THE STORY OF BÂYAN THE PAROQUET
Said one among them, 'Surely not in vain
My substance from the common Earth was ta'en
And to this Figure moulded, to be broke,
Or trampled back to shapeless Earth again.'Omar Khayya’m.Life—meaning the life which animates the bodies of other people—is not priced
high by the natives of the East Coast; but eight or nine years ago, it was held
even more lightly than it is at present. Murder was frequently done for the most
trivial causes, and a Malay often drew a knife, when an Englishman would have
been content to drop a damn. Young Chiefs were wont to take a life or two from
pure galeté de cœur, merely to show that they were beginning to feel their feet,
and were growing up brave and manly as befitted their descent. Such doings
were not regarded altogether with disfavour by the boy's parents,—for, in a rude
state of society, a Chief must be feared before he is loved, if his days are to be
long in the land,—and some of the older men encouraged their sons to make a
kill, much in the same spirit which animated parents in Europe half a century
ago, when they put a finishing touch to the education of their children by
sending them on the Grand Tour. Some fathers went even further than this, and
Râja Haji Hamid once told me that he killed his first man when he was a child of
eleven or twelve, his victim being a very thin, miserable-looking Chinaman,
upon whom his father bade him try his 'prentice hand. The Chinaman had done
no evil, but he was selected because he was feeble and decrepit, and would show
no fight even if attacked by a small boy with a kris. Râja Haji told me that he
botched the killing a good deal, but that he hacked the life out of the Chinaman
at last, though the poor wretch, like Charles II., took an unconscionable time
adying. Death to this Chinaman must have only been one degree less unpleasant
than it was to the man who
beyond the seas
Was scraped to death with oyster shells