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Updated: May 21, 2025
Preceded by these youths, whose unsteady gait and sleepy faces afforded our Malay guides no small amusement, we cautiously crept along the ruai, passing at every ten paces or so enormous holes in the bamboo flooring occasioned by rot, and a fall through which would have precipitated us into the mud and filth thirty feet below.
On the occasion of one of these feasts, the "ruai" is gaily decorated with green boughs, palm leaves, &c., and the heads to be feasted are taken out and hung from one of the posts in the hall. An incessant beating of gongs, drums, &c., is kept up unceasingly for four days and nights, and war-dances performed by the warriors of the tribe.
The Resident's entry was hardly a dignified one, as he had to clamber up the pole and into the building on all fours, drawing his body through the small aperture hardly three feet square, which formed the entry of the house. Once in the "ruai," however, great preparations were made by the inmates for his welcome.
Shaking hands with him, an operation which he performed half unconsciously, we took our departure and left this merry old gentleman to his slumbers. Our guides now showed the way into one of the smaller rooms leading out of the ruai, and occupied by Mrs. Lat and her two fair daughters. These were the fairest natives I ever saw in Borneo, being of a light yellow complexion, not unlike the Chinese.
The overpowering stench arising from stale arrack, &c., was well-nigh sickening, while, to complete the unsavoury coup a'oeil, a bunch of human heads, their mouths stuffed with rice, grinned at us from the end post of the ruai, whence their owners had not yet sufficiently recovered from their orgies to remove them.
On re-seating ourselves in the ruai, L. happened to notice the intricate and really beautiful tattooing on the body of one of the younger men. Strange to say neither L.'s punctures nor mine showed the slightest signs of inflammation afterwards, and the figures are far more distinct than they would be had Indian ink or gunpowder been employed.
This pole can be drawn into the house on occasion, thus cutting off all communication with the outside. Each of these compartments has a door of its own leading into the "ruai," and these are taxed by Government at 1 dol. a door.
Proceeding along the ruai, we followed our cicerone into one of the little doors at the end, leading into one of the small compartments of the married people, but a pair of bare legs escaping through the side door into the adjoining "box," warned us that the fair occupant was evidently not at home to us!
They were very ugly, and their teeth stained a jet black. The mode of burial practised by the Kayans is a curious one, and I here give it in the words of an eye-witness: When a man dies, his friends and relatives meet in the "ruai," and take their usual seats.
He wore a dirty waistcloth which had once been white, his only adornment being a short red flannel jacket, fastened with three old buttons of the 34th Regiment of the time of George III.; how they ever got there is, and ever has been, a mystery to me. "Lat" was sitting or rather lying in a three-sided wooden box or alcove, about ten feet square, built upon the centre of the ruai.
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