One Night I Woke Up After A Particularly Noisy Fight, And Saw What
Appeared To Me To Be A Dog Sitting Calmly By My Bed With Its Back
Turned To Me.
Lifting my mosquito net, therefore, very quietly, I let
drive with my fist at it, putting all my pent-up indignation and anger
for sleepless nights into the blow.
Alas! it was a very solid dog that
I struck against, being nothing more nor less than the side of one of
my boxes, and I barked my knuckles rather badly. The laughter of the
Dayaks was loud and prolonged when Dubi translated the yarn to them
next day, and they remembered it long afterwards. Until I heard the
roar of laughter that went up, the story had not struck me as being
so very amusing!
All around the house for some distance was a forest of tall
fruit-trees. They had of course all been planted in times past by
the Dayaks' ancestors, and every tree had its owner, but they had
become mixed up with many beautiful wild tropic growths which had
sprung up between the trees. Some of these fruit-trees, such as the
"durian," "rambutan," mango, mangosteen, "tamadac" or jackfruit,
"lansat" and bananas, were familiar to me, but there were a great
number of fruits that I had never heard of before, and I got their
names from my Dayak friends.[13]
Needless to say, I never before tasted so many fruits that were
entirely new to me, and most of them were ripe at the time of my
visit. The "durian" comes easily first. It is without doubt the
king of all fruit in both the tropic and temperate zones, and is
popular alike with man and beast, the orang-utan being a great
culprit in robbing the Dayaks of their "durians." I never saw the
"good" "durian" growing wild in Sarawak, but I tasted here a small
wild kind with an orange centre which made me violently sick. No
description of the "durian" taste can do it justice. But its smell
is also past description. It is so bad that many people refuse to
taste it. It is a very large and heavy fruit, covered with strong,
sharp spines, and as it grows on a very tall tree, it is dangerous
to walk underneath in the fruiting season when they are falling,
accidents being common among the Dayaks through this cause. I myself
had a narrow escape one windy day. I was sitting at the foot of one
of these trees eating some of the fallen fruit, when a large "durian"
fell from above and buried itself in the mud not half a yard from me.
Danna, the second chief, would always leave one or two of the fruit
for me on a box close by my head where I slept, before he went off
to his "padi "-planting early in the morning, so that I got quite
used to the bad smell.
The Dayak house was surrounded on three sides by a horrible swamp,
the roads through which consisted of fallen trees laid end to end,
or else of two or three thick poles, laid side by side, and kept in
place by being lashed here and there to two upright stakes, so that
I had to balance myself well or come to grief in the thick mud.
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