Beneath the houses is the storage-place for canoes that are leaky and old, or only half finished and in process of being sprung and spread out into proper shape before being fitted up with gunwales and thwarts. It is generally a very disorderly and noisome place, where all the refuse from the house is thrown, and where pigs wallow, and chickens scratch for grains of rice that fall from the husking mortars in the veranda overhead. Between the houses and the river’s bank,—a distance of a hundred yards, more or less,—the jungle is cleared away, and in its place are clumps of cocoanut, or Areca palms, and, here and there, small storehouses, built on piles, for rice. In front of the houses of the Kayans there are sure to be one or two forges, where the village blacksmiths, makers of spear-heads, swords, hoes, and axes, hold an honorable position. In the shade of the palms the boat-builders’ sheds protect from the scorching heat of the sun the great logs that are being scooped out to form canoes; the ground is covered with chips, from which arises a sour, sappy odor that is almost pungent and is suggestive of all varieties of fever, but is really quite harmless. In the open spaces tall reedy grass grows, and after hard rains a misstep, from the logs forming a pathway, means to sink into black, oozy mud up to the knees.
Just on the bank of the river there are usually four or five posts, about eight feet high, roughly carved at the top to represent a man’s head; these have been put up after successful head-hunting raids, and on them are tied various fragments of the enemy,—a rib, or an arm, or a leg bone; these offerings drive away the evil Spirits who might wish to harass the inmates of the house, and they also serve as a warning to enemies who may be planning an attack. Such remnants of the enemy are held by no means in the same veneration with which the heads, hung up in the house, are regarded; after the bits of flesh and bone are tied to the posts they are left to the wind and rain, the pigs and chickens.
POSTS ERECTED IN FRONT OF A HOUSE AFTER A HEAD-HUNT
ON THESE POSTS ARE HUNG SMALL FRAGMENTS OF THE ENEMY. THE CARVED FACES RECORD THE NUMBER OF HEADS TAKEN.
Not a few of the Kayan and Kenyah houses have been enlarged and built out at both ends until they shelter from six hundred to a thousand persons, and are possibly a quarter of a mile long; this statement seems to verge on a ‘traveller’s tale,’ but it must be remembered that these houses are really villages of a single street, the veranda being a public thoroughfare, unobstructed throughout its whole length, in front of the private family rooms. From the ground to the veranda a notched log serves as steps, and it takes no little practice to enable a clumsy, leather-shod foreigner to make a dignified entrance into a Borneo house. The notches in the log are worn very smooth by the constant tread of bare feet, and, as there is no door-mat below for muddy feet, the shallow notches are often coated with a thin and treacherous layer of slime; foreigners generally enter a Kayan house on all fours, giving to the natives an astounding idea of occidental manners. To the natives, however, these steps present no difficulties,—no matter how steep or slimy the log, they seem to get a firm hold on the edge of the notches with their prehensile toes, and, even with heavy loads on their backs, walk up as freely as if on level ground. The piles on which the large houses rest are fifteen or twenty feet high, and often two and a half feet in diameter at the base; in some few cases they are carved with grotesque figures of human heads, or conventionalised representations of monkeys, crocodiles, and snakes.
In the days before the humanising influence of Rajah Brooke’s government had spread to the Kayans, and Kenyahs, and tribes living in the central highlands, it was a preliminary custom, in building a house, to thrust into the first excavation wherein the heavy, up-river, corner post was to rest, a young slave girl alive, and the mighty post was then planted on her body, crushing out her life as a propitiatory offering to the demons that they should not molest the dwelling. Happily, this custom has been abolished, and in houses now built, instead of a girl, a pig or a fowl has been substituted. I regret to add that in the house of Tama Bulan, wherein we lived for some time, the earlier custom had been followed.
The roofs of the houses are partly thatched and partly shingled. The shingles are hewn out of ‘Billian,’ a species of iron-wood which stands for years, without decay, the alternate change from damp to dry heat; each one has a square hole at its upper end, through which passes the strip of rattan wherewith it is tied to the frame of the roof. The thatching is of palm leaves doubled over a stick five feet long and then bound on the roof, overlapping like shingles; several layers of these palm-leaf tiles make a perfectly tight roof, and one that may be quickly repaired. In building a Borneo house not a nail is used and but very few pegs; all beams and cross-ties are either roughly mortised and bound together, or else merely tied one on top of the other with rattan or with long strips of fibrous bark; even the planks of the floor or walls are not pegged, but are tied to one another and laced to the joists.
In selecting the site for a house, before so much as a twig of the jungle is cleared away, there are always extreme and prolonged pains taken to discover, through ‘Omen birds,’ the temper of the evil Spirits of that locality,—to a Kayan there are no such things as beneficent Spirits. Until this temper is definitely discovered the whole household is under a ‘permantong,’ or taboo, and may not leave its quarters, whatever these quarters may be, be they the old house or a temporary shelter.