24 
AN EXPEDITION TO THE BAH COUNTRY. 
not only had he been on unfriendly terms with the 
Baram people, but also with the remainder of the 
border tribes, and the only occasion on which he had 
met them before was on the warpath. 
f' ' C H9 ' . 
The next day he and Tama Lawai, the Ivenyah 
chief, went through the ceremony of “ berpirit ” or 
blood-brotherhood. This ceremony consists in each man 
making a small cut on the upper arm of the other and 
taking a drop of blood therefrom ; this is put into a 
cigarette and smoked in turn by each, after which a 
fowl is killed as a sacrifice, and the gods are called 
upon to witness the fact that the two men are now to 
be looked upon as brothers, and that if in trouble must 
help one another, or in starvation share the last grain 
of rice, etc. After which gifts were exchanged, which 
consisted on the part of Tama Lawai of a spear, a 
white coat, and a pair of Chinese trousers. These latter 
caused much amusement, as Ballang Tawi, not under¬ 
standing the use of such things, put both his legs into 
one leg of the trousers and strutted about with the 
other leg waving in the wind behind him ! 
The next day we went and visited the neighbouring 
salt-spring from which the people of this village obtain 
their salt. After about an hour's walk, we came to a 
long building, everything of which was made of bamboo 
from the posts to the tiles. This was the salt factor}- 7 , 
and the sight which presented itself to our eyes on 
entering was fit for a Dante’s Inferno. Great long 
furnaces into which logs of wood twelve feet long were 
being thrust for fuel and on top of which were placed 
huge shallow iron cauldrons, and around these flitted 
and hovered half-naked attendants, whose long hair and 
wild appearance in the hot smokey atmosphere, all 
formed a “ toute ensemble ” absolutely savage and 
unearthly, and reminded one of the stokehole of a P. & 
O. liner in the Red Sea. On closer examination we 
found that the process consisted in baling the brine 
from the springs near by into the cooking pots ; whilst 
this was boiling the salt coagulated around the brims, 
from which it was scooped into bamboo vessels. The 
mouths of these latter when full were then stopped 
up and the whole thrust again into the furnace and 
after a few minutes withdrawn, when, the bamboo 
having been burnt off, the salt appeared hard and white 
