Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
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 stink-
ing 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 in-
to 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 sys-
tem of drainage, the arrangement of the villages is such, that any other system would be
very inconvenient.
Chief's house and rice shed in a Sumatran village
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;
