236 MAN : PAST AND PRESENT. [CHAP. 



Despite their generally quiet, taciturn demeanour, all these 



Sundanese peoples are just as liable as the Orang- 

 Amok. n Malayu himself, to those sudden outbursts of 



demoniacal frenzy and homicidal mania called by 

 them meng-dmok, and by us "running amok." Indeed Mr Wallace 

 tells us that such wild outbreaks occur more frequently (about 

 one or two every month) amongst the civilised Mangkassaras and 

 Bugis of south Celebes than elsewhere in the archipelago. " It 

 is the national and therefore the honourable mode of committing 

 suicide among the natives of Celebes, and is the fashionable way 

 of escaping from their difficulties. A Roman fell upon his sword, 

 a Japanese rips up his stomach, and an Englishman blows out 

 his brains with a pistol. The Bugis mode has many advantages 

 to one suicidically inclined. A man thinks himself wronged by 

 society he is in debt and cannot pay he is taken for a slave or 

 has gambled away his wife or child into slavery he sees no way 

 of recovering what he has lost, and becomes desperate. He will 

 not put up with such cruel wrongs, but will be revenged on man- 

 kind and die like a hero. He grasps his kris-handle, and the 

 next moment draws out the weapon and stabs a man to the heart. 

 He runs on, with bloody kris in his hand, stabbing at everyone 

 he meets. ' Amok ! Amok ! ' then resounds through the streets. 

 Spears, krisses, knives and guns are brought out against him. 

 He rushes madly forward, kills all he can men, women, and 

 children and dies overwhelmed by numbers amid all the excite- 

 ment of a battle 1 ." 



Possibly -connected with this blind impulse may be the strange 



nervous affection called Idtah, which is also pre- 

 Maiady. ta valent amongst the Malayans, although only now 



first clearly described by the distinguished Malay 

 scholar, Mr Frank Athelstane Swettenham 2 . No attempt has yet 

 been made thoroughly to diagnose this uncanny disorder, which 

 would seem so much more characteristic of the high-strung or 

 shattered nervous system of ultra-refined European society, than 

 of that artless unsophisticated child of nature, the Orang-Malayu. 

 Its effects on the mental state are such as to disturb all normal 



1 The Malay Archipelago^ p. 175. 



2 In Malay Sketches, 1895. 



