The day on which we were to leave, Wahpering brought us some fruit and fish and a pair of ring-doves. Motioning me to one side, he whispered, the while looking shyly at the mistress, "Ranee very beautiful! How much you pay?" I was staggered for the moment, and made him repeat his question. This time I could not mistake him. "How much you pay for wife?" He gave his thumb a jerk in the direction of the mistress. I saw that he was really serious, so I collected my senses, and with a practical, businesslike air answered, "Two hundred dollars." The old fellow sighed.
"The great Rajah very rich! I pay fifty for best wife."
I have not tried to tell you all we did on our tropical island playing Robinson Crusoe. I have only tried to convey some little impression of a happy ten days that will ever be remembered as one more of those glorious, Oriental chapters in our lives which are filled with the gorgeous colors of crimson and gold, the delicate perfumes of spice-laden breezes, and with imperishable visions of a strange, old-world life.
They are chapters that we can read over and over again with an ever increasing interest as the years roll by.
No one knows who invented the sarong. When the great Sir Francis Drake skirted the beautiful jungle-bound shores of that strange Asian peninsula which seems forever to be pointing a wondering finger into the very heart of the greatest archipelago in the world, he found its inhabitants wearing the sarong. After a lapse of three centuries they still wear it,--neither Hindu invasion, Mohammedan conversion, Chinese immigration, nor European conquest has ever taken from them their national dress. Civilization has introduced many articles of clothing; but no matter how many of these are adopted, the Malay, from his Highness the Sultan of Johore, to the poorest fisherman of a squalid kampong on the muddy banks of a mangrove-hidden stream, religiously wears the sarong.
It is only an oblong cloth, this fashion-surviving garb, from two to four feet in width and some two yards long; sewn together at the ends. It looks like a gingham bag with the bottom out. The wearer steps into it, and with two or three ingenious twists tightens it round the waist, thus forming a skirt and, at the same time, a belt in which he carries the kris, or snake-like dagger, the inevitable pouch of areca nut for chewing, and the few copper cents that he dares not trust in his unlocked hut. The man's skirt falls to his knees, and among the poor class forms his only article of dress, while the woman's reaches to her ankles and is worn in connection with another sarong that is thrown over her head as a veil, so that when she is abroad and meets one of the opposite sex she can, Moslem-like, draw it about her face in the form of a long, narrow slit, showing only her coal-black eyes and thinly pencilled eyebrows.