned a suit of white duck, stepped into a river launch in company with Inchi Mohamed, the Chief Justice, and steamed out into the broad waters of the Maur.

The southernmost kingdom of the great continent of Asia is the little Sultanate of Johore, ruled over by one of the most enlightened Princes of the East. Fourteen miles from Singapore, just across the notorious old Straits of Malacca, is his capital and the palace of the Sultan.

We had been guests of the State for the past two weeks. Its ruler, among other kind attentions to us, had suggested a visit to his out province Maur and a crocodile hunt along the banks of the broad river that wound about the foot of Mount Ophir.

Fifteen hours' steam in his beautiful yacht along the picturesque shores of Johore brought us to the realization of a long-cherished dream,--the seeing for ourselves the mountain whose exact location had been a subject of conjecture for so many centuries. Were I a scholar and explorer and not a sportsman, I might again and more explicitly set forth facts which I consider indubitable proof that the Mount Ophir of Asia and not the Mount Ophir of Africa is, as I have already claimed, the Mount Ophir of the Bible. But here, I wish only to narrate the record of a few pleasant days spent at its foot.

The Maur River, at its mouth, is a mile across; it is so deep that one can run close up to its muddy banks and peer in under the labyrinth of mangrove roots that stand like a rustic scaffold beneath its trunks, protecting them from the highest flood-tides.

It was some time before I could pick out a crocodile as he lay sleeping in his muddy bath, showing nothing above the slime except the serrated line of his great back, which was so incrusted that, but for its regularity, it might pass for the limb of a tree or some fantastically shaped root.

"There you are!" said the Chief Justice, pointing at the bank almost before we had reached the opposite side. I strained my eyes and raised the hammer of my "50 x 110" Winchester; for I was to have a shot at my first live crocodile.

We drew nearer and nearer the shore and yet I failed to see anything that resembled an animal of any sort. The little launch slowed down and the crew all pointed toward the bank. I cannot now imagine what I expected then to see, but something must have been in my mind's eye that blinded my bodily sight; for there, right before me, was a little fellow not over three feet long.

He had just come up from the river, and his hide was clean and almost a dark birch color. His head was raised and he was regarding us suspiciously from his small green eyes.

I put down my rifle in disgust, and took up my revolver. I had no idea of wasting a hundred and ten grains of powder on a baby. I took careful aim and fired. The revolver was a self-cocker, and yet before I could fire again, he had whirled about and was out of reach. He was gone and I drew a long breath. The Malays said I struck him. If I did, I had no means of proving it.

The only way to bag crocodiles is to kill them outright or nearly so. If they have strength enough to crawl into the river and die, they will come to the surface again two days later; but the chances are that they will get under a root, or that in some way you will lose them. Out of forty or fifty big and small ones that we hit only five floated down past the Residency.

I also soon found out that my hundred and ten grain cartridges were none too large for even the smaller crocodiles. As for those eighteen and twenty feet long, it was necessary that the Chief Justice and I should fire at the same time and at the same spot in order to arrest the big saurians in their wild scramble for the water.

We had tried some half-dozen good shots at small fellows, varying from two to five feet in length, when I began to lose interest in the sport; so I turned to watch a colony of little gray, jungle monkeys, that were swinging and chattering and scolding among the mangrove trees.

One of them picked a long dart-shaped fruit off the tree and essayed to drop it on the head of his mate below. I was about to call my companion's attention to it, when I heard a crash among the roots near where the missile had fallen, and a crocodile, so large that I distrusted my senses, turned his great log-like head to one side and gazed up at the frightened monkeys. I raised my hand, and the launch paused not over twenty yards from where he lay patiently waiting for one of the monkeys to drop within reach of his great jaws.

The sun had dried the mud on his back until the entire surface reminded me of the beach of a muddy mill-pond that I used to frequent as a boy.

"Boyah besar!" (A royal crocodile) repeated our Malays under their breaths.

The Chief Justice and I fired at the same time, and the massive fellow who, but a moment before, had looked to be as stiff and clumsy as a bar of pig iron, now seemed to be made of india-rubber and steel springs. I should not have been more surprised had the great timboso tree, beside which he lay, arisen and danced a jig. He seemed to spring from the middle up into the air without the aid of either his head or his tail. Then he brought his tail around in a circle and struck the skeleton roots of the mangrove with such force as to dislodge a small monkey in its top, which fell whistling with fright into the lower limbs, while the crocodile's great jaws, which seemed to measure a third of his length, opened and shut viciously, snapping off limbs and roots like straws.

"He sick!" shouted the Chief Justice. "Fire quick."

I threw the cartridge from the magazine into the barrel, and raised the gun to my shoulder just as the huge saurian struck the water. My bullet caught him underneath, near the back legs. My companion's must have had more effect, for the crocodile stopped as though stunned. I had time to drop my gun and snatch up my revolver.

It was an easy shot. The bullet sped true to its mark and entered one of the small fiery eyes. The huge frame seemed to quiver as though a charge of electricity had gone through it and then stiffened out,--dead.

Our Malay boys got a rope of tough gamooty fibres around the great head, and we towed our prize out into the stream just as the Resident's launch, bearing the Prince and the ladies, steamed up the river to watch the sport.

A crowd of servants got the crocodile up on the bank near the palace grounds and drew it two hundred yards to their quarters. Now comes the strangest part of the story.

My servants had half completed the task of skinning him, for I wished to send his hide to the Smithsonian, when the muezzin sounded the call to prayers from the little mosque near by. In an instant the devout Mohammedans were on their faces and the crocodile in his half-skinned state was left until a more convenient time. At six o'clock the next morning I was awakened by a knock at my door:--

"Tuan, Tuan Consul, come see boyah (crocodile)."

I got up, wrapped a sarong about me, put my feet into a pair of grass slippers, and followed my guide out of the palace, through the courts to where the crocodile had been the night before, but no crocodile was to be seen. My guide grinned and pointed to a heavy trail that looked like the track of a stone-boat drawn by a yoke of oxen.