"The Tiger is sometimes believed to be a man or demon in the form of a wild beast, and to the numerous aboriginal superstitions which attach to this dreaded animal Muhammadanism has added the notion which connects the Tiger with the Khalif Ali. One of Ali's titles throughout the Moslem world is 'the Victorious Lion of the Lord,' and in Asiatic countries, where the lion is unknown, the tiger generally takes the place of the 'king of beasts.'" [287] But the anthropomorphic ideas of the Malays about the Tiger go yet farther than this. Far away in the jungle (as I have several times been told in Selangor) the tiger-folk (no less than the elephants) have a town of their own, where they live in houses, and act in every respect like human beings. In the town referred to their house-posts are made of the heart of the Tree-nettle (t'ras jelatang), and their roofs thatched with human hair--one informant added that men's bones were their only rafters, and men's skins their house walls--and there they live quietly enough until one of their periodical attacks of fierceness (mengganas) comes on and causes them to break bounds and range the forest for their chosen prey. There are several of these tiger-villages or "enclosures" in the Peninsula, the chief of them being Gunong Ledang (the Mount Ophir of Malacca), just as Pasummah is the chief of such localities in Sumatra. [288] So too, from Perak, Sir W. E. Maxwell writes in 1881:-- "A mischievous tiger is said sometimes to have broken loose from its pen or fold (pechah kandang). This is in allusion to an extraordinary belief that, in parts of the Peninsula, there are regular enclosures where tigers possessed by human souls live in association. During the day they roam where they please, but return to the kandang at night." [289] Various fables ascribe to the tiger a human origin. One of these, taken down by me word for word from a Selangor Malay, is intended to account for the tiger's stripes. The gist of it ran as follows:--