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A Malay Interior Malay Bird-Scaring Rice Culture Picturesque Dismalness A Bad Spell An Alarm Possibilities of Peril Patience and Kindness Masculine Clatter KWALA KANGSA, February 20. Yesterday afternoon I had an expedition which I liked very much, though it ended a little awkwardly owing to a late start.
Sir F. A. Weld writes of this visit "At Kwala Lumpor, besides the reception and a dinner at the Capitan China's, a Chinese theatrical performance was given representing a sultan and great rajahs, quarreling, but laying aside their quarrels on the appearance of a 'governor, who pacifies the country.
We landed at the village of Kwala Kangsa "In the glory of the sunset, In the purple mists of evening," in which the magnified purple mountains were piled like Alps against the flaming clouds. By the river bank lay the Dragon boat and the square bamboo floating bath, through the side of which Mr. Birch was mortally wounded.
The supply of this ore is apparently inexhaustible, but no veins have as yet been found. The mine of Ampagnan only, near Kwala Lumpor, the capital, gives employment to over one thousand Chinamen, and each can extract in a year one thousand pounds weight of white smelted tin valued at 35 pounds sterling.
Newbold's day the whole population of Kwala Linggi, where he was stationed, fled by night into the Malacca territory, where they afterward settled to escape from the merciless exactions to which they were subjected.
From Tura to the Kwala Mtoni is seventeen and a half miles, a distance which, however easy it may be traversed once a fortnight, assumes a prodigious length when one has to travel it almost every other day, at least, so my pagazis, soldiers, and followers found it, and their murmurs were very loud when I ordered the signal to be sounded on the march.
This river, even one hundred and fifty miles from its mouth at Kwala Kangsa, is two hundred yards wide, and might easily be ascended by "stern-wheel" boats drawing a foot of water, such as those which ply on the upper Mississippi.
In the noonday the indigo-colored Hijan hills, with their swollen waterfall coming down in a sheet of foam, looked cool, but as we dashed through Taipeng I felt overpowered once more by what seems the "wearing world," after beautiful, silent Kwala Kangsa, for there are large shops with gaudy sign-boards, stalls in the streets, tribal halls, buffalo-carts with buffaloes yoked singly, for the spread of their huge horns is so great that they cannot be yoked in pairs; trains of carts with cinnamon-colored, humped bullocks yoked in pairs standing at shop doors, gharries with fiery Sumatra ponies dashing about, crowds of Chinese coolies, busy and half-naked, filling the air with the din of their ceaseless industry, and all the epitomized stir of a world which toils, and strives, and thirsts for gain.
Road-making has not made great strides in Perak, but railroads are being planned, and a good road extends from the port of Larut to the great Chinese mining town of Taipeng, and thence to the British residency at Kwala Kangsa, a distance of over thirty-three miles, the electric telegraph accompanying the road.
On a single Chinese plantation, near Kwala Lumpor, there are over two thousand acres of tapioca under cultivation, and the enterprising Chinaman who owns it has imported European steam machinery for converting the tapioca roots into the marketable article. Whatever enterprise I hear of in the interior is always in the hands of Chinamen.
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