The earthenware pot or bamboo used for the purpose must be new, nothing must have been cooked in it before, and nothing after. Directly the legop has been poured out it is thrown away because contaminated.

The perfect newness of these vessels serves to increase the power of the poison.


A couple of days before the Sakai wishes to prepare the deadly mixture he goes in search of the creeper, which having found he uncovers its roots and to assure himself that he has not made a mistake, he tries if it has the bitter taste natural to it. Secure upon this point he digs up a nice lot and then fills up his dosser with two sorts of bulbous plants which secrete a glutinous substance but whose name and quality I have never found out. This done he rambles about the forest until he is able to find two kinds of wasps or bees (whichever they are); one is very big and black the sting of which causes a high fever, and which generally has its nest on the ground; the other is little and red, stings like a nettle and has its nest under the leaves of a tree.

If he has in store some teeth of the sendok snake, or of any other equally venomous, he now returns to the village, otherwise he looks for one, kills it and possesses himself of its fangs.

Having thus all the necessary ingredients, the Sakai begins to pound the roots into a paste. This mass he then puts into a tube stopped up by leaves which lets pass a liquid but not a substance. Keeping this primitive filter suspended over the receptacle to be used for boiling, he slowly empties some water into it which soaking through the paste becomes of a brown colour before it reaches the vessel beneath.

Terminated the filtering process he takes the two bulbous plants and squeezing them in his hand he sprinkles as much of their juice as he thinks fit, into the same vessel. The serpent's teeth and the bees are then pounded, they too, and cast in with all the rest which is at once placed on a slow fire. When the mixture begins to boil the Sakai skims off the impurities floating on the surface and adds a little more legop if it seems to him necessary, taking great care, meanwhile, not to breath or to be enveloped by the fumes rising from the pot.

Root of the poisonous creeper "Legop".