The home-life of Borneo head-hunters

When we parted company with the somewhat unpeaceful Peace-party at Tama Aping Buling’s, as previously narrated, we set out by ourselves to visit a settlement of Punans, which had been for some months past in the jungle a short distance from the head-waters of the Dapoi. The sense of freedom and relief from the responsibility of that host of warlike peace-makers could not fail to add to our enjoyment of this lovely river; but, even apart from this private, personal emotion, nothing can be imagined more thoroughly and charmingly tropical than the scenery, shifting and changing at every stroke of the paddle, on which we now entered. The sky was cloudless, the temperature delightful; great trees, slanting far over the river, interlocked their branches overhead, and, in perfect sun-flecked shade, we pursued our slow way over the curling, bubbling, and babbling water, with our men lazily poling or paddling the canoes. Little blue, green, and red king-fishers darted across our bows, hither and thither, from the tangled undergrowth on the banks; from huge, distorted branches covered with delicate little bright-green ferns, dangled long, sweeping vines, which had caught in their coils clumps of stag’s-horn fern and gay orchids, thus adorning our pathway with hanging-baskets of Nature’s own handicraft; large, startled fruit-pigeons glided swiftly under the archway of boughs, stirring the leaves with the wind from their swift wings; and from the depths of the ever-dripping jungle resounded the hoarse croak of the horn-bill or there was wafted the plaintive, melodious call of the Wawa monkey. Except for these sounds and the gurgling of the water, all nature was absolutely hushed, and the odor of damp, rich earth and warm leaves was heavy, like the atmosphere in an orchid-house in winter.

The banks of the Dapoi are somewhat thickly populated, and we halted at several houses, where we made ourselves most welcome by largesses to the women of strips of bright yellow or of gay red cloth, for frontlets, and to the men we gave handfuls of Java tobacco. From the female heart, as grateful as, in this instance, it was vain, our gifts received an immediate appreciation; when we took our departure, the river-bank looked like nothing so much as a bed of marigolds and poppies in fullest bloom.

At dusk we arrived at Tama Balan Deng’s,—a village of Sibops recently moved over from the Rejang. The Chief gave up his own room to us, and, hospitable soul, without hinting it to us, quietly and silently moved his family into an adjoining temporary hut; for his house was only partially completed. We found here that tobacco was smoked by the men much more frequently in pipes—a rare custom in this part of Borneo—than in cigarettes. These home-made pipes differ so widely from any I have ever seen or heard of, that possibly they are worth a word of description:—The stem is a piece of bamboo more than an inch in diameter, into which is set a straight, slim bowl, which can hold only a small wad of tobacco. In the stem they insert a plug of shredded palm leaves, or of shavings of wood, bound on a stick; and then take the end of the stem into their mouths, and having first got the tobacco well alight by a few gentle puffs, they give a powerful suck, whereby the wad of glowing tobacco is drawn down through the bowl into the stem, but is prevented from reaching the mouth by the plug of palm leaves. Their name for a tobacco-pipe is ‘S’puk,’ which seems to be an imitation of the sound of the check given by the plug of palm leaves to the wad of tobacco under the vigorous suck.

Very few of the inmates of the house had ever before seen white people; and we had a crowd of gaping spectators constantly about us. During our first night, almost all the inmates crowded into our room, as I said above, where they remained, positively the whole night through, watching us, exchanging observations on our personal appearance, and lost in wonder at our clothes, our marvellous paleness, the colour of our eyes and of our hair. We opened our eyes at daylight, in time to catch sight of the women in the group creeping out, almost on all fours. This creeping, crouching, feminine mode of walking obtains among almost all the tribes; when women pass a group of men on the veranda, they must crouch down as low as they can; or even when they have themselves been of the group and wish to leave it, they must creep away, not rising higher than a squatting position until they are at a distance. Thus it was, on this present morning; when they withdrew from this inquisitive vigil they crouched until they were outside the room.

