persons of princely rank who have committed this crime are placed on a raft of bamboos and set floating away out to sea.[68.5] [Sidenote: Persons guilty of incest buried alive.] In Semendo, a district of Sumatra, the punishment for incest and murder used to be to bury the criminals alive. Before they were led to their doom, it was customary for the villagers to feast them, every family killing a fowl for the purpose. Then the whole population escorted the culprits to their grave outside the village and saw the earth shovelled in upon them. In the year 1864, at the village of Tandjong Imam, this doom was executed on a man and his deceased wife’s sister, with whom he had been detected in an intrigue. “Great was my emotion and indignation,” said the humane Dutch governor, {69} “when I stood by the grave of these poor wretches along with the unworthy chiefs who had sat on the bench of justice during the enforced absence of Pangeran Anom and pronounced this sentence. I told them in plain language that judges who pronounced such a sentence of death on grounds so trivial (the request of the family concerned) deserved themselves to undergo the same punishment.” The Dutch Government has since issued stringent orders that no one henceforth is to be buried alive, and has threatened with death any person who shall dare to disregard its orders.[69.1] The same punishment for incest is, or used to be, inflicted by the Pasemhers, another tribe of Sumatra, but more merciful than the people of Semendo they gave the culprits at least a chance for their life. The guilty pair were bound back to back and buried in a deep hole, but from the mouth of each a hollow bamboo communicated with the upper air; and if when the grave was opened after seven days the wretches were found to have survived a prolonged agony far worse than death, they were granted their life.[69.2] Nor was even this dreadful fate the worst that could befall the sinner who broke the rules of sexual morality in Sumatra. [Sidenote: Adulterers killed and eaten.] The Battas or Bataks of Central Sumatra condemned an adulterer to be killed and eaten; strictly speaking he should be speared to death first and eaten afterwards, but as the injured husband and his friends were commonly the judges and executioners, it sometimes happened that, passion proving too strong for a strict adherence to the letter of the law, they cut the flesh from his living body, ate it, and drank his blood, before it occurred to them to terminate his sufferings by a spear-thrust. However, an adulterer occasionally escaped with his life on the payment of a fine, always provided that his accomplice was not the wife of a chief; for in that case there was no help for it but he must be killed and eaten.[69.3]