ITo TWO YEARS IN THE JUNGLE. 



do it. He declined to touch it, and it was some time before we 

 found a coolie who was willing to take the wretched little waif in 

 his arms and carry it along, even under promise of liberal j)ay for 

 his services. 



As we stood in the road trying to carry out our intentions, peo- 

 ple stopped out of curiosity, and presently there came toward us, 

 from a clump of bushes, a man in the last stage of starvation. He 

 was entirely nude, except a dirty rag around his loins, and being 

 naturally tall, his gaunt appearance was all the more striking. He 

 was indeed a living skeleton, literally skin and bone. He was nearly 

 six feet high, but I could have picked him up in my arms and car- 

 ried him like a child. Every large bone in his body was shai'ply 

 outlined through his dark, unhealthy-looking skin, and his stomach 

 was shrunken in as though he had been disembowelled. This ghastly 

 apparition, with a stick in one hand and an old earthen chattie in 

 the other, slowly hobbled up on trembling limbs, and stood before 

 me, with Waxt written on every feature. As soon as it came close 

 up to me — I say it, because it seemed more like the gaunt spectre 

 of Famine than a living man — it slowly went down upon its knees, 

 then upon its hands, feebly and painfully, and finally pressed its 

 forehead to the dust at my feet and lay there grovelling. Its only 

 word or exclamation was " Saw-mee-ee ! " repeated with a despair- 

 ing moan on the last syllable. 



It meant the same as " Oh, lord ! " in our language, and was 

 addressed to me personally, as to an idol ! The wretched man had 

 been brought so low that he could forsake his idols and ci-y to a 

 white man for succor. I never felt so utterly mean and helpless. 



The above is no fancy picture, nor overdrawn for the sake of 

 effect, but only one out of ten thousand such experiences occurring 

 daily during those fearful times. It was the second year of the 

 famine, and hundreds were dying every day of starvation and fam- 

 ine diseases. Every time I stopped at the bungalow in Animallai, 

 men, women, and children came flocking to the doors with that 

 dismal wail of " Saw-mee-ee," often rising in perfect chorus. They 

 were mostly old men, and women with children, sometimes babes 

 which were nothing but little black skeletons. The old men would 

 pat their hollow stomachs with one claw-like hand, and extend the 

 other, and the women would point to their emaciated children and 

 hold up their bony arms. At first I began to give the people cop- 

 pers, and sometimes rice, but I soon found it would not do. They 

 came to me in such continually increasing crowds that I was quite 



