The colour of the skin is a dark muddy-brown or bronze (several shades deeper than the coast natives), but it is liable to slight variation, and is generally a little paler in the women and girls, who resemble far more distinctly the coarse Malayan type than the men do.
The hair of the head is very luxuriant, and of all varieties between wavy and curly, but is not crisp or frizzly to any degree. No hair grows on the face, or on the body, save about the armpits, etc.
The outline of the face is an oblong rectangle, and the forehead is somewhat retreating, but occasionally high and rounded, though narrow; the supraciliary arch is prominent, but the eyebrows are light. The eyes, with black pupils, are both oblique and horizontal, and when the latter, are often accompanied by the Mongolian fold, which occurs most frequently among the women.
The nose is broad and flattened, with rounded tip and rather rounded nostrils, the plane of which is upward. It is generally of medium size and straight, but now and again has a pronounced bridge, or a slightly concave outline.
The cheekbones and zygomatic arch are prominent, and a degree of prognathism is prevalent. The teeth are large, irregular, and discoloured, and project outwards. The mouth is large, the lips thick, with the upper very curved from centre to ends; they are generally closed. The lower jaw is commonly large and heavy, and the chin is pointed, as the bones converge directly from the basal angle. The ears lie close to the head, and are hidden by the hair, but the lobes are much distorted with plugs of wood.
The huts in which the Shom Pe[.n] dwell, although always built on piles, show considerable differences, and vary from a well-built floor with a carefully constructed roof of palm leaf attap, to a rough platform often placed against the side of a tree and sheltered by two or three palm branches fastened to the corners.[131]
They are said to possess gardens enclosed in zigzag fences, where they cultivate bananas, yams, and other tubers. The pandanus fruit they cook in a well-made vessel of sheets of bark, carefully protected with green leaves and luted with clay, in which we can, perhaps, see one of the origins of pottery; for it is quite admissible that, in course of time, the leaves should be discarded, more clay added, and at length the effect of fire on the latter having been observed, the bark also would be done away with, or only used as a mould for a clay vessel, from which more suitable shapes would finally be evolved.