The Further Side of Silence/The Lone-hand Raid of Kûlop Sûmbing
THE LONE-HAND RAID OF KÛLOP SÛMBING
HE WAS an ill fellow to look at—so men who knew him tell me—large of limb and very powerfully built. To his broad and ugly face a peculiarly sinister expression was imparted by a harclip, which left most of the upper gums exposed. It was to this latter embellishment that he owed alike his vicious temper and the name by which he was known. That his disposition should not have been of the sweetest was natural enough, for women did not love to look upon the gash in his lip; and whereas, in the land of his birth, all first-born male children are called Kûlop, his nickname of Sûmbing—which means "the chipped one"—distinguished him unpleasantly from his fellows, and reminded him of his calamity whenever he heard it.
He was a native of Pêrak, and he made his way alone, through the untrodden Sâkai country, into Pahang. That is practically all that is known concerning his origin. The name of the district in which Kûlop Sûmbing had his home represented nothing to the natives of the Jĕlai Valley, into which he strayed on the other side of the Peninsula, and now no man knows from what part of Pêrak this adventurer came. The manner of his coming, however, excited the admiration and impressed itself upon the imagination of the people of Pahang—who love pluck almost as heartily as they abominate toil—so the tale of his doings is still told, though these things happened nearly forty years ago.
Kûlop Sûmbing probably held a sufficiently cynical opinion on the subject of the character of his countrywomen, who are among the most venal of their sex. He knew that no woman could love him for his personal attractions, and that those who would be willing to put up with him and with his disfigurement would be themselves undesirable. On the other hand, experience convinced him that many would be ready to lavish their favours upon him if his money-bags were well lined. Therefore he determined to grow rich with as little delay as possible, and in order to compass this end he looked about for some one whom he could conveniently plunder. For this purpose Pêrak was played out. The law of the white men could not be bribed by a successful robber, and of recent years the chances of evading it had been much restricted. In these circumstances, he turned his eyes across the border to Pahang, which was still ruled by its own Sultan and his chiefs, and which bore a notable reputation as a land in which ill things might be done with impunity, to the great profit and contentment of him who did them.
He had a love of adventure, was absolutely fearless, and was, moreover, a good man with his weapons. To put these possessions to their proper uses more elbow-room was necessary than Pêrak afforded, for there a man was forever haunted by the threatening shadow of the central gaol; and as he did not share the Malay's instinctive dread of travelling alone in the jungle, he decided to make a lone-hand raid into the Sâkai country, which lies between Pêrak and Pahang. Here he would be safe from the grip of the white man's hand, hidden from the sight of the Government's "eyes," as the Malays so inappropriately name our somnolent policemen; and here, he felt sure, much wealth would come to the ready hand that knew full well how to seize it. To Kûlop Sûmbing, reasoning thus, the matter presented itself in the light of a purely business proposition. Such abstractions as ideas of right and wrong or questions of ethics or morality did not enter into the calculation; for the average unregenerate Malay is honest. and law-abiding just as long as it suits his convenience to be so, and not more than sixty seconds longer. Virtue for virtue's sake makes not the faintest appeal to him, but a love of right-doing may occasionally be galvanized into a sort of paralytic life within him if the consequences of crime are kept very clearly and very constantly before his eyes. He will then discard sin because sinning has become inconvenient. So Kûlop Sûmbing kicked the dust of law-restrained Perak from his bare brown soles, and set out for the Sâkai country in the remote interior of Pahang, into which even the limping, lop-sided justice of a native administration made no pretence to penetrate.
He carried with him all the rice that he could bear upon his shoulders, two dollars in silver, a little salt and tobacco, a handsome kris, and a long spear with a broad and shining blade. His supplies of food were to last him until the first Sakai camps should be reached, and after that, he told himself, all that. he might need would "rest at the tip of his dagger. He did not propose seriously to begin his operations until the mountain range, which fences the Pêrak boundary, had been crossed, so he was content to leave the Sâkai villages on the western slope unpillaged. He impressed some of the naked and scared aborigines to serve as bearers, and levied such supplies as he required; and the Sâkai, who were glad to get rid of him so cheaply, handed him on from village to village with the greatest alacrity. The base of the jungle-covered mountains of the interior was reached at the end of a fortnight, and Kûlop and his Sâkai began to drag themselves up the steep ascent by means of roots, trailing creepers, and slender saplings.
