(M159) Again, the Burmese think it an indignity to have any one, especially a woman, over their heads, and for this reason Burmese houses have never more than one story. The houses are raised on posts above the ground, and whenever anything fell through the floor Dr. Bastian had always difficulty in persuading a servant to fetch it from under the house. In Rangoon a priest, summoned to the bedside of a sick man, climbed up a ladder and got in at the window rather than ascend the staircase, to reach which he must have passed under a gallery. A pious Burman of Rangoon, finding some images of Buddha in a ship’s cabin, offered a high price for them, that they might not be degraded by sailors walking over them on the deck.(856) Formerly in Siam no person might cross a bridge while his superior in rank was passing underneath, nor might he walk in a room above one in which his superior was sitting or lying.(857) The Cambodians esteem it a grave offence to touch a man’s head; some of them will not enter a place where anything whatever is suspended over their heads; and the meanest Cambodian would never consent to live under an inhabited room. Hence the houses are built of one story only; and even the Government respects the prejudice by never placing a prisoner in the stocks under the floor of a house, though the houses are raised high above the ground.(858) The same superstition exists amongst the Malays; for an early traveller reports that in Java people “wear nothing on their heads, and say that nothing must be on their heads ... and if any person were to put his hand upon their head they would kill him; and they do not build houses with storeys, in order that they may not walk over each other’s heads.”(859) In Uganda no person belonging to the king’s totem clan was allowed to get on the top of the palace to roof it, for that would have been regarded as equivalent to getting on the top of the king. Hence the palace had to be roofed by men of a different clan from the king.(860)