Tama Balan’s was the last house on the Dapoi, and as we continued up the pleasant stream we seemed to have left all Borneo behind us. Suddenly we caught sight of a young Punan girl standing in a canoe near the shore, and so earnestly engrossed in stamping grated tapioca root through a piece of matting to strain it, that she never noticed our approach. When at last she looked up and caught sight of our canoes, and the inconceivable white beings in them, in a flash she snatched up her mat and basket of tapioca, and darted into the jungle, like a startled fawn. She was such a pretty picture, as she stood in her canoe, absorbed in her work, that I told one of our men to find her and lure her back with promises of rich presents, if she would allow me to take a picture of her. She was quickly found, and brought back somewhat reluctantly; never before had she seen white folk, and what idea the making of a picture conveyed to her poor, little, bewildered brain, cannot be fathomed. In reminiscence, it must have seemed to her a hideous dream; she was told to go on with her work, while a horrible monster, with a face as pale as ashes, and incomprehensibly clad, stood off at a distance, and placed on three long sticks an awful object, that expanded and contracted, hid his face in a black cloth, looked at her with an awful eye for a moment, gave her a big piece of yellow cloth and a handful of tobacco, and then with his black object and long sticks was off again in a canoe;—such, at least, was her utterly bewildered and dazed expression, as she stood motionless in her canoe, holding in her hands the yellow cloth and the tobacco, her only proofs that she was not dreaming, and glancing from them to us alternately as we disappeared rapidly round the turn of the river, vanishing into empty space from which we had as suddenly and mysteriously emerged. No Punan mind could doubt that she had been visited in a trance by supernatural Spirits.

Not long after this, the river grew so shallow that we deserted the boats, and walked for miles and miles, so it seemed, up the bed of the stream.

At last, as we were nearing our destination, we halted for rest and refreshment, at a rice-field hut; and here there strolled in upon us one of the Punans themselves from the settlement; he had been out with his blow-pipe after small game. He made no attempt to conceal his speechless wonderment at white people, and silently gazed at us in open-eyed and open-mouthed astonishment. When our Sibop guide, whom we had brought from Tama Aping’s, as an interpreter, asked him whether he had ever before seen white men, he replied, with awestruck earnestness, ‘Never anything like them have I seen! Surely they must be the Fathers of all People!’ Ever after he referred to us or addressed us as his ‘fathers.’

Not long after resuming our march, our guide suddenly turned off from the river-bed into the open jungle,—that is, jungle in which there is but little undergrowth, except thorny palms and rattans. It is the ideal forest primeval, where old and majestic trees form in every direction vast, illimitable, solemn vistas. On a sudden, our guide asked us to halt and keep perfectly silent, while he went on ahead to give notice to the Punans that some peaceful, friendly visitors were approaching. Unless this notice were given, he declared that the people would scatter at the first sound of our approach, and we should find nothing but empty huts. When he returned, he guided us down a slight hill and over a stream, and through a dense hedge of tall plants of wild tapioca. We emerged into more open ground, and were all at once in the Punan village. The huts could be hardly distinguished from the surrounding grasses and palms, so low and fragile were they. The walls were merely boughs and twigs interlaced, and against them leaned broad palm leaves; the roofs were a loose thatch of leaves and boughs, but could not be more waterproof than the natural roof of leaves overhead. The ‘village’ comprised only four huts, and in not one of them could I stand upright.

