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to be the subject of the game is placed under a cloth. He is sometimes made dizzy with incense and shaken to and fro by his companions, tapped on the head and subjected to various other stupefying manipulations. Meantime they chant incessantly round him in chorus a sort of rhyming incantation the meaning of which it is impossible fully to comprehend, but in which the animal typified is mentioned by name, and attention drawn to some of its characteristics.
After a while, if the charm succeeds the boy jumps up, climbs cocoanut and other fruit trees with the activity and gestures of an ape, and devours hard unripe fruits with greediness; or else, perhaps, he struts like a peacock, imitating its spreading tail with the gestures of his hands and its cries with his voice till at last his human consciousness returns to him.
When the actual "suggestion" does not take place, it becomes a game pure and simple. The "charmed" boy, when he thinks the proper time has come, merely makes some idiotic jumps and grimaces and perhaps climbs a tree or two or pursues his comrades in a threatening manner.
The children in Acheh also play these games, and it is especially the common ape (buë), the cocoanut monkey (eungkòng) and the elephant whose nature is supposed to be imparted to the boys by means of suggestion[1].
At the time of the full moon young lads sometimes disguise themselves to give their comrades of the same gampōng a fright. Those who make their faces unrecognizable by means of a mask and their bodies by unwonted garments are known as Si Dalupa; where they imitate the forms of animals, they takes their appellation from that which they copy e.g. meugajah-gajah = to play the elephant.
- ↑ For the "ape-suggestion" they sing the following verse: chhòʾ kalichhèʾ, kalichhòʾ, kanji rumi, meuteumeung kayèë cheukòʾ, jigòʾ-gòʾ lé si banggi, i.e. "Chhòʾ, the paste of Stambul is already slippery, already slippery, he finds a crooked tree. Opium smoker (nickname of the eungkòng, owing to his constant yawning) shakes him". The verse containing the elephant suggestion is almost entirely untranslateable.
