The napkin is there, whose mouth can it wipe?
The sireh is ready, but who will use it?
Thy Sister is cold, who will fondle her?
Ah-hu! ah-hu! come death, deliver me.’
“And then she fell to weeping and moaning, struggling with her sisters, and trying to cast herself into the sea.
“That is the tale of Ra’ûnah and Nakhôdah Ma’win, and every one knows it. Some tell it one way and some another, but that is how it came to me. The girl was mad, mad with love and regret for six months; and then her father married her to another man, and that cured her. I knew the man: he was a foreigner. She and two of her sisters died long ago, but the other is alive still.
“How to get the dûyong’s tears? Oh, that is easy enough. You catch the sea-woman when she comes up the sand to eat the sweet grass on shore. I told you how to do it. You have to lie in wait and she waddles up on two sort of fins that she uses like feet, helping with her tail. If she sees you, she tries to get back into the sea, but you stand between her and the water and so catch her. Then, if you want her tears, you make a palisade of sticks in the deeper water of the bay through which she came, and there you bind her in a sort of cage, at the surface of the water, so that she can’t move. It is like the thing they put elephants in when they are half-tamed. When she finds she is held fast there, and cannot get down into the deep water to her young, she weeps, and as the tears stream down her face you catch them, sweep them into a vessel, and you have the philtre.”
There was a pause. Then a man said, “I hear they sell dûyong’s tears in Penang.”
The teller of the story at once replied, “Very likely, I have heard it too; but it is probably only some make-believe stuff. You must try it before you buy it.”
“How do you do that?”