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Updated: May 10, 2025
This is the time generally chosen by them for long excursions into the jungle in search of rattans, rubber, camphor, and for warlike expeditions or the paying of distant visits. It is the duty of the women to prevent the PADI being choked by weeds.
Nothing, apparently, can stamp out the instinct which prompts high and low, rich and poor, to take possession of any property belonging to someone else whenever the opportunity offers. Men with flocks and herds, and pâdi swamps, and fruit orchards, steal if they get the chance just as much as does the indigent peasant who has sold his last child into slavery for three dollars in cash.
After the pros and cons have been fully discussed, the chief names the day for the beginning of the clearing operations. At the beginning of the sowing the house is again subject to MALAN for one day. During the growth of the PADI various charms and superstitious practices are brought into use to promote its growth and health, and to keep the pests from it.
In wet weather such a foot-way is a necessity, because pigs, fowls, and dogs, and in some cases goats, run freely beneath and around the house, and churn the surface of the ground into a thick layer of slippery mire. Here and there along the front of the house are open platforms raised to the level of the floor, on which the PADI is exposed to the sun to be dried before being husked.
One has been accustomed to see him with his neck bowed to the yoke he hates, and breaks whenever the opportunity offers; or else in the pâdi fields. In the former case he looks out of place, an anachronism belonging to a prehistoric period, drawing a cart which seems also to date back to the days before the Deluge.
Although in a year of good PADI harvest each family constantly renews its supply of BORAK, yet the spirit is never drunk in private, but only on festive occasions of the kind described above, or when a man entertains a small party of friends in his own chamber.
The supposition that the Kayans represent a part of such a population, which was driven on by the pressure of Malays to seek a new country in which to practise its extravagant system of PADI culture, is in harmony with the probability as to the date of their immigration to the southern rivers of Borneo; for the rise and expansion of the Menangkabau Malays began in the middle of the twelfth century A.D.; and the Kayans may well have entered Borneo some 700 years ago.
In the Polynesian language araea, the "red earth" of the tale, is the same as vari, and in Indonesia there were the words fare or pare, in Malay padi or peri, and in Malagasy vari, all meaning rice. A Rarotongan legend relates that in Hawaiki two new fruits were found, and the vari discarded. These fruits were the breadfruit and the horse-chestnut, neither of which is a native of Polynesia.
And every now and again athwart the green carpet, stretched out below, glittered belts of water sparkling like silver in the sun. The hills, which were also all planted with padi, looked like grassy slopes with a back-ground formed by terraces of hill-tops. One above the other they lay in ranges, until, in the furthest distance, mountains of noble height towered like giants above them all.
Among the principal boys' games the following deserve mention: Spinning of peg-tops of hard wood, usually thrown overhand, but sometimes underhand, in a manner very similar to that of English boys, each boy in turn striving to strike the tops of the others with his own; this game is played about the time of PADI harvest. Simple kites are flown.
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