Upon a certain day they attained the summit of a nameless mountain, and threw themselves down. panting for breath, upon the bare, circular dramming-ground of an argus pheasant. On the crest of nearly every hill and hogsback in the interior of the Peninsula these drumming-grounds are found, patches of naked earth trodden to the hardness of a threshing-floor, and carpeted with a thin litter of dry twigs. Sometimes, if you keep very still. yon may hear the cocks strutting and dancing, and mightily thumping The ground, but no man, it is said, has ever actually seen the birds going through their vainglorious performance. At night-time their challenging yell— incredibly loud, discordant, yet clear—rings out across the valleys, waking a thousand echoes, and the cry is taken up and thrown backward and forward from hill-cap to hill-cap. Judging by the frequency and the ubiquity of their yells, the argus pheasants must be very numerous in the jungles of the interior. but so deftly do they hide themselves that they are rarely seen, and the magnificence of their plumage, which rivals that of the peacock, is only familiar to us because the birds are often trapped by the Malays.
At the spot where Kûlop and his Sâkai lay the trees grew sparsely. The last two hundred feet of the ascent had been a severe climb, and the ridge, which formed the summit, stood clear of the tree-tops which had their roots halfway up the slope. As he lay panting Kûlop Sûmbing gazed down for the first time upon the eastern side of the Peninsula. the theatre in which ere long he proposed to play a very daring part. At his feet were tree-tops of every shade of green, from the tender, brilliant colour which we associate with young corn to the deep and sombre hue which is almost black. The forest fell away beneath him in a broad slope, the contour of each individual tree, and the gray, white, or black lines which marked their trunks or branches growing less and less distinct, until the jungle covering the plain became a blurred wash of colour that had more of blue than green in it. Here and there, very far away. the sunlight smote something that answered with a dazzling flash, like the mirror of a heliograph, and this, Kûlop knew, was the broad reaches of a river. The forest hid all traces of human habitation or cultivation, and no sign of life or movement was visible save only a solitary kite circling and veering on outstretched, motionless wings, and the slight, uneasy swaying of some of the taller trees as a faint breeze sighed gently over the jungle. Here. on the summit of the mountains, the air was damp and chilly, and a cold wind was blowing, while the sun seemed to have lost half its usual power; but in the plain below the earth lay sweltering beneath the perpendicular rays, and the heat-haze danced and shimmered above the forest like the hot air above a furnace.
During the next few days Kûlop Sûmbing and his Pêrak Sâkai made their way down the eastern slope of the mountains, and through the silent forests, which are given over to game and to the really wild jungle-folk, who fly at the approach of human beings, and discover their proximity as instinctively as do the beasts which share with them their home.
Kûlop and his people passed several abandoned camps belonging to these wild Sâkai—mere rough hurdles of boughs and leaves, canted on end to form lean-to huts; but of their owners they saw no trace, for even when these people trade with the tamer Sâkai they adopt the immemorial custom of silent barter and never suffer themselves to be seen by the men with whom they do business. Their principal stock in trade are the long, straight reeds of which the inner casing of the blowpipe is made, and these they deposit in certain well-known places in the jungle, whence they are removed by the lamer tribesmen, who replace them by salt, knife-blades, flints and steels and other similar articles. Now and again a successful slave-raid has resulted in the capture of a few of these savages, but their extraordinary elusiveness, added to the fact that they live the life of the primitive nomadic hunter, roaming the forest in small family groups, renders them difficult to locate, and impossible to round up in any large numbers.
Kûlop Sûmbing, of course, took very little interest in them, for to his utilitarian mind people who possessed no property could make no claim upon the attention of a serious man. Therefore, he pushed on through the wild Sâkai country, following game paths and wading down the beds of shallow streams until the upper waters of the Bĕtok, the principal tributary of the Jĕlai River, were struck. Here bamboos were felled, a long, narrow raft was constructed, and Kûlop Sûmbing, dismissing his Pêrak Sâkai, began the descent of the unknown river. He knew only that the stream upon which he was navigating would lead, if followed far enough, into the country inhabited by Malays; that somewhere between it and himself lay a tract peopled by semi-civilized Sâkai; that he proposed to despoil the latter, and would have some difficulty in preventing the Pahang Malays from pillaging him in their turn; but he fared onward undismayed, alone save for his weapons, and was filled with a sublime confidence in his ability to plunder the undiscovered land that lay before him.
When you come to think of it, there was something bordering upon the heroic in the action of this unscrupulous man with the marred face, who glided gently down the river on this wild, lone-hand raid. Even the local geography was unknown to him. For aught he knew, the stream might be beset by impassable rapids and by dangers that would task his skill and courage to the utmost; and even if he triumphed over natural obstacles, the enmity which his actions would arouse would breed up foemen for him wherever he went. He was going forth deliberately to war against heavy odds, yet he poled his raft down the river with deft punts, and gazed calmly ahead of him with a complete absence of fear.
It was noon upon the second day of his lonely journey down the Bětok that Kûlop sighted a large Sâkai camp, evidently the property of semi-tame tribesfolk, set in a clearing on the right bank of the river. The sight of a Malay coming from such an unusual quarter filled the jungle-people with superstitious fear, and in a few minutes every man, woman, and child had fled into the forest.
Kûlop went through the ten or fifteen squalid huts which stood in the clearing, and an occasional grunt of satisfaction signified that he approved of the stores of valuable gum lying stowed away in the sheds. He calculated that there could not be less than seven pîkul, a quantity that would fetch a good six hundred Mexican dollars, even when the poor price ruling in the most distant Malayan villages of the interior was taken into consideration. This, of course, was long before such a product as plantation rubber had come into existence in the East, and wild gutta was much sought after by Europeans in the towns of the straits settlements. Now, six hundred dollars represented a small fortune to a man of Kûlop Sûmbing's standing, and the sight of so goodly a store of gum filled him with delight. But here lie found himself faced by a problem of some difficulty. How was the precious stuff to be carried downstream into the Malayan districts of Pahang? His raft would hold about one pîkul, and he felt reasonably certain that the Sâkai, who were fairly used to being plundered by their Malayan neighbours, would not interfere with him very seriously if he chose to remove that quantity and to leave the rest. But the thought of the remaining six pîkul was too much for him. He could not find it in his heart to abandon it; and of a sudden he was seized by a dull anger against the Sâkai who, he almost persuaded himself, were in some sort defrauding him of his just dues.
Seating himself on the threshold-beam in the doorway of one of the huts, he lighted a rokok—a cigarette of coarse Javanese tobacco encased in a dried shoot of the nîpah palm, and set himself to think out the situation and to await the return of the tribesmen; and ever, as he dwelt upon the injury which these miscreants were like to inflict upon him if they refused to help him to remove the gutta, his heart waxed hotter and hotter against them.
Presently two scared brown faces, scarred with blue tattoo-marks on cheek and forehead, and surmounted by frowzy mops of sun-bleached hair, rose stealthily above the level of the flooring a dozen yards away, and peeped at him with shy, distrustful eyes.
Kûlop turned in their direction, and the bobbing heads disappeared with astonishing alacrity.
"Come hither," Kûlop commanded.
The heads reappeared once more, and in a few brief words Kûlop bade their owners have no fear, but go back into the forest and fetch the rest of the tribesfolk.
After some further interchange of words and considerable delay and hesitation, the two Sâkai sidled off into the jungle, and presently a crowd of squalid aborigines issued from the shelter of the trees and underwood. They stood huddled together in an uneasy group, gazing curiously at Kûlop, while with light feet they trod the ground gingerly, with every muscle braced for a swift dart into cover at the first. alarm of danger.
"Who among yon is the headman?" asked Kûlop.
"Your servant is the headman," replied an ancient Sâkai.
He stood forward a little as he spoke, trembling slightly as he glanced up furtively at the Malay, who sat cross-legged in the doorway of the hut. His straggling mop of hair was almost white, and his skin was dry and creased and wrinkled. He was naked, as were all his people, save for a dirty loinclout of bark cloth, which use had reduced to a mere whisp. His thin flanks and buttocks were gray with the warm wood ashes in which he had been lying when Kûlop's coming interrupted his midday snooze.
"Bid these, your children, build me eight rafts of bamboo, strong and firm, and moor them at the foot of the rapid yonder," ordered Kûlop. "And hearken, be not slow, for I love not indolence."
"It can be done," said the Sâkai headman submissively.
"That is well," returned Kûlop. "And I counsel you to see to it with speed, for I am a man very prone to wrath."
Casting furtive glances at the Malay, the Sâkai set to work, and by nightfall the new rafts were completed. For his part, Kûlop of the Harelip, who had declared that he loved not indolence, lay upon his back on the floor of the chief's hut, while the jungle-people toiled for him, and roared a love song in a harsh, discordant voice to the hypothetical lady whose heart was presently to be subdued by the wealth which was now almost within his grasp.
