In the Mouth of the Tiger

by Lynette Silver

  It was still early, with the shadows of the forest lying long on the ground, when Krani Hondai called his court together to ponder the question. They sat around the penghulu’s dais, with Denis on one side and Pat on the other. Facing them were the wise men of the community, wrinkled shamans with the various tokens of their calling: sacred stones and feathers, powerful herbs, and magic potions in little clay pots.

  ‘Tuan Denis,’ Hondai began respectfully. ‘My people are troubled that you refuse to kill this tiger that we all fear. It has already taken chickens and dogs, and it is our experience that once a tiger begins to raid a Temiar settlement, it will not be satisfied until it has tasted human blood. But if the gods of the forest do not wish us to kill the tiger, and have given you this message in a dream or through the actions of the tiger itself, so be it. We would obey the gods and abide by your decision.’

  ‘Penghulu,’ Denis said in formal Malay. ‘I had no dream concerning the tiger. But when I woke in the middle of the night I saw the beast clearly in the moonlight. It is a well-grown, healthy animal, quite capable of catching jungle prey, which means it has no need to kill people to stay alive. It is not fitting that we kill such a beast, as it is unlikely that it will ever trouble the Temiar. To do so, I believe, would offend your gods, who I know abhor unnecessary violence and unnecessary killing.’

  It was a good little speech and I saw many in the longhouse nodding their heads in agreement. But one old man, one of the shamans, was not satisfied.

  ‘My dreams have foretold that a tiger would visit these forests, and seem in the beginning to be a friend, or at worst a nuisance. But in my dreams the tiger grows arrogant because the Temiar ignore it, until one day its pride is such that it thinks it can kill the Temiar at will. And then, in my dreams, the blood of the Temiar begins to flow.’

  There was a rustling in the hall, and I could hear people drawing in the long whistling breaths that in the Temiar culture signify concern.

  It was Pat who responded. ‘I, too, have seen this tiger of yours, Mengu,’ he said looking directly at the shaman. ‘It has haunted my own dreams too. But I understand that the beast in our dreams is not a flesh and blood animal of the forest, but the outward form the gods have given to a real threat to the Temiar – the threat they will face when the Japanese army comes to Malaya, as it assuredly will.’

  There was an even louder chorus of indrawn breaths. The Temiar were aware of the Japanese depredations in China, and they had heard the speculation that Japan had eyes also on Malaya for its rubber and tin, and would one day invade.

  ‘The tiger in my dream was a real tiger,’ the wrinkled little shaman insisted querulously. ‘It was not a symbolic tiger.’

  Pat rose to his feet, and lifted his face so that he stared upwards at the steep-pitched, heavy-beamed ceiling of the longhouse, where the Temiar traditionally hang their most sacred emblems. ‘I am a Temiar by marriage and by spirit,’ he said in a dramatic, sibilant whisper. ‘As a Temiar it is my duty to warn my people that their very existence is in danger. I give you that warning now. The visit by the tiger was to provoke this discussion, to force us to think about the real threat from the Japanese that is coming, so that we can prepare ourselves for the struggle.’

  It was a powerful performance and impressed the Temiar deeply. The meeting broke up with much talk and gesturing, and I gathered that Pat had been preaching his message for some time, and that it had become an issue of some controversy.

  ‘You really do make every post a winning post,’ Denis said rather caustically as the three of us sauntered down to the river for a swim. There was a wide, inviting stretch of the Telom below the longhouse where several people were already bathing.

  ‘I’ve got to keep at them,’ Pat said seriously. ‘I’ve got so little time. They are like children, you know – you have to use a little melodrama to catch their attention.’ He caught sight of Anjang amongst the bathers and called out to her sharply. ‘I would have thought you would have been in the longhouse with me,’ he said in Malay when she came up to us. ‘I needed your support, Anjang. I am doing important work for your people, and I need you with me to remind them that I am a Temiar too.’ I noticed that he looked a little sulky, and he took a sidelong look at her companions. Uda and Busu were amongst them, laughing at some joke between themselves.

