Dr. Bastian had always difficulty in persuading a servant to fetch it from under the house. In Rangoon a priest, summoned to the bedside of a sick man, climbed up a ladder and got in at the window rather than ascend the staircase, to reach which he must have passed under a gallery. A pious Burman of Rangoon, finding some images of Buddha in a ship’s cabin, offered a high price for them, that they might not be degraded by sailors walking over them on the deck.[1] Similarily the Cambodians esteem it a grave offence to touch a man’s head; some of them will not enter a place where anything whatever is suspended over their heads; and the meanest Cambodian would never consent to live under an inhabited room. Hence the houses are built of one story only; and even the Government respects the prejudice by never placing a prisoner in the stocks under the floor of a house, though the houses are raised high above the ground.[2] The same superstition exists amongst the Malays; for an early traveller reports that in Java people “wear nothing on their heads, and say that nothing must be on their heads . . . and if any person were to put his hand upon their head they would kill him; and they do not build houses with storeys, in order that they may not walk over each other’s heads.”[3] It is also found in full force throughout Polynesia. Thus of Gattanewa, a Marquesan chief, it is said that “to touch the top of his head, or any thing which had been on his head was sacrilege. To pass over his head
- ↑ Bastian, op. cit. ii. 150; Sangermano, Description of the Burmese Empire (Rangoon, 1885), p. 131; C. F. S. Forbes, British Burma, p. 334; Shway Yoe, The Burman, i. 91.
- ↑ J. Moura, Le Royaume du Cambodge, i. 178, 388.
- ↑ Duarte Barbosa, Description of the Coasts of East Africa and Malabar in the beginning of the Sixteenth Century (Hakluyt Society, 1866), p. 197.
