Codex Buruana
By Chaumont Devin
Ka'u, Hawai'i, May 10, 2011.

Revision 1, copyright 2011, by Chaumont Devin.

Preface.

Buru is an island situated north of Australia between New Guinea and the
Celebes.  With an area of about 3,400 square miles, it is high, rugged,
and covered by savannah and dense forests.  The language spoken by its
people appears to have branched off from other Austronesian languages
sometime over two thousand years ago.  No one knows how long people have
been living in Buru, but 60,000 years might not be an unreasonable guess.

This book is about Buru and its people, not as seen by outsiders, but as
seen through native eyes.  It contains the English translations of over
200 carefully transcribed Buru texts narrated by people at all stages of
life from childhood to adulthood to old age.  It covers a broad range of
subjects important to Buru people, and is not limited to any onetheme.

Introduction.

The purpose of the following paragraphs is not to champion this or that
theory of human origins but only to explain Buru in the context of human
development as best I can based upon the shifting sands of current
scientific understanding--or at least this is my excuse.  I have used the
"out of Africa" and "after Toba" models, but these may be completely wrong
although they seem to fit the facts as we know them at this time.

I will provide no citations on this subject since most things I am writing
about here can readily be researched and demolished in a couple of minutes
using any good Internet search engine such as Yahoo or Google on the web.
 Any ideas you cannot find on the web I claim as new and mine.

Deep down we are all pretty much the same, and it would now seem that
after the Toba eruption on the island of Sumatera some 74,000 years ago
there were only a few hundred or at best a few thousand of us left, all
tiny, black skinned, wooly headed, and living on the east coast of Africa.

But once the Toba dust settled, we began moving out in canoes along the
southern coasts of Asia, and in a relatively short time reached Australia.
We also traveled up the east coast of Asia.  You can find our ancestral
remains in all of these places, and even (it is now claimed) in South
America.  And into the 20th century it was still possible to find remnants
of our original Negrito stock living in the forests of Africa, south and
southeast Asia, Melanesia, and Australia, whereas those of us who left the
forests have branched and branched again into the hundreds of distinct
physical types and the more than 6,000 languages we find in the world
today.

This tale may seem preposterous until we stop to consider the fact that by
just tweaking a few genes here and there it is possible to create all of
the modern human types we see around us from the genetic material carried
about by any modern human being.  Yet what may be more convincing to some
is the story of man's best friend.  As far as we have been able to
ascertain, all modern dogs are descended from an original stock of gray
wolves, from which they have been evolving since only about half as long
ago as the Toba eruption.  The differences we see in different breeds of
dogs are far greater than the differences we see between races of men, but
this is to be expected since they take only about 10% as long as humans to
mature and breed.  Yet all modern dog breeds can mate with each other and
produce fertile offspring, and all dog breeds can mate with gray wolves.
 In like manner, all human races can breed with each other and with the
original Negrito stock from which they evolved.

I have several reasons for believing in canoes as the vehicle for early
human expansion.  The first is the fact that Australia has been separated
by wide expanses of water since long before the advent of human beings.
 There was absolutely no way of walking from Africa to Australia.  The
second is the rapidity with which Australia was settled after we first
left Africa.  Archeologists have dated human remains in Australia to over
60,000 years ago, and human artifacts have been found in layers that seem
to be in the vicinity of 120,000 years old.  The third is the settlement
pattern of modern Negritos.  They are generally found in great forests not
far from the sea.  The fourth is the vast range across which Negrito
remains have been found--first along the coasts of northeastern China and
now (it is claimed) even in South America.  These facts clearly indicate a
rapid phase of expansion by sea followed by a long process of evolution
and adaptation as people moved inland from the coasts, and not the other
way round.  Modern man has always been a creature of the sea, and even
Homo floresiensis must have paddled canoes, else he could not have reached
Flores.  Yet we forget our maritime past almost as soon as ever we leave
the sea behind us.

It is clear that Buru has been colonized by sea, and not just once but on
many occasions, the last few of which are still alive in human memory.
 Yet for every person that has come to stay in Buru, many more have come
and gone.  The original Negrito substrate is still visible, after all Buru
is dense tropical forest near the sea--the exact environment for which the
Negrito type seems particularly adapted.  But this Negrito substrate has
been submerged beneath layer upon layer of later human types.  The
Polynesians were almost certainly in Buru at one time.  We can pick this
up from certain words in the modern Buru vocabulary and from certain
elements in their traditions.  The Mongoloid human type is also visible in
some individuals.  But the people of Buru are not Negritos or Polynesians
or East Asians.  They are a mixture of races, and the only thing we can
safely say about them is that they belong to that great family of man
called "Austronesian," and speak an Austronesian language unique to their
own island.

