THE WILD MAN OF THE WOODS. 125 



In addition to the grey-head there were two 

 men in their prime, an old woman, three grown 

 women and three children. Apparently the white 

 man was as much ' an object' of curiosity to 

 them as they were to me. A liberal donation 

 of tobacco, rice and coarse sugar soon made 

 us good friends, and they quickly lost all their 

 fear. They spoke a dialect of the Khol language, 

 and through Mookroo I learnt much of their manners 

 and customs. The men were armed with bows and 

 arrows. The bows were made of bamboo, the string 

 also being a thin strip of that material. The arrows 

 were of reed, tipped with a round knob of bamboo, 

 and were most curiously feathered. Instead of 

 three straight lines of feathering, there was a 

 perfect spiral of plumes at the string end, giving 

 the arrow a screw motion when in flight. The 

 blunt knob arrows are used for shooting birds. 

 The men wore strings of beads round the neck 

 and feathers in the hair, and a strip of plantain 

 bark suspended from the waist. The women wore 

 no covering of any kind. Some months later a 

 party of seventeen of these strange folk visited 

 my camp at Somij and asked for work. They 

 would not live in a hut, which they said choked 

 them, but took to the forest and lived under the 

 trees. They generally seek the shelter of a large 

 overhanging rock, and against this they rest a 

 few branches torn from the neighbouring trees, 

 creep within this passage and kindle a fire at the 

 two openings. I found they could do very little 

 work, as they were averse to continued labour. 



