The lodge of the disappearing Men part 3

The Kampong

To-day the partner is resting. The steamer is no more. We will go chasing experience without anyone else. Four miles inland there is where live around fifty Kia Kias. As the day is warm we will put on the lightest garments we have and go there. We can't miss the route, for the main street of which the nation flaunts passes the place. It prompts an expired preacher's little estate around three miles more remote on.

Every one of the men has punctured the septum of his nose to allow embeddings a couple of pig tusks

A couple of croc teeth influence an awesome nose-to adornment

33The keep going building we pass on our way through the external edges of the little town is a meandering whitewashed structure. It is the administration healing facility. We should see this place, for in it they are endeavoring to spare the Vanishing Men. We are met at the little office entryway by a medical attendant in unobtrusive white. She is the just a single on obligation now, for attendants are difficult to acquire in this off the beaten path corner of our old stool. She is half white and half Chinese. She talks five dialects easily, we find, for as we chat with her she passes into French every so often, with sprinklings of Malay and Dutch. It is a propensity etymologists have, for they find better shades of significance in differed tongues. Her English is immaculate and we underestimate the immaculateness of her Pekinese, for she discloses to us she was conceived in the Heavenly Domain.

In the wards she demonstrates to us the patients in her care. Here we discover the scourge of progress stalking like a dismal ghost. Insights, she advises us, give the Kia Kias fourteen years more to live. Once the race numbered a hundred thousand, however now with the happening to the outsiders the venereal scourge has arrived and their not well supported bodies can't withstand the gallant treatment important for effectively fighting the ailment. The simple imprisonment in the healing center executes some of them.

34Before the happening to the outsiders they were a sound race that flourished and succeeded. Genuine, they ate each other, however their eating regimen appeared to concur with them. It was the best joy they escaped life. These supper parties are forbidden now and the poor fiends inside reach of the rebuffing whites have nothing for which to live. They are a race without desire, lacking get-up-and-go of life, and look for fervor in overabundances that take toll of hundreds where the simmering pit guaranteed yet a similar few. In early days there was ancestral association, which was fundamental for survival. Presently they live in less fear and incredible sloth, their inaction reproducing liberality in the main thing left to them, unhindered exotic nature. Genuine, the clans that live in the remote fastnesses of the wilderness still keep up the old traditions and they are debased just marginally with the scourge; still, it has discovered them.

With blended feelings we leave the healing facility. The exhortation of the architect comes to us with new criticalness. Each ship or boat that handles 35the islands has been freighted with the scourge, accumulated from the four breezes and brought here. At that point come the preachers further to obscure the sky, for do they not lift hands, eyes raised askance, at the exposed savage and power him to wear garments? The innocent and untutored locals don't have the foggiest idea about that in rain-drenched garments there sneaks a threat. Their exposed skins shed the water and they never progress toward becoming chilled, however those whom the evangelists have dressed are every last one subject to pneumonic inconveniences that are making further advances on the race.

The street twists into the wilderness where the quiet is supreme. A mile from town it has dwindled to a negligible pathway. As we brush the nearby developing bushes that outskirt it, we unstick billows of midges and mosquitos which, with the wet warmth and the sweat that drenches us, end up terrible. Be that as it may, we have set out for the kampong, and will go there.

Following a wearisome hour, we go to a clearing where we discover a palm-covered shack. Three exposed kids are sprawling on the 36ground, jabbering child talk. They don't see our approach until the point that we are near them, however as we say "hi" they ricochet to their feet and vanish in the shrub with wild cries of caution. They are much the same as any of the wild things that live in the wilderness. We giggle at their sudden dread and call to them to return, while their mom inside the shack peeps subtly at us through a hole in the divider. Obviously she isn't tremendously scared, for she goes to the entryway and welcomes us with, "Tabe, Tuans," the stock welcome of the Malay-talking local. She is clad in her birthday apparel, as stripped as on her natal day put something aside for an overwhelming neckband of shells twisted twice around her neck. She approaches us with simple elegance, entirely unaware of her nakedness. Despite the fact that she wears no covering whatever, she is dressed, for the pride with which she moves and her articulate absence of hesitance shape a piece of clothing that curtains her pleasingly.Setting off to a heap of cocoanuts next to the shack, she chooses two which she opens with a deft stroke of a substantial expansive bladed blade. These she gives us, with a grin and a twisted, relatively teasing lifting of the hip as she extends her arm to hand them to us. Offering us pause, she vanishes inside the shack, developing in a minute with two Chinese enameled containers which she offers us. We say thanks to her, yet want to drink the cool water of the nuts from the shell.

The dark colored cleaned urchins, after observing their mom in well disposed discussion with the outsiders, come back to the clearing and eye us with ponder and some doubt. They are on their little toes, as it were, looking for the smallest suspicious development, prepared to travel to the defensive wilderness. Their huge sloe eyes become contemplative as we offer them a few pennies and their mom consoles them, at last beating their feelings of trepidation and conveying them to where we are hunkered upon our hindquarters with hands outstretched. They connect, grab the pennies, and are gone, whereupon the mother yells with cheer. While we are giggling over the little comic drama a kid of potentially eighteen 38years, bare as his mom, originates from the brush with some more cocoanuts, which he hurls on the heap by the shack. He takes a gander at us and his mom guides him to control us to the kampong, which is set back off the way a couple of poles.

