The paths are rough, the trails are blind
The Jungle People tread;
The yams are scarce and hard to find
With which our folk are fed.
We suffer yet a little space
Until we pass away,
The relics of an ancient race
That ne’er has had its day.

The Song of the Last Semangs.

The night was closing in apace as I and my three Malay companions pushed our way through the underwood which overgrew the narrow wood path. We were marching through the wide jungles of the Upper Perak valley, which are nearer to the centre of the Malay Peninsula than any point to which most men are likely to penetrate. Already the noisy crickets and tree beetles were humming in the boughs above our heads, and the voices of the bird folk had died down one by one until now the monotonous note of the night-jar alone smote upon our ears. The colour was dying out of the leaves and grasses of the jungle, and all things were assuming a single sombre shade of black, the trees and underwood becoming merged into one monstrous shapeless mass, bulking big in the gathering darkness.

We had been delayed all day, by constantly going astray on the innumerable faint tracks, which, in this part of the country, begin nowhere in particular, and end nowhere at all. The jungle-dwelling tribes of Semang, who alone inhabit these woods, guard their camps jealously, for, until lately, they were often raided by slave-hunting bands of Malays and Sakai. To this end they do all that woodcraft can suggest to confuse the trails which lead to their camps, making a very maze of footpaths, which serve but as a faint guide to strangers in these forests.

The Semang are the survivors of a very ancient race of negrits, remnants of which are still to be found scattered over Eastern Asia, and may be supposed to be the first family of our human stock that ever possessed these glorious lands. In appearance they are like African negroes seen through the reverse end of a field-glass. They are sooty black in colour; their hair is short and woolly, clinging to the scalp in little crisp curls; their noses are flat, their lips protrude, and their features are those of the pure negroid type. They are sturdily built, and well set upon their legs, but they are in stature little better than dwarfs. They live by hunting, and have no permanent dwellings, camping in little family groups, wherever, for the moment, game is most plentiful, or least difficult to come by.

It was a fire from the camp of a band of these little people, which presently showed red in the darkness a few yards away from us, just when we were despairing of finding either a shelter for the night or a meal with which to satisfy the pangs of hunger, that a twelve hours’ march had caused to assail us. We pushed on more rapidly when the gleam of welcome light showed us that men were at hand, and presently we emerged upon a tiny opening in the forest, in the centre of which the Semang camp was pitched. The shelters of these people were rough enough to deserve no better name. They consisted of three or four lean-to huts, formed of plaited palm leaves, propped crazily on rudely trimmed uprights, and round the fire, in the centre of the camp, a dozen squalid aborigines were huddled together. We approached very cautiously, and when I had been seen and recognised, for I was well known in these parts, the sudden panic, which our presence had occasioned, subsided quickly, and we were made free of the encampment and all that it contained.

Hunger is a good sauce, and I ate with a satisfaction which has often been lacking at a dinner table at home, of the rude meal set before me. A cool green leaf of the wild banana was spread for me, and on it were laid smoking yams and other mealy jungle roots, which fill one, as young turkeys are filled during their rearing; a few fish, fresh caught in the stream and cooked over the fire in the cleft of a split stick, and the meat of some nameless animal monkey I feared which had been dried in the sun until it was as hard as a board, eked out the curious meal. I did full justice to the roots and fish, but prudently left the doubtful meat alone, and when the cravings of my hunger were appeased, I began to make advances to my hosts.

First I produced a palm-leaf bag holding about four pounds of coarse Chinese rock salt, and bade the Semang gather round and partake. The whole contents of the bag were emptied out on to a leaf with minute care lest one precious grain should be lost, and then the naked aborigines gathered round and feasted. These jungle dwellers lack salt in their daily food, and look upon it as a luxury, much as a child regards the contents of a bon-bon box. With eager fingers they clutched the salt, and conveyed it to their mouths in handfuls. This coarse stuff would take the skin off the tongues of most human beings who attempted to eat it in this way, but I suppose that nature gives the Semang the power to take in abnormally large quantities of salt at one time, because his opportunities of eating it in small daily instalments are few and far between. In an incredibly short time the four pounds of salt had disappeared, and when the leaf had been divided up, and licked in solemn silence, the Chief of the family, an aged, scarred, and deeply wrinkled negrit, turned to me with a sigh and said

’It is very sweet, this salt that thou hast given us. Hast thou tobacco also, that we may smoke and rest?’

I produced some coarse Japanese tobacco which I had brought with me for the purpose, and when cigarettes had been rolled, with green leaves for wrappers, we all squatted around the fire, for the night was chilly up here in the foothills, and the silence of sated appetite and rested limbs fell gently upon us.

