Beno, the flood

This time the governor of the East Coast of Sumatra had made his trip to the Kampar River so arranged that he could see the benô, the surge, which makes this river unsuitable for regular boat traffic.

The word "surge" better describes what one is talking about than "tidal wave." has to say. There is no better word to give an idea of ​​the piece of water, which, on two or three consecutive days, is taken full and new moon, is pushed up from the sea by the tide, and that at various points in the river, which is several hundred metres wide, sometimes has a height of three meters or more, where it moves at a speed of the riverbed is pushed in at a speed of ten to thirty kilometers per hour. That huge chunk of water has a continuous front, a boiling, roaring wall. It is, or a new river, of some meters higher water level, shoots over the existing one, which is caused by the the ebb tide has been sucked dry; and not gradually, but all at once, without transition. A great bandjir, but in the opposite direction.

Several rivers in the world exhibit a phenomenon that in more or less corresponds to the beno. In the Dutch East Indies it is only the Kampar and Rokan Rivers, both of which flow into the Strait flow out of Malaka, where the beno prevails. On the Rokan it is never as high and as dangerous as on the Kampar; but one can imagine concept of the mass of water that covers kilometers wide at high tide mouths slide in, when one sees the height of the "tree", the jetty of the Chinese center Bagan Si Api-Api, the second fishing place in the world, at the mouth of the Rokan.

There are only a few Europeans who can see this overwhelming natural wonder here seen, because these remote areas are very rarely visited. Both rivers flow through the low countries in their lower reaches Sumatra's east coast, which is not of interest here capital; the soil is not fertile enough for large-scale agriculture, and here and there swamps extend, created by floods or when the mighty rivers shifted their beds.

There are therefore only sporadic small settlements of indigenous people population. The Hindus, perhaps ten centuries ago, on some higher places on the banks built their resting places, of which still remains of baked bricks remain, but numerous will be the population has never been there.

For both Sumatra rivers the origin of the beno will be together related to the narrowing of the Strait of Malacca caused by the chain of islands east of central and southern Sumatra. Or, to put it to put it simply, geologically speaking, those islands are the remnant of the bond which Sumatra has with Malaka, on the mainland of Asia connected. When after the ice age the meltwater at the poles and in the glacial areas became exposed, great changes took place in the Indonesian archipelago. First the Philippines said goodbye to Borneo, and Bali from Java; after that the connection was broken between Java and Sumatra, and finally Borneo and Sumatra broke away from each other. Now only Sumatra and Malaka were still connected, and also the The lower part of this connection eventually submerged. This created the slot between the Asian mainland and Sumatra, the world strait from Malaka. How long ago it was that this last separation came into being, will probably remain unknown. The geologist will not be able to accept, but based on data in 163 AD by Ptolemy recorded, considered in connection with ethnological indications, there is room for the assumption that at the beginning of our era a narrow, low isthmus still existed between Malaka and a part from Sumatra south of the Rokan estuary.

Be that as it may, there is a threshold here in the Strait, the higher part of the old connection, which should influence the way in which the water that rises at high tide just covers the two wide mouths of Kampar and Rokan slides in.

It is up to experts to assess the exact cause of the effect of the beno on the rivers. There are different theories over, but it remains a miracle for everyone to whom it is given to live through the moment when the boiling waterfront roars passes by, further, further and further up the wide river.

There was a place for the administrator of these regions on the left bank selected, from where he saw the spectacle in the greatest power and of could see nearby. Downstream lay a gently curving river bend with a slightly higher edge, which was noted at each bend crumbled; if this bend had been passed, the surge would have high speed up a straight stretch of river, and here the beno showed itself at its best.

It was mid-December, the monsoon rains had flooded the river made, and it was spring tide, two factors which made a high expected a surge. At this time of year, almost not a day goes by without rain, so we had quick hands on the bank a simple hut made, a canopy of leaves above some benches of twigs and branches, on which the governor, the local governing official and some heads of the population awaiting the They had set up upcoming events. The old Kampar warehouse was also among them. The previous evening he had sailed the government vessel "Diana", with which the governor made the journeys in these regions, safely at anchor brought behind the island of Ketam, where the beno is never dangerous; and In the early morning the company was in a light canoe upstream rowed.

It was ten o'clock. The river, which at this point is more than three hundred meters wide, flowed quietly along the ten-foot high, steep The shoreline. It was still low tide; the beno wasn't expected for another hour. Lead-colored under the heavily overcast sky stretched the silent surface of the water, that from this point one can travel for miles can see upstream and downstream.

“Is this now the place where the beno is most dangerous for sailing?” the governor asked.

