AN ANOMALOUS PEOPLE.
HE north-western portion of the island of Borneo coa- 1 sista of one vast huddle of hills, those near the coast covered with rank green grass and mean shrub jungle, through which the red soil shows like flesh draped by a semi-trans- parent veil, those inland smothered in virgin forest, the whole culminating in the magnificent mountain of Kina- Balu, which, rising majestically, dominates the land. Between the hills a few insignificant rivers slink to the sea, dragging their black waters from the mountain range which runs parallel to the shore at a distance of some fifteen miles, • .--rivers which rise in big green patches of shallow swamp, open out into fens and morasses in which the trees stand knee-deep in foul water and a sodden slush of vegetable life, and on the dangerous sand-bars at their mouths wage eternal war with wind and tide: The best of the coast land has passed into the keeping of the Brfinei people, the Biljaus, and the Iltmuns, all folk of the adventurous Malayan stock, who in this part of Asia are the dominant race, the two last-named tribes being the descendants of the most noted sea-rovers and pirates in the Archipelago. Within the memory of living man these people were wont to put to sea for a three years' cruise in fleets some thousands strong, threshing out the narrow straits ruthlessly, and braving the dangers of the mightier waters which lie between Indo-China and Singapore and spread away from the mainland of Asia to the Philippines. Now steam and the British warship have together combined to render impossible what to the Malay was ever the "lordliest life on earth," and the 'Naas and Ilinuns, forced by circumstance to pre- tend that they are a pastoral people, pass their days in trying to solve the problem of how to live royally for a minimum expenditure of the energy which is claimed by sordid toil. It is true that Allah in His mercy has given them the North Borneo Company to fight, a blessing of which they are by no means unmindful, as the shareholders of that cor- poration know to their cost ; but indeed their lot has fallen on dull and evil times, which were surely unendurable were it not for the existence of certain infidels, whom the white men are powerless adequately to protect, and whose blended sim- plicity and timidity make them as so many pavid lambs in the talons of the True Believer.
These poor people answer to the generic name of Dasun- viz., "the folk who dwell in clearings in the forest "—and they are among the most curious of the many strange and diverse offspring of the human family with which the Archipelago is crammed to the bewilderment of anthro- pologists. In appearance they are more fragile and slender than the Malays, something lighter in colour, and in the eyes of one and all may be marked that peculiar expression, at once patient, fearful, and utterly despondent, which belongs to the lost races, the races that have never bad their day, and have been during all their history as driven cattle before their stronger oppressors. They are filthily dirty in person and surroundings; they dress in foul wisps of rag round loins and head ; they tattoo their bodies in fantastic fashion ; they carry much of their portable gear in the elastic holes punched in the sagging lobes of their ears ; and they encase their wrists and ankles, and the bodies of their women-folk from breast to waist, in coils of brass wire. They live in scattered groups, each village usually consisting of a single long hut, wherein the family cubicles open out on to a com- mon verandah, and the roof trees fairly groan under their loads of dried human skulls, the hideous trophies of hundreds of unrecorded treacheries. For the Dasun, like all the natives of Northern Borneo, never kills in fair fight if he can avoid doing so, and takes no flattering unction to his soul either on the score of his victim's prowess or his own valour, He kills, in fact, as the ferret and some other animals kill, for the mere love of bloodshed, selecting the defence- less for his prey, and sparing neither sex nor age. It is curious that Borneo, which for a tropical country is sin- gularly free from the more savage of the beasts, should pro- duce more men instinct with this wanton homicidal mania than any other place of its size in the world. The Dilsun plants rice, and on occasion even displays a certain rude skill in the irrigation of his fields ; he grows and cures his own tobacco, which to the European palate is infinitely less acrid than the villainous "Java grass "; he fishes in the river, searches the jungle for gutta, rattans, and eagle wood, and before Manchester came to his aid was accustomed to fashion his own scanty garments out of bark and various fibres. For the rest, he has domesticated the fowl, the buffalo, the goat, the pig, and the clog,—the latter his inseparable though three- parts starved companion, a bony, long-legged, yellow creature, with the sharp nose and the pricked ears which tell so surely of close relationship to his wild fellow of the forests. But in spite of all these things, which in a greater or a lesser degree must be accounted as signs of successful attainment towards a certain standard of civilisation, the Dasun remains hopelessly and irredeemably a savage. Coin-
pared with the Malay, who has an original but complete civilisation of his own, and a code of manners more exacting than that of, the most refined European, the Dilsun is as barbarous as he is unpleasing to at least four of our five senses. Since, moreover, he has been down-trodden for ages, and shares with so many other Oriental peoples a complete lack of ambition for higher things, the marvel is that he has progressed so far as he has on the road of improvement; but surely it is written that thus far shall he go and no farther.
