Fatumak bore me no grudge for trying to pry too curiously into his art; he came to visit us again the next day; all was forgiven and he was as genial as ever. It happened that on this particular occasion he had come to settle his accounts with Friedlander for goods to be received in return for coconuts rendered. He was always most accurate in his dealings and seemed to remember so exactly the number of coconuts representing the value of each article which he had been promised, that Friedlander fairly marvelled at his memory, until one day he discovered that the old man had invented a cipher for all the articles of trade and for the quantities of coconuts. In this cipher he drew up his accounts with a lead pencil on any old scrap of paper that he could find, and then proudly read them off to Friedlander. The signs were always the same and were perfectly intelligible to the writer, no matter how long a time had elapsed since they had been written. On the opposite page is a photograph of one of his accounts, which I preserved after it had been settled; the various entries have been numbered and translated. Some of them are merely pictographs, such as the axe, and the iron pots, but others need explanation. I asked him the meaning of the mark indicating a package of tea, and he explained that when tea was given to him it was always in a little piece of paper, and that the little round object represented the bundle, and the crooked line at the top was the twist he gave to the ends of the paper to keep it secure. The sign which he used for boxes of sardines is puzzling; Fatumak did not explain it, but it looks as if the wavy twist on the right side of the figure is meant to represent the strip of tin which is twisted off with a key when these cans are opened; whence he got the sign also for a hundred coconuts he could not explain, but it was always the same and perfectly legible to him.
The people of Uap use a decimal system having separate words for twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, but sixty is six-tens, seventy, seven-tens, etc.; and again, uncompounded words for one hundred and one thousand. This may seem trivial to note, but I found a decimal system among the Miri Nagas of Upper Assam, in India; they counted, however, only to ten, and then repeated; they had no terms for eleven, twelve, thirteen, etc., nor for twenty. When they reached ten, a stick or pebble was placed beside them on the ground as a record of the tens.
Fatumak’s cipher or system of sign writing elevates him at once head and shoulders above the most advanced and intelligent of his fellow-countrymen, who, for the greater part, have barely emerged from the stone age; in fact, adzes of sharpened shell are still to be found in almost all the houses of the old families, and the old men can distinctly remember these primitive implements in daily use by their parents and grand-parents.
In sooth Fatumak was a most lovable old character, uncomplaining under the discomforts of his deformity, always ready to impart and anxious to receive information, and never obtrusive or presuming, as is so often the failing of natives of these islands when they find that a stranger is interested in them.
CHAPTER IX
RELIGION
One evening when old Fatumak appeared to be in a philosophical mood and Friedlander was at hand as a kind interpreter, a favourable opportunity seemed present to ask the reader of the future to turn back the pages of his memory and tell what he knew of the dim and misty past,—when and how and by whom this fair little tropical world was created. After the question was put to him, he sat silent for a while, with his eyes cast down fixedly on a fresh bolus of betel nut, for the various condiments whereof he was rummaging in his betel basket on the floor beside him. When the mixture was duly spread out upon the green leaf of wild pepper, to add the last supreme touch, he took up his bamboo box of powdered lime, holding it between his thumb and middle finger and, tapping it meditatively with his forefinger, shook out a sprinkling of lime through the small hole in the bottom; then he lovingly folded the leaf over its contents, and throwing his head back and rolling up his eyes, crammed the bolus far back in his cheek, then in a somewhat muffled voice at length replied, “There are many strange stories about those times, but I think they are all untrue, yet what I am now about to tell you I know is just what really happened.” He leaned back against the door post and ruminated quietly, while Friedlander explained to me what had just been said, and then Fatumak resumed, with the following story, which I give without the frequent interruptions: “Long, long ago when there was nothing but sea and sky, and no land, there was a large piece of driftwood like the trunk of a coconut palm floating on the waves; on the under side of it was a great barnacle, and out of this came the first woman, and she lived in the water and never went up on top of the huge log. Very soon she had a daughter, whom she warned that on no account was she to go up on top of the log. The daughter’s curiosity was, however, too much for her and when it was low tide and the bottom of the sea came up to meet the log, she crept up on top, and a gal tree [hibiscus] grew down from the sky and stuck fast to the log and held it in one place. When she got up into the air and daylight, she found that the driftwood was inhabited by all sorts of devils (kan) that hover about on the surface of the sea, and they were all clothed, but she was not. As soon as the clothed devils of the sea caught sight of her and saw that she was not like themselves and was naked, they killed her and preserved her body in salt.
