124 IN MALAY FORESTS. 



though he spent some weeks on the hill. The tiger 

 roared close to his camp a few nights later, and he 

 and another officer in the Survey Department sat up 

 for it several times without success. 



No other European that I know has seen these 

 penanggal, but Malays have told me that they have 

 seen them ; and the people of Tanjong Malim agreed 

 that these must be the lights that were occasionally 

 seen on Changkat Asah from the village. 



I wish I knew what those flaming balls were. But 

 of one thing I am certain : when we watched those 

 flying and dancing lights, we looked upon that which 

 had robbed Baginda Sutan of his mind. 1 



1 Since writing the above I have seen the following account by Mr 

 Andrew Lang in the ' Illustrated London News ' : 



' * I am well acquainted with the set of lights which are often seen by 

 the people of Ballachulish and Glencoe, villages on the south side of 

 the salt-water Loch Leven (not Queen Mary's fresh-water Loch 

 Leven), on the west coast of Argyllshire. They are bright lights 

 which disport themselves on the north side of the loch, where steep 

 hills descend to the level, and to the road along the level, leading to 

 the head of the loch. They rush, as it were, along the road, then up 

 the hill, then down to the water edge, and so on, and are visible, not 

 only to the Celtic natives, but to the English tourist. The ground 

 is not marshy, even on the level, and the phenomena, though doubt- 

 less natural and normal, have not yet found a scientific explanation. 

 They are not what people call ' corpse candles,' and a local myth used 

 to attribute them to the agency of a dead laird an explanation in 

 itself improbable, and now abandoned as inadequate to the facts of 

 the case." 



These Loch Leven lights would appear to be the same thing as the 

 lights of Changkat Asah ; and I have been tempted to rewrite the 

 paragraphs about the Will-o'-the-wisps and St Elmo's lights. On the 

 whole, however, I prefer to leave my account as I originally wrote it. 



