was slowly crossing another avenue in the forest.
“Feeling the folly,” says Sherard Osborn, “of yielding to the impression of
reality which the illusion was certainly creating in my mind, I walked away, and
kept the Malay employed in different ways until midnight; he, however, every
now and then spat vehemently, and cursed all evil spirits with true
Mohammedan fervour.”
THE ORANG-LAUTS.Of this singular race of Malays, the Orang-Lauts, “Men of the Seas,” or “Sea-
Gipsies,” it is said that they do not seem to know anything of a Creator. “A fact
so difficult to believe,” says Mr. Thomson, “when we find that the most
degraded of the human race, in other quarters of the globe, have an intuitive idea
of this unerring and primary truth imprinted on their minds, that I took the
greatest care to find a slight image of the Deity within the chaos of their
thoughts, however degraded such might be, but was disappointed. They knew
neither the God nor the Devil of the Christians or Mohammedans, although they
confessed they had been told of such; nor any of the demi-gods of Hindu
mythology, many of whom were recounted to them.”
The three great epochs of individual life, birth, marriage, death, pass unnoticed
by them. At birth, the mother’s joy is the only welcome to a world it is not likely
to find very bright or happy. At marriage, the sole solemnity is the exchange
between the male and the female of a mouthful of tobacco and a cheepah, or
gallon, of water. At death, the body of the deceased is wrapped in his rags and
tatters, and with, perhaps, a few tears from the attendant women, committed to
the earth. They have none of that exquisite enjoyment of life which is felt by a
cultured race; and neither the entrance upon it nor the passage from it seems to
them an event calculated to awaken any emotion of interest. And as they are
absolutely without religion, so are they wholly free from superstition; the solemn
influences of Nature seem to produce no effect upon their stolid dispositions. Of
the pârus, and dewas, and nambangs, and other phantom forms which, in the
quick imagination of the Malay, haunt each mountain, rock, and tree, they
nothing know; and knowing nothing, they do not fear. Terror is as often the
result of knowledge as of ignorance. The mind that has no conception of an
unseen world or a supernatural force, must necessarily be free from all
apprehension of it.