Note 217 — Chapter VI · Magic Rites as affecting the Life of Man (continued 3)

“This ordeal is not peculiar to Perak. I find a short description of a similar custom in Pegu in Hamilton’s New Accounts of the East Indies (1727). In Pegu, he says, the ordeal by water is managed ‘by driving a stake of wood into a river and making the accuser and accused take hold of the stake and keep their heads and bodies under water, and he who stays longest under water is the person to be credited.’”217