IN TIMOR-LAUT. 307 



CHAPTEE IV. 



SOJOURN IN TiMOE-LAUT — continued. 



The natives — Hair and coiffures^ — Vanity — Stature and living characteristics 

 — Cranial characters — Clothinjr — Tjikalele dance — Arras — Marriasc 

 ■^Artistic slull — Individual and moral character — Treatment of their 

 children — Games — Fine figures — Gravos^Good butterfly resorts. 



Many trying and vexatious delays — the laziness of the natives, 

 quarrels in the village, and fear of attacks from our neigh- 

 bours, which are easier to look back on from the midst of civili- 

 sation than to bear at the time, with equanimity — prevented out 

 house, which taxed all our energies, from being finished till 

 the nineteenth day after our arrival, and not till then was I 

 able to commence making any close study of the surrounding 

 country, or of its flora and fauna. But we had no useless time 

 on our hands, everything Avas so new to us. The people that 

 came about us to gaze, were all subjects deserving the closest 

 study. Their every gesture and every custom had to be 

 watched with microscopic acuteness, if we were to improve our 

 opportunities and not fail in deciphering the story — only thus 

 recorded and to be ere long blurred and blotted by foreign 

 contact — of their race, incessantly being unfolded before us 

 in their every unconscious word and commonest action. 



All the natives of the islands we saw were handsome-featured 

 fellows, lithe, tall, erect, and with splendidly formed bodies. 

 They dyed their hair of a rich golden colour by a preparation 

 made of cocoa-nut ash and lime, varying, however, in shade 

 with the time, from a dirty grey through a red or russet colour, 

 till the second day, when the approved tint appeared. Several 

 modes of arranging their hair were in vogue. It was either 

 carefully combed out, transfixed with a long forkrlike comb, 

 and confined within a single girdle of palm-leaf, or a black, red 



