146 IN MALAY FORESTS. 



died rather than renounce a syllable of the profession 

 of his belief. He fasted most strictly throughout the 

 month of Eamthan ; and every Friday he attended 

 the village mosque, where he heard the imaum read 

 extracts of the Koran in the original Arabic, a 

 language of which neither the reader nor the audience 

 understood a single word. He would have been 

 horrified to hear that any person should say of him 

 that a belief in the Spirits of the Forest and the 

 Water had more meaning for him than had any 

 teaching of Muhammad, but such was nevertheless 

 the case. Among the Malays who live, remote from 

 the civilisation of the ports and towns, in the up- 

 river districts, where the villages are sparse and few 

 and the forest vast and all-encompassing, the veneer 

 of Islam is as thin as the pre-Muhammadan belief 

 in spirits is deep : Allah and Muhammad are far 

 from this life, and six heavens in six layers lie 

 between their heaven and this world; but the Jins, 

 the Dewas, and other demons and spirits, actually 

 walk the earth. 



To Alang Abdullah, Batara Kala and Hana Taskun, 

 the great Water Jins, were very real, very terrible, 

 and very present. He had recognised them riding 

 by his house on the roaring December floods, and in 

 the silence of the night he had heard the Earth Jins 

 hunting and holloaing through the forest. Less than 

 three miles from his house was a hill where one 

 might chance upon the Voice-Folk, the spirits whom 

 all may hear but none may see ; and not many miles 

 down the Perak river was a district named after the 

 Demon Bota, where to this day the spirit deludes 



