husband spared the erring couple and the wife was again taken in adultery, the villagers themselves decreed the punishment. The unfaithful wife and her lover were dragged outside the village and impaled on sharp stakes amid the taunts and jeers of the bystanders, who only desisted from their mockery when death had stilled the writhing agony of the sufferers.[67.1] “The Hottentots,” says an old writer, “allow not marriages between first or second cousins. They have a traditionary law, which ordains, that both man and woman, so near to each other in blood, who shall be convicted of joining together either in marriage or fornication, shall be cudgel’d to death. This law, they say, has prevail’d through all the generations of ’em; and that they execute it at once, upon a conviction, without any regard to wealth, power or affinity.”[67.2] [Sidenote: Incest and adultery severely punished in the East Indies.] We have seen that in the East Indies sexual crimes, particularly incest, adultery, and fornication, are often viewed with grave displeasure because they are believed to draw down the wrath of the higher powers on the whole community. Hence it is natural that such offences should be treated as high treason and the offenders punished with death. A common punishment is drowning. For example, when incest between a parent and a child or between a brother and a sister has been detected among the Kubus, a primitive aboriginal tribe of Sumatra, the culprits are enclosed in a large fish-trap, made of rattan or bamboo, and sunk in a deep pool of the river. However, they are not pinioned; nay, they are even furnished with a tin knife, and {68} if they can cut their way out of the trap, rise through the bubbling water to the surface, and swim ashore, they are allowed to live.[68.1] In the island of Bali incest and adultery are punished by drowning; the criminals are sewed up in a sack half-filled with stones and rice and cast into the sea. A like doom is incurred by a woman who marries a man of a lower caste; but sometimes she dies a more dreadful death, being burnt alive. [Sidenote: Modes of execution adopted which avoid the shedding of blood.] Both modes of execution may be adopted in order to avoid shedding the blood of the sinners; for in Bali, the ordinary way of despatching a criminal is to stab him to the heart with a creese (kris) or crooked Malay sword.[68.2] In the island of Celebes, as we saw, the blood of persons who have been guilty of certain sexual crimes is believed to blast the ground on which it falls;[68.3] so that it is natural in their case to resort to a bloodless mode of execution such as drowning or burning. In Mamoedjoe, a district on the west coast of Celebes, the incest of a father with his daughter or of a brother with his sister is punished by binding the culprits hand and foot, weighting them with stones, and flinging them into the sea.[68.4] Among the Bugineese of Southern Celebes