692 A VISIT TO THE MOUNTAINEERS, DO DONGO, 
death feast commences they kill a buffalo, throw it down outside the 
kampong, make a fence round it, and leave the dead animal thus 
until the feast is about to be finished, when, as a conclusion, the as¬ 
sistants devour the buffalo even although it is completely putrified. 
It remains for me to say a few words upon the religion of these peo¬ 
ple, if religion there is amongst them. 
From all that I have observed and learned the Orang Dongo 
know nothing of God, of a superior being, creator and preserver of 
the world. They are not even acquainted with spirits good or bad, 
intermediatory between men and the genius, good and bad, of the 
world. Their ideas on this head are so thoroughly steeped in ma¬ 
terialism that they attribute all supernatural or incomprehensible 
force to real objects, such as, for example, to the sun, the moon, 
the sea, trees, volcanos, and above all to stones. This perhaps 
arises from the circumstance that the whole of their country is 
nothing more than a mass of stones and rocks. The Orang Dongo 
are then true partisans of fetichism, as were probably all the inha¬ 
bitants of the Indian Archipelago in times more or less remote.* It 
is above all in the stones that they seem to have most confidence. 
In case of accident, or disease they address themselves te stones, 
they carry offerings to certain amongst them, all this to implore the 
favor and assistance of their genius, named Dtfwd by the Orang 
Dongo. There is still more. In front of each house there are some 
large stones, flat and very smooth, which serve for tutelary stones 
to the inhabitants and at the same time as places where they do 
their needs! each time the stone has served the last purpose, it is 
carefully cleaned! 
The Orang Dongo have one great feast annually. It is called 
Roujd, and commences the first new moon after the rice season. 
Some days previously they collect all the dogs and tie them up to 
make them very hungry. The first day of the feast being come, 
every one quits the villages, not a single person remaining, all goto 
the mountains where they amuse themselves with the chace and do¬ 
ing nothing, singing and shouting. They must not avail themselves 
of fire arms; this would bring ill luck to the hunt. Every thing 
living, deer, wild pigs, monkeys, birds, serpents &c. is devoured! 
The women occupy themselves in the meantime in cooking and 
twisting threads of cotton bought in the plain and which are the 
ends of threads which each piece of cloth has at its extremities. 
* Sec ante vol. I. p. 28 : 2 - 
