DOMESTIC LIFE 21

villages of 400 and 500 houses were not uncommon, and there
were two or three of 800 houses.

Now that all fear of being raided has gone for ever, people
no longer feel the need of living together in large communities,
and the size of villages is steadily decreasing. The peculiar
vagabond strain in the blood of the Kuki-Lushai race, if not
controlled, leads to villages splitting into hamlets and hamlets
sub-dividing, till in the Manipur, Hills we find single houses
in the midst of dense jungle, several miles from the next
habitation. This could never happen among tribes belonging
to the Naga group, with whom intense love for the ancestral
village site is a leading characteristic. A short distance out-
side the village by the roadside there generally are several
platforms of logs with posts round them adorned with skulls of
animals, gourds, rags, and old pots. These are memorials of
deceased heroes, and will be more fully dealt with later on.

The gate itself was composed either of two large slabs of
timber, or of a number of stout saplings suspended from a cross
bar by holes cut through their upper ends; during the day
these were drawn aside, but at night they hung perpendicularly
in the gateways and were firmly secured between two cross bars.
Passing through the gate, one finds oneself in a sort of irregular
street leading up to the highest point of the village, where there
is generally an open space, from which other streets branch off.
On one side of this space will be the chiefs house, with the
"zawlbuk," or bachelors' hall, opposite it. The villages of
powerful chiefs are beautifully laid out in regular streets which
follow the natural features of the ground. When Colonel
Lister in 1850 captured the village of Shentlang he was so im-
pressed with the regularity with which the villages within sight
were laid out that he was easily led to believe these were can-
tonments inhabited solely by warriors. If the village is a large
one and contains a mixed population, it is divided into several
quarters, or " veng," which are generally inhabited by people of
the same clan, and each will have its zawlbuk, a large building
constructed by the united labour of the men of the veng or the
village. As the mith&n or gyal (tame bison) belonging to the
village pass the night under the zawlbuk, it is generally built
on rather a steep hillside, so that the natural fall of the ground