This it is which renders the Dfisun at once an anomaly and an enigma, one of the thousand puzzles that are set to men of science by the bewildering corner of Asia which we call the Malayan Archipelago,—for while it is certain that his past has been both unrecorded and inglorious, that his present is abject, and that his future is hopeless, his language and his religious beliefs betray a subtlety, a refine- ment, and an amount of originality which seem altogether at odds with the man himself. He has been utterly domi- nated by the Malays, who possess one of the simplest if one of the most idiomatic of tongues, and whose own rude pantheism surrendered almost without a struggle to the teachings of the Muhammadan missionaries; yet he possesses a language which would seem to belong to a refined and fastidious civilisation, and has held staunchly to his own beliefs in spite of all efforts to convert him to the faith of Islam. The Ditsun, in fact, who in his every-day dealings is the most docile, timid, and unaggressive of men, runs fearlessly a-tilt against all the best-constructed theories of the learned. What business has such an one as he with a language which is not only agglutinative and complicated by a most elaborate system of prefixes, suffixes, and diabolical interfixes, but con- jugates its verbs and declines its nouns after a fashion which seems to have stepped straight out of some sort of chaotic Latin grammar ? Such incompliance with received ideas as to what should by right belong to primitive men seems to amount to an insolence,—a kind of lese-majeste against the person of the great king Science. But when we turn from the speech of the Dasun to a consideration of his religious beliefs a still more incongruous originality is revealed.
Space will not permit me to do more than give a single instance illustrative of the ingenuity of the DUsun's creed, but fortunately one example will suffice to convince moat readers that this curious people, though sunken in the depths of an abject barbarism, have in their time thought deeply concerning the origin of things, and have evolved explana- tions which at any rate bear comparison with those put for- ward by the philosophers of higher races. "In the Beginning," say the Dasuns, "there was nothing, only darkness and the emptiness of the void,- but there was a long, thin stone ; and out of the long, thin stone came creeping from one end the god Kinohringan, and from the other end came the goddess Sinemundu, crawling. And together they seated themselves upon the long, thin stone, and around them was nothing, only the darkness and the emptiness of the void. Then Kinohringan spoke to Sinemundu, telling her of the Perfect World which he had it in his mind to make, the world without flaw, in which there should be happiness and ease and health and peace and abundance, and in which no evil should find foot- hold; and Sinemundu listened to his words, professing admira- tion, and after the manner of women saying soft words of praise to pleasure him." But before beset about his task of creation, Kinohringan rose up from his seat upon the long, thin stone, and bidding Sinemundu await his return, wandered off into the void in order to explore its capabilities, and when he had departed, evil entered into the heart of Sinemundu his wife. First, she was offended in that Kinohringan had spoken of his schemes only, and of the great things which he would do; and then she began to ask herself, in what was she his inferior seeing that both had emerged from the long, thin stone ? Re- senting his airs of superiority, she sought some means of vindicating her own claims to consideration and respect, and at once the idea came to her that she would create the Perfect World of which he had spoken, so that on his return he would find that he had been forestalled, and would admit that her godhead was equal to his own. Thereupon she began hurriedly to fashion the world, working with feverish haste lest all should not be completed before her lord rejoined her ; and since she was a woman she lacked con-
tinuity of purpose, and was ever busy over another piece of work before she had fairly completed that which she had in hand. Therefore all diet she wrought was flawed and blemished, for the hills were too high, so that they robbed men of their breath, and the valleys were too low, so that they became swamps for which no man has any use, and where the waters were not too abundant they were scarce and difficult to find. Moreover, the sun was too hot, the moon could only shine fitfully, the rains were too heavy, the droughts too long, the jungles too dense, and game and forest produce too rare and hard to come by. But worse than all this, pain and sickness and death, the bad dreams which cause the Dfisuns to destroy so many of their unborn children, and the cruel curse of labour, without which man may not support life, were suffered to win a place in the world which Sinemundu fashioned. But when Kinohringan returned and beheld the sorry, misshapen thing which she had made, he was filled with horror and cried aloud with an exceeding bitter cry, but he would have naught to do with it, and bade Sinemundu manage it in accordance with the measure of the folly which bad brought it into existence. Wherefore among the Dasune women bold all sacerdotal offices even to this day, and though the people pray to the great god Kinohringan, they know that all evil has its source in the goddess whose pridt and untimely interference alone prevented the creation of the Perfect World.
That, I maintain, would be a remarkable myth, no matter what the ancient religion in which it found a place, or the race of the forgotten philosopher who evolved it ; but coming to us as it does from one of the most primitive peoples in the depths of the Bornean forests, it seems to thrust out of shape many of our preconceived ideas as to the limitations of the intellect among savages. It is ingenious, original, and in a sense plausible; it shows a certain cynical appreciation of some aspects of human nature, and it supplies a workable explanation for things inexplicable. It is, above all, curious to note the reappearance of the masculine tendency—itself as old as Adam—to lay all the blame for a world that has gone awry upon the woman. At any rate, it bears out Sir Walter Scott's opinion, that none are so mean and ignorant but. that they have something interesting to impart to their betters if the latter know where to look for it,—even in the camps of
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