“No aristocratic youth dare venture to pay his addresses to a Dyak demoiselle unless he throws at the blushing maiden’s feet a netful of skulls!  In some districts it is customary for the young lady to desire her lover to cut a thick bamboo from the neighboring jungle, and when in possession of this instrument, she carefully arranges the cadeau d’amour on the floor, and by repeated blows beats the heads into fragments, which, when thus pounded, are scraped up and cast into the river; at the same time she throws herself into the arms of the enraptured youth, and so commences the honeymoon.”

Another account of Dyak courtship (Roth, II., 166) represents a young warrior returning from a head-hunting expedition and, on meeting his beloved, holding in each hand one of the captured heads by the hair.  She takes one of the heads, whereupon they dance round each other with the most extravagant gestures, amidst the applause of the Rajah and his people.  The next step is a feast, at which the young couple eat together.  When this is over, they have to take off whatever clothes they have on and sit naked on the ground while some of the old women throw over them handfuls of paddy and repeat a prayer that they may prove as fruitful as that grain.

“The warrior can take away any inferior man’s wife at pleasure, and is thanked for so doing.  A chief who has twenty heads in his possession will do the same with another who may have only ten, and upwards to the Rajah’s family, who can take any woman at pleasure.”

FICKLE AND SHALLOW PASSION

Though the Dyaks may be somewhat less coarse than those Australians who make a captured woman marry the man who killed her husband, an almost equal callousness of feeling is revealed by J. Dalton’s statement that the women taken on the head-hunting expedition “soon became attached to the conquerors”—­resembling, in this respect, the Australian woman who, of her own accord, deserts to an enemy who has vanquished her husband.  Cases of frantic amorous infatuation occur, as a matter of course.  Brooke (II., 106) relates the story of a girl of seventeen who, for the sake of an ugly, deformed, and degraded workman, left her home, dressed as a man, and in a small broken canoe made a trip of eighty miles to join her lover.  In olden times death would have been the penalty for such an act; but she, being a “New Woman” in her tribe, exclaimed, “If I fell in love with a wild beast, no one should prevent me marrying it.”  In this Eastern clime, Brooke declares, “love is like the sun’s rays in warmth.”  He might have added that it is as fickle and transient as the sun’s warmth; every passing cloud chills it.  The shallow nature of Dyak attachment is indicated by their ephemeral unions and universal addiction to divorce.  “Among the Upper Sarawak Dyaks divorce is very frequent, owing to the great extent of adultery,” says Haughton (Roth, I., 126); and St. John remarks: