But whilst near the sea the inhabitants and travellers can enjoy all the luxuries and conveniences of the 20th century, in the interior of the Peninsula, leading a nomadic life in the thick of the jungle, which covers the range of mountains from north to south, a primitive people still exists. All unconscious of the violent passions and turbulent emotions that disturb the tranquillity of their fellow-creatures (civilized in form if not in fact) at some miles distant from them, they live quietly and peaceably in their forest homes preserving intact their original simplicity and ingenuousness.
The hot breath of our fagging life, that generates every sort of nerve complaint, has not yet reached their mountain haunts. On those wild heights the nerves rest; the affections are not tormented; love is pure and, for this, lasting; ambition neither perverts the mind, nor consumes the conscience; there are no honours or favours to arouse envy; no artificial boundaries to liberty or difficult problems about Capital and Labour; there are no rich and no poor, for in that blessed spot money is an unknown article and what is more—strange triumph of the Savage over the Civilized—every man is a brother to the other!
Up there in the forest there are neither princes nor subjects; Governments nor Police; no Tax-gatherers, public meetings or strikes so that if Stecchetti[1] were still living he might have been sent among the Sakais to find the ideal place of which he was always seeking the address.
The 15th of June 1891 I landed at Penang (the Prince of Wales's Island) on my return from an exploring tour in the Isle of Nias. I was feeling rather worn out with the fatigues lately undergone so resolved to rest awhile on British territory.
I had brought with me a rich and interesting ethnographical collection I found no difficulty in selling to the Perak Government that destined it to the Museum at Taiping, a small town where is the British Residence.
During my well-earned repose I often heard speak of the Mai Darats, a tribe of Aborigines dwelling in the interior of the Peninsula and who were called by the name of Sakais by the Malays, a scornful appellation which signifies a people of slaves, and this insulting term is explained by the fact that formerly their neighbours carried on an extensive slave-trade by making them victims and also took advantage of their simplicity and good faith in many other ways, until the British Protectorate was established and these poor wandering tribes were put upon a par with more civilized races.
I began to gather information concerning these wild men of the bush and learnt that they inhabited the unfrequented parts of the Perak and Pahang States, that they were a nomadic race and that they passed most of their time in the abstraction and preparation of vegetable and animal poisons in which art they were exceptionally expert and that they were equally skilful in shooting poisoned arrows. Some of my informants wanted to make me believe that they were exceedingly ferocious by nature and so superstitious that they would aim their deadly dart at whatever stranger ventured to approach them, believing him to be the messenger of some Evil Spirit and that afterwards they would make of him a dainty meal to comfort their insatiable stomachs.
But knowing something of the previous relations between the Sakais and the people surrounding them I was put on my guard against certain exaggerated and prejudiced reports and felt strongly tempted to try and dissipate the vague mystery—that I somehow guessed was based upon self-interest—in which they wished to envelop the Mai Darats.
The more they told me about them the more I felt attracted towards the Sakais, it seeming to me that a people so foreign to every light of civilization, so bold as they were described to be, so free from every regime or authority, must needs afford an interesting study to one who sought to know them at close quarters. Perhaps, when once I had overcome the, not always surmountable, difficulty of getting into their company, I might find amongst them a tranquil life and settle down in their midst as a planter or agriculturist for I was already convinced that I was unfitted for commercial enterprises in which very often scruples of conscience and uprightness are encumbrances.