which Solomon’s ships sailed. For all ages the gold of the Malay Peninsula has
been known; from the earliest times there has been intercourse between the
Arabians and the Malays, while the Malayan was the very first of the far Eastern
countries to adopt the Mohammedan religion and customs.
All the articles mentioned in the Biblical account of Mount Ophir are found in
and about Malacca in abundance, while on the coast of Africa two of them,
peacocks and silver, are missing.
If the Hebrew word thukyim is translated peacocks, and not parrots, then
Solomon’s ships must have turned east after passing the Straits of Bab-el-
Mandeb, and not south along the coast of Africa toward Sofala. For peacocks are
only found in India and Malaya.
It is a singular fact that in the language of the Orang Bennu, or aborigines of the
Malay Peninsula, that word “peacocks,” which in the modern Malay is marrak,
is in the aboriginal chim marak, which is the exact termination of the Hebrew
tuchim. Their word for bird is tchem, another surprising similarity.
The morning sun brought us to our feet long before it was light in the vast spaces
beneath our eyes. The jungle held its reddening rays for a moment; they flamed
along the course of a half-hidden river; we stood out clear and distinct in their
glorious effulgence, and then the broken, denuded crags and ragged ravines of
the padang-batu absorbed them in its black fastnesses.
The gold of Mount Ophir was all about us. The air, the stones, the very trees,
seemed to have been transformed into the glorious metal that the little fleets of
Solomon and Huram sailed so far to seek. The Aurea Chersonese was a
breathing, pulsating reality.