“fondata sopra l’acqua come Venezia,” as Vespuccius says, suggested to him the name of Venezuela or little Venice for this coast.[584] A pile village in Jull Lake, a lacustrine expansion in a tributary of the upper Salwin River, is inhabited by the Inthas, apparently an alien colony in Burma.  They have added a detail in their floating gardens, rafts covered with soil, on which they raise tomatoes, watermelons and gourds.[585]

In little Lake Mohrya, located near the upper Lualaba River, a southern headstream of the Congo, Cameron found numerous pile dwellings, whose owners moved about in dug-out canoes and cultivated fields on land,[586] as did their Swiss confreres of twenty centuries ago.  Livingstone, in descending from Lake Nyassa by the Shire River, found in the lakelet of Pamalombe, into which the stream widened, similar water huts inhabited by a number of Manganja families, who had been driven from their homes by slave raiders.  The slender reeds of the papyrus thicket, lining the shore in a broad band, served as piles, number compensating for the lack of strength; the reeds, bent downward and fastened together into a mat, did indeed support their light dwellings, but heaved like thin ice when the savages moved from hut to hut.  The dense forest of papyrus left standing between village and shore effectually screened their retreat, and the abundant fish in the lake provided them with food.[587]

[Sidenote:  Malayan pile dwellings.]

In the vast island world of Indonesia, where constant contact with the sea has bred the amphibian Malay race, we are not surprised to find that the typical Malay house is built on piles above the water; and that when the coast Malay is driven inland by new-comers of his own stock and forced to abandon his favorite occupations of trade, piracy and fishing, he takes to agriculture but still retains his sea-born architecture and raises his hut on poles above the ground, beyond the reach of an enemy’s spear-thrust.  The Moro Samal Laut of the southern Sulu Archipelago avoid the large volcanic islands of the group, and place their big villages over the sea on low coral reefs.  The sandy beaches of the shore hold their coco-palms, whose nuts by their milk eke out the scanty supply of drinking water, and whose fronds shade the tombs of the dead.[588] The sea-faring Malays of the Sunda Islands, in thickly populated points of the coast, often dwell in permanently inhabited rafts moored near the pile dwellings.  Palembang on the lower swampy course of the River Musi has a floating suburb of this sort.  It is called the “Venice of Sumatra,” just as Banjarmasin, a vast complex of pile and raft dwellings, is called the “Venice of Borneo,” and Brunei to the north is the “Venice of the East."[589] Both these towns are the chief commercial centers of their respective islands.  The little town of Kilwaru, situated on a sandbank off the eastern end of Ceram, seems to float on the sea, so completely has it surrounded and enveloped with pile-built houses the few acres of dry land which form its nucleus.  It is a place of busy traffic, the emporium for commerce between the Malay Archipelago and New Guinea.[590]