Kûlop slept that night in the Sakai hut among the restless jungle-folk. Up here in the foothills the air was chilly, and the fire, which the Sâkai never willingly let die, smoked and smouldered in the middle of the floor. Half a dozen long logs, all pointing to a common centre, like the spokes of a broken wheel, met at the point where the fire burned red in the darkness, and between these boughs, in the warm gray ashes, men, women, and children sprawled in every attitude into which their naked brown limbs could twist themselves. Ever and anon some of them would arise and tend the fire, and then would group themselves squatting around the blaze, and jabber in the jerky, monosyllabic jargon of the aborigines. The pungent smoke enshrouded them, and their eyes waxed red and watery, but they heeded it not, for the warmth of fire is one of the Sâkai's few luxuries, and the discomforts connected with it are to them the traditional crumpled rose leaf.
And Kûlop of the Harelip slept the sleep of the just.
The dawn broke grayly, for a mist hung low over the forest, white as driven snow, and cold and clammy as the forehead of a corpse. The naked Sâkai peeped shiveringly from the doorways of their huts, and then went shuddering back to the grateful warmth of their fires, and the frowsy atmosphere within.
Kûlop alone made his way down to the river bank, and there performed his morning ablutions with scrupulous care, for whatever laws of God or man a Malay may disregard, he never is unmindful of the virtue of personal cleanliness which, in an Oriental. is ordinarily of more immediate importance to his neighbours than all the godliness in the world.
His ablutions completed, Kûlop climbed the steep bank, and standing outside the headman's hut, summoned the Sâkai from their lairs in strident tones, bidding them hearken to his words. They stood or squatted before him in the white mist, through which the sun, just peeping above the jungle, was beginning to send long slanting rays of dazzling white light.
They were cold and miserable—this little crowd of naked savages and—they shivered and scratched their bodies restlessly. The trilling of the thrushes, and the morning chorus raised by the other birds, came to their ears, mingled with the whooping of troops of anthropoid apes, but this joyous music held no inspiration for the Sâkai. The extraordinary dampness of the air during the first hours after daybreak, in these remote jungle places of the Peninsula, chills men to the marrow and is appallingly depressing. Moreover, the Sâkai are very sensitive to cold, and it is when dawn has roused them and the fierce heat of the day has not yet broken through the mists to cheer them, that their thin courage and vitality are at the lowest ebb.
"Listen to me, you Sâkai," cried Kûlop in a loud and wrathful voice; and at the word those of his hearers who were standing erect made haste to assume a humble squatting posture, and the shiverings occasioned by the cold were increased by tremblings born of fear.
If there be one thing that the jungle-folk dislike more than another, it is to be called "Sâkai" to their faces, and they are never so addressed by a Malay unless he wishes to bully them. The word, which has long ago lost its original meaning, signifies a slave, or some say, a dog; but by the aborigines it is regarded as the most offensive epithet in the Malayan vocabulary. In their own tongue they speak of themselves as sĕn-oi—which means a "man"—as opposed to gob, which signifies "foreigner"; for even the Sâkai has some vestiges of pride, if you know where to look for it, and from his point of view the people of his own race are the only human beings who are entitled to be classed as "men," without any qualifying term. When speaking Malay, they allude to themselves as Ôrang Bûkit—men of the hills; Ôrang Ûtan—men of the jungle; or Ôrang Dâlam—the folk who live within, viz., within the forest. They love to be spoken of as raayat—peasants, or as raayat râja—the king's people; and the Malays, who delight in nieely graded distinctions of vocative in addressing men of various ranks and classes, habitually use these terms when conversing with the Sâkai, in order that the hearts of the jungle-folk may be warmed within them. When, therefore, the objectionable term "Sâkai" is applied to them, the forest-dwellers know that mischief and trouble are threatening them, and as they are as timid as any other wild animals of the woods, they are forthwith stricken with terror.
"Listen, you accursed Sâkai," Kûlop of the Harelip cried again, waving his spear above his head. "Mark well my words, for already I seem to hear the warm earth calling to the coffin planks in which your carcasses shall presently lie if you fail to do my bidding. Go speedily and gather up all the gutta that is stored in your dwellings, and bring it hither to me lest sonic worse thing befall you."
The Sâkai, eying him fearfully, decided that they had to deal with a determined person whose irritable temper would quickly translate itself from words into deeds. Slowly, therefore, they rose up and walked, each man to his hut, with lagging steps. In a few minutes the great balls of rubber, with a hole punched in each through which a rattan line was passed, lay heaped upon the ground at Kûlop's feet. During the absence of the men, the women and children had almost imperceptibly dribbled away, and most of them were now hidden from sight behind the huts or the felled trees of the clearing. But the men when they returned brought with them something as well as the rubber, for each of the Sâkai now held in his hand a long and slender spear fashioned from a bamboo. The weapon sounds harmless enough, but these wooden blades are strong, and their points and edges are as sharp as steel. Kûlop Sûmbing was shocked and outraged by this insolent suggestion of resistance, and arrived at the conclusion that prompt action must supplement rough words.
