202 PYGMIES AND PAPUANS 



Tapiro do it with the utmost ease and they scorned our 

 boxes of matches, which we offered them in exchange for 

 their apparatus, and showed no signs of surprise at a 

 suddenly kindled match. * 



The most frequent use of the fire-stick is in lighting 

 the tobacco, of which nearly every man carries a supply 

 in his larger bag. These people cultivate tobacco in 

 sufficient quantities to be able to supply the Papuans of 

 the low country. The leaves are dried and neatly rolled 

 up into long bundles weighing three or four pounds ; the 

 flavour is strong and rather bitter, but it is not un- 

 pleasant to smoke. The Tapiro smoke tobacco chiefly 

 as cigarettes, using for the wrapper a thin slip of dry 

 pandanus leaf. When, as is often the case, the wrapper 

 is very narrow and the tobacco is inclined to escape, the 

 man smokes his cigarette in a pecuhar manner ; he holds 

 the unlighted end in his fingers and with his mouth 

 draws out the smoke from between the edges of the 

 wrapper in the middle of the cigarette, this he continues 

 to do until the cigarette is about half consumed when he 

 puts the end in his mouth in the ordinary way. 



The Tapiro also smoke tobacco in a pipe in a fashion 



of their own. The pipe is a simple cylinder of bamboo 



about an inch in diameter and a few inches in length. 



A small plug of tobacco is rolled up and pushed down to 



about the middle of the pipe, and the smoker holding it 



upright between his lips draws out the smoke from below. 



* I am informed by Mr. H. Balfour, of the Pitt Rivers Museum, 

 Oxford, that a similar method of making fire is employed by people 

 in Assam, the Chittagong Hills, at certain places in the Malay Penin- 

 sula, in Borneo, at numerous places in different parts of New Guinea, 

 and at one place in West Africa. 



