SARA, ANOTHER BELLE OF TAMA BULAN’S HOUSEHOLD.
SHE WAS UNATTRACTIVE IN APPEARANCE, BUT HER VIVACIOUS CONVERSATION RENDERED HER VERY POPULAR
(From a photograph taken, and kindly loaned, by Professor A. C. Haddon, F. R. S.)
Just at this minute, Tama Bulan hurried into the room, and, asking us to come out, excitedly told us that a woman, named Lueng, whose child had been one of those to receive a name that day, was very ill and had fallen down in her room suddenly, and could not be wakened; had we ever heard of such a thing, he asked, in our country, or had we by chance any medicine for her. We went at once with him and found the woman in a state of profound collapse; she had been suffering from a severe attack of grippe, and the excitement of the day had been too great for her; we could get no further history than this, and from the cackling old women who were busy about her and from her husband and her brother we could get no coherent answers to our questions. We did the best we could with our limited resources; we stimulated her heart with hypodermics of strychnia; we had her laid flat instead of propped up, as she had been by the old women; at length she revived sufficiently to ask for water. When we bade them to give it to her they positively refused, saying we wanted to poison her; by administering a hypodermic injection we had indiscreetly overstepped the bounds of Kenyah submission to the white man’s medicine. Instead of water, the old women insisted on pouring down the patient’s throat a thick, warm paste of rice and water, at which, of course, she gagged and choked. We saw that our efforts were of no avail, and were therefore compelled to resign her to her friends and the Dayongs. One very officious old woman seemed to think that the sovereign remedy for such ills was to reach and scratch the patient’s back-bone by kneading the finger-tips deep down into the abdomen. Indeed, at one time, I thought she would actually push her fingers through the skin and tear the vitals from the unconscious woman. We told Tama Bulan that we could do nothing further, and that the woman would probably die; whereupon, knowing the temper of his people, he urged us to leave her to the Dayongs and to come away. Shortly after, as we were sitting in the fading twilight in the little apartment which Tama Bulan had caused to be put up for us, we saw them bring the limp body out of the room and place it on a mat in the veranda, only a few feet away from our door. The husband and the brother were frantic with grief and anxiety, and continually bent over her and shouted her name; then they took a blow-pipe and, putting one end close to her ear, they shouted her name again, hoping to call back her soul that was wandering off. They told her that her little child was crying for her and wanted to be fed. I crept into the group, once, and listened for her heart-beats, but they had stopped for ever. Tama Bulan asked me, aside, ‘Is she alive, Tuan?’ and when I told him she was dead, he whispered, ‘Don’t tell them; let them discover it themselves.’
A female Dayong was then summoned to find out whither the soul had gone, and to lure it back to the body; to this end she made several successive demands of valuable beads from the husband, as a fee, and the agonised, headlong haste with which he ran to get them from time to time, was truly pathetic.
I have said elsewhere that I could detect among this people no signs of genuine, unselfish affection. Perhaps this should be qualified by saying that at the solemn hour of death, or of its threatened approach, they manifest an emotion in which there certainly seems to be an element of affection, but even then alarm or terror seems to predominate.
A flickering damar lamp was placed on the floor near the body, and within the circle of its light the old hag of a Dayong, chanting in a monotonous minor key, strutted backward and forward with a shield in one hand and a parang in the other, and many strings of beads about her neck and waist. Twice she paused to ask for a young chicken, and when it was handed to her, she seized its head in her mouth and bit it off, sucked a mouthful of blood from the neck and spat it on the floor, closely scrutinising how it had splattered. Throughout this scene the grief-stricken, wailing reiteration of the dead woman’s name echoed through the veranda, now but dimly lit with damar lamps; every sound of mirth and gaiety was hushed; the only noise, except the wailings and the Dayong, came from the dogs and the pigs beneath the house, where they snarled and fought over the remnants of the feast that had fallen through the floor.
When the female Dayong had done her utmost to recall the soul, and had failed, our good, faithful friend, Tama Talun, volunteered to try his power. He demanded no costly beads, merely a parang, and in the same manner as his predecessor he walked backward and forward in the circle of light. We could not understand a word of what he was saying, but every now and then he threw down his parang so that its point stuck in the floor, where it remained swaying from side to side. As it swayed he walked slowly, about ten paces from it, and then gave a hop in the air and a shrill shout. Then slowly he walked back to the parang, pulled it up, and continued his chanting and walking.
While this was going on, the group suddenly realised that the woman was veritably dead, beyond all hope. With a scream the husband and the brother snatched up the body and rushed into the family room with it; some of the group followed, and some crept silently away into the dark corners of the veranda.
Before long, Tama Bulan came to tell us that the people were in a highly excited state, and, most unfortunately, they held us responsible for the woman’s tragic and sudden death, and that we had better remain in our little room and not venture out into the veranda.