"I looked up just as a black leopard sprang at us. Ali's
spear whizzed by my head, hitting the animal in the side. I
fired, catching him in mid-air squarely in the chest with an
explosive bullet."
To Malays nothing seems impossible, and it is difficult to hold them down to actual facts. They will hedge about with "I think" and "bârang-kâli (perhaps)" until you give up in disgust; and then they will offer to bring their brothers or other relatives, who will repeat the performance. Sometimes I used to spend hours in wondering how their minds worked, and I came to the conclusion that they talk merely with a desire to please. They want to tell anything you want to hear, regardless of whether it is true or not. It is exasperating and occasionally funny. For instance, several years after I left Sumatra, I was traveling through the jungle, looking for elephants. At one village I talked with the Malay headman, who represented the government in that locality, and the conversation turned to large elephants. Jumbo, who was eleven feet two inches, had died, and I had it in my mind that I should like to find an animal big enough to take his place. "Have you ever seen a twelve-foot elephant?" I asked the headman. And as quick as a flash, he answered, "How many do you want?" He could not understand why I rolled back on the floor and laughed until my jaws ached. The headman was a true Malay.
I found it best, in trying to get information from a Malay, to ask my question and then, before he had a chance to speak, say: "Jângan fîkir—jawâb ya tîdak. Sahya bûlih fîkir. (Don't think—answer yes or no. I'll do the thinking)." Then he would generally admit immediately that he didn't know, but he would always offer to bring his brother or some other person that he thought might know. It is a trait that makes business relations between the whites and the natives difficult, and is to a large degree responsible for the fact that much of the business in the Archipelago is done through the Chinese. The Chinese have sufficient patience and understanding to deal with the Malays, and they know how to make them work.
There are two distinct classes of Malay: the Orang Ulu, living in the jungle, and the Orang Laut, living on the coast. Through their association with the Chinese merchants, some of the latter develop into clever dealers, but for the most part they are content to spend their lives in loafing. They work when they need money, but they need so little of it that they can afford to idle along through life. When the supply of food runs low, they put out in their boats at daybreak and return at sundown with fish. These are sorted and left to dry, afterward sorted again, according to their market value, and sold to the Chinese, who ship them in palm-leaf baskets to Singapore. Then the Malays have finished their work for another month or so. Often the merchant advances money for future delivery, and the Malays find themselves obliged to work for long periods to keep from being punished for debt. That is a favorite method of making them work. They consider themselves gentlemen and despise the Chinese as pig-eating heathens. If they must submit to working for the Chinese merchants, they have the satisfaction of watching the coolies do most of the hard labor while they spend their days at games.
The day's routine while I stayed in Palembang with the old hadji was simple and pleasant. I lived with him and his first wife—he had three others. We rose early and went for a swim in the river, and then, squatting on the floor and eating with our fingers, we breakfasted on fish and rice. After breakfast, the hadji and I would stretch out on our mats and smoke and talk until my servant came to prepare my lunch. A Malay eats but two meals a day—always rice and fish—but I found that two weren't enough for me. After lunch I slept through the heat of the day, with the thermometer climbing up to about 125°. Then, when evening came, Palembang stirred into life.
The Malays liked games and they were continually after me to show them some new kind of kindergarten pastime. It made no difference whether it was tag or diving into buckets of treacle after money; if it was a game, they liked it. Some of them knew how to play chess and they gave whole days and nights to it. They are especially fond of gambling, and they repeatedly lose all their money and borrow from the kind merchant, with the result that, to make good their debts, they spend weeks in fishing.
Occasionally I went to the Dutch quarter to seek a few hours of companionship with white people, but I got little satisfaction out of these visits because I could speak better Malay than Dutch, and at Palambang there were few people who knew English. The white people could not understand why I preferred living with the natives, and some of them looked down on me for it. However, that fact did not trouble me, because I knew what I wanted and I was on the way to getting it. With the hadji I learned the Malay language rapidly, and before long I knew the natives far better than the average white man who goes to work in the Archipelago. For the most part, the whites make no effort to understand them and are thus largely responsible for the troubles that arise. In recent years, the attitude of the colonial governments has changed for the better and there have been fewer disturbances.
The natives came to have confidence in me, especially after the capture of the python, and accepted me as a friend. Often during the evening, when the hadji and I sat talking on the veranda, thirty or forty natives would squat near us, listening to the conversation. If the hadji or I cracked a joke, they would laugh uproariously—not that they understood what had been said, but simply because they wanted to do the proper thing.
The hadji's nephew, Ali, became my devoted servant. He was about twenty years old and far more intelligent than the average; also he was brave and resourceful—qualities that made him my most valuable aid until he was killed during one of our expeditions several years later.