The woman bore him many children. One day, when in a friend's house, people were eating punai, and he also ate some of it. His wife learned this and said to him: "I hear that you have eaten punai. You don't like me. I shall become a bird again." Since then her descendants have never eaten this bird, because they know that their great, great, great grandmother was a punai.
NOTE.—The punai is a light-green pigeon. Mata Punai (the eye of punai) is one of the most common decorative designs of many Dayak tribes.
23. RETRIBUTION
In the beginning there were mountain-tops and sea between them. Gradually the sea subsided and the land appeared. A man and a woman living on such a mountain-top had a son. One day a typhoon lifted him in the air and carried him off to Java, where he arrived in the house of a rich Javanese. This was long before the Hindu kingdom of Modjopahit. In this house he remained many years, and showed much intelligence and industry in his work, which was to cut wood, fish, look after the poultry, and clean the rooms. It was not necessary to give him orders, for he understood everything at a glance. By and by he became a trader, assisting his patron. Finally he married the rich man's only daughter, and after living happily a long time he remembered his parents, whom he had left in Borneo, desired to visit them, and asked his wife to accompany him.
They went in two ships, and, after sailing a month or more, came to a mountain, for there was no river then. When the ships arrived, prahus came out to ask their errand. "I am looking for my father and mother whom I left long ago," said the owner. They told him that his father was dead, but that his mother still lived, though very old.
The people went and told her that her son had come to see her. She was very poor, for children there were none, and her husband was dead. Wearing old garments, and in a dilapidated prahu, she went out to the ships, where she made known that she wanted to see her anak (child). The sailors informed the captain that his mother was there, and he went to meet her, and behold! an old woman with white hair and soiled, torn clothing. "No!" he said, "she cannot be my mother, who was beautiful and strong." "I am truly your mother," she replied, but he refused to recognise her, and he took a pole (by which the prahus are poled) and drove her off.
She wept and said: "As I am your mother, and have borne you, I wish that your wife, your ships, and all your men may change into stone." The sky became dark, and thunder, lightning, and storm prevailed. The ships, the men, and the implements, everything, changed into stone, which today may be seen in these caves.
NOTE.—In the neighbourhood of Kandangan, a small town northward from Bandjermasin, are two mountains, one called gunong batu laki: the mountain of the stone man, the other gunong batu bini: the mountain of the stone wife. They contain large caves with stalactite formations which resemble human beings, ships, chairs, etc. The natives here visualise a drama enacted in the long gone-by, as related.
The Ex-Sultan of Pasir, a Malay then interned by the government in Bandjermasin, who was present when this story was told to me by a Mohammedan Kahayan, maintained that it is Dayak and said that it is also known in Pasir (on the east coast). Although the fact that the scene is laid in a region at present strongly Malay does not necessarily give a clew to the origin of the tale, still its contents are not such as to favour a Dayak source.