THE LARGE LOG IN THE FOREGROUND HAD BEEN ROUGHLY HEWN FOR MAKING A CANOE, BUT ON ACCOUNT OF A WARNING FROM AN OMEN-BIRD WAS ABANDONED.
In the verandas of the Kayan houses there are always large wooden mortars wherein rice is hulled; from morning until night there is always to be heard, somewhere in the length of the house, the rhythmical thumping that betokens that young girls are at their everlasting task of threshing, hulling, and winnowing the rice for the daily repast. The rice mortars are cut from large logs of wood, and are somewhat prismatic in shape, usually five or six feet in length by two or three feet wide on the upper surface; they rest upon a base not more than a foot wide, [as in the photograph, where, on the right, some boys are sitting on the edge of a mortar,] but are made firm by stout poles that are set into them and extend through the flooring to the ground below, and also by strong braces that are pegged to the house beams above. The upper, broad surface of these mortars is slightly concave, and is divided into two or more sections, each with a round pit six inches deep in the centre. In husking the rice, these pits are filled with the grains, and then two, or sometimes four, girls, standing upon the broad top, pound the rice in the pit with wooden pestles five or six feet long, which they hold at the middle with both hands. The motion that they adopt is exceedingly graceful; they stand with the heels together, and lift the pole or pestle perpendicularly above their heads as high as they can reach, then, bending the body at the hips and swinging the arms down, they jam the pestle into the rice pit; as they raise the pestle again for another stroke they put one foot forward to push back into the pit the grains that may have jumped out on the flat surface of the mortar. When thus pounding, the young girls keep perfect time with one another, the poles never clash, and each girl brushes back, first with one foot, then with the other, the grains she jostles out, so that when they pound fast the motion becomes almost a dance. Not infrequently the pestles are ornamented at their upper end with several sliding rings or a sliding block that jingles when the pestle strikes; this rhythm and this jingle impart some alleviation to the tedious task. When the husks are all beaten off, the chaff is winnowed out by tossing the grains and catching them again and again upon a flat basket. The task of hulling rice falls exclusively to the women and girls; they begin it when they are so small that they can barely lift the pestle, and, once started in proficiency, the task becomes an element of their life, and their winnowing-baskets are hung as symbols of industry on their graves.
In the accompanying photograph of a veranda, the coffin-shaped box hanging on the wall on the right is a case wherein war-coats are kept, so that the goat-skin and feathers whereof they are made cannot be eaten by hungry dogs. The photograph does not give an absolutely correct idea of the daily appearance of a veranda; there is only one dog to be seen,—there should be at least a dozen. The exposure had to last so long that, lest the dogs should jar the camera, we had them all driven down the notched log to the ground, and then the log was turned wrong side up, so that they could not return. (We tried this method of getting rid of the dogs once at night when they were particularly troublesome and quarrelsome, and seemed to prefer our bodies to any other couch, but the crafty curs knew an adequate revenge; as soon as they found themselves locked out they made night hideous with concerted and disconcerting baying at the moon, until we were glad to readmit them. Our leather shoes we always had to tie high up on the rafters at night, or they would have been eaten up, all but the soles and heels.)
This photograph was taken from a point just opposite the chief’s door, about half way down the length of the veranda.
KALURI—MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS.
The family rooms, even those of the chief, are often dark and disordered little compartments, and in them it is usual for anything but quiet to reign; the smallest of the infants sprawl on the floor, the fowls, that have flown up to steal the rice drying on the platforms at the back of the house, squawk and cackle, and the old women who are relegated to culinary sinecures, such as rice-boiling, add a mild confusion by whacking the dogs that wander in and prowl about the cooking-pots. The space under the eaves, unlike that of the veranda, is boarded up from floor to roof with rough hewn planks; the only light is admitted through small windows in the planks or through trap-doors in the roof. Of course, there is never a pane of glass in the windows, and I doubt that the natives of the interior, or even of the coast towns, ever saw a glazed window.
In spite of the darkness of these rooms, there is, nevertheless, more industry in them than is ever found in the veranda; the women are really the workers of the community, and seem never to sit absolutely idle gossiping, as do the men; when the harvesting is finished and there is no more work out of doors, they employ their time in making mats and baskets of rattan strips, in stringing beads into ornaments for war-coats, in weaving cloth for feast-day garments, and in fashioning large, round, flat hats for the next season’s work in the rice-fields. During the rainy season, the husbands and lovers seem to have little to do but sit in the veranda, lounging against the railing at the open space under the eaves, whence they can observe the river and its incidents, and watch the smoke from their long cigarettes curl and drift among the fronds of tall cocoanut palms that sway and rustle on a level with their faces. These are the days when war expeditions are planned and resolutions made to add fresh heads to the row already hanging in front of the chief’s door, and thereby remove any taboo enforced by the death of relatives. The men seldom linger in the family rooms during the day, and the women, except when busy hulling the rice in the big wooden mortars, spend no time in the veranda.
The doorway from the veranda into the family room opens into a very dark and narrow passage, with the partition wall of the next room on one side and a rack for fire-wood and long bamboo water-bottles on the other. Possibly it is to announce the coming of a guest that the flooring of these little entries is always laid down in such a wobbly fashion, and of logs and billets of wood so rickety, that it is impossible to walk upon it without stumbling or an unseemly clatter; whatever be the reason, such is the fact, and I never stepped over the high threshold into the dark of one of these passages without expecting to trample on babies or to fall through on the wallowing pigs below.