Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 34.djvu/261

Rh gongs tuned to different keys, and wooden drums. The next entertainment was given by a party of some twenty men and women performing an incantation over some medicine which was to be administered to the chief. "They all held palm-branches in their hands, which they waved in graceful unison and in perfect time to the melodious cadence of their voices. The women sang one line, and the men took up the solemn refrain in a sort of Gregorian chant. They danced gracefully, holding each other's hands, in a ring around the mysterious object of their charms; both the dancing and singing are continued until the sorcerer declares that the spell has been worked over the medicine. It should be stated that the Tamhanuahs declare that after death their souls find rest in peace on the top of the great mountain Kinabalu, as their forefathers believed before them." A curious mausoleum was visited at Imbok. It was built of solid bilian-wood, a material of long-lasting qualities, and the ends of the prettily ornamented and fluted posts and beams were carved into grotesque heads of animals. It contained some thirty or forty bodies, and was surrounded by fruit-trees.

At Pemengah, where a police station was established, many of the traders were found living and keeping their stores in houses built upon large bamboo rafts, called lanteens, which were made fast to the banks by rattans. The people at one of the villages near this place had never seen a white man before, and when Mr. Daly first arrived the women and children ran away and hid themselves in one of the back rooms, and the men looked "nervously suspicious." They examined his arms and chest, and were very merry at the idea of his skin being white, "which they seemed to think an absurd freak of nature. . . . They all smoke from morning till night, and out of pipes that have brass mouth-pieces and large bowls, such as are used by the Dusum tribes of the west coast. The tobacco is grown by themselves, and retains a green color by their process of fermentation. . . . They have not yet learned the use of guns or of gunpowder. They had not previously seen a double-barreled breech-loader, and when I opened mine to put in a cartridge, they exclaimed, 'Oh, it is broken!' I brought down a few of the swifts that build the edible bird's-nests, and found them to be very small, and to have a patch of white on the back and tail. The men wear only the loin-cloth; the women have but one garment, viz., a short petticoat, which is kept up around the waist by coils of brass wire; the young girls have, as an addition, coils of brass wire from the ankle half-way up to the knee. The cloth is woven from the thread made from the cotton-trees, kapok, that grow luxuriantly around their houses, and the women use the same kind of spindle for making thread as is common among the Dusums of the west coast, holding the cotton