the patient as he sat up inside his mosquito curtain. Another brief pause, and the
Pawang betook himself once more to the filling of the tray. Taking a large bowl
of parched rice, he scooped up the rice in his hands, and let it run through his
fingers into the tray, until there was a layer of parched rice in the latter of at least
an inch in depth, and then deposited the egg, already alluded to, in the very
centre of the parched rice. Next he took a comb of bananas (presented by one of
the company), and cutting them off one by one deposited them in a dish, from
which they were presently transferred to the tray. The Pawang now returned to
the patient, and kneeling down in front of him, fumigated his hands in the smoke
of the censer, and then, muttering a charm, wrapped the smaller piece of yellow
cloth turban-wise round his own head, and slowly and carefully pushed the
yellow-robed patient (who was still in a sitting posture) forward until he reached
a spot which was exactly under the centre of the tray, and which faced, I was
told, the “place of the Rising Sun.”
The long straw-coloured streamers of the tray-fringe dropped gracefully around
the patient on every side, and had it not been for occasional bright glimpses of
the yellow cloth he would have been almost invisible.
The censer, voluming upwards its ash-gray smoke, was now passed from hand to
hand three times round the patient, and finally deposited on the floor at his feet.
The loading of the tray now recommenced, and the Pawang standing up and
looking towards the south, deposited in it carefully the several portions of
“cooked” offerings (the sum of the various portions making up a whole fowl).
Then, after washing his hands, he added to the tray small portions of rice
variously prepared and coloured (viz. parched and washed rice, and rice stained
yellow (saffron), green, red, blue, and black, seven kinds in all). Next he
deposited in the tray the uncooked portions, whose sum also amounted to a
whole fowl, then, after a further hand-washing, the “cakes,” and finally, after a
last washing, he fastened to the “suspenders”^126 of the tray the small ornamental
rice-bags called kĕtupat and lĕpat.^127
But the list of creature comforts provided for the spirits comprised other things
besides food. Five miniature water-buckets, each manufactured from a strip of
banana leaf skewered together at each end with a bamboo pin, were now filled,
the alternate corner ones with water and cane-juice (called “palm-toddy” in the
Spirit Language), and the central one with the blood of the fowls killed for the