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A Garo Jungle Book; Or, the Mission to the Garos of Assam
A Garo Jungle Book Or the Mission to the Garos of Assam Author:William Carey General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1919 Original Publisher: Judson Press Subjects: Garo (Indic people) Missions Assam (India) Religion / Christian Ministry / Missions Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you bu... more »y the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: Ill GLIMPSES OF THE HOME LIFE GARO houses, called changys, are bamboo structures, from thirty to one hundred and fifty feet long, and from twenty to forty feet broad. Each house is built out from the cliff rearwards, and supported on piles. The fronts are flush with the ground, or raised a couple of feet above it, perhaps a line of them on the crest of a ridge, or a cluster crowning some conical hill. " The walls and the floor are of bamboos, cut open, and woven as mats." In many houses a veranda runs along the side, and there is always a platform or porch at the back end. Through a trap-door in the flooring all manner of filth is thrown down to the scavenging fowls and hogs below. The house porch is often used for pounding rice, the mortar being a hollowed stump of hard wood, the pestle a thick pole. Front verandas are often piled up with skulls of stags, bulls, boars, leopards, and other ghastly relics. Human skulls -- the most prized of all -- have happily now disappeared. When the British occupation took place, in 1873, Captain Williamson ordered them to be brought out and burned. What heaps there were, and how reluctantly yielded up; but what immemorial feuds those fires quenched for evermore! By some the porch is used for stalling the bulls. There are generally two, one on each side of the door, and very sleek and fit they look. The Garos do not breed them, but buy them at the markets. On public festivals the creatures are taken out and brought together to fight, bei...« less