separated them from
the Sakai camp, and they felt themselves safe from pursuit.

To understand this, you must realise what the Sakai of the interior is.
Men of his race who have lived for years surrounded by Malay villages
are as different from him, as the fallow-deer in an English park from
the Sambhur of the jungles. Sakai who have spent all their lives among
Malays, who have learned to wear clothes, and to count up to ten, or may
be twenty, are hardly to be distinguished from their neighbours, the
other ignorant up country natives. They are not afraid to wander through
the villages, they do not rush into the jungle or hide behind trees at
the approach of strangers, a water-buffalo does not inspire them with as
much terror as a tiger, and they do not hesitate to make, comparatively
speaking, long journeys from their homes if occasion requires. In all
this they differ widely from the semi-wild Sakai of the centre of the
Peninsula. These men trade with the Malays, it is true, but the trade
has to be carried on by visitors who penetrate into the Sakai country
for the purpose. Most of them have learned to speak Malay, though many
know only their own primitive language, and when their three numerals,
_na-nu_, _nar_, and _ne_--one, two, and three--have been used, fall back
for further expression of arithmetical ideas on the word _Kerpn_, which
means 'many.' For clothes they wear, the narrow loin cloth, fashioned
from the bark of certain trees, which only partially covers their
nakedness; they are as shy as the beasts of the forest, and never
willingly do they quit that portion of the country which is still
exclusively inhabited by the aboriginal tribes. It was to semi-wild
Sakai such as these that Chep and her people belonged.

There are tribes of other and more savage jungle-dwellers living in the
forests of the broad Sakai country, men who fly to the jungles even when
approached by the tamer tribesmen. Their camps may be seen, on a clear
day, far up the hillsides on the jungle-covered uplands of the remote
interior; their tracks are occasionally to be met with mixed with those
of the bison and the rhinoceros, the deer and the wild swine, but the
people themselves are but rarely encountered. The tamer Sakai trade with
them, depositing the articles of barter at certain spots in the forest,
whence they are removed by the wild men and replaced by various kinds
of jungle produce. Of these, the most valued are the long straigh