The pagan tribes of Borneo - Get a Free Blog Here

ii8 PAGAN TRIBES OF BORNEO chap.
people devote themselves to gathering the fruit
which forms for a time almost their only food.
Except during the busy padi season the work
of the women is wholly within the house. The
heaviest part of their household labour is the preparation
of the rice. After breakfast they proceed
to spread out padi on mats on the open platforms
adjoining the gallery. While the padi is being
dried by the exposure to sun and wind on these
platforms, it must be protected from the domestic
fowls by a guardian who, sitting in the gallery,
drives them away by means of a long bamboo slung
by a cord above the platform. Others fill the time
between breakfast and the noonday dinner by
bathing themselves and the children in the river,
making and repairing clothing, mats, and baskets,
fetching more water, cleaning the rooms and preparing
dinner. This meal consists of boiled rice
with perhaps a piece of fish, pork, or fowl, and,
like breakfast and supper, is eaten in the private
rooms.
As soon as dinner is over the pounding oi\h^padi
begins (Frontispiece, Vol. II.). Each mortar usually
consists of a massive log of timber roughly shaped,
and having sunk in its upper surface, which is a
little hollowed, a pit about five inches in diameter
and nine inches in depth. Into this pit about a
quarter of a bushel of padi is put. Two women
stand on the mortar facing one another on either
side of the pit, each holding by the middle a large
wooden pestle. This is a solid bar of hardwood
about seven feet long, about two inches in diameter
in the middle third, and some three or four inches
in diameter in the rest of its length. The two
ends are rounded and polished by use. Each
woman raises her pestle to the full height of her
reach, and brings it smartly down upon the grain in
the pit, the two women striking alternately with a