On the western coast of the Peninsula, more especially that part of it which forms one side of the Straits of Malacca, the shore-line is generally one long stretch of mud, covered with mangrove trees to the verge of high-water mark and rather further, for when the tide is up there are thousands of acres of mangrove whose roots and several inches of the stems are submerged. Beyond this forest the receding tide leaves great wastes of evil-smelling mire, soft and clinging, in which the searcher for shell-fish sinks almost to his waist.
Many rivers, small and great, find their way to the sea through this wide flat. At high water they look imposing enough, but when the tide is out a narrow and shallow channel is left winding about between low slimy banks, and right and left the eye wanders over a desolation of glistening mud with an almost imperceptible slope to the edge of the distant sea.
Pools of shallow water and tiny channels, through which the receding tide finds easier road to river or sea, alone break the monotony of the unsightly waste.
That is as far as physical features go. The mud-flats have their denizens, but they are not over-attractive.
First, there is the Malay fisherman, hunting for mussels and other shell-fish. If he is there at all he will be hard to see, for he pushes his little dug-out fifty or a hundred yards up a mud creek, leaves it and fossicks about, sunk above his knees in the mire.
Then there are myriads of birds, attracted by the great possibilities of gain to the industrious searcher after garbage, stranded fish, and all sorts of particularly loathsome-looking and foul-smelling dead things to be found in such a place. These birds are often strange-looking creatures, vast of size, long and lank of leg, snaky of neck and spiky of bill. But they are wary to a degree, they always seems to be standing just in the tiny ripple of the smallest wavelets where you instinctively know the mud and sea meet, and there they watch the gradually receding tide with melancholy abstraction, as though they took no real interest in the daily toil of sustaining life.
Last, there is something else here, and, if you are not quite a stranger, you will look first, look longest, and look always for this other thing. Perhaps it is the extraordinary fitness of her surroundings (I say her advisedly), perhaps the art with which nature has designed the body of the saurian to make you think her a log, or a stranded palm-branch, a half-buried spar of a wrecked boat, or even a lighter or darker ridge of the surrounding mud—certain it is that as the crocodile lies there, basking in the sun which makes air and water and blistering slime shimmer and dance before your eyes, you will not notice the creature, nay, even when pointed out to you, it is ten to one that you will not even then realise that she is there.
But get nearer, speak no word and let your rowers pull a long and noiseless stroke till some one with a quick eye and a steady hand can put a bullet in the reptile’s neck. As that great mouth suddenly opens, disclosing the rows of shining teeth, as it shuts again with the noise of a steel trap, as the horrible scaly claws dig deep into the mud in their agony and the great spiked tail lashes round in fury, as the loathsome yellow belly slides over the ooze and you catch sight of the stony cruelty of the crocodile’s eye, then you will realise what manner of thing she is, and you will probably conceive for her and all her kind a deadly horror and loathing, and a consuming desire to slay the whole brood will seize you then and remain with you for all time.
If it should happen to you to have to fight a wounded crocodile at close quarters, if accident brings you in contact with a man who has just lost arm or leg, or with a corpse out of which a crocodile has torn the life, your feelings towards these river-murderers will not be softened.
There are Malay rivers so infested by these reptiles that at low water for a mile or two from the river’s mouth they will be seen, in twos and threes or larger groups, lying on either bank basking or sleeping in the sun. It repeatedly happens that they knock people out of their boats and then kill and devour them, and in places where the creatures are specially numerous, if a crocodile is shot dead on the bank, in less than half an hour the carcase will be dragged into the river and a crowd of the reptiles will be tearing it in pieces and fighting for the remains.
Villages on the Malay coast are nearly always situated on the bank of a river; the sea is full of fish and the men of a coast village are mostly fishermen. If the village is of any size and the industry of any importance, the catching of fish is supplemented by curing—that is, salting and drying them.
The whereabouts of a village of this kind may be recognised by the traveller on sea or land when he is yet a great way off. Probably for that reason, and because the cleaning of thousands of fish loads the water with food of a kind that is specially attractive to the saurian, the immediate neighbourhood of a fishing village is the favourite resort of the crocodile.
At the mouth of a wide river on the Perak coast there is just such a village. It is thriving, and as there are a number of Chinese as well as Malay fishermen, it boasts a police-station. The houses are built for the most part on piles; at high water the sea washes under them, and the means of inter-communication are wooden stagings from house to house. At low water there is mud, great stretches of mud, running from the edge of the mangrove swamp which backs the village far out to the west and the waters of the Straits of Malacca.
It was in the month of Ramthân, when begin those forty days of fast observed by all good Muhammadans—though so few of them know why they fast, or the details of the touching story which tells the sufferings of the Martyrs of Kerbela—that one night, past the middle of the month, but when the moon still lit up the water and made things plain as day, a strange thing happened at this small coast village.
In it there lived a Malay revenue officer with his wife and child, and on the night in question these three, being at home, went to sleep about 10 P.M. as was their wont.
