on their oiled brown skins they looked
like the bronzes in a museum. Unlike the natives we had seen along the
coast, whose garments made a slight concession to the prejudices of
civilization, these children of the wild "wore nothing much before and
rather less than 'arf o' that be'ind." Several of them were armed with
the sumpitan, or blow-gun, which is the national weapon of the Dyaks,
and each of them carried at his waist a _parang-ilang_, the terrible
long-bladed knife which the head-hunter uses to kill and decapitate his
victims.

Monsieur de Haan, as well as the other Dutch officials whom I
questioned on the subject, attributed the prevalence of head-hunting in
Borneo to the vanity of the Dyak women. He explained that, just as
American girls expect candy and flowers from the young men who are
attentive to them, so Dyak maidens expect freshly severed human heads.
The warrior who refused to present his lady-love with such grisly
evidences of his devotion would be rejected by her and ostracized by
his tribe. Nor does head-hunting end with marriage, for the standing of
both the man and his wife in the community depends upon the number of
grinning skulls which swing from the ridgepole of their hut. Heads are
to a Dyak what money is to a man in civilized countries--the more he
has, the greater his importance. The Controleur at Tenggaroeng assured
me very earnestly that his Dyak charges were by no means ferocious or
bloodthirsty by nature and that they practised head-hunting less from
pleasure than from force of custom. But I am compelled to accept such
an estimate of the Dyak character with reservations. From all that I
could learn, head-hunting is a sport, like fox-hunting in England. Nor
does it, as a rule, involve any great risk to the hunters, for the
head-hunting raids are usually mere butcheries of defenceless people,
the Dyaks either stalking their victim in the bush and killing him from
behind, or attacking a village when the warriors are absent and
slaughtering everyone whom they find in it--old, men, women, and
children. The head of an orang-utan, by the way, is as highly prized in
many of the Dyak tribes as that of a human being. Nor is this
surprising, for the warrior who single-handed can kill one of the
mighty anthropoids is deserving of the trophy.

During my stay in Borneo I heard many theories advanced in explanation
of head-hunting. Some authorities claimed that it is the Dyak's way of
establishing a