When we left Africa, there were several kinds of human in the world, some
of them much bigger than us, and known to be cannibals.  Among these were
Homo erectus and Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, now extinct.  We also know
of a smaller kind of human being called Homo floresiensis, now also
extinct.  It is no wonder, therefore, that in a culture with strong oral
traditions such as we find in Buru, there should be many references to
man-eating giants and friendly little people.

Physical forms evolve quickly.  A scant 35,000 years ago there was only
one kind of dog in the world: the gray wolf.  Another scant 35,000 years
before that, and there were only two kinds of modern human in the world:
the Negrito and the bushman.  But language evolves even faster than
physical form.  A scant 70,000 years ago we may all have been speaking the
same language, yet there are now over 6,000 languages in the world.

The human linguistic apparatus itself does not evolve.  Take an infant
from some remote region of the world and raise him/her as part of your
family, and he/she will end up speaking English just like everybody else
around him.  What evolves, or rather changes, is the set of external
symbols we call "words," and the ways in which these words are arranged
into phrases and sentences.  Such a set of external symbols and the linear
patterns they assume in sentences constitute the vocabulary and grammar of
a language, or just "a language."

If every language could have split into two languages every 5,000 years
since 70,000 years ago, then by this time there would be 16,384 languages
on earth instead of 6,000+.  But we know that languages split apart far
more rapidly than once every 5,000 years.  For example, Spanish, italian,
French, and Portuguese were all once Latin, and that was only 2,000 years
ago.  A conservative estimate might therefore be that languages split in
two once every 1,000 years instead of once every 5,000 years.  If this
were the case, then today there ought to be 1,180,591,620,717,411,303,424
languages in the world instead of just 6,000+.      So it would seem
pretty clear that there are almost as many languages being lost as there
are languages being created at any time.

An interesting phenomenon that goes hand in hand with language is the way
people think.  Although it is possible to express pretty much any
imaginable idea in any imaginable human language, some languages are
better adapted for expressing certain kinds of ideas than others.  Thus we
tend to think in more or less different ways depending on the languages we
have been using to think in.  To think in ways unfamiliar in the languages
we are used to takes effort, and people tend to steer themselves away from
expending unnecessary effort.  In this way, to a great degree, language
dictates our thoughts.

A prime example of the way language can influence thought is mathematics,
which is clearly a language just like any other.  People who know math,
and know it well, are able to think in ways that other folk find difficult
or even impossible.  Yet all the thoughts expressed in mathematics can be
expressed in any other language.  We know this because when people teach
math, they teach it in the local language--not in Math.  And yet in most
natural languages mathematical concepts remain so difficult to express as
to make it nearly impossible to actually USE them except in the language
of mathematics itself.

But knowing the profound effects of language upon thought, we can also see
how language might be dangerous.  When Albert Einstein came upon his great
discoveries, he was almost certainly not thinking in Math.  He may have
been thinking in French or in German or some other European natural
language, but almost certainly not in Math.  In fact he did so badly in
mathematics in college that he had to get help from a girlfriend in order
to express his discoveries in Math.  Then he realized how important math
was, became a great mathematician, and never discovered anything out of
the ordinary again.

Some languages must be great to swear in.  Does your grandfather swear in
Spanish or in Chinese or Italian?  Other languages seem better for
expressing affection, Mon Ami.

Some languages are very close to each other.  For example, take English
and Dutch.  I would guess that they split apart something just over a
thousand years ago.  These two languages are so close to each other that
Dutchmen actually think a lot like Englishmen and vice versa.  Most
English texts can be readily translated into Dutch, and most Dutch texts
can be readily translated into English.  Even languages as far away from
each other as Hebrew and English are still so close together that the King
James translators were able to come up with a meticulously accurate
translation of the Hebrew Old Testament into English.

