To commence with Mr. Hale’s account:—“The valley of the Kinta is, and has been for a very long time, essentially a mining country. There are in the district nearly five hundred registered mines, of which three are worked by European Companies, the rest being either private mines, i.e. mines claimed by Malays, which have been worked by them and their ancestors for an indefinite period, or new mines, in other words new concessions given indifferently on application to Malays and Chinese. There are about three hundred and fifty private Malay mines, and it is with these principally that the following paper will deal.
“So far, no lodes have been discovered in Kinta; it is, however, probable that, as the country is opened up and prospectors get up amongst the spurs of the main range, the sources of the stream tin will come to light.
“Mining in Kinta, like mining in Lârut, is for stream tin, and this is found literally everywhere in Kinta; it is washed out of the sand in the river-beds—a very favourite employment with Mandheling women; Kinta natives do not affect it much, although there is more than one stream where a good worker can earn a dollar per day; it is mined for in the valley, and sluiced for on the sides of hills; and, lastly, a very suggestive fact to a geologist, it has been found on the tops of isolated limestone bluffs and in the caves[225] which some of them contain.
“This stream tin has probably been worked for several centuries in Kinta; local tradition says that a very long time ago Siamese were the principal miners, and there is evidence that very extensive work has been done here by somebody at a time when the method was different from that which is commonly adopted by Kinta Malays at the present day. There are at least fifty deep well-like pits on the Lahat hill, averaging about eight feet in diameter and perhaps twenty feet deep.
“Further up country I have seen a large pit which the natives called a Siamese mine; this is about fifty feet in diameter and over twenty feet deep, and its age may be conjectured from the virgin forest in which it is situated. Besides these, at many places extensive workings are continually brought to light as the country is opened up, and these appear to have been left undisturbed for at least a hundred years. Further evidence of old work is furnished by slabs of tin of a shape unlike that which has been used in Perak in the memory of living persons; and only a few weeks ago two very perfect ‘curry stones’ of an unusual shape and particularly sharp grit were found at a depth of eight feet in natural drift. These may, perhaps, have been used to grind grain.
“So peculiarly is Kinta a mining district, that even the Sakais of the hills do a little mining to get some tin sand wherewith to buy the choppers and sarongs which the Malays sell to them at an exorbitant price.
“The Malay pawang, or medicine-man, is probably the inheritor of various remnants and traditions of the religion which preceded Muhammadanism, and in the olden time this class of persons derived a very fair revenue from the exercise of their profession, in propitiating and scaring those spirits who have to do with mines and miners; even now, although the Malay pawang may squeeze a hundred or perhaps two hundred dollars out of the Chinese towkay[226] who comes to mine for tin in Malaya, the money is not perhaps badly invested, for the Chinaman is no prospector, whereas a good Malay pawang has a wonderful ‘nose’ for tin, and it may be assumed that the Chinese towkay and, before his time, the Malay miner, would not pay a tax to the pawang unless they had some ground for believing that, by employing him and working under his advice, there would be more chance of success than if they worked only on their own responsibility.
“The pawang being a person who claims to have powers of divination and other imperfectly understood attributes, endeavours to shroud his whole profession in more or less of mystery. In his vocabulary, as in that of the gutta-hunters, special terms are used to signify particular objects, the use of the ordinary words being dropped; this is called ‘bahâsa pantang.’[227]
“The following are some of the special terms alluded to:—
“Ber-olak tinggi,[228] instead of gajah—elephant. The elephant is not allowed on the mine, or must not be brought on to the actual works, for fear of damage to the numerous races and dams; to name him, therefore, would displease the spirits (hantu).