Outside the huts, when we approached, there seemed to be only a few old women. Although our friendly intentions had been announced, the younger folks had hidden in the huts, so as to observe us from a safe distance through the chinks in the leafy walls. There were only two men in the village when we arrived; all the others were away hunting with blow-pipes, or after camphor, gutta-percha, rattans, or other products of the jungle, which from time to time they trade off with their more civilized neighbors, the Sibops and Berawans, for cloth, tobacco, salt, etc. Three old women, however, at once greeted us, and, coming up boldly, insisted on touching all of us, passing their hands over our arms and our backs, and talking volubly all the while in a plaintive and much injured tone of voice. It was quite depressing. I was sure that we had unconsciously wounded their tenderest and holiest feelings, and that they were reproaching us for wandering near their ‘sacred bower’ and molesting their ‘ancient solitary reign;’ but, before long, I was immensely relieved by finding that a tone of petulant but resigned remonstrance was the common and invariable intonation of each and all. Little by little all fear was dismissed, and we were soon surrounded by a merry, but sad-voiced, crowd of boys and girls, young women and old; even babies in arms,—I should say, babies in slings on their mothers’ backs,—were pressed forward, not merely to look at us and to touch us, but to be touched by us. Gentle, simple-hearted creatures, they believed that merely to stroke us or to be stroked by us, brought them blessings; this then, we found, was the meaning of the feeble stroking and caressing touches that greeted us from the old women. Our interpreter told me, that what I had imagined were reproaches, was a continuous plaintive murmur of how good and kind it was of the wonderful white people to come so far just to see them and bring them blessings. They examined and admired everything we had with us or on us; our coats, our hats, our shoes, the buttons and button-holes on our clothes,—these excited their profound wonder.

A book of photographs, which I had taken during a former visit to the Baram, was looked at over and over again; they never wearied of it, and their clucks of admiration were constant while they explained to one another the meaning of the pictures. After they fully understood that these miraculous pictures had been made by my camera, they became absolutely without fear of having their pictures taken,—indeed, in their simple hearts, they had somehow come to believe that thereby bodily ailments would be cured. In the photograph of a group of women and children, on the opposite page, in the corner on the right, there sits a poor, unhappy mother, whose unfortunate little baby is so hopelessly and enormously hydrocephalic that it could never leave the basket which she holds in her lap. She begged me for medicine to cure it, but when I told her that there is none that would do it any good, she piteously begged to be allowed to sit in the front line, so that the little patient might derive the full benefit of the picture-making. Just beyond her stands another devoted mother, who, in order to bring the powerful curative effect of the camera to bear on the alleviation of the severe sufferings of her little boy, is holding her hand on the abdominal locality, where little children most frequently have pains. On her right, and again in the front row, are women afflicted with goitre, which they, too, hoped would be cured by the picture-making.

The Punans are nomads, never building permanent houses, nor remaining long in one locality. Of all the tribes they are, perhaps, the most mild and gentle; they are not head-hunters, and care no more for a collection of human heads than for that of any other animal, and, therefore, never go on a raid. They know the country more thoroughly than any other natives, and are always sought by the Sibops, Kayans, Kenyahs, and Ibans as guides in expeditions after camphor, gutta-percha, and bees-wax. They live solely on the products of the jungle, esculent roots and plants, such as caladium, wild tapioca, a species of canna, the tender, uncurled fronds of ferns, and the heart of several species of palm.

The men are extremely skilful with the blow-pipe and in the construction of snares and traps. When they are not surfeited with small birds, they are completely happy with roast or boiled monkey, and as for the small Bornean porcupine,—it is a delicacy never to be rejected. For some reason, which I could never discover, they will not kill a python. Salt, tobacco, and rice are downright luxuries. They cultivate no fields, owing to their nomadic life; consequently, the Punan fathers and husbands and sons work hard to obtain from the jungle, far and near, those articles for which they themselves have no use, such as camphor, bees-wax, etc., which they can barter with Malay and Chinese traders. Most valuable of all these articles is rhinoceros horn; in fact, the killing of a single rhinoceros places the wealth of a Punan village almost ‘beyond the dreams of avarice;’ there is no scrap or portion of the animal that is not prized; the flesh is coveted food; the horn, nails, hair, skin, and even the contents of the stomach, are traded at the highest rate of exchange to the Chinese, who use them all for medicinal purposes.

It falls to the lot of the women to prepare the tapioca root for food, an operation which takes the place of the monotonous pounding and threshing of rice in other tribes.