But the distance from English to Buru and from Buru to English is such
that it is impossible to create any very accurate translation from English
to Buru or vice versa, and this is why, despite a lot of effort on the
part of various European and American missionaries, it has never been
possible to translate even the New Testament into what we now call the
Buru Language.  Not only are these two languages continents apart, but
even the very thoughts of English and Buru men are quite different from
each other.  The best that can be hoped for is a good paraphrase.  This is
not because the brains of Englishmen and Buru men are wired differently
from each other.  They may have a lot of outwardly different physical
characteristics, but they can all survive on pretty much the same foods,
drink the same water, breathe the same air, respond to the same
antimalarial medications, and chase the same women.  These things seem to
prove that internally there are no major differences--especially not at
such a complex level as the wiring of the brain.  No, but the thoughts of
Englishmen have been conditioned by English language, and the thoughts of
Buru men have been conditioned by Buru language, and this makes them think
in very different ways.  Language is like the rails of a railroad track,
and the minds of Englishmen and Buru men have been sent down different
tracks.

Thus in the following "translations," I will make no attempt at verbatim
translation.  Any such attempt would sound quite stilted in English, if
not downright weird.  Instead I will allow my mind free reign, first to
understand what the Buru texts say, and then to render them in
straightforward English, trying always to capture every possible nuance of
thought and mood, "every possible nuance" meaning what I find I am able to
express without trouble in English.  But having said this, I will not
leave those purists who demand verbatim translation adrift.  Instead, I
will provide the original of each translated text, and an abridged
Buru-English dictionary in which they can look up every word.  Each Buru
text will be numbered, and the English translations will each begin with
the words, "Text #nnn:" plus some title or explanation, and end with the
words, "End text #nnn.  To make reading easier for both English and Buru
speakers, I will present the English translations first, and the original
Buru texts in another section.  Each buru text will also begin with the
words, "Text #nnn:" and the same title as is found in the English
translation, but the Buru texts will not say "End text #nnn." at their
ends.  Words appearing outside the translated texts in the English
translations will be my comments and explanations, and anything found in
brackets within an English translation will also be some hopefully
ellucidating comment of mine.  Asterisks in the original Buru texts have
been placed where I have some doubt because of difficulties encountered
during transcription--most often caused by a narrators careless
pronunciation or a bad job of tape recording.

The names of the narrators of these texts, as well as the names of the
locations where they were recorded, are given at the start of each
original, along with the date on which they were recorded.

Many of the original audio files from which these texts were transcribed
are freely available on the Internet from http://oldmaluku.com/buru/audio.

CAVEAT: Let no one suppose that this work is in any way comprehensive or
definitive or exhaustive.   There were many factors impeding my efforts to
collect information in Buru.  I have barely scratched the surface.  Even
my own archives contain a great deal more information than can possibly be
included in these pages.

And now, despite my natural proclivity to keep writing forever about human
origins, the universe, Buru men, and seafaring Negritos, let us go
straight to the actual Buru texts, because certainly no one is more
qualified to talk about Buru than the people of Buru themselves, and here
they are in all their glory!

Chapter 1: English Translations Of The Buru Texts.

Text #001: Rape of the Fairy Princess.

A certain unmarried man once came upon a cool and pleasant spring.  The
water burst from a hole in the rock, flowed downhill, and became a pool.
he stood gazing down along this stream from under a banyan tree for
awhile, and was suddenly surprised to see seven fairy princesses descend
before him, each one with her own pair of wings.

They descended from their malige [flying apparatus], undid their wings,
stepped into the water together, bathed, plunged their hands into the
water to make a clapping soundÀin the pool, frolicked, splashed and made
merry with each other.

So this unmarried man crept up stealthily, stole the wings of one of the
seven fairy princesses, and ran off with them to his home.  There he
ascended into his grain storage hut, which was filled with ears of rice,
dug down through these till he reached the bark floor, hid the wings of
the fairy princess, and piled grain over them till it reached the
ridgepole.  Then he returned to the pool to spy upon the bathing fairies.

The seven fairy princesses continued to batheÀuntil they were finished,
then went quickly for their wings, each of the six recognizing her own
pair and putting them on in order to return to their malige; but it became
apparent that one pair was missing.  So they searched up and down among
the roots and in the bushes, but it simply wasn't there.

At last the six said to their companion, "You will have to keep on
searching hereÀalone.  We cannot stay because the time has come for us to
return to our malige."

So the six took to the air while their companion watched helplessly until
all she could see was the yellow of the bottoms of their feet up in the
clouds.  Then she alternately sat and stood sobbing,"Alas my wings!
Whatever could have taken them away?"  And so she watched her six
companions until they had disappeared from sight, and then she sat and
cried.

Then this unmarried man stood nearby with his kris and his layers of
clothing, stepped stealthily closer, and touched the girl on her shoulder.