  Anjang giggled and wound her arm through Pat’s. ‘Stop your important work for a while, husband, and join me in the river,’ she said. ‘It is so cool in the water.’

  It was fun in the water, and we splashed each other and chased each other through a pile of huge, smooth rocks that partly dammed the Telom at this point, making its waters rush and gurgle. Then we lay and sunned ourselves on a white sandy beach, our costumes drying on us in the hot mid-morning sun. Anjang, of course, wore only her light cotton sarong, and I envied her her freedom. Like all the Temiar girls, she had no inhibitions but an innate sense of modesty, and would wring out and retie her sarong after every plunge with complete composure.

  ‘Do you really believe the Japanese will try and wipe out the Temiar?’ I asked Pat. ‘I mean, surely the Temiar are no threat to anyone, and it hardly seems worth the effort for the Japs to try and kill them.’

  ‘Pat thinks of himself as Malaya’s version of Lawrence of Arabia,’ Denis said. ‘He’s going to stay on in the jungle when the Japs come, and mobilise the Temiar, and their cousins the Semai and the Negritos. You plan to terrorise the poor Japs, don’t you, Pat? Appear out of the forest to shoot up their bases and then disappearing back into the ulu.’

  ‘That’s more or less correct,’ Pat said, a little stiffly. He sat up and used a piece of twig to sketch a map of the Malay Peninsula. ‘The ulu runs all the way down the middle of the peninsula. Effectively, it cuts the country in half. I believe that anyone who controls the ulu controls Malaya. You have interior lines, for a start. More importantly, once in the ulu you’re more or less invisible. You strike when and where you like, then simply disappear back into the forest. It’s the tactics Lawrence used in the Middle East, only in his case the “country within a country” was the Arabian Desert. Once he had the desert Arabs on his side he was invincible. With the Temiar on our side, we’d also be invincible. Nobody could find us in the ulu. Not even with aeroplanes because you’re shielded by the canopy.’

  Denis reached over and tapped Pat’s sketch to give emphasis to his words. ‘There are a few things you are forgetting, Pat. Mobility for a start. You can cross the desert at a pretty fair lick, but in the jungle you’re limited to two or three miles an hour at best. And that’s only on the Sakai trails. Off the trails and you’re sunk. That rules out any large-scale movements of men and equipment, which would be essential if you wanted to make any sort of impact. More importantly, look at the difference in personality between the Arabs Lawrence had under his command and the Temiar you would have to use. The Arabs are born for war. Their highest wish is to die in battle and so go straight to Paradise. Temiar are quite the reverse. They’re dreamers who detest any form of violence. They particularly hate any chance of dying violently because that would compromise their immortal souls. I applaud your attempts to ginger them up to fight the Japs, but I just don’t think you’re going to get anywhere.’

  Pat smiled a little grimly. ‘Then why are we setting up our stay-behind parties?’ he asked.

  Denis shook his head slowly. ‘Several reasons, Pat. Sabotage. Intelligence. A presence on the ground to help if we counter-attack. But there is no intention to take on the Japanese face to face like Lawrence of Arabia.’

  Pat’s slightly petulant look returned and he stood up abruptly. ‘You’re telling me I’m wasting my time.’

  ‘Not at all. We needed the help of the Temiars and you have secured that for us very well indeed.’

  ‘Well, thank you very much,’ Pat said with heavy irony. ‘You really can be a miserable blighter, Denis. You might be quite right, but I think I’ll stick to my guns. Come on Anjang – race you to the other side.�
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  The two of them plunged into the river and headed for the far bank, their heads sleek black shapes on the rippling, silver surface of the water.

  ‘He really does believe what he’s saying,’ I commented. ‘And he’s a very persuasive type. Are the Temiar going to fight the Japanese for him if there is a war?’

  Denis looked at me keenly. ‘I hope they don’t. For his sake and for the sake of the Temiar.’

  ‘Would it be that bad?’

  ‘What Pat says sounds rational – all that talk of interior lines, and a country within a country, and so on. But the reality is that anyone stuck in the jungle is at a disadvantage in the real world. In fact, if I were a conniving sort of devil I’d lure my worst enemies into the ulu, using just the arguments Pat uses. And then I’d just stand by and watch them thrash around like rats caught in a trap of their own devising.’

