ii8 PAGAN TRIBES OF BORNEO chap. 



people devote themselves to gathering the fruit 

 which forms for a time almost their only food. 



Except during the busy padi season the work 

 of the women is wholly within the house. The 

 heaviest part of their household labour is the pre- 

 paration of the rice. After breakfast they proceed 

 to spread out padi on mats on the open platforms 

 adjoining the gallery. While the padi is being 

 dried by the exposure to sun and wind on these 

 platforms, it must be protected from the domestic 

 fowls by a guardian who, sitting in the gallery, 

 drives them away by means of a long bamboo slung 

 by a cord above the platform. Others fill the time 

 between breakfast and the noonday dinner by 

 bathing themselves and the children in the river, 

 making and repairing clothing, mats, and baskets, 

 fetching more water, cleaning the rooms and pre- 

 paring dinner. This meal consists of boiled rice 

 with perhaps a piece of fish, pork, or fowl, and, 

 like breakfast and supper, is eaten in the private 

 rooms. 



As soon as dinner is over the pounding oi\h^padi 

 begins (Frontispiece, Vol. II.). Each mortar usually 

 consists of a massive log of timber roughly shaped, 

 and having sunk in its upper surface, which is a 

 little hollowed, a pit about five inches in diameter 

 and nine inches in depth. Into this pit about a 

 quarter of a bushel of padi is put. Two women 

 stand on the mortar facing one another on either 

 side of the pit, each holding by the middle a large 

 wooden pestle. This is a solid bar of hardwood 

 about seven feet long, about two inches in diameter 

 in the middle third, and some three or four inches 

 in diameter in the rest of its length. The two 

 ends are rounded and polished by use. Each 

 woman raises her pestle to the full height of her 

 reach, and brings it smartly down upon the grain in 

 the pit, the two women striking alternately with a 



