I believe in everything until it’s disproved. So I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons. It all exists, even if it’s in your mind. Who’s to say that dreams and nightmares aren’t as real as the here and now?
— John Lennon, singer songwriter and founder-member of Beatles
Dragons are stuffs of films both in the Chinese and Greek mythology but highly featured in films depicting the legendary reign of King Arthur and era of the wizard Merlin.
No man in the modern world has claimed to have seen a dragon. But a lead bard in Saratok said he encountered a creature that looked like a dragon while tapping rubber by a pool side circa 1926.
Then as an adolescent, he heard a hissing sound and saw a flash of the dragon rising above the water of the pond for some seconds and then disappears. It certainly perturbed him as he was in the middle of nowhere in the remote hinterland of Melupa basin, a Krian tributary.
The young man immediately stopped tapping and returned home to his longhouse about forty minutes of trekking from the spot.
“You are probably the first person to have seen a dragon anywhere,” his father remarked.
In the evening, the teenager went to bed early and immediately dreamt of meeting a handsome man in full Iban warrior attire who claimed he was Keling, the epitome of prowess and valour in the Iban folklore of the ‘Raised World’ Panggau Libau.
“You are a lucky person,” Keling told the teenager and pointed out he was the dragon (naga in Iban) that he saw earlier in the day by the pond.
“I was just passing by to check on the area,” Keling, the Panggau Libau chief, told him.
Impulsively, the teenager asked Keling to grant him wealth and riches so that he could stop tapping rubber for a living.
“I can’t grant you wealth but you will be blessed with longevity,” the warrior told the subject who woke up to find his parents were still awake. He told them his dream immediately.
“ The next day, a few of them went to the spot to perform a miring (sacrificial appeasement) by the pond side and at the same time named the pond ‘Letung Naga’ (Dragon Pond).
Months later, the teenager, en route to tapping rubber at Letung Ngaga, had another strange encounter just about 500 metres from the edge of the rubber trees.
It was still dark, probably around 5.30am when he heard a dragging sound coming from his right. So he hid behind a tree trunk and saw something dark moving towards and passing by his hideout during the dim light of dawn. It was certainly an enormous serpent with python-like stripes.
He noticed the creature leave a trail heading to his left towards the dragon pond.
It was an encounter where newspapers and tabloids would root through the dictionaries for fresh adjectives or even superlatives of shock and fear to give it a deserving description.
That evening, he dreamt again meeting the same man Keling that he met in his dream months earlier. The Panggau Libau warrior said he was coming back from Bukit Sadok in Betong.
The astounding part was Keling said he was in Betong to lend help to Kalong Ningkan. And the teenager then had never heard of the name Kalong Ningkan — my Google search says Ningkan was born in 1920.
So Ningkan, who was to become Sarawak’s first chief minister 37 years later, was around six years old then.
I passed Letung Naga a few times between 1972 and 1992 while going for durian excursions. The pond remains scary looking up till now but when I passed it for the first time, I stopped for a while to scrutinise the pool water and surrounding, especially
hoping to encounter the dragon flash or if the much-talked about big black fish would appear. None appeared.
So I conceded defeat to the 16-year-old teenager who claimed he saw the dragon and met Keling in his dream — after all, he was lead bard Salok, my father.
I believe totally in his encounter with the dragon and serpent which occurred at the edge of rubber trees belonging to my paternal grandpa Jembu. Our durian excursions were to our Bila Dua orchard, farther upriver, also inherited from Jembu.
Keling’s grant of longevity on dad came true when he lived till the ripe age of 92.
Born in 1910, dad passed on peacefully in 2002 outliving mum, who was six years his junior, for 14 years.
He lived a life that was full, including accompanying me to Casino de Genting in 1989 and gave me extra “ummph” to win big.
“Good thing that Keling granted me longevity as I live to see a better life for our family. It makes me happy and that is equivalent to wealth,” he told me in 2000.
