people will sometimes agree to "amok," and then rush on with such
energetic desperation as to be very formidable to men not so excited
as themselves. Among the ancients these would have been looked upon as
heroes or demigods who sacrificed themselves for their country. Here it
is simply said--they made "amok."
Macassar is the most celebrated place in the East for "running a muck."
There are said to be one or two a month on the average, and five, ten,
or twenty persons are sometimes killed or wounded at one of them. It is
the national, and therefore the honourable, mode of committing suicide
among the natives of Celebes, and is the fashionable way of escaping
from their difficulties. A Roman fell upon his sword, a Japanese rips up
his stomach, and an Englishman blows out his brains with a pistol.
The Bugis mode has many advantages to one suicidically inclined. A man
thinks himself wronged by society--he is in debt and cannot pay--he is
taken for a slave or has gambled away his wife or child into slavery--he
sees no way of recovering what he has lost, and becomes desperate. He
will not put up with such cruel wrongs, but will be revenged on mankind
and die like a hero. He grasps his kris-handle, and the next moment
draws out the weapon and stabs a man to the heart. He runs on, with
bloody kris in his hand, stabbing at everyone he meets. "Amok! Amok!"
then resounds through the streets. Spears, krisses, knives and guns are
brought out against him. He rushes madly forward, kills all he can--men,
women, and children--and dies overwhelmed by numbers amid all the
excitement of a battle. And what that excitement is those who have been
in one best know, but all who have ever given way to violent passions,
or even indulged in violent and exciting exercises, may form a very good
idea. It is a delirious intoxication, a temporary madness that absorbs
every thought and every energy. And can we wonder at the kris-bearing,
untaught, brooding Malay preferring such a death, looked upon as almost
honourable to the cold-blooded details of suicide, if he wishes to
escape from overwhelming troubles, or the merciless clutches of the
hangman and the disgrace of a public execution, when he has taken the
law into his own hands and too hastily revenged himself upon his enemy?
In either case he chooses rather to "amok."
The great staples of the trade of Lombock as well as of Bali are rice
and coffee; the former grown on the plains, the latter on the hills. The
rice is exported very largely to other islands of the Archipelago,
to Singapore, and even to China, and there are generally one or more
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