WO-BANG-AN-AR
That night we slept in the banian, and next day Nella led us through the jungle to a clearing some five miles distant. There we found about a hundred men, women, and children. All of them, save Wo-bang-an-ar, who had his food supplied to him by his subjects, looked thin and drawn. Some of the men wore the Big Numbers costume, some that of the Small Numbers. The women wore the usual Small Numbers dress of a few leaves. A few men carried old rifles, but they had only about half a dozen cartridges among them; a few others had bows and arrows or clubs, but the majority were unarmed. This seemed strange, in the light of our experience among the tribes of northern Malekula, but even stranger was the fact that these people had no houses or huts—no dwellings of any kind. They lived in the banians. Sometimes they put a few leaves over the protruding roots as a shelter from rain. Occasionally, they built against the great central trunk of the tree a rough lean-to of sticks and leaves. Beyond that they made no attempt at constructing houses.
During the three days we spent among them, I picked up fragments of their history, which runs somewhat as follows:
Years ago, before the white men came to Malekula, there were many more people on the island than there are to-day. In the north and in the south there were great tribes, who were fierce and warlike. They fell upon the people who dwelt in the isthmus, and destroyed their villages. Again and again this happened. The tribes that lived in the isthmus grew smaller and smaller. Their men were killed and their women were carried off. Finally the few that were left no longer dared to build villages; for a village served merely to advertise their whereabouts to their enemies. They became nomads, living in trees. They even ceased the cultivation of gardens and depended for their food on wild fruits and nuts, the roots of trees, and an occasional bit of fish. Their number was augmented from time to time by refugees from the Big Numbers tribes on the north and from the Small Numbers on the south—a fact that explained the variation in dress we had noticed. They were unarmed, because their best means of defense was flight. They could not stand against their warlike neighbors, but they could elude them by climbing trees and losing themselves in the dark, impenetrable jungles.
CHAPTER X
THE DANCE OF THE PAINTED SAVAGES
After three days among the nomads, we decided that there was no cannibalism among a people so mild and spiritless, and so we packed our belongings and set off for the Amour. We thought we had half a day’s journey ahead of us, but to our surprise we reached the ship in less than two hours. Nella, to be on the safe side, had led us to the headquarters of the tribe by a circuitous route.
It was high tide when we reached the beach; so we took the opportunity of getting the Amour off the sand. A good breeze took us rapidly down the coast. At nightfall we started the engine and by midnight we had anchored in Southwest Bay.
SOUTHWEST BAY