To-day the assistant is resting. The steamer is gone. We shall go hunting adventure on our own. Four miles inland there is a kampong where live about fifty Kia Kias. As the day is warm we will put on the lightest clothing we have and go there. We cannot miss the way, for the only road of which the country boasts passes the place. It leads to a deceased missionary’s little plantation about three miles farther on.
Each of the men has perforated the septum of his nose to permit inserting a pair of boar-tusks
A pair of alligator-teeth make a wonderful nose-ornament
33The last building we pass on our way through the outer fringes of the little town is a rambling whitewashed structure. It is the government hospital. We must see this place, for in it they are striving to save the Vanishing Men. We are met at the little office door by a nurse in modest white. She is the only one on duty now, for nurses are hard to obtain in this out-of-the-way corner of our old footstool. She is half white and half Chinese. She speaks five languages fluently, we find, for as we converse with her she lapses into French now and then, with sprinklings of Malay and Dutch. It is a habit linguists have, for they find finer shades of meaning in varied tongues. Her English is perfect and we take for granted the purity of her Pekinese, for she tells us she was born in the Celestial Empire.
In the wards she shows us the patients in her care. Here we find the curse of civilization stalking like a grim specter. Statistics, she informs us, give the Kia Kias fourteen years more to live. Once the race numbered a hundred thousand, but now with the coming of the strangers the venereal scourge is upon them and their ill-nurtured bodies cannot withstand the heroic treatment necessary for successfully combating the disease. The mere confinement in the hospital kills some of them.
34Before the coming of the strangers they were a healthy race that thrived and prospered. True, they ate one another, but their diet seemed to agree with them. It was the greatest pleasure they got out of life. These dinner-parties are taboo now and the poor devils within reach of the punishing whites have nothing for which to live. They are a race without ambition, lacking zest of life, and seek excitement in excesses that take toll of hundreds where the roasting-pit claimed but a comparative few. In early days there was tribal organization, which was necessary for survival. Now they live in less dread and great sloth, their idleness breeding indulgence in the only thing left to them, unrestricted sensuality. True, the tribes that live in the remote fastnesses of the jungle still maintain the old customs and they are contaminated only slightly with the scourge; still, it has found them.
With mixed emotions we leave the hospital. The advice of the engineer comes to us with new significance. Every ship or schooner that plies 35the islands has been freighted with the scourge, gathered from the four winds and brought here. Then come the missionaries further to darken the sky, for do they not lift hands, eyes raised askance, at the naked savage and force him to don clothes? The childlike and untutored natives do not know that in rain-soaked clothing there lurks a menace. Their naked skins shed the water and they never become chilled, but those whom the missionaries have clothed are one and all subject to pulmonary troubles that are making further inroads on the race.
The road winds into the jungle where the silence is absolute. A mile from town it has dwindled to a mere foot-path. As we brush the close-growing shrubs that border it, we dislodge clouds of midges and mosquitos which, with the moist heat and the perspiration that soaks us, become intolerable. However, we have set out for the kampong, and shall go there.
After an interminable hour, we come to a clearing where we find a palm-thatched shack. Three naked children are sprawling on the 36ground, chattering baby talk. They do not notice our approach until we are close to them, but as we say “hello” they bounce to their feet and disappear in the bush with wild cries of alarm. They are just like any of the wild things that live in the jungle. We laugh at their sudden fear and call to them to return, while their mother inside the shack peeps furtively at us through a crevice in the wall. Evidently she is not much frightened, for she comes to the door and greets us with, “Tabe, Tuans,” the stock greeting of the Malay-speaking native. She is clad in her birthday clothing, as naked as on her natal day save for a heavy necklace of shells wound twice around her neck. She approaches us with easy grace, wholly unconscious of her nudity. Though she wears no covering whatever, she is clothed, for the dignity with which she moves and her utter lack of self-consciousness form a garment that drapes her pleasingly.
Enormous nose-tubes of bamboo which entirely close the nostrils, making breathing possible only through the mouth
The women wear in many cases a tiny breech-clout, but no other covering
37Going to a pile of cocoanuts beside the shack, she selects two which she opens with a deft stroke of a heavy broad-bladed knife. These she gives us, with a smile and a sinuous, almost coquettish lifting of the hip as she stretches her arm to hand them to us. Bidding us wait, she disappears inside the shack, emerging in a moment with two Chinese enameled cups which she offers us. We thank her, but prefer to drink the cool water of the nuts from the shell.
The brown-skinned urchins, upon seeing their mother in friendly conversation with the strangers, return to the clearing and eye us with wonder and some distrust. They are on their little toes, so to speak, watching for the slightest suspicious movement, ready to fly to the protective jungle. Their big sloe eyes grow wistful as we offer them some pennies and their mother reassures them, finally overcoming their fears and bringing them to the place where we are crouched upon our haunches with hands outstretched. They reach out, snatch the pennies, and are gone, whereupon the mother shrieks with merriment. While we are laughing over the little comedy a boy of possibly eighteen 38years, naked as his mother, comes from the thicket with some more cocoanuts, which he tosses on the pile by the shack. He looks inquiringly at us and his mother directs him to guide us to the kampong, which is set back off the path a few rods.
