And address people on earth,
May I not be destroyed by any beast that has life, or by any foe or peril, or by any son of the human race.
And if the chicken in the egg should crow,
And call to chickens on earth,
May I be destroyed by any beast that has life,
But if the chicken in the egg do not crow,”
(etc. etc., as before.)
As a general rule, however, this particular class of charms shows particularly strong traces of Arabic influence, most often, perhaps, taking the form of an injunction (addressed to Jins or Angels) to watch over the person of the petitioner.
To rightly understand charms of the second class, which includes Bathing and Betel-charming charms,[49] we must have some idea of the Malay standard of beauty. This, I need hardly say, differs widely from that entertained by Europeans. In the case of manly beauty we should, perhaps, be able to acquiesce to some extent in the admiration which Malays express for “Brightness of Countenance” (chahia), which forms one of the chief objects of petition in almost every one of this class of charms;[50] but none of our modern Ganymedes would be likely to petition for a “voice like the voice of the Prophet David”;[51] or a “countenance like the countenance of the Prophet Joseph”; still less would he be likely to petition for a tongue “curled like a breaking wave,” or “a magic serpent,” or for teeth “like a herd of (black) elephants,” or for lips “like a procession of ants.”[52]
Malay descriptions of female beauty are no less curious. The “brow” (of the Malay Helen, for whose sake a thousand desperate battles are fought in Malay romances) “is like the one-day-old moon,”[53] her eyebrows resemble “pictured clouds,”[54] and are “arched like the fighting-cock’s (artificial) spur,”[55] her cheek resembles “the sliced-off-cheek of a mango,”[56] her nose “an opening jasmine bud,”[57] her hair the “wavy blossom-shoots of the areca-palm,”[58] slender[59] is her neck, “with a triple row of dimples,”[60] her bosom ripening,[61] her waist “lissom as the stalk of a flower,”[62] her head “of a perfect oval” (lit. bird’s-egg-shaped), her fingers like the leafy “spears of lemon-grass,”[63] or the “quills of the porcupine,”[64] her eyes “like the splendour of the planet Venus,”[65] and her lips “like the fissure of a pomegranate.”[66]