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assemblages is mixed with tobacco or other leaves and is called madat[1]. The Achehnese (of course wrongly) try to associate this word with adat, and assert that it means "the smoking of opium in conformity with certain adat or customs". In Great-Acheh, however, such public opium-smoking has always been exceptional. Every opium-smoker, be he small or great, is sure to be known as such, yet he prefers to perpetrate the actual deed in the solitude of his inner chamber.
Some Achehnese smoke opium in order, as they assert, to prolong the pleasure of coition.
The use of strong drink, which usually degenerates into excess, is especially to be met with among the lowlanders, but is restricted to the upper classes or those who come much into contact with Europeans. For the ordinary Achehnese water is almost his only drink; occasionally he takes some sugarcane juice, squeezed out of the cane by means of a very primitive press. Hence it comes that ngòn blòë ië teubèë "to buy sugarcane juice" is the ordinary name for a douceur.
It was an honoured tradition in Acheh that a member of the Sultan's family who had the reputation of being even a moderate opium-smoker should be excluded from the succession. Intoxicating liquors on the other hand were, as is well known, always to be found in the Dalam. I learned from a widow of Sultan Ibrahim Mansur Shah[2], (1858–70) that the latter had once murdered his own child in a fit of drunken frenzy[3].
The Achehnese colonists on the East and West Coasts who live there sometimes for years at a time in a society where there are no women, develop every vice of the nation to its highest pitch. The true highlanders are reputed not indeed more virtuous (for with them theft and robbery are the order of the day) but less weak and effeminate than the lowlanders. Among them opium, drink and unnatural crime exercise less influence than in the coast provinces. Unreasoning fanaticism, contempt for all strangers and self conceit are all more strongly marked in the upper country than in the lowland districts, which have
- ↑ From the Arabic (
Arabic characters) = spiritual or bodily refreshment. It was at first used as an euphemistic expression for the prohibited drug.
- ↑ The Achehnese pronunciation is Mansō Chah.
- ↑ The intemperate use of strong drink in the neighbourhood of the royal stronghold would appear to have assumed great proportions previous to the commencement of the Achehnese war.
