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After packing my collections I again set out for Sampit with the intention of revisiting Sembulo by another route, proceeding by prahu up the Kuala Sampit as far as possible, and then marching overland to the lake. The controleur was absent, but his native clerk and the kapala together got me the prahus and the men, such as the place afforded.
In Bandjermasin prominent Mohammedans, one of them a Malay Hadji, told me that the Malays also practise incision instead of circumcision. The Malays, moreover, perform an operation on small girls, which the Dayaks do not. The controleur invited me to take part in a banquet which he gave to celebrate the completion of a road. There were present Malay officials, also Chinamen, and one Japanese.
The contrôleur is an official more especially connected with the Government plantations, and the regulation of the industrial relations between the planters and the peasants, or coolies, is an important duty which he fulfils. The Regent is the head of the native officials, but of course inferior in authority to the Resident, whom he calls his "Elder Brother."
It soon became evident that no information could be gained from these people in regard to the traditions of the place. In order to get relief from the increasing throng of men and boys, I went for a walk, in which I was joined by the kapala and the mantri, a small native police authority whom the controleur had sent with me to be of assistance in making arrangements with the Malays.
In the Outposts they at once come face to face with innumerable difficulties and responsibilities, for the controleur is responsible, though within narrower limits than the resident, for everything: justice, police, agriculture, education, public works, the protection of the natives, and the requirements of the settlers in such matters as labor and irrigation.
The contrôleur looked very scandalized, and said it was abominable that the house should be given up to such tumult and disorder.
I expressed a desire to see the royal crown, for I had noticed that the pictures of former sultans, which I had seen in the throne-room, showed them wearing crowns of a peculiar design, strikingly similar to those worn by the Emperors of Abyssinia. My request resulted in a whispered colloquy between the Resident, the Controleur, the Regent and the young Sultan.
At length the oil-lamps of Chanac flashed brightly in the hollow below, and not long afterwards I was sitting at a table in an upper room of a comfortable old inn, the lower part of which was filled with roisterers, for it was Sunday night. I dined with a Government functionary an inland revenue contrôleur, who happened to be a Frenchman of the reserved and solemn sort that cultivates dignity.
It was comparatively a small affair. About a month later, when I stopped at Buntok, on the Barito, the controleur of the district told me that an unusually great tiwah feast had just been concluded in the neighbourhood. He had spent ten days there, the Dayaks having erected a house for him to stay in. More than two hundred pigs and nineteen water-buffaloes had been killed.
In 1880 Controleur Michielsen saw thirty blangas in one house on the Upper Katingan, among them several that in his estimation were priceless. Over them hung forty gongs, of which the biggest, unquestionably, had a diameter of one metre.
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