Page:The further side of silence (IA furthersideofsil00clifiala).pdf/397

 IN CHAINS

T WAS rather more than five and twenty years ago that I returned from leave of absence in Europe, and took charge of the district which forms the interior of the native state of Pahang, and is the exact core and centre of the Malay Peninsula. It was a big tract of country, over three thousand square miles in extent, and in those days. was reckoned the wildest part of the protected Ma- layan states. It did not boast a mile of made road or bridle path in all its vast expanse; it was simothered in deep, damp forest, threaded across and across by a network of streams and rivers, the latter the best of our highways; and a sparse sprinkling of Malay villages was strewn over its surface—a dozen or two of thatched roofs in shady palm and fruit groves adjoining wide, flat stretches of rice-field and grazing grounds studded with rhododendron scrub. Besides the Malay population there were a few camps filled with Chinese miners engaged in fossicking for gold: a band or two of sulky Australian prospectors, sorely discontented with the results which they were ob- taining; and an odd thousand or so of squalid abori- gines, living in dirt and wretchedness up in the mountains. For the rest the inhabitants of my district were native chiefs. the overlords and op-