ANIMAL LIFE IN THE MALAY COUNTRY.
SUPPOSING that one possessed Prince Hassan's carpet, the tree of inexhaustible fruit, the flask of unfailing water, and the cloak of invisibility, so that one might travel in any region of this planet at choice, and be under no sort of bondage or obligation to the human race, the Malay Country would be one of the best possible fields for the exercise of such a privilege. There are wondrous things to be seen in the great forest tracts, where man has not yet intruded, and the animal world leads its life unpersecuted (from the outside) in the jungle and the river ; where birds, insects, and reptiles have their home in the trees, the air, and the swamps ; where flowers more beautiful than any that deck our brides or die in our ball-rooms, mysterious of form, and lavish of growth, drape the giant palms and hang festoons of bells and feathers over the dark, swarming waters. It would be pleasant to pry, unseen, and with no need of pro- tection, into the forest-covered interior of the great peninsula, where gigantic pachyderms, looking like monsters of the far past, roam ; to see the huge elephant, the one-horned rhinoceros, little-eyed and of enormous weight ; the tapir, quite slender and delicate by comparison, and the wild hog, progenitor of all pork, but who does not come to the scraped and pallid complexion of his descendants, because true Malays will not eat him ; and with these a solitary plantigrade, that wistful-faced bear, who wants " back " among the feline and four-handed tribes, and no doubt, like Mrs. Todgers, finds it hard to live. It would be pleasant to watch the ways of this small creature, with its close fur, sensitive nozzle, and narrow, grasping paws, tenacious and miser-like. The Malay buffalo is bigger than the Chinese and Indian varieties, a greyish-pink in colour, hairless, probably stupid, but happily less ill-treated than his "explored" brethren, because he has not men to hunt and torture him, but only tigers, and at least it is soon over when the leopard makes a paralysing spring upon him, or the royal or the spotted black tiger (with the true stripes traceable in certain lights upon his shining, jet-black skin) stalks him and brings him down, fresh and happy from his mud-bath. It would take a long time to exhaust the forest-folk ; for there are the civet, Java, and several other "cats," the musang and the climbing musang, and the water-dog, known to us as the land-otter, an astute creature, with (at least as seen in captivity) a remarkably preoccupied and selfish expression of countenance. This, perhaps, is incidental to life in "gardens," where food is not a fixed, but an arbitrary quantity, and all the excitement and suspense of existence concentrate themselves in one fateful moment, monotonously marked by the advent of a man with a fork and a barrow. And there are four species of deer, two smaller than a hare—gentle creatures that might be, and probably are, pets of the seraglio—one a noble animal, as large as the elk; wild goats, free, happy, and hairy ; and bison, but these are not numerous. It would be " fine " to see the lives of these
creatures ; their wars, their truces, their strategy, their domesti- city, and to observe the demeanour towards them of their superiors, the four-handed race, of whom there are nine kinds in the Malay peninsula, besides two apes, very curious and discon- certing animals, and a lemur, with the beautiful, bright eyes, that cannot bear the light, peculiar to the sloth tribe. Of coarse, the monkeys are the men of those unexplored forest regions, the superior persons who would resent the aping of their ways by clothed intruders, and say, with Gay's travelled Jocko, if they were ever tempted out of their safe " wilder- ness,"—
" I vow 'Lis a disgusting sight,
To see men always bolt upright; Because we sometimes walk on two, I hate the imitative crew."
Their brethren who outranged the forest fastnesses and fell into the hands of men, have they not been chained up, and taught, it may be, by that terrible instructor, hanger, to use their agile limbs and dexterous hands in the gathering of the kindly fruits for other consumption than their own, and have not the bonds of servitude descended to the children of these stragglers? One would like to see that clever service done, too ; but how much better to behold, on the jungly banks of the Linggi River, in the midst of a scene at once of activity and stillness, with colossal flowering trees, green twilight, inextricable involve- ment, with brilliant birds, jewel-like lizards, weird, uncanny flying foxes, and huge saurians basking on shiny banks under the mangroves, the free creatures, sitting in groups, hanging by bands or tails, leaping, grimacing, jabbering, pelting each other with fruit, and, no doubt, perfectly alive to the intellectual in- feriority of all other forest-folk. And then, to see the home of the monkey-man,—the wondrous river-side forest, where the great bamboo towers in its feathery grace, and the rattan creeps along the ground, and then, climbing the trees, knots them together with tough, tangled strands, for it may be twelve hundred feet of fantastic bondage, and the bound and loose alike are loaded with trailers, ferns, and orchids, so splendid and so rare that to have seen one of them once, in costly extra- dition to some gorgeous mansion here, is a thing to be remem- bered! There the "audacious liana," with great clusters of orange or scarlet blossoms, flings itself on several trees at once, or a trailer leaps across the river from tree to tree—the agile monkey of the plant world—and from a height of a hundred feet dangles the festoons of gorgeous blossoms, in which myriads of fairies must surely sleep in the tropical daytime, so as to be fresh for the dancing, with moths and dragon-flies and butter- flies, when the cool evening comes. There is no lack of partners for the elfin beauties, "trooping all together," for the butter- flies swarm in countless thousands in the forest openings, and their variety is endless. It would be pleasant to see a Butter- flies' Ball, opened by the Queen of the Fairies with such a gallant cavalier as either of those that Miss Bird saw in the NM of Bukit Berapit, when all around was light and colour, the morning-hymn of birds, and the sound of crystal waters :—"The
upper part of the body of one of them, and the upper side of its wings, of jet-black velvet, and the lower half of its body and the under-side of its wings of peacock-blue velvet, spotted; another df the same make,' but with gold instead of blue ; and a third with the upper part of the body and wings of black velvet,. with cerise spots, the lower part of the body cerise, and the under-side of the wings white, with cerise spots. All these measured fully
five inches across their expanded wings." One thinks joyfully of these creatures, for they were not netted and impaled, but left to the happy little life their Creator meant them for, unperverted to the base uses of the "specimen."
