NATIVE LIFE IN BRITISH BORNEO. 



249 



gongs tuned to different keys, and wooden drnms. The next en- 

 tertainment was given by a party of some twenty men and women 

 performing an incantation over some medicine wliich was to be 

 administered to the chief. " They all held palm-branches in their 

 hands, which they waved in graceful unison and in perfect time 

 to the melodious cadence of their voices. The women sang one 

 line, and the men took up the solemn refrain in a sort of Grego- 

 rian chant. They danced gracefully, holding each other's hands, 

 in a ring around the mysterious object of their charms ; both the 

 dancing and singing are continued until the sorcerer declares that 

 the spell has been worked over the medicine. It should be stated 

 that the Tamhanuahs declare that after death their souls find rest 

 in peace on the top of the great mountain Kinabalu, as their fore- 

 fathers believed before them." A curious mausoleum was visited 

 at Imbok. It was built of solid bilian-wood, a material of long- 

 lasting qualities, and the ends of the prettily ornamented and 

 fluted posts and beams were carved into grotesque heads of ani- 

 mals. It contained some thirty or forty bodies, and was sur- 

 rounded by fruit-trees. 



At Pemengah, where a police station was established, many of 

 the traders were found living and keeping their stores in houses 

 built upon large bamboo rafts, called lanteens, which were made 

 fast to the banks by rattans. The people at one of the villages 

 near this place had never seen a white man before, and when Mr. 

 Daly first arrived the women and children ran away and hid them- 

 selves in one of the back rooms, and the men looked " nervously 

 suspicious." They examined his arms and chest, and were very 

 merry at the idea of his skin being white, " which they seemed to 

 think an absurd freak of nature. . . . They all smoke from morn- 

 ing till night, and out of pipes that have brass mouth-pieces and 

 large bowls, such as are used by the Dusum tribes of the west 

 coast. The tobacco is grown by themselves, and retains a green 

 color by their process of fermentation. . . . They have not yet 

 learned the use of guns or of gunpowder. They had not previously 

 seen a double-barreled breech-loader, and when I opened mine to 

 put in a cartridge, they exclaimed, ' Oh, it is broken ! ' I brought 

 down a few of the swifts that build the edible bird's-nests, and 

 found them to be very small, and to have a patch of white on the 

 back and tail. The men wear only the loin-cloth; the women 

 have but one garment, viz., a short petticoat, which is kept up 

 around the waist by coils of brass wire ; the young girls have, as 

 an addition, coils of brass wire from the ankle half-way up to the 

 knee. The cloth is woven from the thread made from the cotton- 

 trees, Tcapoh, that grow luxuriantly around their houses, and the 

 women use the same kind of spindle for making thread as is 

 common among the Dusums of the west coast, holding the cotton 



