CHAPTER III.
GAMES AND PASTIMES.
§ 1. Various games of young and old.
Childrens' toys.Over the cradles of little children in Acheh are hung sundry objects cut out of paper which charm the infant by their colour and movement and as it were hypnotise him. These are called keumbay bundi. A like purpose is served by boiled eggs coloured red and transfixed with a small piece of stick, with paper ornaments fastened on the top.
In Java they use rattles called klontongan[1] with membranes of paper and a little string on either side to which is attached some hard object. When the wooden handle passing through the drum of the rattle is smartly twisted round, these pellets strike the membrane in quick succession. In Acheh these are known under the name of tèngtòng or geundrang changguëʾ (frogs' drum), as the noise they make bears some resemblance to the croaking of frogs.
Boys play a good deal with tops (gaséng).[2] A kind of humming-top is made from the kumukōih-fruit by thrusting a stick through it by way of axis, and making a hole in the side. The wooden tops resemble our own[3].
- ↑ Mal. kělèntong (Translator).
- ↑ The Malay word is identical with the Achehnese (gaseng). Among the Malays both old and young delight in spinning tops. Skeat mentions (Malay Magic p. 485) a bamboo humming top, said however to have been borrowed from the Chinese. (Translator).
- ↑ Those for children the wood of which is brought to a point are called "female" tops (gaséng inòng); those with round iron spindles gaséng bulat, those with a chisel-shaped point gaséng pheuët. There is a certain game with this last in which there are two parties, as a rule from different gampōngs, and the conquerors are allowed to "hack" the tops of the losers. (I have seen a game very like this played by school-boys with similar "peg. tops" in the North of Ireland). (Translator).