A slight breeze was blowing off the sea, blowing against the falling tide, and the moonlight glorified the hideous expanse of slime till it looked like a limitless mirror, blending far away with the haze-enshrouded waters of the sea, but bordered landwards by that dark fringe of mangroves, the thick forest forming a striking contrast to the moonlit beauty of the glistening shore.
The wind sighed up the river, played through the great brown nets hanging up to dry, and, scarcely stirring the tops of the mangroves, swept gently towards the distant hills.
All the village slept, except the one Guardian of the Peace, who showed his devotion to duty by punctually striking the hours on a huge metal gong.
The night was far advanced, when suddenly he heard a child crying in the house of the Malay revenue clerk. Then there was the noise of footsteps and the voice of the man calling to his wife, but no answer. After a few minutes there was the sound of approaching feet, a shout from the Malay, followed by the man himself.
The constable called out, “What is the matter, Che Mat?”
Che Mat replied, “I was asleep, but awoke hearing the child crying for its mother. I could not see her anywhere, and she did not answer when I spoke. Then I got up and saw at once the door of the house was open, but she is nowhere to be seen. Have you heard anything of her?”
The constable had heard nothing, but there was evidently something uncanny about this disappearance, for, in a village such as this, where the houses are more in the water than on land, where the pathless mangrove is the background, and the waters of the river the foreground, there are few places left in which to look for any one or anything with any chance of finding them.
The man on guard roused his comrades, and, as Malays do not sit down and discuss plans of action, some one at once made a move; the others followed, and they all walked out to the last house on the platform, and then listened.
“Hark! did you not hear something?” Yes, through the silence of the night, wafted on the incoming breeze, there was a distinct but faint cry from the direction of the sea.
It did not take the men long to get down to the ground, and first hurrying along the edge of the trees, they went some distance, hearing the cries at intervals and ever more plainly, till it became necessary to strike right out across the mud. By this time there was no doubt about the source of the cries, for the voice of the object of their search was recognised, and that the woman was in sore distress did not admit of doubt. Making all the speed they could, sinking above their knees at every step, stumbling, falling, but ever pressing on, they saw at last to their horror, in the brilliant moonlight, the woman on the ground being literally worried by three crocodiles, each six or eight feet in length.
As crocodiles go, six or eight feet is no great length, but to go to sleep in your own house and wake up at midnight within a hundred feet of the sea, but with half a mile of mud between you and anything like dry land, and at the same time assailed by three crocodiles quite big enough to kill you, is calculated to shock the strongest nerves.
After a short but exciting fight, the police beat off the scaly beasts with difficulty, and found the woman had been badly torn in legs, and arms, and neck.
Whilst the men were arranging to carry her back, no easy matter over half a mile of soft but sticky wet mud and ooze, she told her tale:
“I was sleeping,” she said, “and had a vision. Two radiant Beings appeared to me and bid me rise and follow them, and they would show me a sight more glorious than is vouchsafed to mortals. Transported with joy, I rose and followed them, and whilst filled with ecstatic rapture by the companionship of these Celestial Beings, I seemed to be borne along without effort of my own through enchanted fields of more than earthly beauty. Suddenly I was awakened by feeling the teeth of a crocodile in my leg, and, to my horror, I found I was out here on this mud-flat half a mile from home, but close to the sea, with three crocodiles attacking me, no means of defending myself, and little hope of help. I fell, and the beasts tore and worried me, biting my arms, and legs, and neck, while I screamed for help until you came and rescued me.”
Well, after all, there is nothing very strange in that. A woman of peculiar nervous organisation, a somnambulist, dreams a dream and walks out into the balmy atmosphere of a moonlit Eastern night. She walks rather far, and has a rude awakening. That is nothing; other sleepers have walked further, and their awakening has been to the life beyond the grave.
Only this was curious: that while the men sank deep into the mud at every step, the woman had never sunk in at all. When found, there was only mud on the soles of her feet, and, though she had walked half a mile across the flat, and her tracks were plainly visible in the moonlight, they were all on the surface, and she had crossed the soft, unstable mire as easily as though it had been a metalled road.
So the men bore her home, not wondering overmuch, for in this thing they saw the hand of the Celestial Beings who guided her feet with such consideration, to abandon her to the ferocious attentions of the crocodiles.
The woman herself, her husband, and the police were satisfied as to the means, but found the end too hard for their understanding.
The ideal woman, the product of higher education and deep research in divers subjects, supplies the real clue to the phenomenon, for, when asked “where the true Spirit of God is,” she modestly replies, “I can tell you: it is in us women. We have preserved it and handed it down from one generation to another of our own sex unsullied.”[2]
Doubtless—from the time when the Spirit moved upon the face of the waters, and, later, on the Sea of Galilee; but it is more difficult to understand how woman, unaided, has handed anything down from one generation to another.
The same idea is, however, more happily conveyed in the injunction of the President of the Scraggsville Woman’s Suffrage League to her husband, when ordering him to go and purchase a divided skirt. “If you are afraid, pray to God for courage; She will help you.”
The mere male has his uses, one of which is to assist the unsullied sex to perpetuate the Spirit of God, and another to be within hail when there are crocodiles about.