The story continues...
I arrived during harvest time and many people were busy gathering in the rice crop or engaged in related matters and were too busy or too tired to humour my request for a lesson in an old way of making fire
These are subsistence farmers and it was not a good year as strong monsoon winds and storms had flattened parts of the fields so it was not my part to be pushy.
Fortunately, after spending the first day learning how to harvest rice, I spoke to an old man in his 70s named Salang whom I knew. He was not busy with rice harvesting and he promised me a lesson the following morning.
I had come just to photograph the fire starting but the quest turned into a complete tutorial on this form of fire making. Im setting it out in some detail for the record since the 19th Century accounts are brief and sometimes misleading.
Since I had collected and dried the temiang bamboo on a previous visit, we now started by collecting the tinder.
This meant locating an
apiang palm, mentioned in Skertchly as growing only on the banks of mountain streams far into the interior. In our case, we were about 60km from the coast close to a large stream in a transition zone between low hills and swamp.
[Apiang palm and Salang]
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The tinder is not, as Skertchly says, from the external covering of the stem but from intermediate layers between the outer layers and the inner pith. This is surprising since his description of the tinder is quite accurate.
Incidentally, his translation of tinder as
umbut is not correct as umbut simply means the palm pith or heart of palm. Salang never refered to the tinder fluff as
umbut but as
lulut (refered to by Skertchly as the Malay word for tinder) which he obtained from
umbut apiang (apiang palm heart).
I have only a very small Dyak vocabulary and spoke to Salang in standard Malay. He has practically no English and a limited and heavily accented Borneo Malay but I am sure on this point.
[ cutting off the outer layers]
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Getting the lulut is quick if you know what you are doing. Note the way he holds the parang
[a brown flocculent mass, quite soft. This is scraped off and forms the best tinder. Skertchly]
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[heart of palm umbut]
We later brought the heart to a hut used when the Dayaks are working the fields so they do not have to walk all the way back to the long house.
The scraped lulut was then collected.
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I had brought my collecting bag, Salang improvised. Aesthetically, it was no contest.
[bag vs. leaf]
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The ethno-pyrology literature makes no mention of any additive to the apiang lulut but Salang said that we had to add something. He brought me to a plant which I know by sight but not name.
[plant]
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The leaves of this plant can grow to 10 metres and are shaped like a V with wings in the way a child might draw a distant bird in flight. Some call it natures corrugated iron and it is indeed used as shelter material as this picture shows
[corrugated roof]
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We collected some very dry old roof mats from the rice hut and brought it back to the longhouse. Salang washed it to remove dirt and impurities.
We then dried the lulut and leaves which is almost as exciting as watching grass grow.
When dry the leaves were burnt on a drum lid till they almost turned to ash at which time they were covered. I dont know why this was done. Initially, when I heard the word tin, I thought they would make some kind of char fibre but this was almost entirely ash, char dust at best if there is such a thing (Any suggestions why they do this?)
[ burning leaves]
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[ash]
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The lulut and the ash were then mixed taking care not to let any dirt etc on to it.
A piece of fluffed up tinder is then placed on top of a piece of stone / crockery with the thumb on top in the conventional way and the temiang section is struck hard with a glancing blow. If lucky a small spark or two is produced. As Balfour said it is a method requiring great skill and in a very demanding environment at that.
[striking bamboo]
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The tinder was not dry enough as it had barely 2 hours of direct sunlight to dry since being scraped off the inner stem. The crockery was also unsuitable being too modern though it threw off feeble sparks. We tried some robust ferrocium sparks to test the tinder. A very tiny part ignited but even hand fanning only produced more smoke.
[ smouldering tinder]
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When I return to Borneo, well do it again with drier tinder.
Some the Dutch bushies were experimenting last weekend with the bamboo I sent them with I hear better results.
