To make it more safe, it
is built upon _very high posts_, and there are ladders to get up by. The
posts are sometimes forty feet high; so that when you are in the house,
you find yourself as high as the tall trees. There is one very large
room, where all the men and women sit, and talk, and do their work in the
day. The women pound the rice, and weave the mats, while the men make
weapons of war, and the little children play about. There is always much
noise and confusion in this room. There are a great many doors along one
side of the long room; and each of these doors leads into a small room
where a family lives; the parents, the babies, and the girls sleep there,
while the boys of the family sleep in the large room, that has just been
described.
You know already what are the ornaments on which each family prides
itself,--the HEADS hanging up in their rooms! It is the SEA Dyaks who
live in these very large houses.
The HILL Dyaks do not live in houses quite so large. Yet several families
inhabit the same house. In the midst of their villages, there is always
one house where the boys sleep. In this house all the HEADS of the
village are kept. The house is round, and built on posts, and the
entrance is underneath through the floor. As this is the best house in
the village, travellers are always brought to this house to sleep. Think
how dreadful it must be, when you wake in the night to see thirty or
forty horrible heads, dangling from the ceiling! The wind, too, which
comes in through little doors in the roof, blows the heads about; so that
they knock against each other, and seem almost as if they were still
alive.
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