Creggan's guide on this occasion was a very good specimen of his tribe. When you see one grown man you know what the rest are like. The guide, then, was as black as—as—I was going to say soot, but that is really a black that has a rusty tinge in it. As black, then, as the inside of an empty tar-barrel with the bung in.
Well, Ephraim—as Creggan called him, though why I am sure I could not tell you—had, to begin with, such a mop of frizzly hair, that had you turned him upside down it might have been used to sweep the decks with. This hair was black, but intermixed with silvery threads. Both brows and nose were rather prominent. His nostrils were wide, and moved about with every word he said. He was most spirited too, emphasizing every voluble sentence with strange gestures and shrugging of shoulders.
Most of the men seen had their hair and beards stained with reddish clay, but not so Ephraim. He was proud of his gray hairs. His mouth was quite the same as the real African nigger; wide enough to have engulfed an ordinary-sized turnip, and the lips were very bulgy and thick. Armlets, bangles, and ear-rings of brass are common to both sexes.
Little children went about entirely naked. Ephraim's whole suit of wearing apparel could not have cost much anywhere. He had a bit of manilla rope round the waist, to which his sheathed knife was fixed, and to which also was attached what looked like a dirty towel. This was tied to the rope in front, passed between the limbs, and was tied to the rope again at the back. But there was nothing repulsive about this man. He looked bold, erect, and honest; nor would his glance have quailed before the Queen.
His wife, for he had one, was positively prepossessing; and I am really glad to testify to this, for the pictures of Papuans placed before our school-boys are terrible caricatures.
Ephraim's wife was certainly undressed from the waist upwards, with the exception of bangles and a necklace of teeth, and pretty shells, pink and snow-white. From the waist to the knees she wore a skirt of grass cloth, surmounted by a shorter one of fringed cocoa-nut fibre. She smiled affably and innocently when Creggan spoke to her, showing teeth as white as those of a six-months-old Newfoundland dog, and she glanced upwards at the handsome lieutenant with eyes that were certainly beautiful.
There was something truly good in Treekee's heart, I'm sure, for seeing the dogs pant, she brought a calabash of water, and lying down beside them in the shade of a tree-fern, made them drink from the half of a cocoanut-shell.
Honest Bob licked Treekee's black face to show his gratitude.
That day our heroes had a long tour through the forest with Ephraim and his wife. They had come armed, but did not find much to shoot, so they contented themselves by making a collection of splendid butterflies and beautifully-coloured beetles.
Ephraim got them back by three o'clock. He then proposed that they should be rowed over in dug-outs to visit a lake-village. Their own boat was hauled up safely under the banana-trees. So away they went.