It Is A Beautiful House, Of One Very Large, Lofty
Room, Part Of Which Is Divided Into Apartments By Heavy Silk Curtains.
One End Of It Is Occupied By A High Dais Covered With Fine Mats, Below
Which Is Another Dais Covered With Persian Carpets.
On this the Sultana
received us, the Rajah Moussa, who is not her son, and ourselves
sitting on chairs.
If I understood rightly that this prince is not her
son, I do not see how it is that he can go into the women's apartments.
Two guards sat on the floor just within the door, and numbers of women,
some of them in white veils, followers of the Sultana, sat in rows also
on the floor.
It must be confessed that the "light of the harem" is not beautiful.
She looks nearly middle-aged. She is short and fat, with a flat nose,
open wide nostrils, thick lips, and filed teeth, much blackened by
betel-nut chewing. Her expression is pleasant, and her manner is
prepossessing. She wore a rich, striped, red silk sarong, and a very
short, green silk kabaya with diamond clasps; but I saw very little of
her dress or herself, because she was almost enveloped in a pure white
veil of a fine woolen material spangled with gold stars, and she
concealed so much of her face with it, in consequence of the presence
of the Rajah Moussa, that I only rarely got a glimpse of the
magnificent diamond solitaires in her ears. Our conversation was not
brilliant, and the Sultana looked to me as if she had attained nirvana,
and had "neither ideas nor the consciousness of the absence of ideas."
We returned and took leave of the Sultan, and after we left I caught a
glimpse of him lounging at ease in a white shirt and red sarong, all
his gorgeousness having disappeared.
After we returned to the bungalow the Sultan sent me a gift. Eight
attendants dressed in pure white came into the room in single file, and
each bowing to the earth, sat down a brass salver, with its contents
covered with a pure white cloth. Again bowing, they uncovered them, and
displayed the fruitage of the tropics. There were young cocoa-nuts,
gold-colored bananas of the kind which the Sultan eats, papayas, and
clusters of a species of jambu, a pear-shaped fruit, beautiful to look
at, each fruit looking as if made of some transparent, polished white
wax with a pink flush on one side. The Rajah Moussa also arrived and
took coffee, and the verandas were filled with his followers. Every
Rajah goes about attended, and seems to be esteemed according to the
size of his following.
We left this remote and beautiful place at noon, and after a delightful
cruise of five hours down the Jugra, and among islands floating on a
waveless sea, we reached dreary, decayed Klang in the evening.
I. L. B.
LETTER XV
Tiger Mosquitoes - Insect Torments - A Hadji's Fate - Malay Custom - Oaths
and Lies - A False Alarm
THE RESIDENCY, KLANG, February 7.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 140 of 229
Words from 73216 to 73730
of 120530
