For a moment I stood and gazed out over the vast expanse that lay before me, my mind filled with the wild, unwritten poetry of its jungles and its people; then I turned to my companion.
“It is beautiful!”
He shrugged his shoulders.
“But not equal to the view from our own Mount Washington.”
“Then why take so much trouble to secure it? Mount Pulei is as high, and there is a good road to its top.”
I laughed. “Mount Pulei or Mount Washington is not Ophir.”
“True!” he answered, opening his eyes in surprise at the seeming absurdity of my statement. “He that told you they were speaketh a lie.”
We spent the night on the summit, and watched the sun drop into the midst of the sea, away to the west. It was cool and delightful after the moist, heat-laden atmosphere of the lowlands, and a strong breeze freed us from the swarm of tiger mosquitoes that we had learned to expect as the darkness came on.
Where the Ophir of the Bible really is, will ever be a question of doubt. To my mind it embraces the entire East—the Malay Peninsula, Ceylon, India, and even China,—Ophir being merely a comprehensive term, possibly taken from this Mount Ophir of Johore, which signified the most central point of the region to which Solomon’s ships sailed. For all ages the gold of the Malay Peninsula has been known; from the earliest times there has been intercourse between the Arabians and the Malays, while the Malayan was the very first of the far Eastern countries to adopt the Mohammedan religion and customs.
All the articles mentioned in the Biblical account of Mount Ophir are found in and about Malacca in abundance, while on the coast of Africa two of them, peacocks and silver, are missing.