Tama Bulan did all in his power to show us that we were welcome, and assigned to us an immense slab of Tapang wood about eight feet square and suspended about three feet above the floor by beams from the roof; hereon we could spread our mats at night and keep our possessions out of the reach of the hungry mongrel dogs that pervaded the veranda. As soon as we were thus properly shelved, and had our things stowed away comfortably, our host came and requested us to visit him in his private apartment and meet his family. With much pride he conducted us into the presence of his daughter, Bulan, who had gathered about her a bevy of her intimate girl friends, all busily engaged in making cigarettes; she received us with quiet dignity, but, owing to our lack of proficiency in Malay, I must acknowledge that the conversation could not be termed particularly brilliant. However, we did our best to be entertaining; Dr. Hiller and myself displayed the elaborate Japanese tattooing on our arms, and I sprung by hand, at her father’s instigation, into Bulan’s good graces. She was about seventeen or eighteen years old, with a strong resemblance to her father, and mild, gentle eyes which she slowly opened and shut with demure solemnity; her teeth were, of course, blackened; her hair was parted in the middle, and brought down low in glossy black waves over her forehead and held in place by a fillet of plaited rattan; her eyebrows and eyelashes had been either shaved or depilated. The one ineradicable blemish in her beauty is her left ear; over-ambitious parents had suspended therein too heavy weights when she was young, and one beautiful ear-lobe had given away; to be sure, it had been patched and reunited, but the patch was undeniable, and an ugly lump the result. Alas! even three hundred miles in the heart of Borneo il faut souffrir pour être belle. I showed her some of the pictures of American men and women in the Magazines we had with us; she was much amused at the small waists of the women, which I was obliged to tell her were effected by steel bands laced tightly about them. This was incomprehensible to her, and the torture which she inferred excited her sympathy. In every picture where neither beard nor moustache marked the sex I had to tell her which were men and which were women; she could see no difference in the faces, and the dress and coiffure had no meaning to her.
We were next shown the little son and heir who was to be the centre of the coming festivities; he was the whitest Bornean baby that I ever saw, his skin was what might be called a dark-cream color. Infant as he was,—not yet a year old,—he evinced the utmost terror at the sight of us, and emitted such bawls that he had to be carried away quickly. His ears, even at that early age, had been slit, and were already quite elongated with large bunches of pewter rings, which were, in fact, his sole article of dress. It always seemed strange to see babies in arms carried about without a rag of clothing on them; long clothes are so indissolubly associated in our minds with infancy that there seemed to be something monstrous and discordant in a tender little baby continually stark naked. This baby, in spite of its bad temper, was, however, the idol of the household; nephews, nieces, friends, and slaves of its parents were all proud to be allowed to carry it about the veranda, in its sling hung with charms.
While we were away on a five days’ visit to another Chief on the Apoh River, Tama Bulan most hospitably caused to be constructed for us in the veranda, nearly opposite his apartment, a little room partitioned off by matting and a wall of bamboo rods, wherein, as he explained, we should be free from the annoyance of children and dogs; but even while he was speaking a row of little, beady eyes peering at us through the cracks between the bamboos made me sympathize with the feelings of the freaks at a circus when the small boy lifts the flaps of the tent.
On the day of our arrival, the only indication of the approaching festivities were hundreds of bunches of bananas, suspended everywhere from the roof; but when we returned from the Apoh River, preparations were already in full swing for the Naming, and we contributed freely from our store of tobacco for the manufacture of cigarettes. Bulan’s room was the centre of this industry, and the workers, all women and girls, occupied every inch of the floor, squatting in groups round baskets piled high with the stringy weed. While some prepared the dried banana leaves, others rolled the cigarettes; some rolled them on their thighs, others on polished boards held in their laps. It was a merry gathering, with a constant buzz of gossip, and now and then loud bursts of innocent laughter that bespake the vacant mind. The holiday had already begun, and during the days devoted to the ceremonies there is no work in the rice-fields, consequently the house was full of young people who would be, at other times, hard at work out of doors. The small boy was, of course, ubiquitous,—as, on similar busy occasions, he is in civilized countries; and little Adom seemed to be everywhere at every instant, upsetting baskets of tobacco, purloining rolls of banana leaf, dropping chips and rubbish from rafters above on the heads of the workers beneath, and at every turn in everybody’s way; nevertheless he was treated with uniform forbearance, and only occasional playful sallies from the girls kept him from downright hindering them in their work. Kindliness and hilarity ruled the hour.
GROUP OF BOYS
THE FOURTH ON THE LEFT IN THE FRONT ROW IS LAWI, AN ADOPTED SON OF ABAN LIAH, AND A PRESUMPTIVE CHIEF. THE OTHERS WERE ALREADY HIS DEVOTED FOLLOWERS.
As fast as the cigarettes were made they were strung on a thread and hung, a dangling fringe, on a framework of rattans about six feet long, representing a horn-bill with his wings outspread. The head was carved of wood and painted, so that it had a most life-like appearance, and in addition it was ornamented with several strips of bead-work cloth draped around it and enveloping the neck; its tail was composed of real feathers with the broad black band. The cigarettes were hung almost as closely as feathers all over the body, wings, and tail,—indeed, there must have been a thousand affixed to it. When the last cigarette was hung in place, and it took far into the night before the whole was finished, the huge bird was suspended from a rafter beyond the reach of pilfering hands, until the proper time for distribution.
In deciding the exact date for the important ceremony of naming the son of a Chief, the phase of the moon is of vital importance. According to the Kenyah calendar, the moon passes through twelve phases, whereof only two or three are really auspicious; and when some are in the ascendant they prognosticate even downright ill luck to all who are then named. These phases are as follows (‘bulan,’ meaning moon): (1) ‘Bulan musit,’ the birth of the moon; (2) ‘Bulan anak,’ the moon has a child; (3) ‘Bulan dyipu boin,’ the pig’s tooth moon; (4) ‘Bulan bakwong,’ the bird’s-bill moon; (5) ‘Bulan petak,’ moon of sickness; (6) ‘Bulan batak-palan,’ the fish moon, moderately good, but not auspicious for building houses; (7) ‘Bulan salap jiit’ and (8) ‘Bulan salap bioh,’ the big and the little belly-moons; both good moons; the ‘Salap bioh’ is the best for naming children. (9) ‘Bulan loong-payong jiit,’ moon of the small payong fruit; (10) ‘Bulan loong-payong bioh,’ moon of the big payong fruit; these two phases are auspicious for almost any undertaking. (11) ‘Bulan blasong jiit,’ moon of the small pearl shell (the shell often attached to the front of a war-coat); this is also an auspicious phase. (12) ‘Bulan blasong bioh,’ moon of the big pearl shell,—i.e., full moon; this is considered not a very favorable phase. A child born under it goes to extremes. It is either very intelligent or else an idiot. Fighting and trouble are most apt to occur during the full moon.
The usual age at which a child is named is at about the end of the first year or at the beginning of the second. Up to this time all the children, especially those of a Chief, are under a ‘lali,’ a word signifying a restriction, and used in the same sense as taboo. As long as this lali is in force the child must not be bathed in the river, but in the private apartment of its parents; it must not be carried even down the ladder from the house to the ground; even to mention its future name is so ill-omened as to be prohibitory; it is known only by the indefinite appellation ‘Angat’ if a boy, and ‘Endun’ if a girl,—Angat means literally a little worm; what Endun means, if it have a separate meaning, I do not know. On the present occasion, the moon was in the phase of Salap bioh, the big-bellied moon,—that is, gibbous.