meat, with sufficient water and a little salt, into a newly-cut bamboo.
The mouth is then stopped up with leaves, and the bamboo is placed over
the fire, resting on a stone at an angle of forty-five degrees or more.
By the time the bamboo is thoroughly charred, the contents are
sufficiently cooked, and it is taken from the fire and emptied out into
a plate. Sometimes rice is cooked in bamboos, and when it is ready to be
eaten, the bamboo is split and torn off in strips, and the rice is found
well cooked inside--a stiff mass moulded in the form of the bamboo.

When the food is ready and put out in plates, the men are asked to come
into the room and eat. Sometimes the women eat with the men; but if
there are too many to eat comfortably at one sitting, the men have their
meal first, and the women eat with the children after the men have done.

The Dyaks all sit on the floor, which also serves as their table. They
have their rice on plates, or sometimes upon clean leaves. They eat with
their fingers, dipping the hand when necessary into the common stock of
salt or common dish of meat or vegetables. They eat with the right hand,
compressing the rice into portions of convenient size.

When the meal is over, they wash the crockery and put it away. The mats
are swept and taken up, and the refuse thrown through the open floor
for the pigs and poultry under the house to eat.

The floor of the Dyak house is clean enough because all the dirt falls
through on to the ground underneath; consequently this is covered with
rubbish, and perpetually wet from the water thrown down from the floor
above, and, being the favourite resort of the pigs and fowls of the long
Dyak house, often smells horribly.

CHAPTER IV

DYAK BABIES AND CHILDREN

A Dyak baby is much like any other baby in being a little helpless human
thing that spends most of his time in sleeping and feeding, worrying its
mother with its constant wants, but yet loved greatly by her, and as it
grows up, making its parents proud of it, and amusing them by its
cunning little ways. Its colour varies from a light brown with a tinge
of yellow to a dark chocolate, and it wears no clothing at all until it
is five or six years old.

Until a civilised government interfered to prevent such cruel murders,
there used to be a custom among the Dyaks that if the mother died when
her child was born, the poor babe should pay the penalty and be buried
with the mother. The reasons gi