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.