lie about in all directions, shrieks and yells resound
throughout the village, and for four days the whole place is given up
to dissipation and riot. A food-offering is made to the heads on the
first day, and a piece of rice stuck in their mouths, which gives them
a most ghastly appearance, as, when freshly taken, they are smoked
over a slow fire until the skin assumes the consistency of leather,
and thus preserves to a certain extent the expression, though
blackened and disfigured, of the face during lifetime. It was once my
fate, in 1873, to be staying at a Dyak house on the Batang Lupar river
during one of these entertainments, and I have no wish to repeat the
experiment.

This, then, had been the state of affairs at the dwelling we were
about to visit. Cautiously clambering up the entrance pole, half the
notches in which had rotted away and left but a precarious foothold,
we entered the house, the flooring of which stood nearly 30 feet above
ground, and within which a sorry spectacle presented itself. Heaps of
food, in the shape of rice, pork, &c., lay strewn about the floor, on
which also reposed (undisturbed even by the loud barking which the
dogs set up on our arrival) the male members of the tribe, some
seventy in number.

The overpowering stench arising from stale arrack, &c., was well-nigh
sickening, while, to complete the unsavoury _coup a'oeil_, a bunch of
human heads, their mouths stuffed with rice, grinned at us from the
end post of the ruai, whence their owners had not yet sufficiently
recovered from their orgies to remove them.

Our Malays succeeded, after some trouble, in waking a young brave who
had evidently succumbed to fatigue (and arrack) while performing the
war-dance, as he was still in full war costume. He, however, quickly
recovered himself, and arousing forty or fifty of his companions, led
us off to see the chief or head-man of the tribe. Preceded by these
youths, whose unsteady gait and sleepy faces afforded our Malay guides
no small amusement, we cautiously crept along the ruai, passing at
every ten paces or so enormous holes in the bamboo flooring occasioned
by rot, and a fall through which would have precipitated us into the
mud and filth thirty feet below.

The chief, rejoicing in the name of "Lat," was a fine-looking old man
about sixty, tattooed to the eyes, and with long grey hairs streaming
down below his waist. He wore a dirty waistcloth which had once been
white, his only ador