Saturday, February 11, 2012

TIBANG, TEBANG, TILONG AND MANDAI by A.J.N RICHARDS, M.A


Last year I tried to find out more about Bukit Mandai, which Is often referred to by Ibans as being the people of the dead, situated in Indonesian Borneo. The top is said to be inaccessible ; but gong music and the sound of people talking can be heard from below, though nothing can be seen expect lights.

In the second Division I was told the hill was in the Ulu  Melawi, a river which flows S.W., to the north of Bukit Raja, joins the Pinoh and then flows N.W. to enter the Kapuas near Sintang.

The officer in Charges at Nangga Kantu in Kalimantan, a Kantu man named Pilang, told me that the hill referred to was called Tilong and was above Nanga Raun (or Ruan) in the river Mandai. The Mandai has its source to the N.E. of the Melawi in the same rugged mass of mountain (Madi plateu), and curves round to the N.W. to enter the Kapuas in a very swampy area below Putus Sibau and S.E. of the Kapuas Lakes.

The Mandai is supposed to be connected underground with a very pothole in the Ulu Ai called Lubok Kelebuai, the abode of Genali, King of the waters. Genali, in A.C. Scott’s Iban Dictionary, is called “Supernatural king of the turtles”. The deep pool is said to be the only water that did not dry up during an extreme, and legendary, drought. A  woman’s hat, lost in the pool, is said to have been found floating in the Mandai.

A story told at Lubok Antu has it that a man hunting in the Mandai and found himself in company with another boat in which a woman was being paddled by two men. He re cognized the woman as his wife and went in pursuit. He caught up as they went ashore and secured his wife who shrank to the size of his thumb. He put her in a safe place and set off home. On arrival home in the Ulu Ai seven days later, he found that his wife had been buried: but he was able to bring her back to life because he had brought her soul back with him.

In “The Riddle of Gunong Tibang” (S.M.J. VII 1956, 7) B.E. Smythies quotes references to Tilong by Beccari & Spencer St. John. In Iban a tilong is abed-platform inside a house, now commonly called pangking (Chinese). In malay (Wilkinson) it is the same as tanglong, spelled telong (with long e), which is a Chinese  lantern, much referred to in Malay literature. Informants at Saratok told me that Bukit Mandai could be seen from Tibang and looked like ship’s funnel. Kirk mentions a hill seen from Tibang, and says it might be Bukit Karihun (80 miles to the S.W.) (“Bukit Tibang and the Baleh Headwaters”, by N. Haile & H. Kirk, S.M.J. VIII, 1957, 10). But this is not Tilong, which would be more like 150 miles distant, hidden in another confused jumble of peaks.


From its name, its seems that Tilong is a fairly isolated out-crop near the edge of a volcanic plateau, higher than it is wide and surrounded by cliffs, like the one photographed in “The Birds of Borneo” from Baram district (Plate 6). Another is shewn by Pierre Ivanoff in the French  original of his recent “Headhunters of Borneo”, called Batu Mili: this is somewhere in Busang country of the ulu Mahakam and therefore south of Tibang;  it also has a legend attached to it  and is referred to by him as a holy hill.

The explanation of the name Tibang is that it looks like one.  A tibang is a round bark-walled padi-bin, of a diameter slightly greater than its height. But from Dr. Kirk’s description it looks more like the inside of one than the outside, for he writes of an “amphitheatre of precipices” with peaks on its edge. And if the Giant Hunter, Antu Grasi, hunts men for his supper, it would be a bold one who would spend long in his padi-pin! I have not found any explanation of the name Tidong but the name Tebang, which means to fell trees, refers to legends. It is not applied to Tibang but could well be to Tilong. There are others, such as the Bukit Tebang near the mouth of the Staat river (above Batu Kitang)  and another outcrop near Gumbang, above  Pangkalan Tebang in the Right Hand Branch of the Sarawak River.

Tilong (Mandai) is said to be the stump of a huge kayu ara  (ficus) which once overshadowed the country. Men decided to cut it down so that they could have the benefit of sunshine but they had only hand axes, probably stone, to tackle the job. They made little progress until a boy sewed them how to fit handles to their axes. But having cut nearly half way through in a day, they found that the chips returned to their places overnight. The boy then tried and succeeded in cutting right through in one day: the chips flying off as big as winnowing baskets and turning to stone as they fell. The tree came down and smothered the whole countryside, with all the people in it. The fallen tree also blocked the way to the abode of the dead (Sebayan) so that the dead can no longer return to mingle with the living as they once used to do.

Perhaps this is also the reason why  Iban, unlike the Kenyah, will not fell kayu ara, believing that they will be afflicted with madness or some other disaster if they do so.