There we got out and walked down the steep bank on to the sandy bed, where we strolled about for a long time, watching strings of carabaos coming up from being watered, each herd led by a small boy, riding on one of the big old grey cows with a calf running alongside. They looked very picturesque, with the shallow river all the colours of the sunset, and the tall palms on the opposite bank standing in black silhouette against an orange-crimson sky.
The carabaos are big grey or reddish-grey water-buffaloes, with immense horns curving backwards, and a long, narrow, flat muzzle. They are used for every sort of purpose, the natives even riding and driving the great unwieldy creatures like horses, and guiding them by means of a single string passed through between the nostrils. If they want the carabao to go to the right they pull the string steadily, if to the left, they give a sharp jerk. Sometimes when the master is angry he will pull the poor carabao’s nose, so that he tears the piece of flesh out altogether; not at all an uncommon occurrence, and nothing distressing to a Filipino.[3] In the days of the rebellion against Spain, a few years ago, when the Filipinos caught the hated Spanish friars, they ran a rope through the priests’ noses, tied their hands, and led them about like the carabaos, so that people might spit upon the hated tyrants, and insult them at their own pleasure.
The carabaos are as gentle and amenable as horses with the natives; quite tiny children ride and bully the huge beasts, looking so comically small on the big backs, with their tiny brown legs hardly reaching to each side of the broad ribs, and driving whole herds with the most perfect independence and self-possession. The carabaos are not at all safe as regards white people, however, for they can smell and detect them at an immense distance; and they will occasionally charge them ferociously, so that they are very dangerous in the open country. I have heard some horrible stories of carabaos killing and trampling on white men in out-of-the-way places. They don’t gore, I suppose because their horns are so flat, but they trample to death, which does just as well.
These great grey, lumbering animals are very picturesque, and redeem many a Philippine scene from utter dulness as they go shambling along, drawing the native two-wheeled cart, with its big hood of brown matting filled with bundles of emerald-green sacate grass. They can shamble at an amazing pace, and that is their usual gait; but they can gallop, too, as quickly as a horse.
Besides the herds of carabaos, we saw several natives down in the bed of the river, going out to certain spots where the shelve of the sand was more abrupt for their supply of water. These were women, of course, for women do all the household tasks, even the most burdensome, their lords being busy standing about the roads or Plazas, or attending a cock-fight.
These women had long bamboo poles, with the divisions knocked out and the end closed up, which they laid in the running stream to fill with water, when they hoisted the long poles to their shoulders and carried them off like giants’ lances. The slender little figures looked quaint and pretty as they came up over the yellow, sandy, shallows in their bright red sarongs and white camisas, walking lightly and gracefully, with their thin brown feet well turned out, the fading light of the sky behind them, and the outline of dark, fretted palms.
We walked through a little palm grove back to the place where we had left the carriage, driving back along the main road as the stars were coming out and the flaring naphtha lights appearing in the little mat-shed shops. There were a great many people about, and swarms of little children in fluttering muslin shirts, all enjoying the cool evening air, which was, as a matter of fact, the same temperature as an August mid-day at home. A lot of carriages and traps flew past, the little ponies tearing like the wind, amongst them the general’s wife in her victoria, drawn by ordinary Waler horses, looking like prehistoric monsters amongst the little Filipino ponies; and we met our pet aversion, three young Mestizo “mashers,” driving at a furious pace in a spidery buggy with huge acetylene lamps, and ringing a bicycle bell.