These roots, which look much like sweet potatoes, are first scraped or grated on a piece of the stalk of a rough, scaly palm, and the coarse pulp is then washed and strained by stamping it through a mat while water is constantly poured over it; this washed and strained pulp is then collected in wooden troughs and allowed to settle. The sediment is a thick, white paste, which when boiled makes a very palatable farinaceous diet. The paste may be also dried and preserved for future use. The roots of the Caladium esculentum are either boiled like potatoes or mashed and made into a sort of gruel. We partook of all the toothsome dishes of the Punans except boiled fern-fronds and monkey; neither happened to be in the Punan larder at the time. I must candidly admit that to me the sight of the preparation of tapioca is not appetizing. In the first place, the hands which hold the tubers while they are being scraped are none too icy clean, they often dabble in the pulp just after they have been successfully busy in alleviating a neglected or troublesome coiffure. In the next place, the finely scraped pulp is taken to a stream and deposited in a mat which rests in a trough, or in a large wooden bowl, on a little platform over the stream. The operator then jumps into the mash and executes therein a lively dance, while, from time to time, a small boy dips up water from the stream and splashes it over the legs of the dancer, to wash down the particles that may have been spattered up, and also to moisten the mash. Strange to say, the paste, when strained, is of the most pure and dazzling whiteness.

To be sure, this operation is no worse than wine-making; but then we very seldom see the must foaming round ‘the white feet of laughing girls;’ whereas we cannot pass a day, where tapioca is the standing diet, without seeing our dinner mashed by girlish feet by no means white,—or clean.

Our men built for us a temporary hut, which, in comparison with any of the Punan huts, was a palace; unfortunately, it had one serious defect; its location seemed to be over an extremely popular thoroughfare of stinging ants,—those veritable little devils. Just as we were about to turn in for the night, a broad procession of thousands of them, every single one with its vicious little tail turned defiantly up, began a diabolical march across our floor of bark. The natives, however, immediately built a small fire directly in their path, which at once caused, first, a stampede of the vanguard, and then all the rest turned tail, and, still in quadruple or sextuple file, retreated somewhat more rapidly than they had advanced, and, at last, all disappeared under the leaves on the ground outside. Next to land-leeches, they are the most pestiferous and noxious insects in the jungle. They do not wait to be attacked, but are instantly aggressive when a victim comes within their ken; and they know to a nicety where the skin is most sensitive. Their bite is quite as severe as the sting of a wasp or of a hornet.

The Punans are pure jungle-folk, and know very little about canoeing or swimming. When we asked to be taken to some place where we could bathe, we were led about a mile away to a delightful, deep, sandy-bottomed pool; but our guide thither could not be persuaded to enter the water, and warned us repeatedly to be careful, as the water was very deep,—it was hardly up to our waists. When we ducked under, a native bystander shouted in genuine terror that one of the ‘white fathers’ was drowned.

To test their skill in marksmanship with the blow-pipe, we fastened a potato about an inch and a half in diameter on a pole, and from a distance of fifty paces they stuck in it six darts out of ten. For small birds, they seldom use darts, which cost some trouble to make; little pellets of clay are equally effective; poisoned darts are reserved for monkeys and larger game. They assert that with a properly prepared dart they can kill even the formidable rhinoceros. For such large game, the point is weighted with a little triangular head of bamboo or of tin, which carries more poison, and becomes detached in the wound.

When we bade farewell, we gladdened every Punan heart by distributing all that remained of our gay cloth and good tobacco; the cloth was quite sufficient for every woman and child in the village to meet the tolerant demands of fashion in the way of apparel; and as for the tobacco,—I longed to know what prodigious stories they would rehearse, as they sat round their fires in the evening, of the marvellous appearance and mysterious actions of the ‘White Fathers.’ But my heart was woeful for that little mother as, day by day, she would discover that the ‘picture-making’ had brought no healing balm to her poor, hydrocephalic boy.