She was very surprised and said, "Oh no!  there is a man standing here!"

Then the man said to the princess,"Follow me, for surely I am your husband
and you are my wife."

So she followed him home and lived with him until she bore him three
children.

Now when she cooked, she would only throw a single grain of raw rice into
the pot, yet when it was cooked, it would be a full pot.  One day she said
to her husband, "Remember never to open the lid of the pot while I am
cooking."

Then he sat thinking, "Why should my wife forbid me to open the pot while
she is cooking?"

So once when his wife had gone out back, heÀentered the kitchen, opened
the pot, and was amazed to see only a single grain of rice bobbing up and
down within the boiling water.

When she returned, she opened the pot and found nothing inside but boiling
water.  The pot was not filled with rice as before, and from that time
forward,Àher magic would not work again.

So she began to pound riceÀday after day to prepare food, and the contents
of the grain storage hut, which had been full up to the ridgepole,
declined slowly until one day her hands scooped away the last of the rice
over her hidden wings and she saw them.

"What is this hidden under the rice?" she asked herself as she began to
pull out her wings.  "Why, these are the clothes I was wearing that day we
bathed at the pool!"  So she laid them out, examined them carefully, and
exclaimed to herself, "They are still in good order!  My wings are still
okay! Everything is still okay!"

Then she hid her wings in a different place, and had a talk with her
husband.  "If ever any of the children are sick," she said, "just go
outside and call upon the woman up in the malige, and she will come down
to you.  She may come in the form of a bird or some other creature, but
you will see her and she will help you."

Then one day, after her husband had gone to his fields, she went to the
place where she had hidden her wings, pulled them out, and tried them on.
 She flew up and came back down repeatedly to make sure they were working
okay, then she returned to her children, kissed them and hugged them, and
said, "If ever any of you are in trouble, just go out and look up into the
moonlight or look up at the shining stars and call upon me, and I will
help you."

Then she flew upwards till all her children could see was the yellow of
the soles of her feet in the clouds and was gone back to her people in the
malige.

End text #001.

A variant of this tale appears in the oral literature of Meralava Island,
in the Banks Archipelago (reference #001).  Both versions have the
following in common:

1.  The banyan tree.

2.  People descending from the sky to enter a pool.

3.  The hiding of the wings.

4.  Fertile union between a man and a woman from above.

5.  Discovery of the wings.

6.  Return to the upper world.

7.  A being from the upper world appearing as a bird.

In addition, the Meralava version of the tale incorporates an important
feature of Buru cosmology missing from the Buru tale, namely the belief in
a layered world consisting of multiple strata (only two in the Meralava
tale), each one of which holds its own villages, houses, and people.  The
Buru people term such strata "exnafan," and often mention the "seven
exnafan above and the seven exnafan below."

The word, "malige," may be a cognate of the Malay "maligai," meaning
palace, and this idea of a flying palace would lead us straight back to
the Sanskrit "vimana," which means tower, palace, or aircraft.  The
meaning of the word, "vimana," is thought to have evolved as follows:

1.  A compounding of the words for "separate" and "measure."

2.  An area of land measured off as sacred ground.

3.  A temple.

4.  A palaceÀor tower.

5.  A flying palace.

6.  A flying conveyance capable of hovering or moving through the air.

Many descriptions of vimana flying machines are given in ancient hindu
texts.  The glittering, metallic kind answer to the following description
recorded in a tale told by Semi in 1984: "hibakaransiku da keha nake
malige eflawa, paa bisnasak," meaning, "Hibakaransiku mounted his golden
malige and was gone."

Text #002: The Wild Men Of The Ite Tree.

Once a village woman asked her husband, "May I go visit my people? I have
not seen or visited them in years."

"Then go," said her husband.

So the next day, she hiked down to her fields, where she dug up taro and
yams, and pounded millet.  Then she carried these things home, placed
cooked food and sago pudding before her husband, and said, "Stay here
while I go."

Now the next morning as she was preparing her things for the journey, her
husband said to her, "When you reach the fork in the trail, see that you
take the path towards Mount Taglasmiten.  Do not take the trail to the
right, because that is the trail to the home of the wild men of the ite
tree.  Instead keep straight on till you reach the home of your people."

When she had heard these words, she set out on foot and walked until about
noon, when she reached the fork in the trail, where she lay down and fell
asleep.  She slept a long time, and when she awoke, she saw that the sun
was already getting low, so she hurried on, but took the wrong trail.

