If the Hebrew word thukyim is translated peacocks, and not parrots, then Solomon’s ships must have turned east after passing the Straits of Bab-el-Mandeb, and not south along the coast of Africa toward Sofala. For peacocks are only found in India and Malaya.
It is a singular fact that in the language of the Orang Bennu, or aborigines of the Malay Peninsula, that word “peacocks,” which in the modern Malay is marrak, is in the aboriginal chim marak, which is the exact termination of the Hebrew tuchim. Their word for bird is tchem, another surprising similarity.
The morning sun brought us to our feet long before it was light in the vast spaces beneath our eyes. The jungle held its reddening rays for a moment; they flamed along the course of a half-hidden river; we stood out clear and distinct in their glorious effulgence, and then the broken, denuded crags and ragged ravines of the padang-batu absorbed them in its black fastnesses.
The gold of Mount Ophir was all about us. The air, the stones, the very trees, seemed to have been transformed into the glorious metal that the little fleets of Solomon and Huram sailed so far to seek. The Aurea Chersonese was a breathing, pulsating reality.
Busuk
The Story of a Malayan Girlhood
They called her Busuk, or “the youngest” at her birth. Her father, the old punghulo, or chief, of the little kampong, or village, of Passir Panjang, whispered the soft Allah Akbar, the prayer to Allah, in her small brown ear.
The subjects of the punghulo brought presents of sarongs run with gold thread, and not larger than a handkerchief, for Busuk to wear about her waist. They also brought gifts of rice in baskets of cunningly woven cocoanut fibre; of bananas, a hundred on a bunch; of durians, that filled the bungalow with so strong an odor that Busuk drew up her wrinkled, tiny face into a quaint frown; and of cocoanuts in their great green, oval shucks.
Busuk’s old aunt, who lived far away up the river Maur, near the foot of Mount Ophir, sent a yellow gold pin for the hair; her husband, the Hadji Mat, had washed the gold from the bed of the stream that rushed by their bungalow.