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Across the rice-plain of Agam, dotted with brown kotas, crowned by myriads of interweaving horns, we reach the scattered village of Paja-Kombo, shadowed by dense woods of cocoanut palms, and famed for one of the most picturesque native markets in the East. The women of Paja-Kombo are noted for their beauty, enhanced by the splendour of many-coloured sarongs, gleaming with gold and silver thread.
The usual payment appears to be twelve ringits or twelve sarongs, which the blian at the wedding places on top of his head, while with his right hand he shakes two metal rings provided with rattles. On the Barito I noted the same kind of rattles used on a similar occasion. He asks Dewa not to make them ill, and a hen as well as boiled rice is sacrificed to this antobu.
Almayer in her savage moods, when excited by the reminiscences of the piratical period of her life, had torn off the curtains to make sarongs for the slave-girls, and had burnt the showy furniture piecemeal to cook the family rice. But Almayer was not thinking of his furniture now.
The two men wore short sarongs around their loins, the women's dress, though somewhat shorter; otherwise they were nude except for bands, to which numerous small metal rattles were attached, running over either shoulder and diagonally across chest and back. After a preliminary trial, during which one of them danced with much elan, he said: "I felt a spirit come down in my body. This will go well."
On the day set for a tiger-baiting the aloun-aloun is jammed with spectators, their gorgeous sarongs and head-kains of batik forming a sea of color, while from a pavilion erected for the purpose the Sultan, surrounded by his glittering household and a selection of his favorite wives, views the dangerous sport in safety.
Silk sârongs, in close imitation of those woven in Pahang and Kĕlantan, are made cheap, and sold as the genuine articles. Bales of the white turban cloths, flecked with gold thread, which are so much worn by men who have returned from the Haj, are annually exported to Mecca, where they are sold, as articles of real Arabic manufacture, to the confiding pilgrims.
The majority of the Javanese natives are employed in the cultivation of rice; in work on plantations, sugar, coffee, cinchona, and tea; and in various lesser industries, such as the making of mats and weaving of sarongs.
A short time ago the reigning prince, who does not appear to be a cypher, came with a great train of followers, some of them only wearing sarongs, a grandson, to whom he is much attached, and the deposed Sultan's two boys, of whom I told you before. They are in Malay clothing, and seem to have lost their vivacity, or at least it is in abeyance.
Beside these, matting is made from rushes and from the cane imported from Palembang, in Sumatra; while for the walls of the houses a heavy matting of bamboo strips is used. The weaving of sarongs is practised by the women all over Java, and the cooking and household utensils, made both in copper and earthenware, indicate by their forms a considerable taste.
You wouldn't believe the troops that came pouring out of those few huts the women in loose trousers pretty much like the men's, but with arms bare and loose sarongs flung over their right shoulders, the children with no more clothes than a pocket-handkerchief apiece.
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