She pushed on and on, until at last she came to a great ite tree growing
from the base of a cliff.  It was the ite tree of the wild men, and its
trunk was covered with ancient vines.  In order to climb it, one took hold
of a rattan vine on the left and a rattan vine on the right and ascended.

She started to climb, and when she reached the first cave in the cliff,
she looked inside, saw two blankets and two swords, and climbed onwards.
 After climbing some more, she reached a second cave, looked inside, saw
two blankets and two swords, and climbed onwards.  The same thing happened
with a third cave.  But at last she reached the top cave, where she saw
only one blanket, one sword, and one bag, and into this cave she entered
and sat down.

In the late afternoon, she saw no more sun.  The sky had turned yellow,
and it had started to rain.  She looked down along the trunk of the great
ite tree and heard a creaking sound from the rattan vines at its base.
Then she saw some of the wild men climbing up and pushing bundles of
firewood into their caves while others followed with strings of
fresh-killed phalanger.  But she kept herself hidden in the uppermost cave
with the one blanket, the one bag, and the one sword, where their father
lived alone.

Now as these wild men climbed up to their caves, their old father pushed
ahead of the rest, saw the woman sitting in his cave, and rejoiced in his
heart.  Then he climbed inside, sat down and started playing with her.

And as he played thus with the woman, his six sons began to call up
questions to him from below. "What great thing are you so happy about up
there, Father?" they asked him.  "Are you two persons or one?"

"Not so, myson," he answered, "I am alone, but I have been gone since
dawn, and my various aches and pains are hurting, so I have been
whimpering and moaning a little from this touch of fever."

[Malarial fever is so common in Buru that it is no call for alarm.]

His sons then fell silent, and presently he called down to them, "My
children, when you have cleaned and butchered the big phalanger, please
bring me up to plates of the viscera and two plates of cassava."

But his sons were not satisfied with these words.  "If you are up there
alone," they called back to him, "then why the two plates of viscera and
two plates of cassava? There must be two of you up there, else you would
only be asking for one!"

"My Children," he answered, "you know that I am an oldman, and I have been
out since dawn, so I am hungry.  I am hungry and weary, and I am an old
man, so I need to cook and eat a bit more than usual."

When his sons heard these words, they kept silent, and when they had
finished butchering the phalanger, they roasted two plates of viscera and
two plates of cassava and brought them up to their father, who received
them at the mouth of his cave.  Then he went back inside, ate a piece of
the liver, and left the rest for the woman to eat.

When she had finished, he sat for awhile, then called down to his six sons
again: "My Children, when you boil the big phalanger, remember to bring me
up two plates of meat and two plates of cassava!  I am an old man, so
please bring them here."

Thus when they had cooked the big phalanger, they sliced up two plates of
meat and two plates of cassava for their father and brought them up in
like fashion, and he ate a little of them and gave the rest to the woman.

And when both the father and the woman and the six sons below had all
finished eating, the six sons prepared their beds to go to sleep, but
their father kept staying awake and making noise, so they called, "Father,
what great thing is keeping you awake?  We have finished eating, so now
let us sleep.  We have kept at our work all day long since morning and are
all tired out, so let's get some sleep.  What are you looking for up there
that keeps you awake anyhow?"

"Hush, my Children," he called back. "I am an old man, and I have been
gone since dawn, and my aches and pains are hurting me, so I am moaning
and whimpering a little from this touch of fever."

At last his children believed that he was really alone and fell sound
asleep while he stayed up smiling and tickling the woman.

And at about midnight, when they were done playing, he said to the woman,
"My dear, please get me some betel nut to chew."

So the woman took a betel nut, split it open, and cut from it a tiny piece
about the size of a phalanger's tooth.  This she placed in a large
betel-pepper leaf, which she filled up with lime.

"Bring it here for me to chew," said the wild man.

"No," said the woman, "but come over here and let me feed it to you like a
baby."

So he came and opened his mouth and she pushed in the leaf full of lime
with the little piece of betel nut in it, and he started chewing, but
there was too much lime, and it cut his tongue, and when he felt it, he
said to the woman, "My dear, this lime is eating my tongue."

"Then come here, dear," said the woman, "and I will scrape it off with a
knife."

"Yes," said the man, "please do scrape it off!"

So she took hold of his tongue and started scraping it with a knife, and
as she did so, she kept saying, "Stick it out further, stick it out
further so I can scrape it all off!"

And when the man had stuck his tongue out a long way, the woman sliced it
clean off at the root and threw the old man off the cliff.