"Cast away your spears, you swine of the forest!" he yelled.
Almost all the Sâkai did as Kûlop bade them, for the Malay stood for them as the embodiment of the dominant race, and years of oppression and wrong have made the jungle folk very docile in the presence of the more civilized brown man. The old Chief, however, clutched his weapon in his trembling hands, and his terrified eyes ran round the group of his kinsman, vainly inciting them to follow his example. The next moment his gaze was recalled to Kûlop of the Harelip by a sharp pain in his right shoulder, as the spear of the Malay transfixed it. His own spear fell from his powerless arm, and the little crowd of Sâkai broke and fled. But a series of cries and threats from Kûlop, as he ran around them. herding them as a collie herds sheep, brought them presently to a standstill.
No thought of further resistance remained in their minds, and the gutta was quickly loaded on to the rafts, and the plundered Sâkai impressed as crews for them. The rafts were fastened to one another, by Kûlop's orders, by a stout piece of rattan, to prevent straying or desertion, and the conqueror sat at ease on a low platform in the centre of the rearmost raft, keeping a watchful eye on all, and maintaining his mastery over the shuddering jungle-folk by frequent threats and admonitions.
The wounded Chief, left behind in his hut, sent two youths through the forest to bid their fellow tribesmen make ready the poison for their blowpipe darts, for he knew that no one would now dare to attack Kûlop of the Harelip at close quarters. But the poison which the Sâkai distil from the resin of the îpoh tree requires some time for its preparation, and if it is to be used with effect upon a human being or any large animal, a specially strong solution is necessary. Above all, if it is to do its work properly, it must be newly brewed. Thus it was that Kûlop Sûmbing had time to load his rafts with gutta taken from two other Sâkai camps, and to pass very nearly out of the jungle people's country before the men whom he had robbed were in a position to assume the offensive.
The Bětok River falls into the Upper Jělai, a stream which is also given over entirely to the Sâkai, and it is not until the latter river meets the Tělom and the Sĕrau, and with their combined waters form the lower Jělai, that the banks begin to be studded with scattered Malayan habitations.
Kûlop of the Harelip, of course, knew nothing of the geography of the country through which he was travelling, but running water, if followed down sufficiently far, presupposed the discovery, sooner or later, of villages peopled by folk of his own race. Therefore, he pressed forward eagerly, bullying and goading his Sâkai into something resembling energy. He had now more than a thousand dollars' worth of rubber on his rafts, and he was growing anxious for its safety. To the danger in which he himself went, he was perfectly callous and indifferent.
It was at Kuâla Měrăbau—a spot where a tiny stream falls into the upper Jělai on its right bank—that a small party of Sâkai lay in hiding, peering through the vegetation at the gliding waters down which Kûlop and his plunder must presently come. Each man carried at his side a quiver, fashioned from a single length of bamboo, ornamented with the dots, crosses, zigzags, and triangles which the Sâkai delight to brand upon their vessels. Each quiver was filled with darts about the thickness of a steel knitting needle, and some fifteen inches in length, with an elliptical piece of light wood at one end to steady it in its flight, and at the other a very sharp tip, coated with the black venom of the îpoh sap. In their hands each man of the ambushing party held a reed blowpipe, ten or twelve feet long, and rudely but curiously carved.
Presently the foremost Sâkai stood erect, his elbows spread-eagled and level with his ears, his fect heel to heel, his body leaning slightly forward from the hips. His hands were locked together at the mouthpiece of his blowpipe, the long reed being held firmly by the thumbs and forefingers, which were coiled above it, while the weight rested upon the lower interlaced fingers of both hands. His mouth, nestling closely against the wooden mouth- piece, was puckered and his cheeks drawn in, like those of a man who seeks to spit out a shred of tobacco which the loose end of a cigarette has left between his lips. His keen, wild eyes glared unflinchingly along the length of his blowpipe, little hard wrinkles forming at their corners.
"Pit!" said the blowpipe.
The wad of dry pith, which had been used to ex- clude the air around the head of the dart, fell into the water a dozen yards away, and the dart itself flew forward with incredible speed, straight to the mark at which it was aimed.
