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Updated: June 10, 2025
In the trees and rubber-vines all about us a colony of long-armed wah-wah monkeys whistled and chattered, and farther away the sharp, rasping note of a cicada kept up a continuous protest at our invasion. At intervals the long, quivering yell of a tiger frightened the garrulous monkeys into silence, and made us peer apprehensively toward the impenetrable blackness of the jungle.
She found Benjamin there. He met her with a happy face. "Bad Indian come to your cabin last night," said he. "He mean evil; he hate old woman. She wah-wah too much, and he hate. Bad Indian hear music violin; he be pleased evil hawks fly out of him. Good Indian come back. One is tied to the other. One no let the other go. What was that low music I hear? Baby music! Chinook wind in the bushes!
Eblis condescends to notice me to-day, and occasionally sits on my shoulder murmuring "Ouf! ouf!" the sweet sound which means all varieties of affection and happiness. They say wah-wah distinctly, and scream with rage like children, but have none of the meaningless chatter of monkeys. It is partly their silence which makes them such very pleasant companions.
I had often heard it when paddling softly up one of the wild Malayan rivers. It was the death cry of a wah-wah monkey facing the cruel jaws of a crocodile. I plunged my fingers into my ears to smother the sound. I understood it all now. Baboo's pirates, the dreaded Orang Kayah's rebels, were the troop of monkeys we had heard the night before in the tambusa trees. "Baboo," I shouted, "come here!
In the Chinook vocabulary, which was originally the trade language of all the tribes employed by the Hudson Bay Company in collecting furs, most of the words resemble in sound the objects they represent. For example, a wagon in Chinook is chick-chick, a clock is ding-ding, a crow is kaw-kaw, a duck, quack-quack, a laugh, tee-hee; the heart is tum-tum, and a talk or speech or sermon, wah-wah.
The space for a camp was somewhat cramped, and the small yellow bees that are so persistent in clinging to one's face and hands were very numerous; they will sting if irritated. Even the lieutenant, ordinarily impervious to that kind of annoyance, sought the protection of his mosquito net. The calls of argus pheasant and wah-wah next morning sounded familiar.
"Yes, Boston tilicum." "Then you must be good to her; that will make her feel good toward you. Do you see?" There came a painful look into the young Indian's face. "I good to her, make her good? She good to me make me good? She no good to me. She say I no right here. The land belong to Umatilla. She must go. You stay. Look out for the October moon. She wah-wah no more."
At Poru we tried in vain to secure a kind of gibbon that we heard almost daily on the other side of the river, emitting a loud cry but different from that of the ordinary wah-wah. Rajimin described it as being white about the head and having a pronounced kind of topknot. As far as we had advanced up the Barito River, Malay influence was found to be supreme.
At Tamaloe animals and birds were not plentiful, the call of the wah-wah usually imparting a little life to the mornings; and I once heard a crow. I do not remember to have seen on the whole Busang River the most familiar of all birds on the Bornean rivers, an ordinary sandpiper that flits before you on the beach.
Woods appeared. Benjamin saw her, and his calm mood fled. He looked up at the master. "I is come back again my old self again. She say I no business here; she no business here. She wah-wah." The master laid his hand on the boy's shoulder kindly and bent his face on his. "I do as you say," the boy continued. "I will not speak till my good self come again. I be still. No wah-wah."
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