And as the old man fell, he uttered something that sounded like, "Taktaka,
taktaka, taktaka, taktaka!"  And when his six sons heard this "taktaka"
sound, they all sprang up and jumped out of their caves after him to the
rocks below, where some had their hips torn from their bodies and others
had their buttocks spattered over the boulders.  And all seven of them
died--the father and six sons.

Then the woman stoked the fire, lit a dried bamboo torch, and climbed down
along the trunk of the ite tree with two spears.  When she reached the
ground, she showed her torch along the base of the cliff and saw that all
seven wild men were indeed dead.  One of them had a neck, but his head had
flown off somewhere else.  Some of them were just an arm or a leg.  They
were all broken apart, and all seven were dead.

Then the woman returned back up the ite tree and began setting the
possessions of the wild men in order.  She worked through the night
gathering everything into one place.  There were cured phalanger and pig
carcasses, woks, gongs, bolts of muslin cloth, swords, spears, and China
plates.  But when she was done, it was still dark, so she sat down and
waited.  She heard the "hio-hao" of the exwasu birds and thought: Now it
will be day.  She sat watching and waiting some more, and presently it
became possible to make out her own body hair.  Then she took some of the
possessions of the wild men and carefully made her way back down the trunk
of the ite tree to the ground, retrieved her fodo basket, and went home.
 When she got to the fork in the trail, she did not continue to the place
of her people, but went straight on to her home.

When her husband saw her coming, he said not one word.  He remained seated
and never asked one question.

"My dear," she said, "I have just nearly died.  Yesterday you told me the
way. "Avoid the path to the right," you told me, "because it leads to the
place of the wild men of the ite tree.  Take the trail that leads leftward
toward Taglasmiten, because that is the trail to your people's home." But
when I reached the fork in the trail, something got into me and I fell
asleep.  I slept a long time, and when I got up, I followed the trail to
the place of the wild men of the ite tree.  When I got there, I looked up
along its trunk and began to ascend.  Inside the lowest cave I saw two
blankets and two swords.  Inside the next cave up I saw two blankets, two
bags, and two swords, and the next cave up was the same.  But in the
highest cave I saw one sword, one bag, and one blanket, and there I
remained.  And in the late after noon, I saw their father returning, and
he ascended to his cave and went inside.  Then they cooked and we ate, and
when we had finished eating, the father asked for betel pepper and betel
nut for him to chew, so I prepared a little betel nut and poured a wild
betel-pepper leaf full of lime and fed it to him, and he chewed it, and it
cut his tongue.  Then I scraped the lime off his tongue with a knife and
tricked him saying, 'Stick it out a little further, stick it out a little
further!' Then I cut it clean off and pushed him out of the cave, and he
made this " "Taktaka, taktaka, taktaka" sound, and his six sons heard it
below me and jumped off the cliff.  Their necks and backs were broken and
some lost arms and legs, and all of them died.  Then early this morning I
started home.  And so, my dear, I say we go back up there and carry off
their possessions."

Now when her husband heard of the many possessions that awaited them, he
rejoiced and returned with her to the place of the wild men of the ite
tree, and together they ascended and lowered all of their possessions to
the base of the ite tree, from whence they began carrying them home.

It took them four days to get all of these things home, and after two more
days, the woman said to her husband, "My dear, let us carry some of these
trade goods to the home of my people, where they will surely stick a pig
for us to eat."

"Okay," answered her husband, "then tomorrow you go down to the fields to
pound millet and dig up sweet potatos and yams.  We will leave some here
and take the rest for our provisions."

When the woman heard this, she went down to their fields and pounded
millet, dug up taro, sweet potatos, and yams, and carried them home, where
she prepared provisions for their journey.  And the next morning they left
home with these provisions, bolts of muslin, swords, spears, and China
plates.

The woman and her husband journeyed until late afternoon, when they
approached the home of her people and were greeted by the barking of dogs.

"Who are the dogs barking at, My Children?" asked her father.

"The dogs are barking at our son in law down on the trail."

And when his son in law had come up to him, he saw the spears, and his son
in law laid out the trade goods on a long sleeping platform.

Then the woman hugged her father and cried.  And after she had hugged her
father, she hugged her mother and cried again.  Then she hugged her
brother and cried some more.

And when they had finished crying, her father split open a betel nut and
offered it to his son in law.  And when his son in law and his daughter
had finished chewing, he sat down.  Then he said to his wife, "Mother, go
back to the kitchen and cook some food for your children to eat, because
they have been walking since early morning and have been hungry down on
the trail."

