The Battas, having frequently suffered by foreign invasions, suspect all strangers of evil intentions, and desire to be as little as possible disturbed by their visits. For this reason, as well as for additional security against hostile incursions, they have no roads nor bridges, and as the villages are generally many miles apart and separated from each other by jungles or woods, this total want of the means of communication presents an almost insuperable obstacle to the traveller. Their distrust of strangers extends even to the members of their own nation, so that Battas of one province cannot enter another without running the risk of being seized as spies and eaten alive.
While two of the great events of human life--birth and marriage-- pass almost unnoticed among the Battas, the third and last act of this ‘strange eventful history’ gives rise to ceremonies which one would hardly expect to meet with among a nation of cannibals. When the rajah of a large village dies, his body is kept so long in the house, until the rice which is sown on the day of his death by his son or his brother comes to maturity. When the rice is about to ripen, a buffalo is killed, and its bones sent round to all friends and relations among the rajahs of the neighbourhood as an invitation to the burial, which is to take place on the tenth day after the reception of these strange missives. Every rajah who accepts the invitation is obliged to bring with him a buffalo. The coffin is placed on a bier before the house, and on the arrival of the guests their buffaloes are tied to strong poles close by. The wives, sons, and other near relations of the deceased, now walk seven times with loud lamentations round the buffaloes, after which the oldest or first wife breaks a pot of boiled rice grown from the seed sown on the dying day on the forehead of one of the buffaloes. This is the signal for a frantic explosion of grief among the mourning women, whose piercing cries are accompanied by the incessant beating of drums and brass kettles in the house. After this lugubrious scene, which soon terminates with the real or feigned exhaustion of the actors, each of the rajahs now in his turn walks seven times round the buffalo which he brought with him, and kills it with a stroke of his lance. The coffin is then removed to the burial-place, and placed on the side of the open grave, amid the profound silence of the assembly. Its lid is opened, and the eldest son of the deceased, stepping forward, looks at the corpse, the face of which is turned towards the sun, and, raising his hand to the sky, says, ‘Now, father, thou seest for the last time the sun, which thou wilt never see again.’ After this short but affecting allocution the lid is closed and the coffin lowered into the grave, upon which the company returns to the village, where meantime the slaughtered buffaloes have been made ready for the funeral feast. Their horns, skulls, and jaw-bones, fastened to stakes, are placed as ornaments round the grave, which has no other monument or inscription. On each of the two following days some food is carried to it, a welcome treat for the dogs, and then it is consigned to the neglect which is the ultimate fate of all.
