170 NOTES ON SUMATRA. 
‘with guns and spears: we soon explained ourselves however, and I was 
then comfortably settled in the head man’s house, sleeping on a rattan 
mat with my rifle and hunting knife by my side, a precaution I thought 
prudent, in spite of the assurances of my boatmen, that though the 
Suygi people were occasionally pirates, they never injured any one 
coming among them in a peaceable manner. 
I was up at daylight in the morning looking about me. The settle- 
ment is a new one; a few trees had been cut down, but there was yet 
no cultivation beyond a few cocoa-nuts planted among the stumps. The 
people were busy spreading agar-agar on mats in the sun to dry, and 
pounding dammar, or Dipterocarpus resin; of which they said the woods 
here yielded abundance, in wooden mortars, to make torches; when 
pounded very fine, it is melted in boiling wood-oil, the fluid resin of 
Dipterocarpus trinervis, and several other species, and mixed with 
crumbled rotten wood, until it is of a consistence to be formed into 
batons eighteen inches or two feet long and about two inches in 
diameter; these are covered with the leaflets of a stemless palm, Zalacca 
conferta, which grows abundantly in freshwater marshes; its fruit is 
large and deep brown, and hangs sometimes quite down in the mud, in 
densely clustered branches, almost hidden by the half-decayed bracts; 
the pulp surrounding the seed is intensely acid, and is much used by 
the Malays as a condiment ; the Malay name of the plant is ** Palumbei," 
or sometimes “ Assam paya,” “bog acid.” The torches now look like 
gigantic cigars, and are sold at from two to five cents each, according 
to their size: many are used at Singapore by the gambier makers, who 
: at a partieular point of the evaporation of the extract require a sudden 
= and fierce fire, which they get by throwing under the pans two or three 
_ of these torches. They are commonly used in the Malay houses for light, 
fixed in a sort of clumsy wooden candlestick; they give a bright, good 
light, but are very smoky, and require almost constant trimming, but 
. are well suited to the open houses of the natives, because they are not 
easily extinguished by the wind. 
.. After a good bath at a clear spring, which was full of a pretty little 
blue-flowered Utricularia with short ligulate leaves, which formed a 
thick turf all round the margin, we started again about half past six 
o'clock. The tide was very low as we emerged from the creek, and on 
. un extensive flat reef of stones and broken coral was a large party of 
J. women and children collecting s agar-agar” and “ tripang,” and carry- 
——— ai 