“Very soon the mother missed her daughter and came up to look for her and found only her dead body preserved in salt. Then Yalafath, the ruler of Falraman (Heaven), was sorry for her and commanded the kan who had killed her to work a charm that would bring her to life again. When this was accomplished, Yalafath gave to the mother and daughter packages of sand and yams and told them to go over the sea and scatter the sand and plant the yams, but to return to the driftwood and the gal tree in seven days without fail. So they set out and did as they were told, but enjoyed it so much that they completely forgot when the seven days were up. Yalafath was very, very angry and sent a rat after them, telling him to eat up all the yam plants. When the mother and daughter saw their plants destroyed, they came to their senses and remembered the promise, so they hurried back to ask pardon of Yalafath. He forgave them and sent them a cat to kill the rat. Then he commanded the daughter to marry the kan who had first killed her and brought her to life again, and he gave them a large canoe with a sail, and they travelled everywhere and found that where the sand had been scattered in piles there were the high lands and mountains, where white people lived and they had everything they wanted. Where the sand had been scattered broadcast were the low coral islands. The dark people are the children of that kan and the daughter of the barnacle woman, but white people are children of kans for they go everywhere in the big ships that Yalafath has given them, and they take everything, even coconuts and sand, from the dark people.”
This narrative does not seem to me to bear the stamp of antiquity. In the first place, cats are of comparatively recent introduction on the island, probably from some of the whaling vessels which frequently traded there fifteen or twenty years ago. In the second place, the reference to the white man taking away the coconuts and even the sand from the dark people is an allusion to a copra-trader who,—so Friedlander told me,—a few years ago cast anchor in the Tomil harbour, and, after discharging his cargo, found that there was not enough dried copra to give him proper ballast, so he had to fill one of his holds with sand-ballast; this the natives could not understand and thought that even the very soil of their island was valuable to the strange white people. I have, nevertheless, given the story as it was told, although it may be merely the offspring of Fatumak’s imagination and tinged with his belief in the ruling of man’s actions by a superior being and a company of subordinate demons.
There are no set forms of religious observance in Uap, but they believe that there is in the sky overhead an abode of departed spirits; it is supposed to be a large house, known as Falraman, and over it presides Yalafath, the creator of the world, who is a kind but rather unsympathetic god; nevertheless, if, in distress, prayers are offered to him, he intervenes and overrules the horde of evil demons. Falraman is precisely like any large house in Uap, and the spirits of men and women who go there assume the same bodily shape that they had in this life, but it is only the “thinking-part,” or tafenai, that really goes. The tafenai of children also go to Falraman, but whether or not they grow old is not known to mortals. The tafenai of stillborn children, however, never get into Falraman; all they know is how to cry; therefore they stay in the ground where they have been buried and cry incessantly for their mothers. After a tafenai has been long enough in Falraman to have the mortal “heaviness” and earthly odour wear off, it goes back to its former dwelling place in Uap and it is then known as an athegith, but is invisible to mortal eyes. If a tafenai find that it had not been befittingly honoured at burial, it brings sickness to the household and will not desist until its dead body has been laid away with due lamentations and funeral songs, and the mach-mach man has pronounced a charm exhorting it to desist. It is the tafenai trying to escape out of the body that makes a person ill, and all the charms said over sick people are exhortations to the tafenai to remain; when a man is delirious, his tafenai has left his body and it may or may not be enticed to return.