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Heritage Snippets of Sarawak
This is the fourth of a four-part series titled ‘The Naga Moves: Dragon Tales from Borneo’. The first three parts can be read here, here and here.
By Dr Monica Janowski
NOOH DAWA lives in Long Pasia, a Lundayeh village in Sipitang in Sabah. Near his village there is a very special forested plateau called Payeh Magah, which he is now protecting. Nooh is doing this, he told me, because he was instructed to do so by the Great Spirit of the Forest. He met the Great Spirit both as a man, in a dream, and as a kamekar dragon, at the Magah Falls.
Nooh first met the Great Spirit at the Magah Falls when he was a young man in the early 1970s, where he was camping after spearing a wild pig and barbecuing it. While he slept, an old man appeared to him in a dream, and said to him: “Nooh, wake up and go down to the Falls. I’ll be waiting for you there.”
Nooh woke up with a start. He sat and thought about what he had said. Should he do what he was asked? He went back to sleep and dreamt again. It was the old man again. He said: “Why didn’t you go to meet me? Just now I told you to come.”
Early the following morning, Nooh went back to the falls but he didn’t see anything there. He sat near the falls for about ten minutes and then returned to his camp.
The next night he slept in the same place and dreamt of the old man again. This time the old man said to him: “Go down to the falls tomorrow morning. I’ll be waiting for you.”
Nooh woke and thought and thought about what the old man had said to him. Then he decided to go down to the falls again. It was about five o’clock in the morning when he went. When he got there, there was a lot of spray on the water. He looked up and realized that there was something big and black on the rock above the falls. He went right up close to have a good look and realised that it was a kamekar — a dragon.
Nooh realised that this was the dragon who looks after the forest—in other words, it was the Great Spirit of the Forest. The dragon looked like a snake but was much bigger than a snake. It was coiled up on a rock shelf that formed part of the waterfall.
It looked at him. He took a small stone and threw it at the dragon. It hit the dragon’s head but the dragon didn’t move an inch. It just blinked its eyes at him. He felt very scared. He wondered if the dragon was going to attack him for throwing a stone at it. But it didn’t move.
Nooh stayed there for about ten minutes. Then he went back to his camp. At about seven o’clock in the morning he went back to the falls and looked at the place where the dragon had been coiled up, but there was nothing there anymore—only some big flies flying around in the area.
He stayed at his camp the following night too and that night, Nooh had a third dream. In it, he met the old man again, and the old man told him that it had been he who had met Nooh in the shape of the dragon at the falls.
“I’m the dragon and I have become a human in order to come and talk to you,” he said.
“Now that you know me, go to the payeh, the swamp forest, and uproot two small trees called aru’. Go and plant them both on the rock near the falls.”
So Nooh went and uprooted the two trees as the dragon instructed and planted them on the big rock.
After he had done that, he went to sleep again and had another dream. He met the old man again. The old man told him that he was not only a dragon—he was the Ada’ Rayeh, the Great Spirit of the Forest. And Nooh made an agreement with the dragon who was also the Great Spirit of the Forest that if those two trees were damaged or destroyed, Nooh would become the Guardian of the Forest.
Thirty years later, in the early 2000s, those aru’ trees had become bigger. But then one day Nooh found, when he visited the Magah Falls, that the trees had been uprooted by floodwaters. That night he dreamt again of the old man, who told Nooh that he must now become the Guardian of the Forest, as he had agreed that he would if the trees were uprooted.
Nooh has been vigilant ever since then in protecting the Payeh Magah forest, including chasing away loggers who wanted to cut down the trees. He had a tattoo made on his arm to commemorate his role as Guardian of the Forest and his memory of the Great Spirit as a kamekar dragon.
Nooh Dawa told me the tale of his encounters with the Great Spirit of the Forest as an old man and as a kamekar dragon when I visited Long Pasia’ in 2014.
Dr Monica Janowski is a social anthropologist who has been doing research in Sarawak since 1986. She has published many articles and books, including Tuked Rini, Cosmic Traveller: Life and Legend in the Heart of Borneo (NIAS Press and Sarawak Museum, 2014). She began researching Borneo dragon stories and legends in 2017. She is currently Curator of the SE Asia Museum at the University of Hull.
This is the fourth of a four-part series titled ‘The Naga Moves: Dragon Tales from Borneo’. The first three parts can be read here, here and here.
“Heritage Snippets of Sarawak” is a fortnightly column.
— DayakDaily
