“Then Si Laboh saw that the king’s daughter, whose name was Princess Rimbut, was suffering from one of the caltrops which he himself had planted. He therefore extracted it from her foot, so that she recovered, and the king, in order to reward Si Laboh, gave him the Princess in marriage.
“Now when they had been married a long time, and had got two children, Si Laboh endeavoured to persuade his wife to accompany him on a visit to his own country. To this the Princess replied ‘Yes; but if I go you must promise never to add to the dish any young tree-shoots at meal-time.’[71]
“On this they started, and at the end of the first day’s journey they halted and sat down to eat. But Si Laboh had forgotten the injunctions of his wife, and put young tree-shoots into the dish with his rice. Then his wife protested and said, ‘Did I not tell you not to put young tree-shoots into your food?’ But Si Laboh was obstinate, and merely replied, ‘What do I care?’ so that his wife was turned back into an elephant and ran off into the jungle. Then Si Laboh wept and followed her, but she refused to return as she had now become an elephant. Yet he followed her for a whole day, but she would not return to him, and he then returned homewards with his children.
“This is all that is known about the origin of elephants who are human beings.”
A Malay charm which was given me (at Labu) to serve as a protection against elephants (pĕndinding gajah) gives the actual name of the Elephant King—
“O Grandfather Moyang Kaban,
Destroy not your own grandchildren.”
Ghost elephants (gajah kramat) are not uncommon. They are popularly believed to be harmless, but invulnerable, and are generally supposed to exhibit some outward and visible sign of their sanctity, such as a stunted tusk or a shrunken foot. They are the tutelary genii of certain localities, and when they are killed the good fortune of the neighbourhood is supposed to depart too. Certain it is, that when one of these ghost elephants was shot at Klang a year or two ago, it did not succumb until some fifty or sixty rifle-bullets had been poured into it, and its death was followed by a fall in the local value of coffee and coffee land, from which the district took long to recover.[72]
A ghost elephant is very often thought to be the guardian spirit of some particular shrine—an idea that is common throughout the Peninsula.
Other general ideas about the elephant are as follows:—