FASCICULI MALAYENSES 
77 
Pandak. Betimor went down to the river to bathe and was lost in the water : 
the bubbles rose up where she disappeared, and her jungle knife was left on 
the bank. Three days after she appeared in a dream to her father and told 
him that she had become a crocodile and must now be called ’Toh Sri Lam. 
So her father made ‘ turmeric rice ’ (nasi kunyit ), parched rice ( beritis ), and 
‘ red rice ’ ( nasi merah ), and took them with a white fowl and some wax tapers 
to the bank of the river where his daughter had been drowned. There she 
appeared to him, turned to a crocodile as far up as her waist. Afterwards she 
became altogether a crocodile, and, leaving her own village, went to a place 
called Ampat Palam, where her footprints were formerly shown. So far the 
old woman : the following additions to the legend were told me by a boatman 
on the Patani River, who was not himself a member of the crocodile family. 
In her old age, ’Toh Sri Lam went to war in the State of Ligor. (Another 
Patani man told me that she went to fight with the Datoh of Kedah). She 
came out of the water in the likeness of an old woman and asked some people 
in a passing boat to take her with them. When they reached Ligor, she 
begged them to put her ashore and to watch what would happen. Then she 
dived into the water and swam away, gradually turning into a large crocodile 
before their eyes. She still remains in the Ligor River, where she causes a 
great whirlpool by continually turning round and round and lashing about with 
her tail. The boatman said that he had gone up this River himself in 
the train of some great Siamese official, and had seen the footprints of ’Toh 
Sri Lam on the bank. When the procession of boats approached the pool in 
which she lives, they lit torches and lamps and made as much noise as possible, 
firing off guns and beating drums, in order to drive her away and to prevent 
the boats being overwhelmed in the whirlpool. 
The old woman claimed descent from Maw Mi, one of ’Toh Sri Lam’s 
brothers, and said that other branches of the family had another brother or 
sister as an ancestor or ancestress. All collateral descendants of ’Toh Sri Lam 
call her Datoh , and regard her as their guardian. Formerly they made sacrifices 
to the crocodiles of the Patani River, but the custom has now died out. 
They believe that ’Toh Sri Lam had direct crocodilian descendants, which are 
distinguished from other crocodiles by being ‘white,’ that is, of a pale colour. 
‘ White ’ crocodiles are kramat , or sacred ; they are held in reverence by other 
people as well as those who belong to the crocodile family, and, like all 
animals that are kramat , are believed to refrain from doing injury to human 
beings except under special circumstances. It is only descendants of ’Toh Sri 
Lam who are prohibited from killing or capturing ordinary crocodiles ; but if 
a person who belongs to her family is present when any crocodile is killed or 
captured, he will have a bad attack of fever. 
