The Legend of Pohon Batu

Author: Juliana Jusit

The Two Hills and the River

A long time ago, at the place now called Pohon Batu, there were two hills of different heights. Between them flowed a big river. Not many people lived on these hills. To cross from one hill to the other, people had to use a small boat called a sampan. When the river flooded, nobody could cross because they were afraid their boats would be swept away by the strong current.

The Problem and the Solution Attempts

One day, heavy rain fell with terrible storms and lightning. At the same time, the people on one hill discovered they had no fire left. There was no other way to get fire in that area. Without fire, they could not cook their food, and they were very cold. So they called across the river to the people on the other hill and asked for help. The other people agreed to help, but getting fire across the flooded river was very difficult.

After thinking for a moment, they decided to send the fire using a hen. They tied the fire to the hen's back and let it fly across the river. But before the hen could fly very far, the fire burned it, and the hen fell into the water. When the people on both hills saw this, they laughed very hard.

The people with the fire said, "A hen cannot fly. Let us try a dog—dogs can swim!" They found the best dog they could and tied the fire to its tail. Then they let it swim across the river. But the dog could not swim because the fire burned it, and the dog drowned. The people laughed even louder than before.

They tried again with a pig, thinking maybe a pig could dive. They tied the fire to the pig's mouth and let it dive into the water. But the pig drowned because it could not really dive. The people laughed so much this time that they forgot all about getting the fire across.

Catastrophe and Transformation

Then the rain began to fall harder and harder, like stones from the sky. The people became very frightened, especially those without fire, because they had laughed the most. Suddenly, the longhouse of the people without fire was surrounded by darkness. Thunder and lightning crashed all around them.

The next morning, the people with fire looked across the river and saw something shocking—the longhouse had turned into a long rock! The people waited for the river to go down before they rowed across to see what had happened.

When they reached the other side, they were scared. But as they looked at the rock, they heard a voice. They found a small hole, and through it they could see a man's face. This man was the only survivor. All his friends had died during the terrible night. The man told them about what happened inside the rock. The people felt very sad for him. After he had stayed in the rock for one week, he died too.

On the inside and outside of the rock, you can see fingerprints, marks from jars, and other signs. These fingerprints show where people had touched it while they were dying inside. Mushrooms grew around the bottom of the rock, so people named it Pohon Batu. You can still see this stone and the mushrooms today at Dalit Gana. Many people now live at the foot of the rock, and this village is also called Pohon Batu.

This narrative is part of Sabah Stories, a collection of traditional tales and indigenous folklore originally gathered and rendered into English by scholars attending Saint Francis Xavier High School in Keningau, Sabah, North Borneo, throughout 1968–1973. The text presented here has been entirely rewritten using contemporary language and phrasing whilst preserving all factual content, cultural terminology, place names, character designations, and the substantive narrative elements of the original source. This is not a reproduction of the original material.