The eyes of one who dwells in the untrodden places of the earth are apt to grow careless of the picturesque aspect of his surroundings. He is often too busy following the track beneath his feet, or observing some other such thing, which is important for his immediate well-being, to more than glance at the beauties which surround him. Often, too, his heart is so sick for a sight of the murky fogs, and drizzle-damped pavements of London, or for the ordered green fields and hedgerows of the pleasant English country, that he does not readily spare more than a grudging tribute of admiration to the scenes which surround him in his exile. To-night, however, as I sat and lay by the crackling logs, I longed, as I had often done before, to possess that power which transfers the sights we see to paper or to canvas. Around us the forest rose black and impenetrable, the shadows deepened by the firelight of the camp. In the clear sky overhead the glorious Eastern stars were shining steadfastly, and at our feet a tiny stream pattered busily on the pebbles of its bed. Around the fire, and reddened by its light, sat or lay my three Malays, bare to the waist, but clothed in their bright sarongs and loose short trousers. The Semang, of both sexes and all ages, coal black, save where the gleams of the fire painted them a dull red, and nude, save for a narrow strip of coarse bark cloth twisted round their loins, lay on their stomachs with their chins propped upon their elbows, or squatted on their hams, smoking placidly. A curious group to look upon we must have been could any one have seen us: I, the European, the white man, belonging to one of the most civilised races in the Old World; the Malays, civilised too, but after the fashion of unchanging Asia, which differs so widely from the restless progressive civilisation of the West; and, lastly, the Semangs, squalid savages, nursing no ambitions save those prompted by their empty stomachs, with no hope of change or improvement in their lot, and yet representing one of the oldest races in the world a race which, though it first possessed the East, with all its possibilities and riches, could utilise none of them, and whose members carry in their eyes the melancholy look of dumb animals, which, when seen on the human countenance, denotes a people who are doomed to speedy extinction, and who, never since time began, have had their day or have played a part in human history.

Tobacco upon the mind of man has much the same effect as that which hot water has upon tea-leaves, or, indeed, as that which that beverage itself has on the majority of women. It calls out much that, without its aid, would remain latent and undeveloped. For human beings this means words, and, while we dignify our own speech over our tobacco by the name of conversation, we are apt to dispose of that of the ladies round a tea-table by labelling it gossip. Among a primitive people conversation means either broken remarks about the material things of life the food which is sorely needed and is hard to come by, the boat which is to be built, or the weapon which is to be fashioned or else it takes the form of a monologue, in which the speaker tells some tale of his own or another’s experiences to those who sit and listen. Thus it was that upon this evening, as we clustered round the fire in this camp of the Semangs, the aged patriarch, who had praised the ‘sweetness’ of my salt, lifted up his voice and spoke in this wise.