The sound of laughter and some one singing in full-voiced baritone greets us as we near the kampong. A man is singing a Kia Kia melody that sounds as though he were ill. He finishes the song as we enter the narrow opening in the kampong wall and all the natives in sight gaze at us for a fraction of a second, paralyzed with surprise and fright.
The spell is broken the moment we step inside and they leap en masse for the exit in the rear of the kampong and wedge there in a ludicrous struggle of arms and legs. Somehow they force their way through the opening and the enclosure is deserted except for a few old women too old to get away.
Our presence in the kampong is resented by the canine population, which gathers before us 39in a semicircle and howls in great anguish of spirit. Soon a dusky form slithers in through the exit, to be followed by several more, and all stand grouped at a respectful distance, eyeing us closely. They are women, startlingly nude. As they come to no harm at our hands, the men take heart and return singly till all the inmates of the kampong are again at home. After a silent study of us the men evidently realize that we are harmless, for they break into loud laughter, which is taken up by the women, and come toward us to make us welcome. The women gather around and, though laughing uproariously, seem friendly enough.
We are in a real cannibal village, and, as it is our first, we are somewhat curious about it. We start in by examining the natives and note the curious decorations with which they adorn themselves. Each of the men has perforated the septum of his nose to permit of inserting a pair of boar tusks or pig knuckles. This of course interferes with his breathing, so he has cut two vertical openings through the sides of 40the nose through which the air whistles at each inhalation. The faces of all the men are besmeared with paint, which they make from colored earths they gather and grind into a fine powder.
The ears of both men and women are perforated in the lower part of the lobes, which, by reason of the many heavy brass rings with which they are weighted, hang down well upon the neck, some of them even touching the shoulders. All wear necklaces of shell, with sometimes a variation in the shape of varicolored seeds sewn upon pieces of trade cloth. The men wear no loin-cloth, but those of family wear a grotesquely inadequate substitute comprised of a shell and a string of bark fiber. The women in many cases wear a tiny breech-clout of twisted fiber scarcely bigger than the palm of one hand, a triangular patch that because of its color and texture does not seem to exist. Many of them seem to be sufficiently happy without even this pretense at clothing and in no way conscious of their nakedness. Among those 41under the age of twenty of both sexes there is no attempt at covering.
We are as much objects of curiosity to them as they to us and while we have been studying them they have been picking us to pieces. The women pluck at our silk shirts and try to peep inside, doing it gently, however, for fear of arousing our anger. They are like a throng of curious, happy children and now and then one of the younger women will burst into shrieks of laughter at some sally of her mates and run a few steps away, where she leaps up and down in exuberance of spirits.
They move like graceful animals, each muscle rippling under its sheathing of dark bronze with a freedom and smoothness that makes us envy them their unrestrained ease. Here are no bloated abdomens, no pinched-in waists. They have never seen corsets. Their bodies and limbs are clean-lined and well rounded and they walk haughtily erect.
In response to our inquiries as to their shelters they extend us a laughing invitation to visit 42them and lead us to the low thatched shelves that run around the enclosure, which forms their back wall. Supported upon low legs of bamboo is a long platform which completely encircles the kampong. There are no partitions of any kind to screen from view the various intimacies of family life. One may sit upon the platform and see whatever transpires in the homes of the entire kampong. In fact, these people live entirely on a community basis, and there are no secrets.
Johnny woos Milly, or whatever their names may be, with little regard for the others and may live with her for some time without censure before he finally decides that marriage is the proper thing. If he finds her to his liking he may inform the rest that he will keep her, and that is all there is to it. There is no scandal, for all know everything. Gossip there is in plenty, but that is when some member plays hookey and visits another kampong with too much regularity. Conduct of this sort is frowned upon, but not punished except by the hookee’s—what shall 43I call her?—sparring partner, who if she learns of the situation may take the offender to task. But such is life even in our own land of Wednesday evenings and cabarets.
Our hosts bring cocoanuts, which they open for us to drink from, and offer us food. We drink, but, strange to say, are not hungry. Our cigarettes are received with marked approval,—so marked, in fact, that they are snatched from us by the package the moment we pass out the first one. They take it for granted that we want them to have them and do not wish to put us to the trouble of distributing them. They do this themselves, after the fashion of ten dogs after one bone, but with surprising good nature. They love tobacco, which they get from the ubiquitous Chinese or Malay traders. Having no paper with which to make cigarettes, they generally eat the tobacco, but some roll the coarse shag in pandanus leaves, making cigars which would put to sleep even confirmed smokers like us.
The hours pass swiftly and we hear a pattering 44on the dry palm-leaves above us. The sky is overcast and we have four miles of humid going ahead of us. After an afternoon spent in lolling around with our new friends we hear the call of the bath-house, and we bid them adieu,—for the present without reluctance.
If these are the good Kia Kias,—in contact with whites more or less, for they live beneath the shadow of the assistant’s authority,—we wonder what the tribes in the interior are like. “Well,” we tell ourselves, “we shall see them soon now. Next week at this time we shall be among them, alone and far from the arm of the white man’s law.”
A long platform which entirely encircles the kampong
During the day the men occupy the sleeping-benches, while the women sit upon the sandy floor of the shacks