incredibly eerie and fantastic that a sober narration of them is more
likely than not to be greeted with a shrug of amused disbelief. One who
has no first-hand knowledge of the Sumatran tribes finds it difficult
to accept at their face value the accounts of the customs practised by
the Bataks of Tapanuli, for example, who, when their relatives become
too old and infirm to be of further use, give them a pious interment by
eating them. When the local Doctor Oslers have decided that a man has
reached the age when his place at the family table is preferable to his
company, the aged victim climbs a lemon-tree, beneath which his
relatives stand in a circle, wailing the deathsong, the weird,
monotonous chant being continued until the condemned one summons the
courage to throw himself to the ground, whereupon the members of his
family promptly despatch him with clubs, cut up his body, roast the
meat, and eat it. Thus every stomach in the tribe becomes, in effect, a
sort of family burial-plot. I was unable to ascertain why the victim is
compelled to throw himself from a lemon-tree. It struck me that some
taller tree, like a palm, would better accomplish the desired result. A
matter of custom, doubtless. Perhaps that explains why we dub persons
who are passe "lemons." Then there are the Achinese, whose women
frequently marry when eight years old, and are considered as well along
in life when they reach their teens; and the Niassais, who are in
deadly fear of albino children and who kill all twins as soon as they
are born. Or the Menangkabaus, whose tribal government is a matriarchy:
lands, houses, crops and children belonging solely to the wife, who
may, and sometimes does, sell her husband as a slave in order to pay
her debts.

Trailing from the eastern end of Java in a twelve-hundred-mile-long
chain, like the wisps of paper which form the tail of a kite, and
separated by straits so narrow that artillery can fire across them, are
the Lesser Sundas--Bali, noted for its superb scenery and its alluring
women; Lombok, the northernmost island whose flora and fauna are
Australian; Sumbawa, where the sandalwood comes from; Flores, whose
inhabitants consider the earth so holy that they will not desecrate it
by digging wells or cultivation; Timor, the northeastern half of which,
together with Goa in India and Macao in China, forms the last remnant
of Portugal's once enormous Eastern empire; Rotti, Kei, and Aroo, the
great chain thus fo