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Noa was not angry at the Prince, rather he was proud of his notice, but a sinister light burned in his eyes as he saw the flushed face and drooping head of the girl. And once the Prince passed by the punghulo's home on his way into the jungle in search of a tiger, and inquired for his daughter.
Our servants at once set about preparing supper before the fire, while we for politeness' sake compounded a mouthful of betel-nut and syrah leaf from the punghulo's state box. The next morning we set out for our twenty miles' tramp, along a narrow jungle path, accompanied by some ten natives of the village whom my companion had retained to cut a path for us up the mountain.
As soon as we shook hands ceremoniously with the punghulo's oldest wife, and tabeked to the rest of his big family, the old man scrambled down the ladder, and sent a boy up a cocoanut tree for some fresh nuts. In a moment half a dozen of the great, oval, green nuts came pounding down into the sand.
There must have been the representatives of at least four generations under the punghulo's hospitable roof. Men and women, alike, were dressed in the skirt-like sarong which fell from the waist down; above that some of the older women wore another garment called a kabaya. The married women were easily distinguishable by their swollen gums and filed teeth.
From the limbs of the trees hung the seed pods, two feet in length, sharp-pointed at the lower end, while on the upper end, next to the tree, was a russet pear-shaped growth. They are so nicely balanced that when in their maturity they drop from the branches, they fall upright in the mud, literally planting themselves. The punghulo's house, or bungalow, stood at the head of the inlet.
Her soft brown eyes glowed with excitement, and she edged away from the punghulo's side until she stood close up in front, so near that she could almost touch the sarong of the Tuan Hakim as he read.
The open places left by the crossing of the bamboo slats were a great convenience to the punghulo's wives, as they could sweep all the refuse of the house through them; they might also be a great accommodation to the punghulo's enemies, if he had any, for they could easily ascertain the exact mat on which he slept, and stab him with their keen krises from beneath.
The cocoanut of commerce contains hardly a suggestion of the tender, fleshy pulp of a freshly picked nut. We left the punghulo's house with the old chief in the bow of our boat he insisted upon seeing that we were properly announced to his subjects and proceeded along the coast for half a mile, and then up a swampy lagoon to its head.
In one corner of the room was the hand-loom on which the punghulo's old wife was weaving the universal article of dress, the sarong. The weaving of a sarong represents the labor of twenty days, and when we gave the dried-up old worker two dollars and a half for one, her syrah-stained gums broke forth from between her bright-red lips in a ghastly grin of pleasure.
It took a dozen men to tie a rope to the serpent's tail, and pull it out. Busuk went everywhere astride the punghulo's broad shoulders as he collected the taxes and settled the disputes in the little village.
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