110 
KINA BALU. 
near the country where the small-pox devil came from, which they explained by bringing 
forward those that were marked, so that I might see this devil’s work. 
On building a new house, to insure the inmates from devils and bad luck, a long 
ceremony is held over a pig. This animal is tied down and a rice tray is placed over it 
to keep off the sun; the priestesses and the female occupants of the new house stand in 
front of the pig with the household bunches of charms and coconut-shells filled with water, 
with which the pig is sprinkled: after nearly an hour’s incantation, accompanied by the 
klicking of small flat pieces of metal held by the women in their hands, the pig is taken by 
the men into the new house and there killed, and afterwards forms part of the evening’s 
feast. 
Children are betrothed when very young and of about the same age; their parents 
seem to arrange all for them. The marriage ceremony is somewhat complicated to 
European ideas. When the young people have arrived at a marriageable age, the parents 
of the bridegroom visit the bride’s family dressed in their best, bringing with them a 
buffalo and a brass gong—but I have known only a gong given. This is the “ berrihan,” 
or payment for the wife ; the parents then return to their own home. The following day 
the bride pays a visit to her future husband’s house, but the young people do not converse; 
the next day she returns to her home : in a few days she again pays a visit, this time 
attended by two of her girl friends, dressed in their holiday clothes ; in the evening there 
is a feast of buffalo-meat and “ arrak.” The night and, in some tribes, the next two days 
and nights are spent in dancing; but the Melangkap brides return home the next 
morning, where they remain for five days, after which the ceremony is over, and the happy 
pah - considered man and wife. 
A man marries into his wife’s household, she not leaving her father’s house ; thus, by 
this arrangement, the man’s labour goes to enrich his wife’s family: this is the old 
patriarchal system. In Melangkap some of the women were married to men who belonged 
to villages a few miles distant, in which case, when the men owned paddi-fields in their 
own districts, they worked there during the busy season separated from their wives. Thus 
a father of several daughters always has sufficient labourers for his household, while sons, 
if they are not possessors of land, leave their own family and join that of their wife. The 
father-in-law has great power over his son-in-law, as the following anecdote will show. A 
Melangkap youth, who was married to a girl living just below the house we occupied, got 
intoxicated—a not unusual occurrence amongst Dusun youth. He came out of his wife’s 
house armed with a spear and the usual small chopper carried by all Dusuns, and 
challenged all the world to come out and fight. As no one seemed anxious to accept the 
challenge, he vented his drunken rage on the neighbouring coconut-trees, one of which he 
spoilt; after this he was disarmed and taken home and kept there until sober. The next 
morning his father-in-law called a meeting of some of the elders of the tribe ; this meeting 
decided that unless the youth paid a fine of a calf and a pig to his father-in-law, he should 
not be received again into that house. The boy was unable to pay the fine, so the girl’s 
father divorced him, and he never entered his father-in-law’s house again. Shortly after 
this the boy left Melangkap, though his young wife had already one child by him. The 
lady herself was decidedly the “ belle ” of Melangkap, and named Kratas. She, I must 
