Part 9

The roof and sides of the house were of attap. This is made from the long, arrow-like leaves of the nipah palm. Unlike its brother palms--the cocoa, the sago, the gamooty, and the areca--the nipah is short, and more like a giant cactus in growth. Its leaves are stripped off by the natives, then bent over a bamboo rod and sewed together with fibres of the same palm. When dry they become glazed and waterproof.

The tall, slender areca palm, which stands about every kampong, supplies the natives with their great luxury--an acorn, known as the betel-nut, which, when crushed and mixed with lime leaves, takes the place of our chewing tobacco. In fact, the bright-red juice seen oozing from the corners of a Malay's mouth is as much a part of himself as is his sarong or kris. Betel-nut chewing holds its own against the opium of the Chinese and the tobacco of the European.

As soon as we shook hands ceremoniously with the punghulo's oldest wife, and tabeked to the rest of his big family, the old man scrambled down the ladder, and sent a boy up a cocoanut tree for some fresh nuts. In a moment half a dozen of the great, oval, green nuts came pounding down into the sand. Another little fellow snatched them up, and with a sharp parang, or hatchet-like knife, cut away the soft shuck until the cocoanut took the form of a pyramid, at the apex of which he bored a hole, and a stream of delicious, cool milk gurgled out. We needed no second invitation to apply our lips to the hole. The meat inside was so soft that we could eat it with a spoon. The cocoanut of commerce contains hardly a suggestion of the tender, fleshy pulp of a freshly picked nut.

We left the punghulo's house with the old chief in the bow of our boat--he insisted upon seeing that we were properly announced to his subjects--and proceeded along the coast for half a mile, and then up a swampy lagoon to its head.

The tall tops of the palms wrapped everything in a cool, green twilight. The waters of the lagoon were filled with little bronze forms, swimming and sporting about in its tepid depths regardless of the cruel eyes that gleamed at them from great log-like forms among the mangrove roots.

Dozens of naked children fled up the rickety ladders of their homes as we approached. Ring-doves flew through the trees, and tame monkeys chattered at us from every corner. The men came out to meet us, and did the hospitalities of their village; and when we left, our boat was loaded down with presents of fish and fruit.

Almost every day after that did we visit the kampong, and were always welcomed in the same cordial manner.

Wahpering was tireless in his attentions. He kept his Sampan Besar, or big boat, with its crew at our disposal day after day.

One day I showed him the American flag. He gazed at it thoughtfully and said, "Biak!" (Good.) "How big your country?" I tried to explain. He listened for a moment. "Big as Negri Blanda?" (Holland.) I laughed. "A thousand times larger!" The old fellow shook his head sadly, and looked at me reproachfully.

"Tidah! Tidah!" (No, no.) "Rajah, Orang Blanda (Dutchman) show me chart of the world. Holland all red. Take almost all the world. Rest of country small, small. All in one little corner. How can Rajah say his country big?"

There was no denying the old man's knowledge; I, too, had seen one of these Dutch maps of the world, which are circulated in Java to make the natives think that Holland is the greatest nation on earth.

One day glided into another with surprising rapidity. We could swim, explore, or lie out in our long chairs and read and listlessly dream. All about our little island the silver sheen of the sea was checkered with sails. These strange native craft held for me a lasting fascination. I gazed out at them as they glided by and saw in them some of the rose-colored visions of my youth. Piracy, Indian Rajahs, and spice islands seemed to live in their queer red sails and palm-matting roofs. At night a soft, warm breeze blew from off shore and lulled us to sleep ere we were aware.

One morning the old chief made us a visit before we were up. He announced his approach by a salute from a muzzle-loading musket. I returned it by a discharge from my revolver. He had come over with the morning tide to ask us to spend the day, as his guests, wild-pig hunting. Of course we accepted with alacrity. I am not going to tell you how we found all the able-bodied men and dogs on the island awaiting us, how they beat the jungle with frantic yells and shouts while we waited on the opposite side, or even how many pigs we shot. It would all take too long.

We went fishing every day. The many-colored and many-shaped fish we caught were a constant wonderment to us. One was bottle-green, with sky-blue fins and tail, and striped with lines of gold. Its skin was stiff and firm as patent leather. Another was pale blue, with a bright-red proboscis two inches long. We caught cuttle-fish with great lustrous eyes, long jelly feelers, and a plentiful supply of black fluid; squibs, prawns, mullets, crabs, and devil-fish. These last are considered great delicacies by the natives. We had one fried. Its meat was perfectly white, and tasted like a tallow candle.

