LIFE'S HANDICAP

LIFE'S HANDICAP

Being Stories of Mine Own People

By Rudyard Kipling

THE LANG MEN O' LARUT

The Chief Engineer's sleeping suit was of yellow striped with blue, and
his speech was the speech of Aberdeen. They sluiced the deck under him,
and he hopped on to the ornamental capstan, a black pipe between his
teeth, though the hour was not seven of the morn.

'Did you ever hear o' the Lang Men o' Larut?' he asked when the Man from
Orizava had finished a story of an aboriginal giant discovered in the
wilds of Brazil. There was never story yet passed the lips of teller,
but the Man from Orizava could cap it.

'No, we never did,' we responded with one voice. The Man from Orizava
watched the Chief keenly, as a possible rival.

'I'm not telling the story for the sake of talking merely,' said the
Chief, 'but as a warning against betting, unless you bet on a perrfect
certainty. The Lang Men o' Larut were just a certainty. I have had talk
wi' them. Now Larut, you will understand, is a dependency, or it may be
an outlying possession, o' the island o' Penang, and there they will get
you tin and manganese, an' it mayhap mica, and all manner o' meenerals.
Larut is a great place.'

'But what about the population?' said the Man from Orizava.

'The population,' said the Chief slowly, 'were few but enorrmous. You
must understand that, exceptin' the tin-mines, there is no special
inducement to Europeans to reside in Larut. The climate is warm and
remarkably like the climate o' Calcutta; and in regard to Calcutta, it
cannot have escaped your obsairvation that--'

'Calcutta isn't Larut; and we've only just come from it,' protested the
Man from Orizava. 'There's a meteorological department in Calcutta,
too.'

'Ay, but there's no meteorological department in Larut. Each man is a
law to himself. Some drink whisky, and some drink brandipanee, and some
drink cocktails--vara bad for the coats o' the stomach is a cocktail--
and some drink sangaree, so I have been credibly informed; but one and
all they sweat like the packing of piston-head on a fourrteen-days'
voyage with the screw racing half her time. But, as I was saying, the
population o' Larut was five all told of English--that is to say,
Scotch--an' I'm Scotch, ye know,' said the Chief.

The Man from Orizava lit another cigarette, and waited patiently. It was
hopeless to hurry the Chief Engineer.

'I am not pretending to account for the population o' Larut being laid
down according to such fabulous dimensions. O' the five white men
engaged upon the extraction o' tin ore and mercantile pursuits, there
were three o' the sons o' Anak. Wait while I remember. Lammitter was the
first by two inches--a giant in the land, an' a terreefic man to cross
in his ways. From heel to head he was six feet nine inches, and
proportionately built across and through the thickness of his body. Six
good feet nine inches--an overbearin' man. Next to him, and I have
forgotten his precise business, was Sandy Vowle. And he was six feet
seven, but lean and lathy, and it was more in the elasteecity of his
neck that the height lay than in any honesty o' bone and sinew. Five
feet and a few odd inches may have been his real height. The remainder
came out when he held up his head, and six feet seven he was upon the
door-sills. I took his measure in chalk standin' on a chair. And next to
him, but a proportionately made man, ruddy and of a fair countenance,
was Jock Coan--that they called the Fir Cone. He was but six feet five,
and a child beside Lammitter and Vowle. When the three walked out
together, they made a scunner run through the colony o' Larut. The
Malays ran round them as though they had been the giant trees in the
Yosemite Valley--these three Lang Men o' Larut. It was perfectly
ridiculous--a lusus naturae--that one little place should have contained
maybe the three tallest ordinar' men upon the face o' the earth.

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