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Updated: May 26, 2025
One who has no first-hand knowledge of the Sumatran tribes finds it difficult to accept at their face value the accounts of the customs practised by the Bataks of Tapanuli, for example, who, when their relatives become too old and infirm to be of further use, give them a pious interment by eating them.
The sounds seem to me more like the mutterings of a volcano. Some new crater may have burst forth in the Sumatran ranges. This thick darkness inclines me to think so especially after the new activity of volcanic action we have seen so recently at Krakatoa. Let me try your matches, Nigel, perhaps they have escaped mine are useless." But Nigel's matches were as wet as those of the hermit.
The hothouse atmosphere of Padang is gladly exchanged for the freshness of the mountain heights, approached by a cog-wheel railway, and affording truer pictures of Sumatran life than the hybrid port of the steaming Lowlands.
When all the bundles are thoroughly dried, they are placed in the granary, and from that time on the handling of the rice is given over to the women. It is worthy of note, however, that the granaries of some Sumatran groups are of similar design and construction.
We conclude our sketch with the Anoa, which belongs to Celebes a small species bearing some resemblance to the antelopes; and the Banting or Sumatran Ox, a native of Java, Borneo, and also, as its second name denotes, of the Island of Sumatra.
The story current among the best informed Malays of this region is that a Sumatran chief with a large retinue crossed to Malacca in the twelfth century, and went into the interior, which he found inhabited only by the Jakuns, or "tree people."
The term asu is that generally employed by the Javanese, from whose country possibly the dog may have been introduced into Borneo. In Brunai, dogs are called kuyok, a term said to be of Sumatran origin. On the North and East there are large herds of wild cattle said to belong to two species, Bos Banteng and Bos Gaurus or Bos Sondaicus.
The singular protuberances have a complete resemblance to the "bosses" which were worn on the shields and breast-plates of warriors of the olden time. A second species, the Warak, which inhabits Java, is somewhat similarly accoutred; but the third Asiatic kind, the Sumatran rhinoceros, has a smoother skin, more resembling that of the African rhinoceros.
No consideration will induce a Sumatran to catch or wound a tiger except in self-defence or immediately after a tiger has destroyed a friend or relation. When a European has set traps for tigers, the people of the neighbourhood have been known to go by night to the place and explain to the animals that the traps are not set by them nor with their consent.
The Fair of Paja-Kombo is a treasury of native Art in most delicate filigree, silver-threaded cloth, baskets or fans of scented grass, and the heavy jewellery of burnished brass which copies the designs of the many golden heirlooms treasured by Sumatran womanhood.
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