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For two hundred odd miles they bore this present to their King, down all the glorious reaches of river, glistening in the sunlight, that wind through the length of the Pahang valley.

Pahang was placed under British Protection in 1888, and Johor is still independent, though its relations with the Government of Great Britain are very much the same as those which subsist between Siam and the Malay States of Kĕlantan and Trĕnggânu.

The kindly old Sultan of Johore, the old rebel Sultan of Pahang, the Sultan of Lingae, in all the finery of their native silks and jewels, the nobles of their courts, and a dozen other dignitaries, were on the grandstand and in the paddock as we entered, yet no one but a modest, gray-haired little man by the side of the English governor had any place in my thoughts. We knew his history.

A snarling moan comes long and low, We may neither flee nor fight, For well our leaping pulses know The Terror that stalks by Night. If you put your finger on the map of the Malay Peninsula an inch or two from its exact centre, you will find a river in Pahang territory which has its rise in the watershed that divides that State from Kĕlantan and Trĕnggânu.

Having ravaged the kingdoms of Johor, Pahang, Kedah, Perak, and Dilli, he transported the inhabitants from those places to Achin, to the number of twenty-two thousand persons. But this barbarous policy did not produce the effect he hoped; for the unhappy people, being brought naked to his dominions, and not allowed any kind of maintenance on their arrival, died of hunger in the streets.

The Pahang Prince, with whom I was travelling, unlike most of the men of that breed, was a very nervous person, and it was not without much persuasion that I had succeeded in inducing him to join me in my camp under the shadow of the great rock.

At Kuâla Lĭpis there dwelt in those days an old and cross-grained madman, a Jĕlai native by birth, who, in the days before his trouble came upon him, had been a great Chief in Pahang. He bore the title of Ôrang Kâya Haji, and his eldest son was named Wan Lingga.

War was lulled, and peace fell upon Pahang when Bĕndahâra Äli, the father of the present Sultân, came to the throne; but, when he died in his palace among the cocoa-nut trees, across the river opposite to the Pĕkan of to-day, civil war broke out once more with redoubled fury.

It is true that the wide dominions of England claim an immense amount of care and energy but her rulers display sufficient activity and wisdom for the need and would have no cause to regret, but rather rejoice, if they were to extend their beneficence to the far off worthy tribes of Sakais now wandering over Perak and Pahang.

I have had Pahang Malays working continuously for sixty hours at a stretch, and all on a handful of boiled rice; but they will only do this for one they know, whom they regard as their Chief, and in whose sight they would be ashamed to murmur at the severity of the work, or to give in when all are sharing the strain in equal measure. The natives of Trĕnggânu are of a very different type.