"
Another account of Dyak courtship (Roth, II., 166) represents a young
warrior returning from a head-hunting expedition and, on meeting his
beloved, holding in each hand one of the captured heads by the hair.
She takes one of the heads, whereupon they dance round each other with
the most extravagant gestures, amidst the applause of the Rajah and
his people. The next step is a feast, at which the young couple eat
together. When this is over, they have to take off whatever clothes
they have on and sit naked on the ground while some of the old women
throw over them handfuls of paddy and repeat a prayer that they may
prove as fruitful as that grain.
"The warrior can take away any inferior man's wife at
pleasure, and is thanked for so doing. A chief who has
twenty heads in his possession will do the same with
another who may have only ten, and upwards to the
Rajah's family, who can take any woman at pleasure."
FICKLE AND SHALLOW PASSION
Though the Dyaks may be somewhat less coarse than those Australians
who make a captured woman marry the man who killed her husband, an
almost equal callousness of feeling is revealed by J. Dalton's
statement that the women taken on the head-hunting expedition "soon
became attached to the conquerors"--resembling, in this respect, the
Australian woman who, of her own accord, deserts to an enemy who has
vanquished her husband.
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