When they are eating or listening to something that interests them the Sakai men and women will remain for whole hours in this attitude without showing any fatigue whatever.
Their feet are rather large and properly arched. The big toe is well separated from the others and is very strong.
The muscles of their arms are not much developed and sometimes these members are too long in proportion to the rest of the body. Their hands are also very long and slender. The chest muscles, on the contrary, are very well developed owing probably to the continual habit of climbing trees, rocks, rifts and the like in search of food or for any other motive that their nomadic life may make necessary.
Altogether the figure of the Sakai does not reveal any large amount of vigour perhaps because he is usually thin and is what might be termed pot-bellied, owing to the sort of food he eats and the cold he suffers during the night, but he is much more robust and taller (the average height of an adult is a little past one metre and a half)[7] than the other tribes and races around him who are in close reports with civilization. This fact would almost make one believe that civilization is detrimental to the physical development of an individual.
These Aborigines are endowed with wonderful agility, as may be seen when they clamber up certain clefts that we should judge impossible of ascent and also when they spring from one part to another with a nimbleness that might excite the envy of our best gymnasts.
They have not much muscular force, as I have said, but they are second to none in enduring fatigue, especially in the case of long marches, to which they are well accustomed as every day they walk about 20 miles, carrying upon their shoulders the by no means light product of the chase, together with the various roots and bulbs they find in the forest, as well as their inseparable blow-pipes and well-filled quivers.
They also resist very well the privations to which they are sometimes subjected by their own improvidence. All that they bring back with them they will eat at once, be it animal or vegetable food, and when they cannot finish it up by themselves they invite people from another village or tribe to come and help them devour it, laughing at every idea of domestic economy that I have vainly tried to impress upon their minds.
But are they wrong, after all? They know for certain that the forest will not leave them to starve and when there is no more rice, durian, mangosteen etc., it is never difficult to catch a pheasant, monkey, rat, serpent or even a wild boar.
Were they acquainted with Italian operas their favourite lines would certainly be:
Non curiamo l'incerto domani
Se quest' oggi n'è dato goder.[8]