“No, sir,” replied the pilot, “the most dangerous point is at Tandjoeng Poelai. The river flows into Kamparmond from three sides, between the sandbanks and forms at Ketam; there it is already noticeable, but not dangerous. Then it starts to swell and becomes stronger and faster; and at the threshold at Poelai it is highest, well ten feet and more; there he is very haunted; but I have not seen you there brought, because one cannot see so far in all directions and because there is no safe place on the shore like here, where we are now; Here he sometimes reaches a height of three metres, but very rarely.”

“And where did the 'Madjoe' end up, and how did that happen?”

“That happened twelve years ago at Tandjoeng Niboeng. It was a small steamboat, the crew knew nothing about its power and operation from the bottom and thought she could manage it. She went stood upright, turned over and was immediately filled with sand, everything was in one momentarily destroyed. The "Madjoe" still haunts sometimes, but at Poelau Lawan, and then the whole kampong comes out to see it.”

“And what do you see then?”

The pilot looked down the row of heads and signaled one of them to to answer the question.

An old, dignified man cleared his throat, as is customary. With tension everyone else looked at him. This was a man who knew a lot narrate.

“Not everyone can see that, sir, you have to have the movie for that. have, there are only a few to whom that is given; they see the "Madjoe" in the middle of the river. At Tandjoeng Semajang it's very different, I have I saw it myself.”

“What did you see there?”

The old man cleared his throat again. “Yes, sir, I'll tell you, but I don't know if you believe it. We people at the river see that things, and our ancestors have seen it too. At Tandjoeng Semajang, which used to be called Si Bajang-Bajang, lived a long time ago woman of the Singô Bônô tribe. We call the beno here bônô, or he We do not know whether it is named after the tribe, but it is said that when there was no beno yet. That woman had supernatural power, and often people came to her little house on the riverside to ask for advice when there were sick people at home. When she had grown very old and was no longer well she could walk, she said one day to the people who came to see her visits, that she wanted to be alone to pray. All those people then saw that the house and the old woman suddenly disappeared were. At that place there is now a kramat, a sacred place where people makes vows. And when the beno comes up, one sees from there, on the river, but far away and in a mist, a ship with full sail, or a canoe, which is rowed with many oars, but people are seen Never. We often see that boat, I've seen it myself. And we like it when someone sees the ghost boat, it brings good luck the entire region.”

It was as if the river lay listening, moving so slowly, more slowly she herself.

“How long ago could this have been?”

"We don't know that; it was at the time when Toek Engok lived. He had also supernatural power, he could use any piece of wood to to float across the river with it, even in the strongest current. Sometimes he stayed behind his mosquito net for a week. A curious woman peeked into the mosquito net and saw that Toek Engok was not on his sleeping place. When he came out of the mosquito net after a few days, the woman what she had done and seen; and now the old man told that he was married to a djinn woman and kept going to her. He had children with that woman, including a son, whose name was Radja Alam, but “No one has ever seen that woman and the children,”

The sky grew darker. Only far downstream a streak sandbank bright white in a sunbeam. In a tree on the bank a large, gray-green flycatcher chose a dead branch as a station for his circle flights. He lurked for a moment, then darted away, snapped with a clearly audible snap of the beak an unsuspecting insect bit, and returned in a graceful curve to exactly the same spot on his branch. And again and again he circled and again and again the catching beak; it had been the only sound for a quarter of an hour outside the hut, where the men listened quietly to the old stories.

When it was eleven o'clock the flycatcher disappeared; now all was still, the nature waited. But fifteen minutes later a wild gust of wind blew through the forest behind the hut, and a moment later a hailstorm rattled on the canopy of leaves. The sun still shone on the white sandbank in the distance, and she now began to shine on the other side of the river too, the lead heaven had relieved itself and between heavy clouds light gray clouds spots. The river remained dark, but the wild wind sheared across it water and brought timid flakes of foam.

Twenty minutes before twelve the sun suddenly broke through broadly, and now maybe two kilometers downstream, a white line was drawn across visible across the river.

“There he is!” shouted the men. “Do you hear that bubbling, sir?”

Now that he was visible, a soft sound could also be heard across the water come. The river was now deathly still, the people were silent. Rapidly growing the roaring sound came up the river and the line widened. The was, or a paddle steamer was working its way up the Kampar. Now the white line broke on the sandbank that had just been illuminated, and there were clearly wildly splashing to see waves jumping over the bank here and there, as if there large animals ran, jumped up and fell down again. Then a hissing water dam over to the gentle bend, the high bank disappeared before a great deal and dull, booming shots rang out, great chunks of the steep bank collapsed into the boiling surf.

