HUMAN TREE-DWELLERS 125 



nearly so pleasing to the eye. Indeed, they are 

 far from comely. They have no idols, no priests, 

 no places or things of worship, no written lan- 

 guage, and their speech is a corrupted form of 

 Malay. They live in small settlements, invariably 

 in trees if in the jungle, with no tribal head. But 

 though an altogether uncivilized people, by no 

 means are they savage. It is a simple, unwarlike 

 race, so raided by the Malays, in times mostly gone 

 now that British influence has spread throughout 

 the Peninsula, that they are exceedingly shy of 

 all strangers: and particularly fearful of chance 

 Malays in the forests. There are, however, groups 

 of Sakais living on the outskirts of Malayan settle- 

 ments that have lost a considerable amount of their 

 timidity, and these have adopted the Malayan 

 sarong (skirt) ; but in the jungle their full dress 

 costume consists of a small piece of cloth, pounded 

 out of tree bark, wrapped about the loins of the 

 adult men and women, while young men and 

 women and the children pursue the course of their 

 untrammelled way clothed only in nose-sticks, ear- 

 rings, armlets, and hair combs. The women, in 

 fact, are much given to adorning themselves with 

 these things, and employ a lighter quality of bark, 

 which they decorate in black dots and lines, to bind 

 their hair. I marvelled at the number of combs 

 one woman would usej but the reason is the very 



