[Note: this transcription was produced by an automatic OCR engine]
THE VILLAGE AND VILLAGE LIFE 31 Houses AND HOUSE-BUILDING Our information about the houses which compose these villages is again very scanty. Typically the Seniang dwelling-house consists of one large rectangular room in which the inmates sleep and the women and children spend their time when it is too wet to be in the open. In front is a kind of semicircular porch where the pigs are kept and where people sometimes sit. Occasion- ally the back of the house is apsidal instead of rectangular, but this projection is a walled-in integral part of the building, not a porch or verandah. The entrance to the building is through a rectangular doorway in the centre of the front wall. It seems that formerly the houses had no side walls, or only very low ones, and that the eaves of the roof reached right down to the ground, but to-day, at least in the coastal villages, walls are built of neatly plaited matting. Very little has been recorded of the technique of house- building. The men ï¬Årst fell two or sometimes three trees, and lop them so that the fork of two branches, or perhaps two roots, form a crutch at one end. The three poles are then planted in the ground in a straight line with the forked end uppermost and a ridge pole, which has been prepared before~ hand, is laid in place, resting upon them. The men now calculate; the desired width of the house and with a length gi_,;c_'reeper vthey measure the distance from the top of the rijdge-§.pole¢.to. the ground on one side where the eaves will qo,r_ne.‘1,;_',;&,-r;i1i_mbe,i'. of bamboos are now taken and cut so that they are ;_ex_actly twice as long as the measurement just obtained. /These bamboos are to be bent over the ridge pole at intervals along its length to make the roof-beams of the house. For this purpose a ï¬Åre is kindled, and the central section (internode) of each bamboo is held over it. The moisture inside is converted tostearn by the heat of the ï¬Åre, a small explosion takes place, and the internode splits longitudinally along a number of parallel lines. The bamboos are now laid on the ground and a stick is put tranversely across the sections which have been split. The two lengths of each bamboo on either side of this are then bent 1 unit of measurement iu house~l7uilding is a span of hands called nahaha, and a stick or creeper used for measuring is usually cut to a length of ï¬Åve such spans, nahaha Imr um 1l1m.—A. B. D.
