CHAPTER III
The Indian homestead—Building—Site and plan of maloka—Furniture—Inhabitants of the house—Fire—Daily life—Insect inhabitants—Pets.
Out of the silence and gloom of the forest the traveller will emerge into the full light of a clearing. Though it is the site of a tribal headquarters there is no village, no cluster of huts, except among some of the tribes on the lower Apaporis. There is but one great house, thatched and ridge-roofed like a gigantic hay-rick, standing four-square in the open. This is the home of some three score Indians.[21]
The immediate signs of their occupancy are but few. There is hardly any litter cumbering the homestead; whatever of refuse there be is cleared more speedily by the ants than it would be by the most up-to-date sanitary authority of London. Back here in the untouched districts, away from the Rubber Belt and the commerce-bearing rivers, there are none of the leavings of civilisation: no broken bottles, no battered tins, no torn and dirty scraps of paper—indeed if bottle or tin ever found its way to these wilds it would be esteemed a most rare and valuable treasure. No village dogs bark their challenge at the stranger’s approach, no domestic fowls clutter away to safety. A naked child or a startled old woman may scurry into the saving murk of the maloka,[22] otherwise the silence and solitude appear little less profound than in the forest.
That is the picture as the artist or camera would reproduce it. The details, the essentials, must be sought within.
Fig. 1.
First of all characteristics is the fact that nothing makes for permanence. The house and its contents at the best are but for temporary use. The possession of a central tribal house does not presuppose that these Indians remain for any length of time in one locality. After about two or three years the house falls into a state of disrepair, but the tribesmen will not patch and mend it. They will simply discard it like all useless things. The women will be loaded up with the few tribal possessions—not forgetting the inevitable burden of their infants—the house will be burnt, and the whole of this grosse famille departs to seek a new site on which to build another habitation.
Building material is easily come by, and though to clear the land for agricultural purposes from the virgin forest entails considerable hard work, it is periodically a necessary task. However rich it may have been in the first instance successive crops rob the soil of its fertility, as the Indian is only too well aware, and fresh ground must perforce be broken up every few years. Then again, paths converging on the homestead in time are worn through the forest undergrowth, dense though it may be, circuitous though the trail of the Indian is invariably. Secrecy is security. A track-way is as good as an invitation, a sign-post, to the enemy. To move becomes a precautionary measure, even if the food supply be not exhausted—another reason that makes for unsettled conditions in forest life.
The site chosen is never near a river, for these are the highways for a possible enemy, and streams for ordinary purposes abound. Also—but this is an insignificant reason in comparison with the first—insect pests are not so abundant at a distance from the river-bank. With an eye to defence from hostile visitors, the Indian habitation is sedulously hidden, and the paths that lead to it are concealed also in every possible way. The track from the river especially may run more or less directly for, say, a third of a mile; then it is absolutely stopped by a fallen tree. No cleared pathway apparently runs beyond this, but the Indian, creeping through the thicket by devious ways, eventually reaches another comparatively cleared track. This will in turn be stopped in the same fashion, and thence lead more directly housewards. The river-path may be broken twice or even three times in little more than a mile.