A slight shock on his right side, just above the hip apprised Kûlop that something had struck him, and looking down he saw the dart still quivering in his waist. But, as luck would have it, Kûlop carried under his coat a gaudy bag, ornamented with beads, and stuffed with the ingredients of the betel quid, and in this the dart had embedded itself. The merest fraction of a second was all that Külop needed to see this, and to take in the whole situation. With him action and preception kept even step. Before the dart had ceased to shudder, before the Sâkai on the bank had had time to send another in its wake, before the men poling his raft had fully grasped what was happening, Kalop had seized the nearest of them by his frowzy halo of e'flocks, and had drawn him screaming across his knees. The terrified creature. writhed and bellewed, flinging his body about wildly, and his friends upon the bank feared to blow their darts lest they should inadvertently wound their kins- man while trying to kill the Malay.
"Have a care, you swine of the forest!" roared Kulop, cuffing the yelling Sâkai unsparingly in order to keep his limbs in constant motion. "Have a care, you sons of fallen women! If you spew forth one more of your darts, this man, your little brother, dies forthwith by my kris."
The Sâkai on the bank had no reason to doubt the sincerity of Kûlop's intentions, and as these poor creatures love their relatives, both near and distant, far more than is usual in more civilized communities. where those connected by ties of blood do not neces- sarily live together in constant close association, they dared not blow another dart. Moreover, one poi- soned arrow had apparently gone home, and a single drop of the powerful solution of the ipoh which they were using sufficed, as they well knew, to cause death accompanied by excrucioting agony. The attacking party therefore drew off, and Kûlop of the Harelip proceeded upon his way rejoicing; but he kept his Sâkai across his knee, none the less, and occasionally administered to him a sounding cuff for the stimula- tion of his fellows.
Thus Kûlop won his way in safety out of the Sâkai country, and that night he stretched himself to sleep upon a mat spread on the veranda of a Malayan house, in the full enjoyment of excellent health, the knowledge that he was at last a rich man, and a delightful consciousness of having performed great and worthy deeds.
For a month or two he lived in the valley of the Jelai, at Bukit Betong, the village which was the headquarters of the Dato' Maharaja Pērba, the great upcountry chief, who at that time ruled most of the interior of Pahang. He sold his rubber to this potentate, and as he let it go for something less than the market price, the sorrows of the Sakai were the cause of considerable amusement to the local authorities from whom they sought redress.
But Kulop of the IIarelip had left his heart behind him in Pêrak, for the natives of that State, men say, can never long be happy when beyond the limits of their own country, and must always sooner or later make their way back to drink again of the waters of their silver river. Perhaps, too, Kûlop had some particular lady in his mind when he set out upon his quest for wealth, for all the world over, if you trac matters to their source, the best work and the most blackguardly deeds of men are usually to be ascribed to the women who sit at the back of their hearts, and supply the driving-power which impels them to good or to evil.
One day Kalop of the Harelip presented himself before the Dato' Maharaja Perba, as the latter lay smoking his opium pipe upon the soft mats in his house, and informed him that, as he had come to seek permission to leave Pahang, he had brought a present "a thing trifling and unworthy of his notice"--which he begged the chief to honour him. by accepting.
"When do you go down river?" inquired the Dâto' for the Jělai Valley is in the far interior of Paliang, and if a man would leave the country by any of the ordinary routes, he must begin his journey by trav- elling downstream at least as far as Kuala Lipis.
"Your servant goes upstream," replied Kulop Sumbing.
The Dato' gave vent to an expression of incredu- lous surprise.
"Your servant returns the way he canie," said Kúlop.
The Dato' burst out into a torrent of excited expostulation. It was death, certain death, he said, for Kalop to attempt once more to traverse the Sâkai country. The other routes were open, and no man would dream of staying him if he sought to reluru to his own country by land or sea. The course he meditated was folly, was madness, was an impossi- bility. But to all these words Klop of the Harelip turned a deaf ear. He knew Malayan chieftains and all their ways and works pretty intimately, and he had already paid too heavy a toll to the Dâto' to have any desire to see his honest earnings further diminished by other similar exactions. If he took his way homeward through country inhabited by Malays, he knew that at every turn he would have to satisfy the demands of the barons and chiefs and headmen whose territory he would cross on his journey, and the progressive dwindling of his hoard which this would entail was a certainty that he would not face. On the other hand, he held the Sâkai iu utter contempt, and as at this stage of the proceedings he was incapable of feeling fear, the Dâto's estimate of the risks he was running did not move him. A sinister grin distorted his face as he listened to the chief's words, for he regarded them as a cunning attempt to induce him to penetrate more deeply into Pahang in order that he might thereafter be plum- dered with greater ease. Accordingly, he declined to accept the advice offered to him, and a couple of days later he set out upon his return journey through the forests.
