FASCICULI MALA TENSES 
19 
collected m the Malay Peninsula together, it will not be necessary here to do 
more than point out that the flutes commonly manufactured and played on by 
the Semdn are mouth-flutes. I could not gain any evidence that this tribe 
makes use of nose-flutes. Bamboo ‘jews-harps/ very similar to those made 
by the Malays and Siamese, were also in use among the Semin, and I saw a 
regular fiddle in the course of construction in one of their camps. They told 
me that on the occasion of feasts and ‘spirit plays* they produced a loud noise 
by beating on recumbent tree trunks with bamboos, the latter being struck 
down vertically, so as to act as resonators. 
The only indigenous implements used in obtaining food, other than the 
weapons of the chase, consist of sticks used for digging up roots, and fashioned 
by roughly sharpening one end of a straight branch with a few strokes of a 
knife. So little are these digging-sticks regarded as objects worth preserving, 
that when the point get blunted, as it generally does after a few minutes’ use, 
the stick is broken across to make a new one. 
The same digging-sticks are also used in hunting the bamboo rat 
(Rbizomys), which is considered a great delicacy. In this case a smouldering 
fire of damp leaves is made, and the smoke is wafted into the holes at the roots 
of a clump of bamboos by means of palm leaves roughly stitched together with 
the stems of creepers to form small triangular fans. The rodents appear to 
be stupified by the smoke, and are easily dug out from their burrows. 
The camps of the Semdn resemble that described near Tanjang Luar, on 
the Jalor-Rhaman border, but the individual shelters are constructed with rather 
more care. The slanting screen is usually made of palm-thatch, formed by 
bending the leaflets down along one side of the mid-rib in each leaf, and then 
tying the mid-ribs to a framework of sticks in such a way that a wall of fairly 
water-tight material is formed. Other palm leaves are so arranged that they 
fall over the upper end of the screen and conduct rain-water beyond the edge 
of the bamboo platform below. To each shelter is attached a kitchen, formed 
of a log fire protected from the prevailing wind by a similar though smaller 
screen. When there are young children in the family, another structure of the 
same character, but provided with a bamboo platform, is often added also. 
In each case the thatch screen is supported in front by one or more branches 
slanting up to it from the ground (Plate IV, fig. 2). 
Unlike the Sakais of South Perak, the Sem&n, as already indicated, practice 
navigation on rafts, on which they are skilled in shooting the rapids that obstruct 
the watercourses of Upper Perak. These rafts are formed of half-a-dozen or 
more slender bamboos of about twelve feet long, lashed together with the stems 
of creepers. When women and children have to be transported, a few more 
