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Updated: May 4, 2025
Here, too, the good-wife devotes a part of her time to fowl-breeding. She, like all the Sakais, sleeps at her pleasure in the morning. As soon as she gets up, with the help of her daughters she prepares the morning meal and serves it out as she thinks proper without the slightest remark being heard as to the quality or quantity of the food given to each.
In that atom of time, which seemed to me a century, I could not even think, but across the deadened faculty of my mind flashed a warning I had recently received from the Sakais: never make a movement in the presence of a tiger, and never look it straight in the face.
During my well-earned repose I often heard speak of the Mai Darats, a tribe of Aborigines dwelling in the interior of the Peninsula and who were called by the name of Sakais by the Malays, a scornful appellation which signifies a people of slaves, and this insulting term is explained by the fact that formerly their neighbours carried on an extensive slave-trade by making them victims and also took advantage of their simplicity and good faith in many other ways, until the British Protectorate was established and these poor wandering tribes were put upon a par with more civilized races.
During the night I tried to make the Malay talk about the Sakais but I could not ask him any direct questions as it would have been a serious affair if my companions came to suspect that our way through the forest was entirely new to me and that I was ignorant of the place where our journey would end.
It is he, too, who selects the spot for a clearing when, as often happens, the Sakais change their place of encampment, forming their village in quite another part of the forest. Besides this he has nothing else to do, unless he is still able to work.
Therefore there was a good chance of speedily liberating ourselves from our ferocious enemy, if the Sakais had not regarded the tiger with superstitious respect, for a reason which I will explain later on, a vague belief in metempsychosis that also has the effect of making them fond of their domestic animals.
I even assured my five companions that when we reached the Sakais there would be no more difficulties, and so urged them on the faster. I hoped that the farther we penetrated into the vast wilds around us the more I might depend upon the fidelity of my carriers as they would have to rely upon my supposed knowledge of the country we were entering and so would be less likely to beat a retreat.
What seems to me sure is that the Sakais have nothing in common with the Malays or with the various other races that surround them. This may perhaps be owing to the contact the latter have with each other, the result being a modification of customs, traditions and purity of blood.
They believe that only their sorcerers have the faculty of beholding spirits which satisfactorily explains to them the strange fact that they are always invisible to other eyes. For the rest, though, the Sakais, like all those on the same par in intellectual capacity, do not trouble their heads at all over whatever natural phenomena.
The utter impossibility of saving a creature that has fallen a victim to this terrible poison has given rise to a superstition among the Sakais that an evil spirit hovers over, or goes into the mixture when it is being prepared and for this they do not set themselves to the work without taking numerous precautions.
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