This method is called ukor mata sa-b’lah, and is used by Sumatran Malays, especially in Menangkabau.
Spearheads can also be measured:—
Measure off the length of the spearhead and fold the string in two; see how often the breadth is contained in the half of the string; if the blade is a good one, it must be five and a half times (tĕngah anam). This is called ukor orang Perak or ukor tĕngah anam.
Another superstition connected with weapons is described as follows by Sir Frank Swettenham. It illustrates the magic powers attributed to the Pawang in so many departments of nature and life, but does not seem to have any special object or meaning.
“A great many Malays and one or two Europeans may be found who profess to have seen water drawn from a kris. The modus operandi is simple. The pâwang (I dare not call him conjurer) works with bare arms to show there is no deception. He takes the kris (yours, if you prefer it) from its wooden handle, and, holding the steel point downwards in his left hand, he recites a short incantation to the effect that he knows all about iron, and where it comes from, and that it must obey his orders. He then with the thumb and first two fingers of his right hand proceeds to gently squeeze the steel, moving his fingers up and down the blade. After a little while a few drops of water fall from the point of the kris, and these drops quickly develop into a stream that will fill a cup. The pâwang will then hand round the blade and tell you to bend it; this you will find no difficulty in doing, but by making two or three passes over the kris the pâwang can render it again so hard that it cannot be bent.
“The only drawback to this trick or miracle is that the process ruins the temper of the steel, and a kris that has been thus treated is useless.”[207]
The subject of this section, more perhaps than any of the others, has lost its former importance, and become almost a matter of merely historical interest. In the Malay Peninsula, at least in the States which are under British protection, offensive weapons are seldom worn now-a-days except on State occasions and for purely ceremonial purposes; and warfare, it may be hoped, is now a thing of the past. In spite of the halo of romance thrown round it in native writings, Malay warfare (in modern times, at least) has never been anything but the barest and most bloodthirsty piracy by sea, and the merest “bushwhacking” and stockade-fighting on land; its final suppression, even if in some degree it should involve a slackening of fibre in the Malay character, is not a matter for regret. With it will disappear much of the curious lore that surrounded it, and indeed a good deal of it must have been lost already. Little has been said here of the methods of divination used in warfare which take up so much space in Malay treatises on the subject; success in war is held to depend on a great number of minute observances, and to be capable of being foretold by careful attention to omens and signs. But the divination applied in warfare does not seem to differ in principle from that which is used in all the other avocations of life, and a sufficient idea of its nature will be gathered from the account given in the next section.