CHAPTER XIX

Malay people have a great reverence for age, and Datu Isa’s many years apparently endeared her still more to the younger generation at Kuching. Her children, grandchildren, and I, were delighted when she would tell us about her early life, and also about the superstitions and legends of her country. Her conversation was always interesting, and I wish I could give an impression of her manner when relating these tales. When sixteen years of age, she, together with several Malay women of Kuching, had been liberated from captivity by the menacing guns of James Brooke’s yacht, turned on to the Palace of her captor, Rajah Muda Hassim, who had intended to carry her off to Brunei for the Sultan’s harem. This personal reminiscence invariably served as the prelude to other interesting tales. The story of the Pontianak ghost, for instance, was the one which perhaps thrilled us most. Malays almost sing as they talk, and their voices quaver, become loud or soft, or die off in a whisper, the words being interspersed with funny little nasal noises, together with frowns, sighs, or smiles. When about to relate a dramatic incident, Datu Isa became silent for a moment, looked at us with knitted brows, although she did not see us, so intent was she on her story.

This is the story of the Pontianak. When a baby is about to be born, the father walking under the flooring of his house hears a low chuckle behind him. He turns round, and sees a beautiful woman looking at him. Her face is like the moon, her eyes are like stars, her mouth is like a half-open pomegranate, her complexion is white, her hair intensely red. She wears a sarong round her waist, and no jacket covers her shoulders. Should the husband have neglected to set fire to the bunch of onions, tuba roots, and other ingredients, the smoke of which keeps evil spirits away, the woman stands there for some moments without uttering a sound. Then she opens her mouth, giving vent to peals of laughter. By this time the husband is so frightened that he can think of no spell by which to combat her evil intentions. After a while, her feet rise an inch or two from the ground, and as she flies swiftly past him, her hair flows straight behind her like a comet’s tail, when he sees between her shoulder blades the large gaping wound, signifying that she is a Pontianak. After this apparition, there is no hope for the woman or the babe about to be born, they are doomed to die, so that the Pontianak is one of the most dreaded ghosts haunting Malay houses.

As Datu Isa finished the Pontianak story, we all clamoured for more. The old lady loved to see our interest, and went on telling us many other superstitions: Unless you cover the heads of sleeping children with black cloth, and put a torn fishing net on the top of their mosquito curtains, the birds, Geruda, Dogan, and Konieh (supposed to be eagles), will come close to them and cause convulsions. You must put knives or pinang cutters near your babies, and when walking out with them you must take these instruments with you, until your babies can walk alone. Then turning to me, Datu Isa would say: “I hope you will never see the sun set under the fragment of a rainbow, Rajah Ranee, for that is a certain portent that the Rajah’s wife must die, although rainbows in other portions of the sky do not matter if you know how to address them. When my children and grandchildren are out in the garden, and a rainbow arches over the sky, we pluck the heads off the more gaily coloured flowers and place them on the children’s heads, and say: ‘Hail, King of the Sky, we have come out to meet you in our finest clothes.’”

It is unlucky for a child to lie on its face and kick up its legs, this being a sure sign the father or mother will fall sick. When a woman expects a baby, the roof of her house must not be mended, nor must her husband cut his hair or his nails. During this time a guest must not be entertained for one night only; they must stay two. When a woman dies in childbirth, during the fasting month of the Muhammadans, she becomes an “orang alim” (a good spirit), and all the sins she may have committed are forgiven her.

Datu Isa had great faith in a bangle I possessed, made of a kind of black seaweed found on the Sarawak coast, and she was anxious I should take care not to break it. It was given me in this way: During the first years of my stay in Sarawak, an old gardener employed at the Palace, having in some way misbehaved himself, was dismissed. Shortly afterwards, I met the old man in a state of great depression during one of my walks the other side of the river, and he begged me to use my influence with the Rajah and get him taken back again, promising he would behave better in the future. He was a lazy old man, but as I felt sorry for him, I asked the Rajah to give him another trial. The Rajah agreed, and the man resumed work in the Astana garden in his own desultory way. I often used to watch him pulling up the weeds from the paths; he would sit on his haunches, stare at the river, and take some minutes’ rest after every weed he extracted. Notwithstanding these drawbacks, he was a grateful soul, and on the morning of his reinstalment amongst the Rajah’s gardeners he brought me a bangle made of this black seaweed. It was very small and I had difficulty in getting it over my hand, so the old man put it into boiling water to make it more elastic, and, after some little trouble, it was forced over my hand. “Lightning, snake bites, and antus can never harm you,” he said, “as long as you keep the bangle round your wrist, but should it ever break, it would bring you bad luck!” The bangle is on my wrist now, and I dread lest anything should happen to it, for should it ever get broken, I should feel just as nervous of the result as would any of my Malay women friends.

Some of the Malays in Sarawak use somewhat disconcerting methods to frighten away evil spirits on the occasion of very bad storms. After a frightful gale, accompanied by incessant lightning and thunder, that occurred in Kuching, two or three owners of plantations in the suburbs of the town came to the Rajah and complained that some of their Malay neighbours had cut down all their fruit trees during the hurricane, in order to propitiate the spirit of the storm. Nowadays these drastic measures to other people’s property are seldom heard of, because the Rajah has his own methods of dealing with such superstitious and undesirable proceedings. It took some time to eradicate these curious and unneighbourly customs, but I believe they are now a thing of the past.

I must tell one more curious belief existing amongst Malays. Just before I left for England, a Malay woman from one of our out-stations brought me a cocoa-nut, very much larger than the ordinary fruit of the Archipelago. I believe these huge cocoa-nuts are only to be found growing in the Seychelles Islands, and the natives call them “cocoa de mer” The woman told me she had brought me this fruit on account of the luck it brought its possessor; at the

same time assuring me it came from fairyland. I asked her to tell me its story, when she informed me that, as every one knows, in the middle of the world is a place called “The navel of the sea.” In this spot, guarded by two dragons, is a tree on which these large cocoa-nuts grow, known as Pau Jinggeh. The dragons feed on the fruit, and when they have partaken too freely of it, have fits of indigestion, causing them to be sea-sick; thus the fruit finds its way into the ocean, and is borne by the current into all parts of the world. These enormous nuts are occasionally met with by passing vessels, and in this manner some are brought to the different settlements in the Malayan Archipelago. The fruit brought for my acceptance had been given to the woman by a captain of a Malay schooner, who had rescued it as it was bobbing up and down in the water under the keel of his boat. “I thought you would like to have it, Rajah Ranee,” she said, “because it cannot be bought for love nor money.” The fruit now occupies a prominent position in our drawing-room at Kuching, and is a source of great interest to the natives.

With our ideas of European wisdom, we may be inclined to smile superciliously at these beliefs, but we should not forget that a great many of us do not like seeing one magpie, we avoid dining thirteen at table, we hate to see the new moon through glass, we never walk under a ladder, or sit in a room where three candles are burning; and how about people one meets who assure us they have heard the scream of a Banshee, foretelling the death of some human being? Putting all these things together, I do not think either Malays or Dyaks show much more superstition than we Europeans do; after all, we are not so very superior to primitive races, although we imagine that on account of our superior culture we are fit to govern the world.