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Updated: June 3, 2025
They are comparatively tall and slender, have less regular and pleasing features than the Klemantans, and their skin is generally darker and more ruddy in colour. Their agriculture is superior to that of the other peoples, but they are addicted to much drinking of rice-spirit. Their social organisation is very loose, their chiefs having but little authority.
For that reason the reaping of the seed-rice is done with knives of a peculiar pattern, such that the blades are hidden in the reapers' hands and do not frighten the rice-spirit till the very last moment, when her head is swept off almost before she is aware; and from a like delicate motive the reapers at work in the fields employ a special form of speech, which the rice-spirit cannot be expected to understand, so that she has no warning or inkling of what is going forward till the heads of rice are safely deposited in the basket.
In the evening of the following day the Madangs prepared a feast for all present, and afterwards a great deal of rice-spirit was drunk and some very good speeches made, former troubles and difficulties being explained and discussed in the most open manner.
That evening we reached a Kenyah village at Long Lawan, and as usual we were hospitably entertained with the fatted pig and brimming cups of rice-spirit. The weather was now brilliantly fine and the river of only normal swiftness, and we passed the night in a Kenyah house in the Akar. Here we spent two days awaiting the arrival of a party of Kayans from the upper Akar.
When all the rest of the rice in the field has been reaped, "the Mother of the Rice" is cut down and carried with due honour to the rice-barn, where it is laid on the floor, and all the other sheaves are piled upon it. The Tomori, we are told, regard the Mother of the Rice as a special offering made to the rice-spirit Omonga, who dwells in the moon.
The people of the high plateaux generally prefer rice spirit, and the Wárs of the southern slopes of the Khasi and Jaintia Hills customarily partake of it also. The Khasis of the western hills, e.g. of the Nongstoin Siemship, and the Lynngams, Bhois, Lalungs, and Hadems almost invariably drink rice-beer, but the Syntengs, like the Khasi uplanders, drink rice-spirit.
"Cheng Lin," said Wang Ho amiably, pouring out for the one whom he addressed a full measure of rice-spirit, "the duty that an obedient son owes even to a grasping and self-indulgent father has in the past been pressed to a too-conspicuous front, at the expense of the harmonious relation that should exist between a comfortably-positioned servant and a generous and broad-minded master.
If that does not drive the pests away, the Dyaks resort to what they deem a more effectual mode of accomplishing the same purpose. They make a clay crocodile as large as life and set it up in the fields, where they offer it food, rice-spirit, and cloth, and sacrifice a fowl and a pig before it.
In returning the whole party bathes in the river, and while they are in the water an old man waves over them some of the ISANG leaves with which the head has been decorated, wishing them health and long life. Every family kills a pig and roasts its flesh, brings out stores of rice-spirit, and prepares cakes of rice-flour.
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