The pagan tribes of Borneo - Get a Free Blog Here

MATERIAL CONDITIONS 53
Alongside the inner wall of the gallery stand
the large wooden mortars used by the women in
husking th^ padi. Above these hang the winnowing
trays and mats, and on this wall hang also various
implements of common use—hats, paddles, fish-
traps, and so forth.
The gallery is reached from the ground by
several ladders, each of which consists of a notched
beam sloping at an angle of about 45°, and furnished
with a slender hand-rail. The more carefully made
ladder is fashioned from a single log, but the wood
is so cut as to leave a hand-rail projecting forwards
a few inches on either side of the notched gully or
trough in which the feet are placed. From the
foot of each ladder a row of logs, notched and
roughly squared, and laid end to end, forms a footway
to the water's edge. In wet weather such a
footway is a necessity, because pigs, fowls, and
dogs, and in some cases goats, run freely beneath
and around the house, and churn the surface of the
ground into a thick layer of slippery mire.
Here and there along the front of the house
are open platforms raised to the level of the floor,
on which the padi is exposed to the sun to be dried
before being husked.
Under the house, among the piles on which it
is raised, such boats as are not in daily use are
stored. Round about the house, and especially on
the space between it and the brink of the river, are
numerous padi barns (PI. 40). Each of these, the
storehouse of the grain harvested by one family, is
a large wooden bin about 10 feet square, raised on
piles some 7 feet from the ground. Each pile carries
just below the level of the floor of the bin a large
disc of wood horizontally disposed, and perforated at
lower edge of a long plank, each being attached by a rattan passed through a
hole in the vertex. Many of the Klemantans hang them in a similar way to a
circular framework, and the Sea Dayaks suspend them in a conical basket
hung by its apex from the rafters.