Then the woman's mother went back and climbed up into her kitchen and
cooked, and when she was done, she called them to eat.

And when they had finished eating, they descended into the parlor, where
the son in law seated himself and began to tell the story:

"My Father and Mother," he said, "this journey of ours happened because
the [deceased] mothers and fathers were watching over us, else you would
have heard that your daughter had died.  She asked me to let her visit
you, her father and mother, and I told her the way clearly, but she fell
asleep on the trail, and when she awoke, she went on to the place of the
wild men of the ite tree, where she almost died.  But by the power of God
she has not died yet, and that is how I have been able to come here with
her."

And when the woman's father and mother heard these things, their hearts
were glad, and the next morning the father in law called his oldest son
and said to him, "Your pig for your sister to eat."

"Okay," said the son, and stuck his pig of four fingers' blubber.

"My son," asked the father in law, "when will you return home?"

"Tomorrow," said his son in law.  "We have slept here two nights, and
tonight will be the third, so we will return tomorrow."

And when the woman's people had stuck the pig, they gathered various kinds
of food: rice, millet, sago meal, and other things, and accompanied their
sister and their brother in law home on their journey.

And when they reached home, the man gave yet more trade goods to his
inlaws to take back with them because they had come a long way.

And the next day these inlaws returned inland to their home.

End text #002.

Tales of the "Geba Bohot," or wild men, pervade the oral literature of
Buru.  As far as I have ever been able to ascertain, a Geba Bohot bears no
outward physical differences with ordinary Buru men.  Nor do the Geba
Bohot speak another language.  A Geba Bohot is simply a Buru man who lives
outside the village and outside the traditional laws of village life.
 Such people may be madmen or thieves driven from distant villages.  Their
origin and condition are of no interest to village men.  Although Geba
Bohot are generally considered evil thieves to be killed on sight, a Geba
Bohot may also be just and good.  The main thing is that, whether bad OR
good, the Geba Bohot is a free moral agent, and therefore dangerous to
village men.  The Geba Bohot are foolish, poor fighters, and easily
overcome.  They are much better dead than alive, therefore it is something
of a duty incumbent upon all honest village men to kill them wherever and
whenever they are discovered.  There is no punishment for killing a Geba
Bohot.  Instead men bring home such things as a Geba Bohot finger to prove
they have killed one.  Even good Christians do not deem it a sin to kill a
Geba Bohot in the forest.

Buru settlement pattern is exogamic--that is, a woman leaves her own clan
and goes to live with her husband.  Thus tales of various misadventures
befalling women who return to visit their people are a favorite theme in
Buru folklore.

This tale and others provide glimpses into daily life and the division of
labor.  The fields are tended by women, and it is the women who pound rice
and millet, dig up tubers, and prepare food.

All travel and transport in ancient Buru was done on foot or by canoe.
There was apparently never a time when any animal was used as a beast of
burden.  Nor did people wear shoes of any kind except for a sort of wide
bark sandal (called "tarupa" in Maluku, probably from Malay "tarompa")
that men wore to protect their feet from the gigantic thorns of the sago
swamps.

The "ite," or "pule" in Malay, are gigantic trees whose trunks are often
covered with their own forest of vines and other plants.  I remember
climbing one to a height of somewhere between 50-100 feet at Kate-kate by
simply pulling myself up through these vines.  The experience is wonderful
because of the awesome perspective it provides over the surrounding
forest, but very unpleasant because of the various kinds of insects and
ants that live in the vines.  I imagine these trees may become extinct
because of the high quality of their wood.  When I was a boy, I owned an
ukulele dug out of a piece of this wood by a carpenter named Rafel in
Hunut.  I brought him the block from which he carved my ukulele from a
place where people had been cutting wood at Kate-kate.  The color of the
fresh wood was light pink and yellow.

Buru women are used to walking up slanting tree trunks and fording streams
on fallen logs.  In fact many parts of trails through great forests are
just fallen logs.  They are able to do this because the muscles of their
feet and ankles have become very strong, and they have developed a keen
sense of balance by means of much practise.  Obliviousness to height is
simply part of the game.  The diminutive Mama Mura, Temi's wife, could
apparently climb the tallest tree to hunt for phalanger just as well as
any man.

Ratten vines are among the strongest cabling and lashing materials in the
world.  They have terrible hooked thorns, but these can be easily trimmed
off with a sharp knife or a Buru sword.

