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Quest for the Fire Bamboo |
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Written by David Maybury-Lewis
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Page 1 of 2 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 70’s 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. I’m 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.
Picture - Apiang palm and Salang. |
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.
Picture - Cutting off the outer layers. |
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." Skertchy |
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. |
I had brought my collecting bag, Salang improvised. Aesthetically, it was no contest.
Picture - bag vs leaf |
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.
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