  I had no idea what he was talking about at the time, but I was to remember those words in the years to come.

  After lunch, Denis and Pat set off to cull the seladang that had been raiding the Temiar food plots, aiming to catch the herd late in the afternoon when they were at their most torpid. It wasn’t sport that they were after, but quick, clean kills. Unai, the man who had wanted to go on the tiger hunt, went with them, walking proudly with Ismail as an additional gun-bearer.

  I had intended to go with them, but it would be a long, hard slog to the marshland where the beasts had been spotted, and yesterday’s walk was taking its toll. So I lay in our little bamboo cottage, deliciously cooled by a breeze from the mountains, trying to read a novel I had brought along. But the story was so unexciting compared to the real world into which we had plunged that I could not concentrate, and put the book down to replay in my mind the things I had seen and experienced. Uda bringing down the bird with his blowpipe so that it fluttered down through the twigs from high in the jungle canopy. Coming across the longhouse at night, with the row of family fires glowing through its flimsy walls like lighted portholes on a liner. The tiger in the moonlight, and the way it had stalked over to our bamboo cottage and peered in at us, full of quiet majesty. And Pat’s dream of turning the Temiar into an army, fit to fight the Japanese at their own game . . .

  I must have slept for hours because the sun had dipped behind the trees when I woke and our little clearing was in a deep pool of shadow. Denis and Pat were back, and I lay listening to their cheerful talk as they sat between the huts cleaning their guns. I was glad they were happy with each other again: there had been a distinct tension in the air during the conversation at the bathing pool.

  Things had gone well on the shoot. They had come across the seladang in the act of raiding the Temiar plantation and brought down the two lead bulls. That meant the herd might well desist from its depredations, as seladang tend to change their behaviour, or even move to fresh pastures, if deprived of their leaders.

  ‘Will the Temiar be able to cope with two carcasses?’ Denis asked, and Pat chuckled.

  ‘Will they just! By tomorrow evening they will have eaten half of one beast already, and hung the rest up to dry. It’ll give them protein for a month if they eke it out, which I’m sure they will.’

  We ate some of the meat that night, beautifully prepared in a hot, rich sauce, with vegetables brought back by the hunters from the ladang. Krani Hondai had decided to hold a jinjang in our honour, and no jinjang worth its salt started with anything else but a lavish feast. The jinjang itself is a curious business – half religious ceremony, half orgy. It is the Temiar way of discharging pent-up emotions, and I suspected that it had been ordered by Krani Hondai as much to disperse the lingering tensions between the proand anti-Pat lobbies as it had to do with honouring our visit.

  We could see that we were in for something special as soon as we climbed into the longhouse for dinner. The place had been completely transformed. The pillars and rafters were festooned with orchids, sprays of berries and coloured leaves, and all the younger Temiar were in their party best. The men wore garlands and had tall coronets of palm leaves cut into feather shapes on their heads, and the bare-breasted girls were equally spectacular, wearing rows of coloured necklaces and their brightest sarongs. A dance space had been cleared in the middle of the longhouse, and a band assembled. The dominant instruments were drums made of hollowed timber covered by tightly stretched deer-hide.

  It was quite late in the evening when the food was finally cleared away and the dancing began. A large, loose circle was formed, men and women mixed together. A shaman commenced proceedings by uttering a long, tremulous chant. The moment the chant ended, the drums crashed and the dancing began. At first it was slow and formal, with the dancers keeping their bodies rigid while moving back and forth in a complicated pattern. Then the tempo increased and the dancers loosened up, moving first their arms and then their whole bodies in a sensuous, stylised way that reminded me of the Javanese temple dancing I had seen in Penang. But as the tempo of the drumming increased further, the movements of the dancers became more and more abandoned. Sweat poured from their gyrating bodies, and their eyes became fixed and staring – the eyes of people in a trance.

