A pair of alligator-teeth make a wonderful nose-ornament
The last building we pass on our way through the outer fringes of the little town is a rambling whitewashed structure. It is the government hospital. We must see this place, for in it they are striving to save the Vanishing Men. We are met at the little office door by a nurse in modest white. She is the only one on duty now, for nurses are hard to obtain in this out-of-the-way corner of our old footstool. She is half white and half Chinese. She speaks five languages fluently, we find, for as we converse with her she lapses into French now and then, with sprinklings of Malay and Dutch. It is a habit linguists have, for they find finer shades of meaning in varied tongues. Her English is perfect and we take for granted the purity of her Pekinese, for she tells us she was born in the Celestial Empire.
In the wards she shows us the patients in her care. Here we find the curse of civilization stalking like a grim specter. Statistics, she informs us, give the Kia Kias fourteen years more to live. Once the race numbered a hundred thousand, but now with the coming of the strangers the venereal scourge is upon them and their ill-nurtured bodies cannot withstand the heroic treatment necessary for successfully combating the disease. The mere confinement in the hospital kills some of them.
Before the coming of the strangers they were a healthy race that thrived and prospered. True, they ate one another, but their diet seemed to agree with them. It was the greatest pleasure they got out of life. These dinner-parties are taboo now and the poor devils within reach of the punishing whites have nothing for which to live. They are a race without ambition, lacking zest of life, and seek excitement in excesses that take toll of hundreds where the roasting-pit claimed but a comparative few. In early days there was tribal organization, which was necessary for survival. Now they live in less dread and great sloth, their idleness breeding indulgence in the only thing left to them, unrestricted sensuality. True, the tribes that live in the remote fastnesses of the jungle still maintain the old customs and they are contaminated only slightly with the scourge; still, it has found them.
With mixed emotions we leave the hospital. The advice of the engineer comes to us with new significance. Every ship or schooner that plies the islands has been freighted with the scourge, gathered from the four winds and brought here. Then come the missionaries further to darken the sky, for do they not lift hands, eyes raised askance, at the naked savage and force him to don clothes? The childlike and untutored natives do not know that in rain-soaked clothing there lurks a menace. Their naked skins shed the water and they never become chilled, but those whom the missionaries have clothed are one and all subject to pulmonary troubles that are making further inroads on the race.
The road winds into the jungle where the silence is absolute. A mile from town it has dwindled to a mere foot-path. As we brush the close-growing shrubs that border it, we dislodge clouds of midges and mosquitos which, with the moist heat and the perspiration that soaks us, become intolerable. However, we have set out for the kampong, and shall go there.
After an interminable hour, we come to a clearing where we find a palm-thatched shack. Three naked children are sprawling on the ground, chattering baby talk. They do not notice our approach until we are close to them, but as we say “hello” they bounce to their feet and disappear in the bush with wild cries of alarm. They are just like any of the wild things that live in the jungle. We laugh at their sudden fear and call to them to return, while their mother inside the shack peeps furtively at us through a crevice in the wall. Evidently she is not much frightened, for she comes to the door and greets us with, “Tabe, Tuans,” the stock greeting of the Malay-speaking native. She is clad in her birthday clothing, as naked as on her natal day save for a heavy necklace of shells wound twice around her neck. She approaches us with easy grace, wholly unconscious of her nudity. Though she wears no covering whatever, she is clothed, for the dignity with which she moves and her utter lack of self-consciousness form a garment that drapes her pleasingly.
Enormous nose-tubes of bamboo which entirely close the nostrils, making breathing possible only through the mouth