418 A NATUEALIST'S WANDERINGS 



it was curious to hear from Timorese throats the AJerto sta ! at 

 the stroke of every hour. Besides the oflScial staff very few 

 Europeans live in Dilly ; the entire trade of the ishmd being 

 conducted by Arabs and (chiefly) by Chinamen. 



The streets of Dilly itself offer to the traveller a fine studio 

 for ethnological investigation, for a curious mixture of nationa- 

 lities other than European rub shoulders with each other in 

 the town*s narrow limits. At a single glance one sees that this 

 crowd has few elements in common with that seen at Cupang, 

 in the west. Tall, erect indigenes mingle with Negroes from 



the Portuguese possessions of Mozambique and the coasts of 

 Africa, most of them here in the capacity of soldiers or con- 

 demned criminals ; tall, lithe East Indians from Goa and its 

 neighbourhood ; Chinese and Eugis of Macassar, with Arabs 

 and Malays and natives from Allor, Savu, Eoti, and, Flores ; 

 besides a crowd in whose veins the desfree of comminojlemerit 

 of blood of all these races would defy the acutest computation. 

 It w^as interesting to study the character of each in their 

 unconscious ways one among each other. The Hindu, with 

 a stately bearing, carried himself with a natural yet not 

 offensive, air of superiority ; the non-dominating, provident, 

 industrious, unobtrusive Mongolian wended his way, obtam- 

 ing rather than asserting the next place, and was looked on 

 with respect and good-neighbourly consideration ; the sturdy 

 Africano rollicked about, noisy (generally drunl<), careless, 

 improvident, hated and feared by the indigenes, who frater- 

 nising with none of the interlopers in their land, and keeping 

 themselves quite to themselves, sat about in small companies 

 under the trees or on the shore, or moved about in their erect, 

 haughty, somewhat sullen and suspicious way, but not at 

 all shunning the town like the West-Timor people. The 

 Arab led his secluded life among his own race, energetic, 

 taking many hard rebuffs with few words, while the Malays, 

 semi-Malays and trading peoples fraternised pretty freely 

 with each other on the shore and over the sides of their 

 praus. 



The shop of Ah Ting, Major of the Chinese, was my 

 favourite study-room while in Dilly, for there during the 

 whole dav came and went an endless succession of these 



ft 



nationalities for the purpose of barter or simply to lounge. 



