3B 
THREE MONTHS IN PAHANG 
If he at any future time shou!d do so, and he again wished to 
describe the local Malay, he would have to start all over again 
with a new vocabulary. Their intelli*^ence is such that they 
have forgotten how to speak their own language. Even 
my own men, Pahang River Mala\'s, mistook ?ome of the 
kampong people for Sakais b}- the accent they indulged in 
when they spoke to us. When they spoke amongst 
themselves we could not understand them at all. 1 was 
informed when I was up there that no boat had been made 
by the villagt^rs for ten years. I refer to the ordinar\- river 
sampan which they would use themselves. The reason given 
was that they had to pay a duty on the timber, and that 
they were too poor to be able to do so. They should have 
said that they were too lazy to try and work so as to obtain 
the where-with-all to pay the small impost demanded* From 
the appearance of the kampong boats that I saw up the 
Ulu Tembeling I should have thouf^ht that no boat had been 
made there for hundreds and hundreds of years. You never 
saw such a collection of derelicts. I believe comparatively 
recently the Pahang Government had to come to the rescue 
to avoid a very serious famine in the Ulu Tembeling. One 
naturally asks why ? What had happened ? Part of the country 
that I saw there is ideal for padi planting, and yet these 
people could not or would not plant enough rice to keep 
them from starving. And the rivers abound with fish and the 
forest with small game. What can you do with such a 
people? We found them in bed, the entire kampong in bed, 
at seven o'clock in the morning. Even my Malays from 
the Pahang River seemed rather disgusted at that, ** The 
Sakais" they said, "We're not as laJiy as all that." Rut 
let us return to our journey. About three in the afternoon we 
saw some seladang tracks on the river bank and stopping 
to investigate found that morning's spoor of a fairly large 
herd. There was a clearing: at this spot and it would have 
been a good place to camp but Awang Ali said that a little 
way farther up the river there was a padang to which he gave 
the name of " Padangr Lenkah " where seladang were frequen- 
tly to be found and he thought that as the tracks of the herd 
appeared to be making up stream that it was possible we 
might pick them up in the padang late in the afternoon* This 
sounded reasonable so we proceeded. At about five o'clock 
Awnng Ali informed us that we should be close to the padang 
round the next bend of the river so I stopped the boat at a 
small island and three of us climbed up the river bank to 
cut through the jungle to the padang. But devil a bit of 
a padang did we find : we found some veiy thick bluker, very 
