was a fine patch of forest, through which the road passed, overshadowed
by magnificent trees, which partly tempted me to stay; but after a
fortnight I could find no good place for insects, and very few birds
different from the common species of Malacca. I therefore moved on
another stage to Lobo Raman, where the guard-house is situated quite by
itself in the forest, nearly a mile from each of three villages. This
was very agreeable to me, as I could move about without having every
motion watched by crowds of men, women and children, and I had also
a much greater variety of walks to each of the villages and the
plantations around them.
The villages of the Sumatran Malays are somewhat peculiar and very
picturesque. A space of some acres is surrounded with a high fence, and
over this area the houses are thickly strewn without the least attempt
at regularity. Tall cocoa-nut trees grow abundantly between them, and
the ground is bare and smooth with the trampling of many feet. The
houses are raised about six feet on posts, the best being entirely
built of planks, others of bamboo. The former are always more or less
ornamented with carving and have high-pitched roofs and overhanging
eaves. The gable ends and all the chief posts and beams are sometimes
covered with exceedingly tasteful carved work, and this is still more
the case in the district of Menangkabo, further west. The floor is made
of split bamboo, and is rather shaky, and there is no sign of anything
we should call furniture. There are no benches or chairs or stools, but
merely the level floor covered with mats, on which the inmates sit or
lie. The aspect of the village itself is very neat, the ground being
often swept before the chief houses; but very bad odours abound, owing
to there being under every house a stinking mud-hole, formed by all
waste liquids and refuse matter, poured down through the floor above. In
most other things Malays are tolerably clean--in some scrupulously so;
and this peculiar and nasty custom, which is almost universal, arises,
I have little doubt, from their having been originally a maritime and
water-loving people, who built their houses on posts in the water, and
only migrated gradually inland, first up the rivers and streams, and
then into the dry interior. Habits which were at once so convenient and
so cleanly, and which had been so long practised as to become a portion
of the domestic life of the nation, were of course continued when the
first settlers built their houses inland; and without a regular system
of drainage, the arrangement of the villages is such that any other
system would be very inconvenient.
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