Part 22

"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.