The sound of chuckling and somebody singing in full-voiced baritone welcomes us as we close to the kampong. A man is singing a Kia song that sounds just as he were sick. He completes the tune as we enter the tight opening in the kampong divider and every one of the locals in locate look at us for a small amount of a second, deadened with shock and trepidation.

The spell is broken the minute we venture inside and they jump as once huge mob for the exit in the back of the kampong and wedge there in an absurd battle of arms and legs. Some way or another they drive their way through the opening and the nook is abandoned with the exception of a couple of old ladies excessively old, making it impossible to escape.

Our quality in the kampong is hated by the canine populace, which assembles before us 39in a half circle and cries in incredible anguish of soul. Before long a shadowy shape crawls in through the exit, to be trailed by a few more, and all stand gathered at an aware separation, looking at us nearly. They are ladies, startlingly naked. Ridiculously no damage at our hands, the men take heart and return independently till every one of the detainees of the kampong are again at home. After a quiet investigation of us the men obviously understand that we are innocuous, for they break into uproarious chuckling, which is taken up by the ladies, and come toward us to make us invite. The ladies accumulate around and, however giggling uproariously, appear to be well sufficiently disposed.

We are in a genuine savage town, and, as it is our first, we are to some degree inquisitive about it. We begin in by looking at the locals and note the inquisitive improvements with which they embellish themselves. Every one of the men has punctured the septum of his nose to allow of embeddings a couple of hog tusks or pig knuckles. This obviously meddles with his breathing, so he has sliced two vertical openings through the sides of 40the nose through which the air shrieks at every inward breath. The characteristics of the considerable number of men are besmeared with paint, which they make from shaded earths they accumulate and crush into a fine powder.

The ears of the two people are punctured in the lower some portion of the projections, which, by reason of the numerous substantial metal rings with which they are weighted, hang down well upon the neck, some of them notwithstanding contacting the shoulders. All wear accessories of shell, with some of the time a variety in the state of varicolored seeds heaps of exchange material. The men wear no loin-fabric, however those of family wear an abnormally lacking substitute involved a shell and a string of bark fiber. The ladies as a rule wear a modest breech-clout of bent fiber hardly greater than the palm of one hand, a triangular fix that on account of its shading and surface does not appear to exist. Huge numbers of them appear to be adequately glad without even this affectation at attire and not the slightest bit aware of their bareness. Among those 41under the age of twenty of both genders there is no endeavor at covering.

We are as much questions of interest to them as they to us and keeping in mind that we have been examining them they have been picking us to pieces. The ladies cull at our silk shirts and attempt to peep inside, doing it tenderly, in any case, inspired by a paranoid fear of stimulating our outrage. They resemble a crowd of inquisitive, glad kids and from time to time one of the more youthful ladies will blast into screeches of chuckling at some sally of her mates and flee, where she jumps here and there in extravagance of spirits.

They move like agile creatures, each muscle undulating under its sheathing of dull bronze with a flexibility and smoothness that influences us to begrudge them their over the top simplicity. Here are no enlarged guts, no squeezed in midriffs. They have never observed bodices. Their bodies and appendages are spotless lined and balanced and they walk haughtily erect.

Because of our request as to their safe houses they extend us a giggling welcome to visit 42them and lead us to the low covered racks that circled the fenced in area, which shapes their back divider. Upheld upon low legs of bamboo is a long stage which totally circles the kampong. There are no allotments of any sort to screen from see the different affections of family life. One may sit upon the stage and see whatever happens in the homes of the whole kampong. Truth be told, these individuals live altogether on a network premise, and there are no mysteries.

Johnny charms Milly, or whatever their names might be, with little respect for the others and may live with her for quite a while without blame before he at long last chooses that marriage is the correct thing. On the off chance that he discovers her to his enjoying he may advise the rest that he will keep her, and it's just as simple as that. There is no embarrassment, for all know everything. Babble there is in bounty, yet that is the point at which some part plays hookey and visits another kampong with an excessive amount of consistency. Direct of this sort is disapproved of, however not rebuffed aside from by the hookee's—what will 43I call her?— fighting accomplice, who on the off chance that she learns of the circumstance may berate the wrongdoer. Be that as it may, that is the way things are even in our own particular place where there is Wednesday nights and supper clubs.

Our hosts bring cocoanuts, which they open for us to drink from, and offer us nourishment. We drink, at the same time, bizarre to state, are not eager. Our cigarettes are gotten with checked endorsement,— so set apart, indeed, that they are grabbed from us by the bundle the minute we go out the first. They underestimate it that we need them to have them and don't wish to put us to the inconvenience of disseminating them. They do this without anyone else's help, after the mold of ten mutts after one bone, yet with astounding amicableness. They adore tobacco, which they get from the pervasive Chinese or Malay dealers. Having no paper with which to make cigarettes, they by and large eat the tobacco, yet some roll the coarse shag in pandanus leaves, making stogies which would put to rest even affirmed smokers like us.

The hours pass quickly and we hear a pattering 44on the dry palm-leaves above us. The sky is cloudy and we have four miles of moist venturing out in front of us. After an evening went through in lolling around with our new companions we hear the call of the shower house, and we say farewell to them,— for the present without hesitance.

On the off chance that these are the great Kia Kias,— in contact with whites pretty much, for they live underneath the shadow of the colleague's power,— we ponder what the clans in the inside resemble. "Well," we let ourselves know, "we will see them soon now. One week from now right now we will be among, only them and a long way from the arm of the white man's law."