120 A MALAGASY VILLAGE 



a hole in each of them ; and one has to hold up two or three 

 poles in order to pass through. 



Here, however, we are at last inside the village, and we see at 

 once that it is a very different place from an English village, 

 with the turnpike road passing through it, its trim houses and 

 cottages, with neat gardens and flower-beds, its grey old church, 

 and its churchyard with elms and yews overshadowing the 

 graves. 



There is nothing at all like this in our Malagasy village. 

 There are no streets intersecting it, and the houses are built 

 without much order, except in one point namely, that they are 

 almost all built north and south, and that they have their single 

 door and window always on the west side, so as to be protected 

 from the cold and keen south-east winds which blow over 

 Imerina during a great part of the year. The houses are mostly 

 made of the hard red earth, laid in courses of a foot or so high. 

 They are chiefly of one storey and of one room, but they 

 generally have a floor in the roof, which is used for cooking ; 

 and, if of good size, they are sometimes divided into two rooms 

 by rush and mat partitions. On the east of Imerina, near the 

 forest, the houses are made of rough wooden framing, filled 

 up with bamboo or rush, and often plastered with cow-dung. 

 In the neighbourhood of the capital, and indeed in most places, 

 the houses are now often made of sun-dried bricks, in two 

 storeys, with several rooms, and often with tiled roofs. 



Here and there throughout the province one comes across a 

 village which was formerly the capital of a petty kingdom, where 

 we find several strong and well-built timber houses. Such a 

 place was Ambohitritankady (I say " was," because it now 

 no longer exists), one of the villages in my mission district. It 

 was on a high hill, and in the centre of the village were ten large 

 houses of massive timber framing and with very high-pitched 

 roofs, with long " horns " at the gables, and these were arranged 

 five on each side of a long oblong space sunk a couple of feet 

 below the ground. Here, in former times, bull-fights took 

 place, and various games and amusements were carried on. One 

 of the houses, where the chief himself resided, was much larger 

 than the rest, and the corner posts, as well as the great central 

 posts supporting the ridge, were very massive pieces of timber. 

 It was all in one great room, without any partitions, the whole 



