For the gods very subtly fashion
Madness with sadness upon earth:
Not knowing in any wise compassion,
Nor holding pity of any worth.Atalanta in Calydon.In writing of the âmok, which Dâto’ Kâya Bîji Dĕrja ran in the streets of Kuâla
Trĕnggânu, I have spoken of suicide as being of very rare occurrence among
Malays of either sex, and, indeed, I know of no authenticated case in which a
man of these people has taken his life with his own hand. A Chinaman, who has
had a difference of opinion with a friend, or who conceives that he has been ill-
treated by the Powers that be, betakes himself to his dwelling, and there
deliberately hangs himself with his pig-tail, dying happy in the pleasing belief
that his spirit will haunt those who have done him a wrong, and render the
remainder of their lives upon earth 'one demned horrid grind.' Not so the Malay.
He, being gifted with the merest rudiments of an imagination, prefers to take
practical vengeance on his kind by means of a knife, to trusting to such
supernatural retaliation as may be effected after death by his ghost.
This story deals with a suicide which occurred in Pahang in July 1893, and I
have selected it to tell, because the circumstances were remarkable, and are quite
unprecedented in my experience.
If you go up the Pahang River for a hundred and eighty miles, you come to a
spot where the stream divides into two main branches, and where the name
Pahang dies an ignominious death in a small ditch, which debouches at their
point of junction. The right stream,—using the term in its topographical sense,—
is the Jĕlai, and the left is the Tĕmbĕling. If you go up the latter, you come to
rapids innumerable, a few gambir plantations, and a great many of the best
ruffians in the Peninsula, who are also my very good friends. If you follow the
Jĕlai up past Kuâla Lĭpis, where the river of the latter name falls into it on its
right bank, and on, and on, and on, you come to the Sâkai country, where the
Malay language is still unknown, and where the horizon of the people is formed
by the impenetrable jungle that shuts down on the other side of a slender stream,
and is further narrowed by the limitations of an intellect which cannot conceive
an arithmetical idea higher than the numeral three. Before you run your nose into