36 THE SULU ISLANDS. [chap. 



places always have the strongest fascination for me. It is pleasant 

 to lie at full length on a palm-leaf, taking deep draughts from a 

 coconut and watcliing the picture of savage life and its surround- 

 ings. Here a Sulu — -^:>a?Ym^-girded, and with liis spear stuck handy 

 in the sand — is drying fish in the sun. They have been already 

 smoked, and now, tied in small bundles, are being stocked away on 

 beautifully neat bamboo frames placed one above the other. A 

 couple of old women are dipping water with long bamboos from 

 the well, leaning over the blocks of white coral of which its parapet 

 is built. In these climates man is amphibious up to the age of ten, 

 and a dozen or more little warriors and their wives in futuro are 

 splashing and spluttering about in front of the houses, or climbing 

 into the carved praus drawn up on the grey sandy earth which 

 forms the beach. Over the tops of the mangroves the sea is 

 visible to the right, in \d\dd patches of bright green, wliite, or blue, 

 according to its depth. Everything is sunmering in the heat. Our 

 coconut is finished, and we look longingly at a mass of the yellow 

 fruit above our heads. The little Eajah who has come out to see 

 us motions to a boy close by, and the young monkey, climbing 

 like a cat by the aid of the notches cut in the tree, throws us 

 down another to refresh us before we start once more upon our 

 rambles. 



Among the big durian and jack-fruit trees at the back of the 

 village lay the little cemetery. The carved wooden headstones were 

 closely packed together, some flat and in the shape of a conven- 

 tional leaf; others straight and post -like, carved to represent a 

 series of superimposed cubes. Overhead the Michelia — the dead 

 man's flower, as the Sulus call it — dropped its deliciously-scented 

 blossoms, and the graves were strewn with the flowers of the Areca 

 palm. Buddhist and Mohammedan alike plant the Champac above 

 their dead. So should we too, I think, did our clunate permit it. 

 Day after day throughout the year the tree blossoms. Day after 

 day the delicately- creamy corollas fall entire upon the grave, 

 retaining both their freshness and their fragrance, unlike any other 



