still following his fallen fortunes. As he lay on his bed of boughs, under a hastily
improvised shelter of plaited palm leaves, with the fear of imminent death
staring him in the eyes; when through the long day every snapping twig and
every falling fruit, in those still forests, must have sounded to his ears like the
footfall of his pursuers, Wan Bong must have had ample time to contrast his past
position with that in which he then found himself. A few days before, he had
returned to Jĕlai, a conqueror flushed with triumph. All Pahang, he had then
imagined, lay at his feet, and he alone, of all the nobles of the Peninsula, had in a
few months upset an old-world dynasty, and placed himself upon a royal throne.
Then, in an instant of time, the vision had been shattered to fragments, and here
he lay, like a hunted beast in the jungles, quaking at every sound that broke the
stillness, an outlaw, a ruined man, with a price set upon his head.
The jungles, for a fugitive from his enemies, are not a pleasant refuge. The
constant dampness, which clings to anything in the dark recesses of the forest,
breeds boils and skin irritation of all sorts on the bodies of those who dare not
come out into the open places. Faces, on which the sunlight never falls, become
strangely pallid, and the constant agony of mind scores deep lines on cheek and
forehead. The food, too, is bad. Rice the fugitive must have, or the loathsome
dropsical swellings, called bâsal, soon cripple the strongest limbs; but a Malay
cannot live on rice alone, and the sour jungle fruits, and other vegetable growths,
with which he ekes out his scanty meals, wring his weakened stomach with
constant pangs and aches. All these things Wan Bong now experienced, as he
daily shifted his camp, from one miserable halting-place to another; but a greater
pain than all the rest was soon to be added to his cup of bitterness. He was an
opium smoker, and his hoarded store of the precious drug began to run very low.
At last the day came on which it was exhausted, and Wan Bong was driven to
desperation. For some twenty-four hours he strove against the overpowering
longing for that subtle drug that leads the strongest will captive, but the struggle
was all in vain. When, at length, the physical pain had become so intense that
Wan Bong could neither stand, nor sit, nor lie down for more than a minute at a
time, nor yet could still the moans which the restless torture drew from him, he
despatched one of his boys to seek for the supply of opium, which alone could
assuage his sufferings.
The boy left him, and his two other companions, in a patch of the high grass,
which the Malays call rĕsam, that chanced to grow at the edge of the forest near
Bâtu Nĕring. He promised to return to him as soon as the opium should have
been procured. But Che’ Wan Âhman's people had anticipated that Wan Bong