The colour of their skin is paler than that of the Papuans—some of them indeed are almost yellow—but they are so indescribably dirty that it is not easy to know what is their true colour; they have also an ugly habit of smearing their faces with a black oily mixture. Neither tattooing nor cicatrization appears to be practised by them. The septum of the nose is always pierced and in it they occasionally wear a curved boar’s tusk planed down to a thin slip, or a short piece of straight bone; the alae nasi are not pierced. The nose is straight and very wide at the nostrils. The upper lip of many of the men is long and curiously convex.
The hair is short and woolly and black; many of the men give a lighter shade to the hair with lime or mud, and in two or three cases it seemed to be of a brown colour without any artificial treatment. They appear to begin to grow bald at a comparatively early age. The younger men grow whiskers and the older have short bushy black beards. There is a good deal of short downy black hair scattered about the body. Their eyes are noticeably larger and rounder than those of the Papuans, and there is in them something sleepy and dog-like which gives a pathetic expression to their faces.[16]
DRESS AND ORNAMENTS
When we first saw them one or two men wore curious helmet-like caps of plaited fibres and another had a strip of fur round his head; otherwise they are completely naked except for the remarkable gourd case described above (p. [161]). Strangely enough they are extremely modest and unwilling to expose themselves; when with some difficulty we had persuaded a man to part with his case, he would not remove it then and there, but always disappeared into the jungle and returned after an interval decently covered with leaves.
Their ornaments are few and simple; a number of men wear arm-bands and leg-bands of plaited fibre similar to those worn by the Papuans, and several of them wear necklaces of seeds, short pieces of bamboo, scraps of broken shell, teeth of wallabies and (in one instance) the bones of a small mammal. The lobes of both ears are pierced and a few men wear in one ear an ornament made of a small piece of gourd to which are attached seeds, scraps of fur, claws of birds and other ornamental odds and ends. One young man, with more originality than the rest, thrust through his front hair a piece of sharpened bone, which projected downwards over his face and gave him a most distinguished appearance (see Frontispiece).
The most elaborate and ornamental of their possessions are the bags, which every man carries. Most of them carry two, a large bag like a haversack slung across the shoulders and usually hanging down the back, and a small bag only a few inches square slung round his neck and hanging down on the chest. They are made of fine fibres of different colours, cleverly netted[17] in ornamental patterns, and they show the best attempt at decorative art that we saw in the country. In these bags the Pygmy man keeps all his portable property. The small wallet round the neck contains his bone and shell ornaments when they are not in use, and his knives; these latter are sharp flakes of a flint-like stone shaped exactly like the flint-knives and scrapers that are found in this country; they are used for scraping down the wood of their bows and for pointing and ornamenting their arrows as well as for other cutting purposes, and it is profoundly interesting in these days of steel to see people still using the implements of prehistoric man. One or two men also carried in their wallets a short dagger made of a pointed cassowary’s bone, and they explained to us by graphic gestures how they were accustomed to shoot a cassowary with their arrows and then after a long chase to stab it with the dagger.
The contents of the larger bag usually are the sleeping mat, the fire-stick and rattan, and tobacco. The sleeping mat is a fabric of pandanus leaves, which can be used either as a mat to lie upon or as a shelter from the rain; it measures usually about six by three feet and is neatly folded to be carried in the bag. The manufacture of these mats is always the work of the women and is a very ingenious process. The long ribbon-like leaves of the pandanus are split horizontally into two strips; the shiny upper one alone is used and the lower is thrown away. Strips of two leaves are placed with their split surfaces together and their shiny surfaces outwards, and then numbers of these pairs of split leaves are sown together, edge to edge, until the mat is of the required size. Thus the mat is made entirely of the outer surfaces of the leaves; it is very strong and is quite impervious to rain.
MAKING FIRE: (1) BY THE FRICTION OF WOOD AND RATTAN.