If one should spread Prince Hassan's carpet in the jungle where the elephants are at home, or by the river-side, where the trackless mangrove swamps begin, and the alligator basks ; where the turtle, the tortoise, and many kinds of lizards pursue their peaceful ways, and the deadliest of the serpent tribe wind their beautiful but horrid forms through the slimy recesses, what strange sights one would see, and how curious an impression one would receive of an entire department of nature in which man is of no account at all, not wanted or missed in its economy And how solemn an experience would the night be—not terrible, because the cloak of invisibility is always understood—with the awful, still forest, the note of that grand night bird, the Argus pheasant, which is said to resemble the cry of the wild man of the interior, the sounds of fierce gambols, of pursuit and capture, hunter and victim, and the plunging of elephants come down to drink ! And then, with sunrise, the change would be like that which followed the arrival of the Prince who awakened the Sleeping Beauty with a kiss, and whom we are — quite ineffectually — bidden by modern un- wisdom to believe was the Sun himself. "Loudly chattered the busy cicada, its simultaneous din, like a concentration of • the noise of all the looms in the world, suddenly breaking off . into a simultaneous silence ; the noisy insect world chirps, cheeps, buzzes, whistles ; birds halloo, hoot, whoop, screech ; apes, in a loud and not inharmonious chorus, greet the sun ; monkeys chatter, yell, hoot, quarrel, and splutter. Occasionally, some heavy fruit, over-ripe, falls into the river with a splash." Now, if we were willing to lay aside the cloak of invisibility for a while, and let the human sentiment of surprise in upon inonkeymanity, would swarms of agile creatures come down on living " monkey-ropes" from the feather-crested trees, to inspect, upside-downedly, the " despiseable " intruder, incapable of even elementary climbing, and deplorably deficient in chatter ?
If, like Ingoldsby's "Sir Thomas the Good," one's taste points insect-wise, there is much (in addition to the " tiger " and the "night" mosquito) to gratify it in the Malay Country, where moths of such surpassing beauty that neither jewel nor flower can compete with them abound ; and notably the wonderful Atlas, measuring ten inches across its wings ; where multitudes of beautiful little creatures live upon the myriad leaves, and the dark nights are illuminated by the flashing of fireflies, moving in undulations like the phosphoric waves of the sea. Glancing through the jungle-openings, we should see sun-birds, rivalling the colours of those living jewels, the humming-birds ; and on the river-banks large kingfishers, arrayed in the glory of their matchless blue plumage ; while the forest trees are studded with green parapets, coral-beaked, and the jungle-tracks are trodden by the stately Argus, the gallant and bellicose jungle-cock, and the Java peacock, with its exquisite, iridescent green feathers. Here is a glimpse of what the waters would reveal to us :—" Multitudes of fish of brilliant colours, together with large medusw, dait or glide through the sunlit waters among the coral groves, where every coral spray is gemmed with zoophytes, whose rainbow-tinted arms sway with the undulations of the water, and where sea- snakes writhe themselves away into the recesses of coral caves."
The ordinary traveller might possibly get too much tiger, especially in Malacca, where a black one (perhaps a panther) came down the principal street early one morning, and made its chola hozree of a Chinaman; and up in Lingat, where the windows of the bungalow in which Miss Bird resided had to be closed, on account of an adjacent tiger, "whose growling was most annoying ;" but the tiger at home would be a great sight,—from an earth-skimming balloon, or Prince Hassan's carpet. As in Cores, so in the Malay penin- sula, the tiger is an object of great dread and reverence. The Malays speak of these animals in whispers only, believing that souls of men departe I dwell in them ; and in some places they will not kill a tiger, unless he is a very mauvais sujet indeed. The Malay's version of the wehr-wolf myth is that some men are :tigers by night and men by day. They wear tigers' claws to avert disease, use the liver, dried and pounded, as a medicine, which is worth twice its weight in gold, and set the centre of the "terrible eyeballs" in gold rings, to be worn as charms. Whether one liked or did not like the ape as an inmate would regulate one's enjoyment of the domestication of that animal in the Malay Country, but that it is a wonderful creature is not to be denied. The Malays are passionately fond of pets, and of all the nice things which travellers and residents in their peninsula have told us of this interesting people, nothing is more charming than this testimony of Miss Bird's :—" They have great skill in taming birds and animals. Doubtless, their low voices, and gentle, supple movements, never shock the timid sensitiveness of brutes. Besides this, Malay children yield a very ready obedience to their elders, and are encourged to invite the confidence of birds and beasts, rather than to torment them."
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