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Updated: May 26, 2025
The principal of these Sumatran languages are the Botta, the Rejang, and the Lampong, whose difference is marked not so much by the want of correspondence in the terms as by the circumstance of their being expressed in distinct and peculiar written characters.
Beyond this point of view lies the green plain of beautiful Fort de Kock, the gem of the Sumatran Highlands, to be numbered henceforth among those ideal scenes which remain permanently photographed on mind and memory.
These people are a race of Sumatran Malays, and members of their tribe have been mercenaries and hired bravos in the Peninsula, beyond the memory of man. They came to Che’ Jahya, they said, to offer their services to him; and, in their coming, he saw the first evidence of that authority over men and things, of which he had sat dreaming through the hot hours of the day.
The rokos are carried in the betel-box, or more commonly under the destar or handkerchief which, in imitation of a turband, surrounds the head. Much tobacco is likewise imported from China and sells at a high price. It seems to possess a greater pungency than the Sumatran plant, which the people cultivate for their own use in the interior parts of the island.
I never observed a Sumatran to fire a shot at a bird, though many of them, as well as the more eastern people, have a remarkably fine aim; but the mode of letting off the matchlocks, which are the pieces most habitual to them, precludes the possibility of shooting flying.
The determined aspect of the Sumatran people denotes the superior calibre of the ancestral stock which colonised the Archipelago, for foreign intercourse, which elsewhere modified national character, scarcely affected the Sumatran Malays, independent of the servile yoke imposed by the mighty princes of Java.
And the more recent opportunity of comparing a living Sumatran elephant with one from Bengal, has served to establish other though minor points of divergence.
The existence of the Sumatran ourang in Borneo is by no means impossible; and I have already compared so many of the native statements, that I place more confidence in them than I did formerly, more especially as their account is in a great measure borne out by the skulls in my possession.
They next wash it in cold water and then proceed to boil it in the manner before described. As an article of trade the Sumatran rice seems to be of a more perishable nature than that of some other countries, the upland rice not being expected to keep longer than twelve months, and the lowland showing signs of decay after six.
Native chronicles record the descent of Sumatran princes from Alexander the Great, but though the pages of Javanese history are comparatively legible, those of Sumatra, designated in early days as "the older Java," resemble a dim palimpsest, marred by erasure or hiatus, and barely decipherable beneath the lettering on the surface of the age-worn parchment.
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