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A river-bed is a path ready cleared through the forests, and, to the Sĕmang, Sâkai, and jungle-bred Malay, it is Nature's macadamized road. More often the unnavigable streams serve as guides to the traveller in the dense jungles, the tracks running up their banks, crossing and recrossing them at frequent intervals.
'That it is which proves Him to be the thing he is, said Ngah. 'Thy words are true, said Che’ Sĕman solemnly. 'He of the Hairy Face has his origin in a man. The Sĕmang the negrits of the woods drove him forth from among them, and now he lives solitarily in the jungles, and by night he takes upon himself the form of Him of the Hairy Face, and feasts upon the flesh of his own kind.
A dozen years and more have slipped away since I heard this tale, told in the fire-light of the Sĕmang camp, in the Upper Pêrak valley, and now there is a trigonometrical survey station on the summit of Korbu.
His body became white and his clothes silken. Pleased with this, Semang ascended the ladder, gathered together all the goods that he had found in the room, and began taking them to the prahu. There he found Deer asleep, and killed him with his spear. After bringing all the goods from the house to the prahu, Semang started down-stream.
It is true that the surveyors employed there have made no mention in their reports of the Amazons of the neighbourhood, and the Sâkai are still living in prosperity, in spite of the impending doom, which the old Sĕmang foretold for them.
This coarse stuff would take the skin off the tongues of most human beings who attempted to eat it in this way, but I suppose that nature gives the Sĕmang the power to take in abnormally large quantities of salt at one time, because his opportunities of eating it in small daily instalments are few and far between.
They both came back and helped to fight the enemy, who lost many dead and retired. Laki, see No. 10. Tehi, see No. 12. A woman called Daietan had one child, Semang, who was a bad boy. He was lazy, slept day and night, and did not want to make ladang nor plant any banana nor papaya trees. His mother angrily said to him: "Why don't you exert yourself to get food?"
Then the Andaman Islanders, the Semang of the Malay Peninsula, the Aket of eastern Sumatra, the now extinct Kalangs of Java, said to have been in some respects the most ape-like of human beings, the Aetas of the Philippines, and the dwarfs, with a surprisingly high culture, recently reported from Dutch New Guinea, are like so many scattered pieces of human wreckage.
The Sĕmang are the survivors of a very ancient race of negrits, remnants of which are still to be found scattered over Eastern Asia, and may be supposed to be the first family of our human stock that ever possessed these glorious lands. In appearance they are like African negroes seen through the reverse end of a field-glass.
Judging by the scared look in his eyes, as he told the story, the old Sĕmang had felt the fear of imminent death very close at hand that day long ago in the quiet forests at the back of Gûnong Korbu.
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