the case in the district of Menangkabo, further west. The floor is made of split
bamboo, and is rather shaky, and there is no sign of anything we should call
furniture. There are no benches or chairs or stools, but merely the level floor
covered with mats, on which the inmates sit or lie. The aspect of the village itself
is very neat, the ground being often swept before the chief houses; but very bad
odours abound, owing to there being under every house a stinking mud-hole,
formed by all waste liquids and refuse matter, poured down through the floor
above. In most other things Malays are tolerably clean—in some scrupulously
so; and this peculiar and nasty custom, which is almost universal, arises, I have
little doubt, from their having been originally a maritime and water-loving
people, who built their houses on posts in the water, and only migrated gradually
inland, first up the rivers and streams, and then into the dry interior. Habits
which were at once so convenient and so cleanly, and which had been so long
practised as to become a portion of the domestic life of the nation, were of
course continued when the first settlers built their houses inland; and without a
regular system of drainage, the arrangement of the villages is such that any other
system would be very inconvenient.
In all these Sumatran villages I found considerable difficulty in getting
anything to eat. It was not the season for vegetables, and when, after much
trouble, I managed to procure some yams of a curious variety, I found them hard
and scarcely eatable. Fowls were very scarce; and fruit was reduced to one of the
poorest kinds of banana. The natives (during the wet season at least) live
exclusively on rice, as the poorer Irish do on potatoes. A pot of rice cooked very
dry and eaten with salt and red peppers, twice a day, forms their entire food
during a large part of the year. This is no sign of poverty, but is simply custom;
for their wives and children are loaded with silver armlets from wrist to elbow,
and carry dozens of silver coins strung round their necks or suspended from their
ears.
As I had moved away from Palembang, I had found the Malay spoken by the
common people less and less pure, until at length it became quite unintelligible,
although the continual recurrence of many well-known words assured me it was
a form of Malay, and enabled me to guess at the main subject of conversation.
This district had a very bad reputation a few years ago, and travellers were
frequently robbed and murdered. Fights between village and village were also of
frequent occurrence, and many lives were lost, owing to disputes about
boundaries or intrigues with women. Now, however, since the country has been
divided into districts under "Controlleurs," who visit every village in turn to hear
complaints and settle disputes, such things are heard of no more. This is one of