The sun now shone brightly on the river, and it was plain to see how it waterfront lined up for the straight stretch of river, which is now mastered had to be. In one straight line came the foaming, raging dam setting up, surprisingly fast now, like a thundering artillery charge, but horse to horse, neck to neck, one continuous front; here and There wild waves reared up, like wild horses. In growling roars the two-meter-high, boiling flood plunged onto the deathly still water, waves of mud sprayed up on the shore, some trees were blown off dragged along the shore.

The ground shook, the shivering men involuntarily did some steps back, and before you knew it, it roared violence over; the river had suddenly become two meters higher and a brown brew was boiling, where trunks and branches and chunks driftwood turned and revolved and stood upright and fell down again smacked, violently stirred by huge eddies, which fought each other. In one moment it was all over, seething, roaring, and the men cheered and roared along, with cold spines...

“Did you get a good look at the horses, sir?” asked the old chieftain. excited.

“Do you mean those jumping heads?”

“Yes, we call them horses. They say that there used to be seven wild ones were horses that pulled the beno up the river. A chief of the tribe Singo Bono, a big "gagah" man, shot one out, and then the beno was gone four times. He became seriously ill and has never been able to walk again; it is not good to do such things do, we humans must be careful”...

That afternoon the governor left for Médan by "Diana", and in the late evening he sat in an easy rattan chair on the upper deck of the ship, and thought back to the wonderful event of that day.

The full moon was reflected in the rippling water of one of the straits in the Bengali Islands group, where the "Diana" gently slipped through. In the inky black edge of the tidal forest, between the moonlit night and the water, the crickets chirped. In some bushes on thousands of fireflies danced on the side and they made the bushes richly candled Christmas trees, but the flames were weak phosphorescent lights, they shone for one second and then all went out out again for just as long, as if on command, unreal, ghostly in the soft mist of phosphorescent brilliance.

Was it possible that the ghost dance of insects obeyed a regulatory power? Fixed laws also prevailed here, undoubtedly, just as good as there on that now so quiet, just now boiling, seething river.

A soft cough sounded on the stairs to the deck. The old shed of the Kampar had been given leave to go to Médan, where a married daughter, he had not yet seen his youngest grandchild. Silently he sat down, with his back against the railing. He felt, why that lonely man could not yet fall asleep in the wonders moonlit night? and that the man—man as he was—needed to meet again to talk to him about what they lived through together?

"I'm glad you're not asleep yet, pilot; you've already got the Seen it so often, but I had never experienced anything like it. And still I think of the stories you told me you have.”

“Yes, sir, I saw how you listened to us; that makes us well, we are attached to those traditions. But no one has dare to tell what our ancestors consider to be the real origin must be from the beno. It is a strange story, and our religion forbids us to believe in such things. But even if our ancestors not yet "orang Islam", they knew a lot. And already ashamed many openly believe in it, in our hearts... I will tell you story telling.

“In ancient, ancient times, in the middle basin of the Kampar, lived a great chief, who had a beautiful daughter It is said that she was wonderfully created, her bosom was half womanly, half like of a man. But she was so beautiful that all the men were crazy about her. She didn't care about that, she didn't want anything from her admirers know, and this caused the chief much concern. He was surprised to see, that the girl apparently only had one friend in the world, her dog. But the father did not know that the dog was his daughter's husband; he knew this first, when she came to confess to him, that she would soon become a mother are... and when seven children were born, they all turned out to be dogs to be. Terrified, the chief threw all the dogs into the river, to make every trace of this terrible shame disappear.

“But behold! the flood of the sea which came unto the land of the great chief was noticeable on the banks, gradually began to ripples, the ripples became ripples, the ripples grew into little waves, and so the movement in the water became stronger and stronger. First there was a rushing sound, then a growling and a roaring sound, and finally the was fully grown. And now one saw here and there, in the midst of the bustling dam, seven heads, who were in charge. These were the adults dogs that have become dogs, who were looking for their mother. And so far they come again and again from the sea, where they live, and they ride the flood They fight; and they leap and growl, and destroy everything they come across. come. They rush forward at a furious pace, shoulder to shoulder; but again and again they finally get exhausted and they just go down again to the sea, where they live, and the next time and again, and yet again once, they try again, but they never find their mother.

"That is how the beno must have come into being, that is, from generation to generation to us passed over. I don't know if it's actually possible, but our “Our ancestors knew so much that we no longer understand.”

The pilot was silent and looked up at the silent man in his chair. He saw him to get up and walk to the railing, where he stood quietly staring into the Night of silver and black. High in the sky, just past the full moon, some kalongs, those giant bats, which in the evening evening with logging, languid wingbeats into infinity, with a destination, which one can only guess. Now they might have been on their way to ripe tree fruits somewhere on an island twenty kilometers off the coast. And in the morning they would start their return journey to the bare, destroyed trees, where they have their colonies by the hundreds. Back and forth, up and down, through the ages; like the raging beno and like the dancing fireflies.