On My Way To Visit A Prominent Katingan I Passed Beneath A Few Cocoanut Trees Growing In Front Of The House, As Is The Custom, While A Gentle Breeze Played With The Stately Leaves.

"Better get away from there," my native guide suddenly said; "a cocoanut may fall," and we had scarcely arrived inside the house before one fell to the ground with a resounding thump half a metre from where I had been standing.

Eighteen years previously a Katingan had been killed in this way as he descended the ladder. Eleven years later another was carrying his child on his back when a cocoanut of small size hit and killed the little one.

The man whose house I visited was rich, according to Dayak standard, not in money, but in certain wares that to him are of equal or greater value. Besides thirty gongs, rows of fine old valuable jars stood along the walls of his room. There are several varieties of these blangas, some of which are many hundred years old and come from China or Siam. This man possessed five of the expensive kind, estimated by the "onder" at a value of six thousand florins each. He consented to have one of the ordinary kind, called gutshi, taken outside to be photographed; to remove the real blanga, he said, would necessitate the sacrifice of a fowl. To the casual observer no great difference between them is apparent, their worth being enhanced by age. In 1880 Controleur Michielsen saw thirty blangas in one house on the Upper Katingan, among them several that in his estimation were priceless. Over them hung forty gongs, of which the biggest, unquestionably, had a diameter of one metre. Without exaggeration it represented, he says, a value of f. 15,000, and he was informed that the most valuable blangas were buried in the wilds at places known only to the owner. No European had been there since Schwaner, over thirty years previously, passed the river.

In front of another house was a group of very old-looking stones which are considered to be alive, though such is not the belief with reference to all stones, information in that regard being derived from dreams. Those on view here are regarded as slaves (or soldiers) of a raja, who is represented by a small kapatong which presides in a diminutive, half-tumbled-down house, and who is possessed by a good antoh that may appear in human shape at night. When the people of the kampong need rice or have any other wish, a fowl or pig is killed; the blood is smeared on the raja and on the slaves, and some of the meat is deposited in a jar standing next to him. When advised of what is wanted the raja gives the slaves orders to see that the people are supplied.

At each side of the base of a ladder, a little further on, stood a post with a carving of a tiger-cat grasping a human head and guarding the entrance.

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