,
they proceed in good spirits. They have a prejudice against the flesh
of deer, which the men may not eat, but which is allowed to women and
children. The reason given for this is, that if the warriors eat the
flesh of deer, they become as faint-hearted as that animal. These may
be called their superstitions, but religion they have none; and though
they know a name for God, and entertain some faint notion of a future
state, yet it is only in the abstract, for practically the belief
seems to be a dead letter. At their marriage they kill fowls, as I
have narrated; but this is a ceremony, not a sacrifice. They have no
priests or idols, say no prayers, make no offerings to propitiate the
Deity, and it is little likely therefore that human sacrifice should
exist among them. In this respect they are different from any known
people who have arrived at the same state of civilization. The New
Zealanders, the inhabitants of the South Seas, &c. &c., for instance,
all bow to their idols, toward which the same feelings of reverence
and devotion, of awe and fear, obtain as with more civilized beings
in regard to the invisible Deity; but here are the mere words, barren
and without practice.

"The day following our arrival at Singe we descended into the plains,
amid their former rice-fields, to shoot deer. The place is called
Pasar (bazaar or market), though it could scarcely ever have been
one. The rice-cultivation was formerly very extensive, and the low
ground all about the mountain is well cleared of wood by the industry
of these Dyaks. But the country becoming unsettled and troubled, and
roving parties of strange Dyaks landing on the coast near Onetong,
cut off the people employed in the fields, and they consequently were
abandoned. We took up our quarters in a ruinous little deserted hovel,
and in the evening walked over the neighboring district, where the
cocoanut and betel-trees mark its former state of prosperity. The sago
is likewise planted in considerable quantity, and serves for food,
when rice falls short. Deer, the large deer of Borneo, abound, and in
a walk of a few miles we saw from fifteen to twenty, and from their
tracks they must be very numerous indeed. The walking was difficult,
for owing to the softness of the ground, we often sank in up to our
thighs, and generally to our knees: and a short distance in this sort
of wading in stiff mud serves to knock a man up. I was fortunate enough
to kill one of the deer, an