FASCICULI MALATENSES 
XXXVll 
We lived on the mountain, for three weeks in April and May and a 
fortnight in August and September, in a little hut of branches and palm 
leaves, tied together with the stems of creepers, which our coolies practically 
built for us in the course of about two hours, and we had also a photographic 
dark room, constructed over a clear mountain stream, and a stage for drying 
specimens erected in the clearing. But for the dampness, due rather to a fine 
mist, which the sun never wholly dissipated, than to rain, for consequent 
attacks of violent toothache, for the parasite to which one of us has already 
alluded, and for land leeches, which were most unpleasantly abundant, we were 
very comfortable, as the Malays of Sai Kau brought us up provisions, which 
they sold to the cook for ridiculously small prices, almost every other day. 
They also brought little bamboo tubes full of specimens which they 
had collected during the ascent, and Siamese pig-hunters often visited us with 
similar wares, so that we saw a good deal of the natives even on the mountain. 
So far as we could discover, there are now no aborigines living on Bukit 
Besar, though it is quite possible that the stories of spirits with which our 
men were regaled on their return to the plains were due to the presence of 
some particular shy and retiring tribe, which may or may not be extinct. 
Ban Sai Kau , sometimes called Kampong Pasir Puteh by the Malays 
(both names meaning ‘ the village of white sand ’), is a large village, or rather 
collection of hamlets, with about six hundred inhabitants, and lies immediately 
below Bukit Besar. The population is almost equally divided between 
Malays and Siamese, the two c peoples ’ here, as in Jalor, being more 
accurately described as the followers of Buddha and Mahommed respectively. 
They do not, however, occupy the same hamlets, for every small group of 
houses is hidden in a grove of cocoanut and areca palms and other fruit 
trees, and separated by extensive rice-fields from its neighbours. Many 
cattle and buffaloes are also pastured in the neighbourhood, and the people, 
though very poor, are well able to live in comfort on the products of their 
fields, orchards and poultry, the sale of their cattle, many of which are sent 
over into Perak and Kedah, providing them with such luxuries as they desire. 
In type they differ somewhat from the Malayo-Siamese of Jalor, the common 
occurrence among them of wavy hair, a dark complexion and a very broad 
nose probably pointing to Semang blood, while it is possible that there has 
been less mixture with Chinamen or true Siamese. Their customs and 
education are very primitive, though Malay boys are invariably taught to 
read the Koran — often without understanding what they read — in Arabic, 
and we found that the majority of them could not count above ten, so that a 
purely concrete system of decimal arithmetic had to be used in our monetary 
