Their Hair Is Black,
Straight And Shining, And The Women Dress It In A Plain Knot At The
Back Of The Head.
To my thinking, both sexes are decidedly ugly, and
there is a coldness and aloofness of manner about them which chills one
even where they are on friendly terms with Europeans, as the people
whom we visited were with Mrs. Biggs.
The women were lounging about the houses, some cleaning fish, others
pounding rice; but they do not care for work, and the little money
which they need for buying clothes they can make by selling mats, or
jungle fruits. Their lower garment, or sarong, reaching from the waist
to the ankles, is usually of red cotton of a small check, with stripes
in the front, above which is worn a loose sleeved garment, called a
kabaya, reaching to the knees, and clasped in front with silver or
gold, and frequently with diamond ornaments. They also wear gold or
silver pins in their hair, and the sarong is girt or held up by a clasp
of enormous size, and often of exquisite workmanship, in the poorer
class of silver, and in the richer of gold jeweled with diamonds and
rubies. The sarong of the men does not reach much below the knee and
displays loose trousers. They wear above it a short-sleeved jacket, the
baju, beautifully made, and often very tastefully decorated in fine
needlework, and with small buttons on each side, not for use, however.
I have seen one Malay who wore about twenty buttons, each one a diamond
solitaire! The costume is completed by turbans or red handkerchiefs
tied round their heads.
In these forest kampongs the children, who are very pretty, are not
encumbered by much clothing, specially the boys. All the dwellings are
picturesque, and those of the richer Malays are beautiful. They rigidly
exclude all ornaments which have "the likeness of anything in heaven or
earth," but their arabesques are delicately carved, and the verses from
the Koran, which occasionally run under the eaves, being in the Arabic
character, are decidedly decorative. Their kampongs are small, and
they have little of the gregarious instinct; they are said to live
happily, and to have a considerable amount of domestic affection.
Captain Shaw likes the Malays, and the verdict on them here is that
they are chaste, gentle, honest and hospitable, but that they tell
lies, and that their "honor" is so sensitive that blood alone can wipe
out some insults to it. They seclude their women to a great extent, and
under ordinary circumstances the slightest courtesy shown by a European
man to a Malay woman would be a deadly insult; and at the sight of a
man in the distance the women hastily cover their faces.
There is a large mosque with a minaret just on the outskirts of
Malacca, and we passed several smaller ones in the space of three
miles. Scarcely any kampong is so small as not to have a mosque.
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