Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
and thus secure from destruction or decay what had been often obtained by much labour and
pains.
While Manuel sat skinning his birds of an afternoon, generally surrounded by a little
crowd of Malays and Sassaks (as the indigenes of Lombock are termed), he often held forth
to them with the air of a teacher, and was listened to with profound attention. He was very
fond of discoursing on the 'special providences' of which he believed he was daily the sub-
ject. 'Allah has been merciful to-day,' he would say—for although a Christian he adopted
the Mahometan mode of speech—'and has given us some very fine birds; we can do nothing
without him.' Then one of the Malays would reply, 'To be sure, birds are like mankind; they
have their appointed time to die; when that time comes nothing can save them, and if it has
not come you cannot kill them.' A murmur of assent follows this sentiment, and cries of
'Butul! Butul!' (Right, right.) Then Manuel would tell a long story of one of his unsuccess-
ful hunts;—how he saw some fine bird and followed it a long way, and then missed it, and
again found it, and shot two or three times at it, but could never hit it. 'Ah!' says an old
Malay, 'its time was not come, and so it was impossible for you to kill it.' A doctrine this
which is very consoling to the bad marksman, and which quite accounts for the facts, but
which is yet somehow not altogether satisfactory.
It is universally believed in Lombock that some men have the power to turn themselves
into crocodiles, which they do for the sake of devouring their enemies, and many strange
tales are told of such transformations. I was therefore rather surprised one evening to hear
the following curious fact stated, and as it was not contradicted by any of the persons
present I am inclined to accept it provisionally, as a contribution to the Natural History of
the island. A Bornean Malay who had been for many years resident here said to Manuel,
'One thing is strange in this country—the scarcity of ghosts.' 'How so?' asked Manuel.
'Why, you know,' said the Malay, 'that in our countries to the westward, if a man dies or is
killed, we dare not pass near the place at night, for all sorts of noises are heard which show
that ghosts are about. But here there are numbers of men killed, and their bodies lie unbur-
ied in the fields and by the roadside, and yet you can walk by them at night and never hear
or see anything at all, which is not the case in our country, as you know very well.' 'Cer-
tainly I do,' said Manuel; and so it was settled that ghosts were very scarce, if not altogether
unknown in Lombock. I would observe, however, that as the evidence is purely negative we
should be wanting in scientific caution if we accepted this fact as sufficiently well estab-
lished.
One evening I heard Manuel, Ali, and a Malay man whispering earnestly together outside
the door, and could distinguish various allusions to 'krisses,' throat-cutting, heads, &c. &c.
