52 IN MALAY FORESTS. 



virgin forest. The ground can be driven in two ways, 

 either directly away from the rice-fields and towards 

 a row of sidins erected alongside the swamp, or the 

 line of the drive may be parallel to the rice-fields, 

 in which case the sidins would be set up at the 

 " neck." 



The pawang takes everything into consideration, 

 his experience of former drives in the same place, the 

 direction of the wind, and his own forecast regarding 

 the side from which danger may come, and decides 

 to have the line of sidins at the neck. 



The word to start is given, each man shoulders his 

 heavy coil of nooses, the headman leads the way, and 

 in irregular single file the party follows him. The 

 village through which their path leads at first is not 

 what we mean by a village in English. Our inter- 

 pretation of the word is a collection of houses. The 

 Malay village is a collection of holdings. Each man 

 owns his two or three acres of land, in the middle 

 of which his house stands ; and as the holdings 

 generally extend in a narrow strip along a river 

 bank, a village containing only a hundred houses 

 is perhaps two miles long. Each man's holding is 

 more or less thickly planted with cocoanut-trees and 

 with a somewhat miscellaneous assortment of fruit- 

 trees, round the roots of which grows a neglected 

 crop of grass where goats and an occasional sheep 

 find pasturage. The only public buildings in the 

 village are the musjid, which is the property of the 

 community, and the school, which is the property of 

 the Government. The nearest police-station is thirty 

 miles away. 