The day on which we were to leave, Wahpering brought us some fruit and fish and a pair of ring-doves. Motioning me to one side, he whispered, the while looking shyly at the mistress, "Ranee very beautiful! How much you pay?" I was staggered for the moment, and made him repeat his question. This time I could not mistake him. "How much you pay for wife?" He gave his thumb a jerk in the direction of the mistress. I saw that he was really serious, so I collected my senses, and with a practical, businesslike air answered, "Two hundred dollars." The old fellow sighed.

"The great Rajah very rich! I pay fifty for best wife."

I have not tried to tell you all we did on our tropical island playing Robinson Crusoe. I have only tried to convey some little impression of a happy ten days that will ever be remembered as one more of those glorious, Oriental chapters in our lives which are filled with the gorgeous colors of crimson and gold, the delicate perfumes of spice-laden breezes, and with imperishable visions of a strange, old-world life.

They are chapters that we can read over and over again with an ever increasing interest as the years roll by.

THE SARONG

The Malay's Chief Garment

No one knows who invented the sarong. When the great Sir Francis Drake skirted the beautiful jungle-bound shores of that strange Asian peninsula which seems forever to be pointing a wondering finger into the very heart of the greatest archipelago in the world, he found its inhabitants wearing the sarong. After a lapse of three centuries they still wear it,--neither Hindu invasion, Mohammedan conversion, Chinese immigration, nor European conquest has ever taken from them their national dress. Civilization has introduced many articles of clothing; but no matter how many of these are adopted, the Malay, from his Highness the Sultan of Johore, to the poorest fisherman of a squalid kampong on the muddy banks of a mangrove-hidden stream, religiously wears the sarong.

It is only an oblong cloth, this fashion-surviving garb, from two to four feet in width and some two yards long; sewn together at the ends. It looks like a gingham bag with the bottom out. The wearer steps into it, and with two or three ingenious twists tightens it round the waist, thus forming a skirt and, at the same time, a belt in which he carries the kris, or snake-like dagger, the inevitable pouch of areca nut for chewing, and the few copper cents that he dares not trust in his unlocked hut. The man's skirt falls to his knees, and among the poor class forms his only article of dress, while the woman's reaches to her ankles and is worn in connection with another sarong that is thrown over her head as a veil, so that when she is abroad and meets one of the opposite sex she can, Moslem-like, draw it about her face in the form of a long, narrow slit, showing only her coal-black eyes and thinly pencilled eyebrows.

In style or design the sarong never changes. Like the tartan of the Highlanders, which it greatly resembles, it is invariably a check of gay colors. They are all woven of silk or cotton, or of silk and cotton mixed, by the native women, and no attap-thatched home is complete without its hand-loom.

One day we crawled up the narrow, rickety ladder that led into the two by four opening of old Wahpering's palm-shaded home. The little punghulo or chief, touched his forehead with the back of his open palm as we advanced cautiously over the open bamboo floor toward his old wife, who was seated in one corner by a low, horizontal window, weaving a sarong on a hand-loom. She looked up pleasantly with a soft "Tabek" (Greeting), and went on throwing her shuttle deftly through the brilliantly colored threads. The sharp bang of the dark, kamooning-wood bar drove the thread in place and left room for another. Back and forth flew the shuttle, and thread after thread was added to the fabric, yet no perceptible addition seemed to be made.

"How long does it take to finish it?" I asked in Malay.

"Twenty days," she answered, with a broad smile, showing her black, filed teeth and syrah-stained lips.

The red and brown sarong which she wore twisted tightly up under her armpits had cost her almost a month's work; the green and yellow one her chief wore about his waist, a month more; the ones she used as screens to divide the interior into rooms, and those of the bevy of sons and daughters of all ages that crowded about us each cost a month's more; and yet the labor and material combined in each represented less than two dollars of our money at the Bazaar in Singapore.

I had not the heart to take the one that she offered the mistress, but insisted on giving in exchange a pearl-handled penknife, which the chief took, with many a touch of his forehead, "as a remembrance of the condescension of the Orang American Rajah."