102 A NATURALISTS WANDERINGS 

 1 



aad listlessly perfume the air, they know not why, with the 

 odours of their incense. 



Not far distant from the Karang dwellings lies the sacred 

 village of Tjibeo, inhabited by the Badui, containing never 

 more nor fewer than forty souls. If their number be increased 

 by birth the overplus must go out and reside in one or other 

 of three neighbouring villages ; if their number decrease the 

 deficit must be made up from among the Outsiders, as they call 

 these extraneous villagers. No foot but one of their own — not 

 even of the highest European oflicial — may cross the sacred 

 boundary, which at some distance hedges the sanctity of their 

 abodes. Like the Eodiyas of Ceylon, they eat carrion and the 

 flesh of animals offensive to their neighbours ; flesh of buffalo 

 they may eat, but they may not kill the animal themselves, 

 and of fowl also if the life have not been taken by the letting 

 of its blood, but by a stroke on the head. They wear only a 

 short loin-cloth, whose colour must never be other than white 

 striped with black.* In speaking to any one not of their 

 own stock, of however high a rank he be, they use the 

 pronouns by which a superior distinctly indicates that he is 

 addressing his inferior. At various periods of the year they 

 also pay mysterious and religious rites to rude venerated 

 blocks of stone, arranged in terraces near their village. The 

 Kalangs are probably an offshoot of the same stock as the 

 Badui, though they are not reckoned among those outsiders 

 who may be received to make up a deficiency in the sacred 

 Forty of Tjibeo, nor do they worship at their shrines. On the 

 high Tengger Mountains, in the east of Java, a colony with 

 rites and customs similar to those of the Badui exists in all 

 the isolation and opprobrium that a .schismatic religion can call 

 out. 



With the exception of the Karangs and the Badui, the 

 entire population of Bantam profess the Mahomedan religion, 

 which however seems to be merely a lusty and fanatical graft 

 on the pagan superstitions of the ancient times. 



* " A magnificent robe haviiicr been given to Gotama, his attendant 

 Ananila, in order to destroy its intrinsic value, cut it into thiity pieces and 

 sewed them together in four divisions, so that the robe resembled the patches 

 of a rice-field, divided by embankments, and in conformity with this precedent 

 the robe of every priest was similiirly dissected and reunited." — Henry's 

 ' Eastern Monachism,' ch^ip. xii. p. 117. Can the striped garments of tho 

 Kalangs and Badui have any reference to the above tradition ? 



