In all these Sumatran villages I found considerable difficulty in
getting anything to eat. It was not the season for vegetables, and when,
after much trouble, I managed to procure some yams of a curious variety,
I found them hard and scarcely eatable. Fowls were very scarce; and
fruit was reduced to one of the poorest kinds of banana. The natives
(during the wet season at least) live exclusively on rice, as the poorer
Irish do on potatoes. A pot of rice cooked very dry and eaten with salt
and red peppers, twice a day, forms their entire food during a large
part of the year. This is no sign of poverty, but is simply custom; for
their wives and children are loaded with silver armlets from wrist to
elbow, and carry dozens of silver coins strung round their necks or
suspended from their ears.
As I had moved away from Palembang, I had found the Malay spoken by
the common people less and less pure, until at length it became quite
unintelligible, although the continual recurrence of many well-known
words assured me it was a form of Malay, and enabled me to guess at the
main subject of conversation. This district had a very bad reputation
a few years ago, and travellers were frequently robbed and murdered.
Fights between village and village were also of frequent occurrence, and
many lives were lost, owing to disputes about boundaries or intrigues
with women. Now, however, since the country has been divided into
districts under "Controlleurs," who visit every village in turn to hear
complaints and settle disputes, such things are heard of no more. This
is one of the numerous examples I have met with of the good effects of
the Dutch Government. It exercises a strict surveillance over its most
distant possessions, establishes a form of government well adapted to
the character of the people, reforms abuses, punishes crimes, and makes
itself everywhere respected by the native population.
Lobo Raman is a central point of the east end of Sumatra, being about a
hundred and twenty miles from the sea to the east, north, and west. The
surface is undulating, with no mountains or even hills, and there is
no rock, the soil being generally a red friable clay. Numbers of small
streams and rivers intersect the country, and it is pretty equally
divided between open clearings and patches of forest, both virgin and
second growth, with abundance of fruit trees; and there is no lack of
paths to get about in any direction. Altogether it is the very country
that would promise most for a naturalist, and I feel sure that at a more
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