The women wear in many cases a tiny breech-clout, but no other covering
Going to a pile of cocoanuts beside the shack, she selects two which she opens with a deft stroke of a heavy broad-bladed knife. These she gives us, with a smile and a sinuous, almost coquettish lifting of the hip as she stretches her arm to hand them to us. Bidding us wait, she disappears inside the shack, emerging in a moment with two Chinese enameled cups which she offers us. We thank her, but prefer to drink the cool water of the nuts from the shell.
The brown-skinned urchins, upon seeing their mother in friendly conversation with the strangers, return to the clearing and eye us with wonder and some distrust. They are on their little toes, so to speak, watching for the slightest suspicious movement, ready to fly to the protective jungle. Their big sloe eyes grow wistful as we offer them some pennies and their mother reassures them, finally overcoming their fears and bringing them to the place where we are crouched upon our haunches with hands outstretched. They reach out, snatch the pennies, and are gone, whereupon the mother shrieks with merriment. While we are laughing over the little comedy a boy of possibly eighteen years, naked as his mother, comes from the thicket with some more cocoanuts, which he tosses on the pile by the shack. He looks inquiringly at us and his mother directs him to guide us to the kampong, which is set back off the path a few rods.
The sound of laughter and some one singing in full-voiced baritone greets us as we near the kampong. A man is singing a Kia Kia melody that sounds as though he were ill. He finishes the song as we enter the narrow opening in the kampong wall and all the natives in sight gaze at us for a fraction of a second, paralyzed with surprise and fright.
The spell is broken the moment we step inside and they leap en masse for the exit in the rear of the kampong and wedge there in a ludicrous struggle of arms and legs. Somehow they force their way through the opening and the enclosure is deserted except for a few old women too old to get away.
Our presence in the kampong is resented by the canine population, which gathers before us in a semicircle and howls in great anguish of spirit. Soon a dusky form slithers in through the exit, to be followed by several more, and all stand grouped at a respectful distance, eyeing us closely. They are women, startlingly nude. As they come to no harm at our hands, the men take heart and return singly till all the inmates of the kampong are again at home. After a silent study of us the men evidently realize that we are harmless, for they break into loud laughter, which is taken up by the women, and come toward us to make us welcome. The women gather around and, though laughing uproariously, seem friendly enough.
We are in a real cannibal village, and, as it is our first, we are somewhat curious about it. We start in by examining the natives and note the curious decorations with which they adorn themselves. Each of the men has perforated the septum of his nose to permit of inserting a pair of boar tusks or pig knuckles. This of course interferes with his breathing, so he has cut two vertical openings through the sides of the nose through which the air whistles at each inhalation. The faces of all the men are besmeared with paint, which they make from colored earths they gather and grind into a fine powder.
The ears of both men and women are perforated in the lower part of the lobes, which, by reason of the many heavy brass rings with which they are weighted, hang down well upon the neck, some of them even touching the shoulders. All wear necklaces of shell, with sometimes a variation in the shape of varicolored seeds sewn upon pieces of trade cloth. The men wear no loin-cloth, but those of family wear a grotesquely inadequate substitute comprised of a shell and a string of bark fiber. The women in many cases wear a tiny breech-clout of twisted fiber scarcely bigger than the palm of one hand, a triangular patch that because of its color and texture does not seem to exist. Many of them seem to be sufficiently happy without even this pretense at clothing and in no way conscious of their nakedness. Among those under the age of twenty of both sexes there is no attempt at covering.
We are as much objects of curiosity to them as they to us and while we have been studying them they have been picking us to pieces. The women pluck at our silk shirts and try to peep inside, doing it gently, however, for fear of arousing our anger. They are like a throng of curious, happy children and now and then one of the younger women will burst into shrieks of laughter at some sally of her mates and run a few steps away, where she leaps up and down in exuberance of spirits.