He knew that it would be useless to attempt to persuade any one to accompany him, so he went, as he had come, alone. The dollars into which he had converted his loot were hard and heavy upon his back, and he was further loaded with a supply of rice. dried fish, and salt; but his weapons were as bright as ever, and to him they still seemed the only com rades which a reasonable man need hold to be essen- tial. He travelled on foot, for single-handed he could not pole a raft against the current, and he followed such paths as he could find, guiding himself mainly by the direction from which the rivers flowed. His plan was to ascend the valley through which the Bêtok ran, until the mountains were reached, and after crossing them to strike some stream on the Pěrak side of the range, down which it would be possible to navigate a bamboo raft.
He soon found himself back in the Sâkai country, and passed several of the jungle-folk's camps, which were all abandoned at his approach; but though he halted at one or two of them in order to replenish his scanty stock of provisions, he considered it more prudent to pass the night in the jungle.
It was on the evening of the third day that Külop became aware of an unpleasant sensation. The moon was at the full, and he could see for many yards around him in the forest, but though no living thing was visible, he became painfully conscious of the fact that he was being watched. Occasionally he thought that he caught the glínt of eyes peeping at him from the underwood, and every now and again a dry twig snapped crisply, first on one side of him, then on the other, in front of him, behind him. He started to his feet and sounded the sorak-the war- cry that pealed in widening echoes through the forest. A rustle in half a dozen different directions. at once showed him that the watchers had been numerous, and that they were now taking refuge in flight.
Kulop of the Harclip sat down again beside his fire, and a new and strange sensation began to lay cold fingers about his heart. It was accompanied by an uneasy feeling in the small of his back, as though a spearthrust in that particular part of his person was momentarily to be expected, and a clammy dampness broke out upon his forehead, while the skin behind his ears felt unwontedly cold. Danger that he could see and face had never had any power to awe him, but his isolation and the invisibility of his enemies combined to produce in him some curious phenomena. Perhaps even Kûlop of the Harelip needed no man to tell him that he was experiencing fear.
He built up his fire, and sat near the blaze, trying to still the involuntary chattering of his teeth. If he could get at grips with his foes, fear, he knew, would leave him; but this eerie, uncanny sensation of being watched and hounded by crafty enemies whom he could not see was sawing his nerves to rags. From time to time he glanced uneasily over his shoulder, and at last wedged his body in between the barrier roots of a big tree, so that he might be secure from assault from behind. As he sat thus, leaning slightly backward, he chanced to glance up, and in a treetop. some fifty yards away, he saw the crouching form of a Sâkai outlined blackly against the moonlit sky, amidst a network of boughs and branches.
In an instant he was on his feet, and again the sórak rang out, as he flung himself at the underwood, striving to tear his way through it to the foot of the tree in which his enemy had been perched. But the jungle was thick and the shadows were heavy; he quickly lost his bearings, and was presently glad to stumble back to his fire again, torn with brambles and sweating profusely.
All through that night Kulop of the Harclip strove to drive away sleep from his heavy eyes. He had been tramping all day, and his whole being was clamouring for rest. The hours were incredibly long, and he feared that the dawn would never come. During every minute he was engaged in an active and conscious battle with physical exhaustion. At one moment he would tell himself that he was wide awake, and a second later a rustle in the underwood startled him into a knowledge that he had slept. His waking nightmare merged itself inextricably into the nightmare of dreams. Over and over again, in an access of sudden panic, he leaped to his feet, and yelled the war-cry, though his dazed brain hardly knew whether he was defying the Sâkai be- setting him or the spectres which thronged his sleep- drugged fancy; but each time the patter of feet and the snapping of twigs told him that those who watched him were stampeding. While he remained awake and on guard the Sâkai feared him too much to attack him. His previous escape from the dart which they had seen pierce his side had originated in their minds the idea that he was invulnerable, and proof against the ipoh poison, so they no longer tried to kill him with their blowpipes. That they dared not fall upon lint unless he slept very soon became evident to Kulop himself. Sleep was the ally of the Sakai and his most dangerous enemy; but fear gripped him anew as he speculated as to what would happen when he at last was forced to yield to the weight of weariness that even now was oppressing him so sorely.
Presently a change began to come over the forest in which he sat. A whisper of sound from the trees around told him that the birds were beginning to stir. Objects, which hitherto had been black and shapeless masses cast into prominence by the clear moonlight, gradually assumed more definite shape. Later the colour of the trunks and leaves and creepers- still sombre and dull, but none the less colour- became perceptible, and Kûlop of the Iarelip rejoiced exceedingly because the dawn had come and the horrors of the night were passing away.