There is one product of the Punan country which I think deserves a note: it is that luxury so dear to the Chinese palate, the edible nests built by swallows, or swifts, in certain limestone caves. In the Niah hills, near the coast, these caves have been the breeding-places of these birds from time immemorial, and in supplying the market with their nests the Punans have been for many a year employed by Chinese traders, and the estimate is well within bounds that several hundred tons of nests have been there gathered by this tribe.

Within the caves of Mt. Subis,—one of the Niah hills,—there is a small settlement of Punans who, during the building season, collect nests. There are three harvests of nests, then the season closes, and the swallows are allowed to rebuild undisturbed and rear their brood.

When I visited the village of Niah and the caves in Mt. Subis, the season was closed, but it had been so very successful and had kept all the natives so busy that those, whose duty it was to attend to the rice crop, had neglected it; consequently, the people of Niah,—a mixed tribe of Malanaus and Punans,—were actually suffering from a rice famine; boats had been sent to neighbouring villages to purchase rice, but they had been away for thirty days or more, and almost every pound in the village had been consumed, except a goodly store in the secure granaries of a stingy, avaricious old head-man, Orang Kaya Perkassa by name, who demanded such an unconscionably exorbitant price for it that even to starving men it was almost prohibitory.

And thereby hangs a tale. A strange old fellow was this Orang Kaya Perkassa, tottering on the brink of the grave, and, possibly for this very reason, saturated with superstition. I took the opportunity, when he happened to pay me a visit, to beg him graciously to grant me the privilege of taking his picture. He refused point-blank and with unusual vehemence; but at last he so far relented that he professed his willingness to submit to the hazardous operation, if he might be allowed to return to his house and procure such charms as would safeguard his person and counteract the baleful effects of the picture-making. Of course, I readily acquiesced, and in a few minutes he reappeared with a ponderous bundle of infallible charms, (they may be seen in his photograph, girdling his waist,) which were oddly shaped pebbles, malformed boars’ tusks, strange knots of wood, etc., (I was not permitted to see them, but from my knowledge of Bornean charms, I cannot be far astray.) As soon as the exposure was over, in an imperative tone he demanded a picture of myself, saying, ‘Since the Tuan now has my picture, it is in his power to do all manner of harm to me, unless I have one of him to keep me safe.’ Before I had time to tell him that I really had no picture of myself with me, several of the natives who had accompanied me on the trip besought me most urgently to refuse his request, insisting that should this wicked old man once get hold of my likeness he would work most powerful charms with it, and I should inevitably die within the month.

It appeared that Orang Kaya Perkassa had recently suffered, under his own roof, an extraordinary piece of ill-luck; a Malay had there run amuck, and, after slashing several of the inmates very severely with his parang, had fled to a hut on the river-bank, where he had been surrounded and finally speared to death. This, of course, involved no end of bad luck to the Orang Kaya’s house; wherefore to exorcise the evil Spirits a great feast had been held, poles elaborately decorated with carved faces were erected to frighten away demons; and, finally, the blood of slaughtered pigs and chickens, together with pieces of their flesh, was sprinkled over both cooked and uncooked rice, which, combined with salt and native ginger, was enclosed in small packages, and solemnly placed in a miniature boat and set adrift on the river, to the end that it might bear out to sea all the ill-luck of the household, and waft it where it could do no one any harm.

After I had finished photographing the Orang Kaya in my own quarters, I left him busy talking to some of his friends, and, with my camera, strolled casually toward his house. After having taken a picture of the ‘demon frighteners’ erected near his dwelling, my attention was attracted to a collection, on his veranda, of uncouth, worm-eaten, water-worn, wooden idols, openly displayed on a shelf and draped with extremely dirty bits of coloured cloth. I had just finished photographing them, when the Orang Kaya himself suddenly hobbled up the notched log, and was at my elbow. He was exceedingly angry, I am sorry to say, at my boldness in taking a picture of them during his absence, and I did my very best to soothe him, and apologized humbly for my intrusion by urging my ignorance. I succeeded at last in appeasing him, and had just calmed him into a fairly peaceable frame of mind, when, unwittingly and most unluckily, I undid all that I had done, by innocently offering to buy one of the worm-eaten figures. Never shall I forget the violent, vehement, towering rage into which he fell, nor the flood of Malay which my proposal called forth. ‘How dare Tuan ask such a thing?’ he almost shrieked, his wrinkled and cross-wrinkled features working with rage. ‘Shall I sell for money my gods of good fortune! Those are gods, gods, I tell you! they are not wood! they are my honored guests, my dearest friends! from the broad sea they came to me! and they will bring me blessings if their livers are not enraged by having a picture made of them. Never would I have suffered it had I been here; the people in the house should have stopped it! Surely, surely more misfortunes will now fall on me!’

