United States or Lithuania ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Waterhouse returned from Banting, he said, "I cannot but admire the patience with which Mr. Chambers talks all day, morning, noon, and night, to every party of Dyaks, who march into the house whenever they like, making it quite their home: it is what very few people could do day after day." This is the trial of Dyak teaching. You cannot appoint specific hours for instruction.
Large trees stretch out their arms across the stream, and the steep, earthy banks are clothed with ferns and zingiberaceous plants. Early in the afternoon we arrived at Tabókan, the first village of the Hill Dyaks.
For an instant the Dyaks attempted to hold their own, but in the face of the snarling, rending horde that engulfed them terror got the better of them all, so that those who were not overcome dived overboard and swam rapidly toward shore.
"The case stands thus: Seriff Sahib, quite frightened at Sadong since last year, enraged likewise at his loss of power and his incapability of doing mischief, collected all the Sakarran Dyaks, and was joined by many of the Dyaks of Sarebus and some Balows. He likewise had a good many Malays, and bullied every one in his vicinity.
It requires great patience and forbearance to educate natives up to a rule of justice and righteous laws; but that it may be done, and carry the co-operation of the people themselves, is evident at Sarawak, where the Malays and Dyaks are associated in the Government, and have always stood by their English rajah, even when it was necessary to punish or exile some of their own chiefs.
The Dyaks thought it a grand thing to be able to bring home a human head to hang up as an ornament in their house. The man who succeeded in securing a human head was looked upon as a great warrior, and so very often the young braves would make an expedition against some tribe simply because they wanted to bring home the ghastly trophy of a human head.
The method of fishing pursued by the Dyaks of Borneo is quite as curious, in its way, as their manner of catching crocodiles. Instead of netting the fish, or catching them with hook and line, they asphyxiate them, using for the purpose a poison obtained from the tuba root, known to scientists as Cocculus indicus.
The following day we went to other ground for deer; but the Dyaks had now enjoyed peace so long that the whole country was in a state of cultivation; and after scrambling over tracts of wild-looking country, in which Mr. Brooke, two years before, had seen the deer in hundreds, we returned to our boats, and down the river to Sarawak. We now began to prepare in earnest for work of another sort.
One morning in Singapore, as I sipped my tea and broke open one cool, delicious mangosteen after another, I was reading in the daily Straits Times an account of the descent of a band of head-hunting Dyaks from the jungles of the Rejang River in Borneo on an isolated fishing kampong, or village, of how they killed men, women, and children, and carried their heads back to their strongholds in triumph, and of how, in the midst of their feasting and ceremonies, Rajah Brooke, with a little company of fierce native soldiery, had surprised and exterminated them to the last man; and just then the sound of heavy cannonading in the harbor below caused me to drop my paper.
Word Of The Day