XI TURTLES 151 
laughed and appreciated the joke of being found 
out. 
The natives here seem a very happy race, caring 
nothing for the past or the future ; living only for the 
hour. The feeling is infectious ; with no anxieties, no 
cares, nothing but a life of idleness, one almost forgets 
for the moment, while basking in that sunshine, that 
there is such a place as an outside world. They laugh 
and cry too in the same breath, and are the very em- 
bodiment of content 
At two o'clock the fishing boats came back laden 
with booty, one dugong — ^a gjreat fat unwieldy-looking 
creature, which they rolled in on to the shore — three 
lai^e turtles, a kingfish, and several crayfish, which 
are very brightly coloured and different from those in 
the south. In the open sea the natives harpoon the 
turtles, assailing the shoal with arrows and spears ; but 
on shore, when they come to lay their eggs in the sand, 
they turn them on their backs, and with axes make their 
shells fly in splinters. The women collect the firm yellow 
fat from the intestines, then boil it down and skim 
it until it becomes colourless and light. The turtles 
lay from forty to seventy eggs in trenches in the sand, 
which they scrape out and fill up again by means of 
their hind legs. The natives are horribly cruel in the 
way that they kill them ; they open them on the left side 
and scoop out the blood, and cut them up piecemeal while 
they are alive, exposing in full action all the internal 
organs; the poor things writhe in agony, snapping 
their mouths and opening and shutting their eyes for 
hours as they lie in the sun. 
The " wit " of the village is a very old and hideous 
woman with one solitary front tooth and a mass of 
tangled gray hair. She came and sang and danced by 
turns in front of us this evening, amid shouts of laughter 
Digitized by LnOOQ IC 