He then stamped into his room and slammed the door. The evil my camera had done must be thwarted. Accordingly, from that sunset till dawn, and even into broad daylight, every gong, big and little, in the Orang Kaya’s house was kept hot with beating. All through the weary vigils of that night we heard this incessant din. ‘The good that’s done we may compute, but not the ill prevented;’ therefore, who can say what success attended this fervent zeal? That it was not successful, the Orang Kaya himself probably believed. For certain it is that he sickened and died within three or four weeks. His death was really due, I believe, to old age, hastened by an unbridled temper and a life of avarice, so strong that, as I have mentioned, he was willing his neighbors and even his own household should die of starvation if only he could add to his wealth.

His people, I learned afterward, attributed his death to my camera, but I rather imagine that by this time they have found out that my camera really brought them an unmixed blessing in disguise.

Mt. Subis is only about fifteen hundred feet high, and the entrance to the birds’-nest cave on the mountain side is some little distance from the base, and can be gained only by a very tortuous and narrow path round the ledges and projections of slippery limestone.

Not far from the main cave is a smaller one, known as the ‘Traders’ cave,’ wherein is a village of twenty or thirty huts, for the accommodation of the Chinese traders who come to pay for the nests that have been collected. It is a village of houses without roofs; within the cave there is no fear of the sun smiting by day nor the moon by night, nor of rain from clouds; consequently, the houses are merely walls and floors, and pretty wobbly walls and floors in addition. The roof of the cave, frescoed with green mould and lichen, is fifty or sixty feet overhead, with irregular projections of limestone, but free from stalactites. No swallows build here, the cave is too light and shallow.

The Punans’ cave, beyond, is of majestic size; just within the entrance the floor dips abruptly to a deep valley, and the roof curves upward in a vast dome; hence, from the level of the valley to the roof is at least six hundred feet. Insensate, indeed, must he be who is not filled with speechless awe as he turns from the brilliant sunshine and enters this illimitable abode of silence and of night. It seemed the veritable entrance to the Inferno; and as the light from the opening struck the massive projections here and there, and cast long, blacker shadows, it became a landscape in the moon, while the appalling, death-like stillness seemed to presage a frightful cataclysm in nature. Underfoot is a deep carpet,—fully three feet deep,—of what seemed tan-bark, but which proved to be a fine, dry, odorless guano, composed mostly of the wing-covers of insects, of a dark-brown color; the jagged sides and roof, and here and there boulders projecting through the covering of the floor, were covered with a deep-green mould or lichen, except where the white limestone gleamed out in patches and seemed almost phosphorescent. The extent beyond, in the utter darkness, seemed illimitable.

Our presence and the echoing of our voices soon startled the swallows, and forth they emerged, in myriads on myriads, from the darkness, and circled round us and above us, and about the mouth of the cave like swarming bees; the whirr of their wings and their twittering sounded like waves on a pebbly beach.

On a flat ledge at one side, near the entrance, was a line of fifteen or twenty of the platform dwellings of the Punans, even more fragile and tumble-down than the huts in the ‘Traders’ cave.’ At the time of our visit, the huts were deserted, giving an air of even greater desolation.

