Page:Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje - The Achehnese - tr. Arthur Warren Swete O'Sullivan (1906).djvu/70

 posed of either three or (as in the plate) five rueuëngs or divisions between the main rafters. In the first case the number of pillars supporting the main body of the house is 16, in the second 24. To form an idea of a house of three rueuëngs it is only necessary to cut off from that depicted in the plate all that lies to one side or the other of the central passage (rambat).

It has further to be noted that the back verandah (sramòë likōt) sometimes also serves as kitchen, and in that case the extension of the house for this purpose as shown in our plate is omitted. The gable-ends always face East and West, so that the main door and the steps leading up to it must have a northerly or southerly aspect.

Further additions are often made to the house on its East or West side, when the family is enlarged by the marriage of a daughter. These are as regards their floor-level (aleuë) tached on as annexes to the back verandah. Some new posts are set up along the side of the verandah to support an auxiliary roof, the inner edge of which projects from the edge of the main roof. Parents who are not wealthy enough to build for their daughters a separate house close by, retire, as far as their private life is concerned, into the temporary building we have just described (anjōng) and leave the inside room (jurèë) to the young married couple.

We shall now make a survey of the Achehnese house and its belongings, not with the object of giving a full description of its subordinate parts (which may be found in the plate), or a complete inventory of all its equipment, but to show the part played by the various portions of the house in the lives of its inmates.

Round about each dwelling is a court-yard, generally supplied with the necessary fruit-trees etc. and sometimes cultivated so as to deserve the name of a garden (lampōïh). Regular gardens, in which are planted sugarcane, betelnuts, cocoanuts etc., are sometimes to be found in this enclosure, sometimes in other parts of the gampōng. The courtyard is surrounded by a strong fence (pageuë) through which a door leads out on to the narrow gampōng-path (jurōng); this in its turn leads