The Orang Bunian: The Hidden People Who Whistle in the Malay Forests
In the deep forests and cool highland jungles of the Malay world — peninsular Malaysia, Sumatra, Brunei, the mountain spine where the mossy forest drips in perpetual cloud — there lives, by the oldest and most persistent conviction of the region, a second population. Not spirits exactly, not demons at all, and not human either: the orang bunian — the "hidden people," or, in the older etymology the tellers love, the whistling people, from the sound by which they are most often known. For the bunian are rarely seen and constantly heard : laughter where no picnic is, a woman's voice singing beyond the next ridge, the murmur of a whole market's bargaining rising from an empty valley at dusk, and above all the whistling — clear, musical, answering itself from tree to tree in forest where no bird makes that call. They are described, by the few whose accounts the tradition credits, as beautiful beyond the human average — fine-featured, luminous-skinned, dressed in the old...