126 



SUMATRA. 



[chap. Till. 



rather slia.iy, and there is no sign of anything we should 

 call furniture, Tliere arc no benches or chairs or stools, 

 but merely the level floor covered with mats, on which the 

 iumatos sit or lie. The aspect of the village itself is very 

 neat, the ground beini^ often swept before the chief hoiises ; 

 but very bad odoui's abound, owing to there being under 

 every house a stinking mud-hole, formed by all waste 

 liquids and refuse matter, ponred down through the floor 

 abova In most other things Malays are tolerably clean — 

 in some scrupulously so ; and this peculiar and nasty 

 custom, which is almost universal, arises, I have little 

 ih>ubt, from their having been originally a maritime and 

 water-loving people, who built their houses on posts in the 

 water, and only migrated gradually inland, fii'st up the 

 rivers and streams, and then into the dry interior. Habits 

 wliich were at once so convenient and so cleanly, and 

 which had been so long practised as to become a portion 

 of tlie domestic life of the nation, were of coursft continued 

 when the first settlers built their houses inland ; and with- 

 out a regular system of drainage, the arrangement of the 

 villages is such, that any other system %vould be very 

 inconvenient 



In all these Suraatran villages I found considerable 

 difticulty in getting anything to cat It was not the 

 season for vegetables, and when, after much trouble, 1 

 managed to procure some yams of a curious variety, I 

 found them hard and scarcely eatable. Towls were very 

 scarce ; and fruit was reduced to one of the poorest kinds 

 of banana, The natives (during the wet season at least) 

 live exclusively on rice, as the poorer Irish do on potatoes. 

 A pot of rice cooked very dry and eaten with salt and 

 red peppers, twice a day, forms their entire food during a 

 large part of the year. This is no sign of poverty, but m 

 simply custom; for their wives and children are loaded 

 with silver armlets from wrist to elbow, and carry dozens 

 of silver coins strung round their necks or suspended from 

 their ears. 



As I had moved away from Palemhang, I had found the 

 Malay spoken by the common people less and less pure, 

 ^iU at length it became quite unintelligible, although the 

 continual recurrence of many well-known words assured 



