Note 81 — Chapter V · Magic Rites connected with the Several Departments of Nature

“An old man picked up a boy in the jungle with a white skin, green eyes, and very long nails. Taking the boy home his rescuer named him Muhammad Yatim (i.e. ‘Muhammad the fatherless’), and when he grew up sent him to school, where he behaved with great cruelty to his schoolfellows, and was therefore soundly beaten by his master (’Toh Saih Panjang Janggut, i.e. ’Toh Saih Long-beard), who used a stick made of a kind of wood called los81 to effect the chastisement. At the first cut the boy leapt as far as the doorway; at the second he leapt to the ground, at the third he bounded into the grass, at the fourth he uttered a growl, and at the fifth his tail fell down behind him and he went upon all fours, whereat his master (improvising a name to curse him by), exclaimed, ‘This is of a truth God’s tiger! (Harimau Allah). Go you,’ he added, addressing the tiger, ‘to the place where you will catch your prey—the borderland between the primeval forest and the secondary forest-growth, and that between the secondary forest-growth and the plain—catch there whomsoever you will, but see that you catch only the headless. Alter no jot of what I say, or you shall be consumed by the Iron of the Regalia, and crushed by the sanctity of the thirty divisions of the Korān.’” Hence the tiger is to this day compelled to “ask for” his prey, and uses divination (bĕrtĕnung), as all men know, for the purpose of discovering whether his petition has yet been granted.