Page:Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje - The Achehnese - tr. Arthur Warren Swete O'Sullivan (1906).djvu/179

 their view. When their caprices could no longer be patiently submitted to, it not unfrequently happened that they were secretly put out of the way by the people whom they had outraged.

It is thus not surprising that the traditional reverence of the people for the rajas and their race expressed itself in a somewhat peculiar manner, finding vent in words and empty forms rather than in deeds.



Examined closely, the power of the later sultans appears to have been actually confined to the limits of the Dalam, though the superficial observer might draw another conclusion from the persistent survival of a different mode of address and of certain forms which really never had any substantial meaning. It was not only the powerful ulèëbalangs