On the driver's return I had to dismount again, and this time the elephant was allowed to go and take a proper bath in a river. He threw quantities of water over himself, and took up plenty more with which to cool his sides as he went along. Thick as the wrinkled hide of an elephant looks, a very small insect can draw blood from it, and, when left to himself, he sagaciously plasters himself with mud to protect himself like the water buffalo. Mounting again, I rode for another two hours, but he crawled about a mile an hour, and seemed to have a steady purpose to lie down. He roared whenever he was asked to go faster, sometimes with a roar of rage, sometimes in angry and sometimes in plaintive remonstrance. The driver got off and walked behind him, and then he stopped altogether. Then the man tried to pull him along by putting a hooked stick in his huge "flapper," but this produced no other effect than a series of howls; then he got on his head again, after which the brute made a succession of huge stumbles, each one of which threatened to be a fall, and then the driver, with a look of despair, got off again. Then I made signs that I would get off, but the elephant refused to lie down, and I let myself down his unshapely shoulder by a rattan rope, till I could use the mahout's shoulders as steps. The baskets were taken off and left at a house, the elephant was turned loose in the jungle; I walked the remaining miles to Kwala Kangsa, and the driver carried my portmanteau! Such was the comical end of my first elephant ride. I think that altogether I walked about eight miles, and I was not knocked up; this says a great deal for the climate of Perak. The Malay who came with me told the people here that it was "a wicked elephant," but I have since been told "that it was very sick and tired to death," which I hope is the true version of its most obnoxious conduct.
I have said nothing about the magnificence of the scenery for a part of the way, where the road goes through a grand mountain pass, where all the vegetable glories of the tropics seem assembled, and one gets a new idea of what scenery can be; while beneath superb tree-ferns and untattered bananas, and palms, and bright-flowered lianas, and graceful trailers, and vermilion-colored orchids, and under sun-birds and humming birds and the most splendid butterflies I ever saw, a torrent, as clear as crystal, dashes over the rocks, and adds the music of tumbling water to the enchantment of a scene whose loveliness no words can give any idea of. The pass of Bukit Berapit, seen in solitude on a glorious morning, is almost worth a journey round the world.
Another wonder of the route is Gunong Pondok, a huge butte or isolated mass of red and white limestone, much weather-stained and ore-stained with very brilliant colors, full of caverns, many of which are quite inaccessible, their entrances fringed with immense stalactites. Some of the accessible caves have roofs seventy feet in height. Gunong Pondok is shaped like the Bass Rock, and is about twelve hundred feet in height. Its irregular top is forest-crowned, but its nearly perpendicular walls of white or red rock afford scarcely roothold for trees, and it rises in comparatively barren solitude among the forest-covered mountains of the interior.
At the end of ten hours' traveling, as I was tramping along alone, I began to meet Malays, then I met nine elephants in groups of three, with men, women, and children on their backs, apparently taking "an airing," the beasts looking grand, as their fronts always do. But that part of the road passes through a lonely jungle region, tiger, elephant, and rhinoceros haunted, and only broken here and there by some rude Malay cultivation of bananas or sugar-cane. When the sun was low I looked down upon a broad and beautiful river, with hills and mountains on its farther side, a village on the shores of a promontory, and above that a grassy hill with a bungalow under cocoa-palms at its top, which I knew must be the Residency, from the scarlet uniforms at the door. There was a small bridge over the Kangsa, then a guard-room and some official residences on stilts, and at the top of a steep slope the bungalow, which has a long flight of stairs under a latticed porch, leading to a broad and comfortably furnished veranda used as the Resident's office and sitting-room, the centre part, which has a bed- room on each side of it and runs to the back of the house, serving for the eating-place. It is as unpretending a dwelling as can be. It keeps out the sun and rain, and gives all the comfort which is needed in this climate, but nothing more. My journey of thirty-three miles from the coast has brought me into the interior of the State, where the Kangsa river joins the Perak, at a distance of a hundred and fifty miles from its mouth, and I am alone in the wilds!
Mystification--A Grotesque Dinner-Party--Mahmoud and Eblis--Fun and Frolic--Mahmoud's Antics--A Perak Jungle--The Poetry of Tropical Life--Village Life--The Officials of the Mosques--A Moslem Funeral--The "Royal Elephant"--Swimming the Perak--The Village of Koto-lamah--A
"Pirate's Nest"--Rajah Dris I fear that the involvement and confusion of dates in this letter will be most puzzling. I was received by a magnificent Oriental butler, and after I had had a delicious bath, dinner, or what Assam was pleased to call breakfast, was "served." The word "served" was strictly applicable, for linen, china, crystal, flowers, cooking, were all alike exquisite. Assam, the Madrassee, is handsomer and statelier than Babu at Malacca; a smart Malay lad helps him, and a Chinaman sits on the steps and pulls the punkah. All things were harmonious, the glorious cocoa-palms, the bright green slopes, the sunset gold on the lake-like river, the ranges of forest-covered mountains etherealizing in the purple light, the swarthy faces and scarlet uniforms of the Sikh guard, and rich and luscious odors, floated in on balmy airs, glories of the burning tropics, untellable and incommunicable!
