"Each house was about 8 feet square, and at one end of each a small platform was attached, on which was the fireplace, with cooking apparatus of bark sheets covered with large green leaves, to prevent charring. In a corner of each hut was a shelf of split sticks, and a long trough of split and hollowed palm trunk sloped from ground to floor for the dogs and other animals to mount by. The ladders for human use were about 18 inches wide, with cross-pieces fastened on by rattan bindings.
"The village lay at the foot of a hill, above which the sun appeared between nine and ten o'clock, and was bounded on the other side by the bed of a stagnant brook. The trees about the houses were festooned with bundles of rattan, and the ground round them was littered deeply with the refuse scrapings. A few chickens and a miserable pariah cur or two wandered about, and several little pigs were caged in the huts.
"This party seemed less well-to-do than the others we had seen, for their only dress was cotton _kissáts_ and waistcloths, and while possessing several pieces of bark cloth, in which they wrapped themselves at night, they had apparently no further clothing. Strings of coloured beads were worn about the neck, and their ear-lobes were distended by wooden plugs from 1 to 2 inches in diameter.
"They were of a most apathetic disposition. A few words were exchanged with our guides, whom the women immediately supplied with lime and sireh, and then, renewing their own quids, sat crouching in the doorways of the huts, or perhaps attended by request to the head of a neighbour who might be troubled with a parasitical itching. Although free from elephantiasis, the body of each individual was covered with the scaly symptoms of ringworm--_tinea circinata tropica_.
"After we had measured the whole party, there was sufficient light to photograph the village, to which, in the dark shade of the jungle, I gave an exposure of ten minutes. The portraits of the natives were taken under difficulties, for the only rays of sunlight that filtered through the branches shifted slowly with the rays of the sun, so that by the time the subject was posed and focussed, he was generally outside the patch of sunshine.