Quickly he boiled his rice and devoured a meal; then, gathering up his belongings, he resumed his journey. All that day, though physical weariness pressed heavily upon him, he trudged onward stub- bornly; but the news had spread among the Sâkai that their enemy was once more among them, and the number of the jungle-folk who dogged his foot- steps steadily increased. Kûlop could hear their shrill whoops as they called to one another through the forest, giving warning of his approach, or signal- ling the path that he was taking. Once or twice he fancied that he caught a glimpse of a lithe brown body, of a pair of glinting eyes, or of a straggling mop of hair; and forthwith he would charge, shouting furiously. But the figure if indeed it had any existence save in his overwrought imagination― always vanished as suddenly and as noiselessly as a shadow, long before he could come within striking distance. This experience, Kûlop found, was far more trying to the nerves than any stand-up fight. could have been. Violent action and the excitement of a bloody hand-to-hand encounter would have supplied him with an anodyne; but the invisibility of his enemy, and the intangible character of their pursuit of him added the terrors of a fever dream to the very imminent danger in which he now knew him- self to be.
The night which followed that day was a period of acute agony to the weary man, who dared not. sleep; and about midnight he again resumed his march, hoping thereby to elude his pursuers. For an hour he believed himself to have suc- ceeded in this. Then the shrill yells began once more to sound from the forest all around him, and at the first cry Kúlop's heart sank. Still he stumbled on, too tired out to charge at his phantom enemy, too hoarse at last even to raise his voice in the sôruk, but doggedly determined not to give in. He was beginning, however, visibly to fail, and as he showed visible signs of distress, the number and the boldness of his pursuers increased proportionately. Soon their yells were resounding on every side, and Kúlop, staggering forward, seemed like some lost soul, wend- ing his way to the Bottomless Pit, with an escort of mocking devils chanting their triumphant chorus around him.
Yet another unspeakable day followed, and when once more the night shut down, Kûlop of the Hare- lip sank exhausted upon the ground. His battle was over. He could bear up no longer against the weight of his weariness and the insistent craving for sleep. Almost as his head touched the warm litter of dead leaves, with which the earth in all Malayan jungles is strewn, his heavy eyelids closed and his breast rose and fell to the rhythm of his regular breathing. He was halfway up the mountains now, and almost within reach of safety, but Kulop of the Harelip- Kúlop, the resolute, the fearless, the strong, and the enduring had reached the end of his tether. He had been beaten, not by the Sakai, but by Nature, whom no man may long defy; and to her assaults he surrendered his will and slept.
Presently the underwood was parted by human hands in half a dozen different places, and the Sâkai crept stealthily out of the jungle into the little pateli of open in which their esiemy lay at rest. He moved uneasily in his sleep-not on account of any noise made by them, for they came as silently as a cloud shadow cast across a landscape; and at once the Sakai halted with lifted fect, ready to plunge back into cover should their victim awake. But Kûlop, utterly exhausted, was sleeping heavily, wrapped in the slumber from which he was never again to be aroused.
The noiseless jungle-folk, armed with heavy clubs and bamboo spears, stole to within a foot or two of the unconscious Malay. Then nearly a score of them raised their weapons, poised them aloft, and brought them down simultaneously on the lead and body of their enemy. Kûlop's limbs stretched them- selves slowly and stiffly, his jaw fell, and blood flowed from him in twenty places. No cry escaped him, but the trembling Sakai looked down upon his dead face, and knew that at last he had paid his debt to them in full.
They carried off none of his gear, for they feared To be haunted by his ghost, and Kúlop at the last had nothing edible with him, such as the jungle- folk find it hard to leave untouched Money had no meaning for the Sâkai, so the silver dollars, which ran in a shining stream from a rent made in his linen waist pouch by a chance spear thrust, lay glinting in the moonlight by the side of that still, gray face rendered ghastly in death by the pallid lip split upward to the nostrils. Thus the Sakai took their leave of Kúlop Sumbing, as he lay stretched beside the riches which he had won at so heavy a cost.
If you want some ready money and a good kris and spear, both of which have done execution in their day, they are all to be had for the gathering at a spot in the forest not very far from the bound- ary between Pahang and Pêrak. You must find the place for yourself, however, for the Sâkai to a man will certainly deny all knowledge of it. Therefore it is probable that Kûlop of the Harelip will rise up on the Judgment Day with his ill-gotten property intact.