The Buru people weave a kind of rough canvas that they sew into bags.

The Phalanger is a nocturnal marsupial that looks something like a possum
and grows about as big as a house cat.  It has large pink eyes and a pink,
prehensile tail.  It lives in large trees, and is hunted for food.  The
flavor of the meat is definitely an acquired taste.  It has a persistent
odor that is faintly reminiscent of the stink of the possum smelt on
California country roads.  Yet when eaten enough times by someone hungry
enough to eat it, this strange flavor is forgotten or even comes to be
enjoyed.

Buru people are almost always more or less hungry, and capable of eating
great quantities of food.  This is partly because of the scarcity of fat
and protein in their diet, and partly because of the large amount of
physical energy they must expend for all of the things they do in daily
life.  It is not strange, therefore, that this healthy female should be
happy to fill herself up with the better part of two helpings of meat and
two helpings of cassava.

The idea of woman as plaything and giver of pleasure is well established
in Buru culture.  Women seem to enjoy this role and fit into it happily.
Those who have the personality for it will tend to assert a more
European-like female dominance at or about middle age.

Forbes (reference #003) wrote: "As soon as a traveler arrived, I noticed
that he was at once waited on by the women of the village, who brought
sirih [betel pepper], betel [betel nut], and chalk, [caustic lime] and a
hot ember to light his cigarette.  The women seemed to live in great
subjection to the men, who never did anything for themselves if a woman
was within call."  These things are true, but the outsider hardly ever
sees a Buru man in anything but his village setting, the village being a
place of rest, socializing, and recreation after grueling hardships and
privations in the forest.

The word I have translated as "moaning and whimpering" is "edhede," for
which I can find no accurate English translation.  People "edhede" from
malarial chills and fever.  How a man and a woman might produce this kind
of sound without a fever is left to the imagination!

In this tale again a man may have all the ingredients handy but ask a
woman to prepare his betel chew instead of moving one finger to do it
himself.  Yet in typical Buru fashion, the woman is right there and
immediately available to accomplish this task.  Being able to supply these
wants and needs is considered to be part and parcel of the adult Buru
female constitution.  Instead of perceiving the betel-nut service as an
unpleasant chore, therefore, a Buru woman is apt to see it rather as a
special honor.  Women tend to carry small swords or sharp knives about
their persons, and the woman of a Buru man's dreams comes with a
betel-chewing kit having containers of gold.  Thus the serving of betel
nut, although done openly, also bears with it an intimate, seductive, and
even sexual connotation.

The list of possessions owned by the wild men pretty much covers all of
the items of wealth in traditional Buru society.  Bronze gongs have
probably been prized in Buru for thousands of years.  Iron woks and swords
and spears may have come later.  A testament to the great wealth of
ancient Buru is the large numbers of China plates and decorative ceramics
that have been found buried or hidden in caves in various caches.  This
wealth must have come from the clove trees, which the Dutch later
destroyed at gunpoint in order to monopolize the spice trade (reference
#004).  It was impossible for them to destroy the wild cloves because the
Buru jungle is too vast, but they outlawed and destroyed those grown for
the spice trade, making such clove trees "illegal" in Buru.  The result
was, of course, to plunge the people of Buru into abject poverty for the
next 350 years.

The clove trade from Maluku is quite ancient.  I encountered some
difficulty in finding accurate citations on the Internet, but among other
things I was able to find these words:

"The Chinese wrote of cloves as early as 400 BC. and there is a record
from 200 BC of courtiers keeping cloves in their mouths to avoid offending
the emperor while addressing him."

"As early as 200 bc, envoys from Java to the Han-dynasty court of China
brought cloves that were customarily held in the mouth to perfume the
breath during audiences with the emperor." --Britanica.

The last two references above are problematic since Chinese writing seems
to have developed later than the dates given.  A more reliable source may
be this one:

"Archeologists found cloves within a ceramic vessel in Syria along with
evidence dating the find to within a few years of 1721 BC."

But whatever the case and in any such case, the cloves came ultimately
from Maluku, which was the only source of cloves known in the ancient
world, thus Maluku has played a role in world civilization since before
the dawn of human history, and the four rivers of Buru may have been the
inspiration behind the four rivers of Paradise instead of vice versa.

The last part of this tale goes further into the Buru INLAW relationship
and provides an example of the formal use of betel nut in that setting.

***** End opening pages.

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