Tama Usong flatly refused to come up to the house because he disliked Aban Avit, and sulked in his boat on the other side of the river, preferring to endure torrents of rain at night rather than forget old scores until the very hour of the grand ratification of peace and amity at Tama Aping Buling’s. His absence, however, was not felt; the house was full of strangers; an old, sad-faced Chief, named Laki Jok Orong, had arrived only the day before, from the Rejang, and was on his way to the Baram, whither he was escorting a middle-aged woman who three years previously had been abducted from her home, and ever since held captive in a Rejang River house. Curiously enough, Dr. Kükenthal, on a visit to the lower Baram, had happened to photograph this very woman before her abduction,[13] and had sent a copy of the portrait to her family. Having discovered the house wherein the woman was detained, some of her friends set out to obtain her release. By means of this photograph, which they took with them, they were enabled to establish her identity beyond dispute, and brought her away. The features in the photograph were still recognisable, even under a thick coating of finger-marks. The woman herself now had possession of it, and, proudly unwrapping it from its many coverings of dirty cotton cloth and dried palm leaves, passed it round the circle.
Laki Jok Orong had a sad tale to tell of the oppression of his people by one Owang Taha, a half-breed Malay, and a sub-Resident for the Government, in the upper Rejang River. When he once got fairly started, he kept up the screed in a whining, lugubrious monotone that droned on and on till his audience, by desertions and by new arrivals, was changed several times, and at last engaged in general conversation; but none the less, the droning plaint of the Rejang Chief still went on and on. The seven or eight long, straggling hairs which he suffered to grow on his lip, above the right corner of his mouth waggled and waved, and in his ears the ornaments, carved out of a horn-bill’s crest to represent tiger-cat’s teeth, alternately pointed up and down as he dolefully shook his head over the never-ending rehearsal of his wrongs. I retired to my dark-tent, developed a dozen or more negatives, packed away all my trays and chemicals, and then when I rejoined the circle around the fire in the veranda, still from the outer edge of darkness quavered Jok Orong’s voice as persistent as ever,—and as unheeded.
SOME CANOES OF THE PEACE-PARTY IN A QUIET REACH BETWEEN RAPIDS.
Early in the next forenoon, Tama Bulan and six of his best paddlers came swiftly up-stream to tell us that Wan was much better, but that they had decided to take him home with all speed. Of course, that Tama Bulan should turn round and immediately go back to Tama Liri’s was not for a moment to be thought of, and, although it was early in the day, jars of arrack were brought out, and the sullen Tama Usong and Juman, persuaded thereto by Tama Bulan, joined us in the veranda, and the unwearied Laki Jok Orong seized a fresh opportunity to indulge in the luxury of woe, and to begin, and continue the recital of innumerable wrongs. The etiquette in drinking toasts is the reverse of ours; with us, he who is toasted remains seated, generally with a sickly, self-conscious smile, while all the others rise and drink to him. In Borneo, however, the toast is the only one who rises and is the only one to drink, and he must leave no heel-taps; it is the company who remain seated, and break into a deafening humming and oo-oo-ing, which are kept up until the last drop is drained. Possibly, the custom arises from the fact that there are rarely cups enough to go round, and one sticky, begrimed, glass tumbler, or else a carved bamboo cup, (rarely used now-a-days,) must perforce pass from lip to lip. That there had been such things as bamboo drinking-cups, we discovered by mere accident from a song, commonly sung at these feasts, which runs:—‘I offer to you the glittering cup, I offer to you the bamboo cup.’ The words have a jingling rhythm:—
Akui mejee tebok klingee
Ara wi wi ará
Aku meju tebok bulu
Ara wi wi ará.