The nests are obtained by lashing long, stout poles, end to end, and then supporting them with guy-ropes of rattan until they reach to the very top of the cave. Up these poles the agile Punans climb hand over hand and foot over foot, walking up them like monkeys; when at the top, they scrape down the nests within reach, by means of a long pole bearing a hoe-like blade, and with a home-made wax candle fastened to it to show where the nests are. An assistant below gathers the nests as they fall. There are two varieties of nest, the black and the white; the latter sell for two thousand Mexican dollars a picul, (one hundred and twenty-three pounds,) the black nests bring only a hundred dollars for the same weight. Unfortunately, the Niah caves are ‘black nest’ caves; but the nests are so very abundant that the export revenue tax assessed on them by the Sarawak Government amounts to thousands of dollars in a year.

The Punans, however, are not the owners of the poles in the caves, but, on account of their skill in climbing, are hired by a Malay or Chinaman, who pays so much a season to the Government for all the nests gathered in an area prescribed by the length of the detaching-pole. The Punans do not use the nests as food, and have learned their value and the best times and methods of harvesting them only since Chinese and Malay traders have come to Niah. The caves, however, have been inhabited by the Punans for very many years. We found tobacco growing wild not far from the mouth, and we were told that it is to be found in considerable quantities all about this locality. The Punans know it well and gather it, but maintain that it is none of their planting, and that it has been known to them and used by them as long as they can remember.

As to the relationship of the Punans to the other tribes of the interior, Aban Deng, of the clan of Long Wats, (who in turn are closely allied to the Kayans, Kenyahs, and Sibops,) gave us the following account:—‘An old Chief living far in the interior highlands of Borneo, left, at his death, two sons, one of whom was energetic and laboured in the rice-clearings, while the other was incorrigibly lazy. With such different temperaments, the affairs of their common household soon became much disordered, and they agreed to separate, each one choosing the families that were to follow them, and thereafter all were to live as they pleased. The lazy brother and his adherents, who preferred hunting and roaming, betook themselves to the jungle, never built houses nor cultivated rice; their descendants are the Punans of to-day. The industrious brother, named Plian, and his adherents cleared the hills of jungle, planted rice, and built strong houses; from them are descended the Sibops and Long Wats. The Punans, after many years of wandering, determined to begin the cultivation of rice; two of their Chiefs collected them in a fertile valley near the base of “Bukit Bulan,” or the Mountain of the Moon, that high mountain in the centre of Kalamantan, (Borneo,) and they all set to work clearing off the jungle, while the Chiefs stood in a group and gave directions on all sides. The Punans, utterly unversed, however, in the cultivation of land, set fire in many places at once to the jungle when it was felled, and their leaders, thus surrounded by a circle of fire, perished in the flames. Dispirited and discouraged at the loss of their leaders, they once more scattered, and have ever since wandered in small bands throughout the jungle, depending on their blow-pipe, and snares, and the fruits of the forest, for their sustenance.’

When a Punan of the common class dies, his body is stretched out simply in a little hut of boughs and leaves, with no further burial. The corpse of a head-man or of one of his family is, on the other hand, wrapped in a coarse mat or a sheet of bark-cloth, and, doubled up in a squatting position, is forced into one of the baskets they use for carrying loads on their backs. It is then placed on a platform of poles, and over it a flimsy shelter of leaves.

Were the choice of a residence in a Bornean tribe forced on me, I should not hesitate long in casting my lot with the Punans. They have never a thought of the morrow; no cares; no responsibilities; no possessions; no enemies, for they desire nothing that other people have, not even clothes; money is dross; and home is where they rest their blow-pipes and hang up their parangs. Night can never find them homeless; home is wherever the setting sun finds them; does rain threaten, a few poles and a few leaves make a house; let the night be clear, and a soft bed of leaves in a nook between the great flat roots of a Tapang tree is luxury itself; for ‘where youth with unstuffed brain [never was a Punan brain ‘stuffed’] doth couch his limbs, there golden sleep doth reign.’

And, finally, in the happy land of the Punan there is no dressing and undressing morning and evening.