’The jungles are growing empty now, Tuan, and many things are changed since the days when I was a boy roaming through the woods of the Plus valley with my father and my two brothers. Now we live in these poor jungles of the Upper Perak valley, where the yams and roots are less sweet and less plentiful than in our former home, and where the fish-traps are often empty, and the game wild and scarce. Does the Tuan ask why then we quitted the valley of the Plus, and the hills of Legap, where once our camps were pitched? The Tuan knows many things, and he has visited the forests of which I speak, why then does he ask our reason? It was not for love of these poor hunting grounds that we quitted the Plus valley, but because we loved our women-folk and our little ones. The Tuan knows the tribe of Sakai who have their homes in the Plus, but does he not know also that they entered into a compact with the Malays of Lasak to aid in hunting us through the woods and selling all of our people whom they could catch into slavery? We of the forests had little fear of the Malays, for we could make blind trails that they could never follow, and could hide our camps in the shady places, where they could never find them. The Malays were wont, when they could trace us, to surround our camps at nightfall, and attack when the dawn was about to break, but many and many a time, when we were so surrounded, we made shift by night to escape from the circle which hemmed us in. How did we win out? What then are the trees made for? Has the Tuan never heard of the bridges of the forest people that the Malays call tali tenau? When darkness was over the forest, the young men would ascend the trees, and stretch lines of rattan from bough to bough, over the places where the trees were too far apart for a woman to leap, and when all was ready, we would climb into the branches, carrying our cooking-pots and all that we possessed, the women bearing their babies at their breasts, and the little children following at their mothers’ heels. Thus, treading shrewdly on the lines of rattan, we would pass from tree to tree, and so escape from our enemies. What does the Tuan say? That it is difficult and hazardous to walk by night on slender lines stretched among the tree-tops? No, the matter was easy. Where there is room to set a foot, why need a man fear to fall? And thus we baffled the Malays, and won our freedom. But when the Sakai dogs aided the Malays, matters were changed indeed. They would sit in the tree-tops, the whole night through, calling one to another when we tried to break away; and, by day, they would track our foot-prints through places where no Malay might follow; and no trail was so blind but that the Sakai could see the way it tended. Men said that they served the Malays in this manner that thereby they might preserve their own women-folk from captivity. But I know not. The Sakai live in houses, and plant growing things like the Malays. They know much of the lore of the forest, but many secrets of the jungle which are well known to us are hidden from their eyes. Yea, even though the fair valley of the Plus is now possessed by them, and the mountain of Korbu is now their home as it was once our own, the spirits of the hills and streams are still our friends, and they teach not their secrets to the strangers. How should it not be so? Our tribe springs from the mountain of Korbu, and the hills of Legap; theirs from the broad forests towards the rising sun, beyond the Kinta valley. No tribe but ours knows of the forests at the back of Gunong Korbu, nor of the doom, which, in the fulness of time, will fall upon the Sakai. Beyond that great peak, in the depths of the silent forest places, there lives a tribe of women, fair of face and form, taller than men, paler in colour, stronger, bolder. This is the tribe that is to avenge us upon those who have won our hunting grounds. These women know not men; but when the moon is at the full they dance naked, in the grassy places near the salt-licks, where the passing to-and-fro of much game has thinned the forest. The Evening Wind is their only spouse, and through Him they conceive and bear children. Yearly are born to them offspring, mostly women-folk whom they cherish even as we do our young; but if, perchance, they bear a manchild, the mother slays it ere it is well-nigh born. Thus live they, and thrive they, ever increasing and multiplying, and their bows and blow-pipes are sometimes found by us in the deep hollows of the woods. Larger are they than those we use, more beautifully carved, and, moreover, they are of a truer aim. But woe to the man who meets these women, or who dares to penetrate into the woods in which they dwell, for he will surely die unless the ghosts give speed to his flight. Of all this tribe, I alone have seen these women, and that when I was a young hunter, many many moons agone. I and two others, my brothers, when hunting through the forest, passed beyond the limits of our own woods, following the halting tracks of a wounded stag. After much walking, and eager following of the trail, for the camp was hungry lacking meat, we found the stag lying near a brook, killed by a larger arrow than the bow we carry throws, and, at the same moment, we heard a loud, threatening cry in a strange tongue. Then I, looking up, beheld a gigantic form, as of a pale-skinned woman, breaking through the jungle, some two hundred elbow-lengths away, and, at the same moment, my elder brother fell pierced by an arrow. I stayed to see no more, but ran, with all my young blood tingling with fear, leaving my brothers and the slaughtered stag, tearing through the thickets of thorn, but never feeling them rend my skin, nor ever stopped to catch my breath or drink, until, all wounded and breathless, covered with blood and sweat-like foam, I half fell, half staggered to the camp of mine own people. Thereafter, for long days, I lay ’twixt life and death, screaming in fear of the dreadful form I ever fancied was pursuing me. My brothers never again returned to camp, and I alone am left to tell the tale.’

The old man ceased his weird story, the fear of what he thought he had seen still apparently strong upon him. He certainly believed what he said, as also did every person present, with the exception of my own sceptical self, and I have often tried to find some reasonable explanation for the story. I have not succeeded, for, even in the wildest parts of the Peninsula, the aborigines do not shoot one another on sight, whatever they may do to bands of marauding Malays, nor do serious quarrels ever arise between them over the division of a little fresh meat. Judging by the scared look in his eyes, as he told the story, the old Semang had felt the fear of imminent death very close at hand that day long ago in the quiet forests at the back of Gunong Korbu. His brethren, too, must undoubtedly have been killed by some one or something, and perhaps the old-world tradition of the Amazons, furnished to the mind of the survivor the most natural explanation of the catastrophe.

A dozen years and more have slipped away since I heard this tale, told in the fire-light of the Semang camp, in the Upper Perak valley, and now there is a trigonometrical survey station on the summit of Korbu. It is true that the surveyors employed there have made no mention in their reports of the Amazons of the neighbourhood, and the Sakai are still living in prosperity, in spite of the impending doom, which the old Semang foretold for them. None the less, however, I hold to the belief that my informant actually did see something weird and uncanny at the back of Gunong Korbu; and that the keen eyes of a jungle-dwelling Semang should not be able to clearly recognise anything their owner could encounter in the forests of the Peninsula, is, in itself, a miracle.