Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/247

Rh contain fireplaces—boxes filled with earth—and secret exits for escape in case of attack.

The language is difficult, but I have not found it poor in conceptions, and have met no formidable difficulties in translating the Gospels into it. It has no literature, and has only recently been written. Myths, parables, proverbs, riddles, the wisdom of ancestors, and the recitations at the dances, are all transmitted orally, and are thereby current in many versions.

The people are of childlike simplicity, careless, often sportive, dreadfully given to falsehood, and unconquerably averse to saving or making any provision for the future. Not even the desire of getting a wife, who has to be paid for, will induce a young man to save; he would rather borrow of a chief, and so put himself under obligations which are almost sure to be equivalent to servitude. The chief occupation of the Niha appears to be idling away the time. What little work is done with any regularity is chiefly performed by the women, who have to take care of the swine and look after the food.

While the special time for contracting loans is a month after the harvest, borrowing goes on all the year round. If the debtor can not pay at the maturity of his loan, the creditor acquires the right of making himself at home in his house, and demanding and receiving the best until he is paid. A similar privilege is accorded to guests, who are entertained with great show of hospitality, and are very apt to make the most of it, in complete indifference to the comfort and feelings of the family.

While the island is nominally under the rule of the Dutch, it is in fact under the control of a set of Liliputian chiefs, who are quite independent of one another, but have the most exalted idea of their magnificent importance. Their title, baleozoe, which may also be acquired by any one who gives a grand feast, is often adorned by some supplementary epithet, like "the foundation of the earth," "higher than the comb" (of a cock), "who is nothing else than fire," "who is always above," or "who is higher than the Malays." No real connection exists between the different clans. Head-hunting is very much in vogue in the interior; but in the northern part of the island an occasional bleached skull, suspended from a post, is the only reminder that it once existed. Severed heads, where the custom still prevails, must be had on a variety of occasions, as on the burial of a chief or the foundation of a house. One of the peaceful tribes whom I visited in company with Controller Mansveld, in January, 1877, complained of the losses they had suffered from a more warlike neighboring tribe. One local chief had lost twelve of his people in six months, another eleven, and another ten, including women and children; and another exclaimed that the tribe was in danger of