  ‘What’s happening?’ I asked, a little uneasily. The whole atmosphere had changed, from easy-going friendliness to barely controlled hysteria. I don’t know whether I felt a touch of fear or whether the crowd’s hysteria had communicated itself to me, but I found myself trembling.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Pat said reassuringly. ‘Things will start calming down from now on.’ He had to shout above the mesmeric throbbing of the drums.

  Pat was wrong. The tempo increased even further, so that the whole fabric of the longhouse vibrated as the dancers leapt and cavorted ecstatically. Then one after another they began to collapse onto the swaying floor, either foaming at the mouth or rigid from some form of cataleptic fit. I was seriously worried now, but Denis restrained me from getting up and going to help them. I soon saw why. One of the shamans – I think it was old Mengu, who had clashed with Pat earlier in the day – began circulating amongst the fallen dancers. He would kneel at a prostrate dancer’s head, then cup his hands and blow short puffs into his or her face. Almost immediately, the dancer would revive, then clamber to their feet as if nothing untoward had happened.

  ‘Religious ecstasy,’ Denis said quietly into my ear. ‘A pretty powerful emotion, and common to the whole of mankind. This is the sort of thing that goes on at revivalists’ meetings up and down England every Friday night. Only in England it lacks a bit of colour. I don’t think the Salvation Army would allow their ladies to go about bare-breasted for a start.’

  I laughed, and that broke the spell for me. Within a few minutes the jinjang was over. Families regrouped and the children took over the floor to play at dancing, their screams and childish efforts a reassuring counterpoint to the abandoned and rather scary performance of their elders.

  It rained that night, the soft rain of the Malayan highlands. I had been asleep and awoke to hear the patter of raindrops on the atap roof of our bamboo cottage. Snuggled up against Denis, with the blankets around my face, I felt warm, secure, and comfortable, and thought wonderingly of how I had once feared the Ulu. In those days the thought of sleeping in a rickety bamboo cottage deep in a jungle gorge, surrounded by savages and visited by a tiger, would have seemed a nightmare. I thought back to how frightened I had been when I had dreamed of meeting a tiger in Happy Valley, and how different the reality had been. It occurred to me, lying there in the friendly darkness, that perhaps most fears are just as groundless. And I thought how liberating it was when one turned and faced one’s fears, and saw them disintegrate like paper tigers in the rain.

  Denis woke as a heavier shower of rain drummed on the atap, and turned towards me. ‘Happy?’ he asked sleepily.

  ‘Deliciously,’ I said.

  The next morning, Denis and I set off for Kuala Lipis with Ismail and our two guides. Pat had decided to stay a few more days, to see more of Anjang but mainly, I think, in or
der to visit a neighbouring Temiar community on the Sungei Renning. He was still in his proselytising mood and as we parted he gripped Denis’s arm in the flamboyant two-handed Temiar way. ‘Go with my blessings, Tuan,’ he said in formal Malay. ‘I must stay. My destiny is here amongst the Temiar.’

  It was the last time I was to see Pat Noone, and I remember thinking then that he was either a saint or a melodramatic fool. He was to die in the ulu, fighting the Japanese as he had promised he would. He died with his dream of using the jungle against the invaders still only a dream. I think he may have learned at the end, as his plans unravelled in harsh reality, that you can never make an ally of the jungle. Its spirits are too powerful for that. Oblivious to the wishes and ambitions of humankind, it is and always has been implacably neutral.

  Our plan was to walk about five miles down the Telom to a point where it broadened and deepened enough to be navigable, and then to ride the remaining fifteen miles to Kuala Lipis in comfort on a traditional Temiar bamboo raft. It may have been only five miles, but that walk took us most of the morning. The country was increasingly marshy, with several open areas where heavy, waist-high foliage hid the Sakai path from everyone except Uda and Busu – and even they were at times forced to crouch and

  seemingly smell the earth to work out where we were.

  About midday I was slogging along in a haze of exhaustion, just putting one muddy boot in front of the other, when the country suddenly opened up into a flat, fertile ladang. There was rice, and millet, and maize, and stands of tapioca, sugar cane and banana trees. In one quarter I saw vegetables growing in neat, irrigated rows, looking for all the world like any of the thousands of Chinese market gardens throughout Malaya.