Presently Dwight returned, followed by Sadok and Baderoon. The former was a hill Dyak, the “star” bird hunter of their party. He came up, completely armed, with his long sumpitan, or blowgun, of Borneo in hand, and on his left arm was a conical shield of bamboo. A steel parang-ihlang hung at his belt, and over his shoulder was suspended the bamboo quiver of darts for the blowgun. His muscular brown arms and shoulders glistened in the sunlight which glinted on the gold and silver threads of his gorgeous chawat and the dull jewels that studded his jacket.
“What have you got for a sleeping rig in the jungle, Sadok?” inquired the curator as the Dyak stood waiting inspection.
Sadok turned him around, exposing the tightly rolled cadjan, or native mat, hung on his back. Unrolled, it would be about four feet square, and it was house, blanket, mattress, and umbrella in one to him, for one corner of it was sewed into a pocket, so that he could wear the thing over his head when it rained.
“You’ll do, Sadok. Mr. Bentham, here, will assign you some black boys to carry up our stuff when we land. You’ll take charge of them.”
“A’right, Orang-kaya!” grinned Sadok, and went forward among the crew again.
“Baderoon next!” called the curator. “What you-fellah got to take ’long beach?”
Baderoon burst into boisterous Papuan merriment and did a handspring on deck. All he owned in the world was the long bow in his hand and a string about his middle, with a quiver of arrows dangling from it. His dress hardly needed taking off at night. There was a brass ring around one arm, with some tufts of human hair ornamenting it, whose owner had been eaten long ago—details obscure if you asked Baderoon!—and there was a three-pronged comb stuck into the long frizzles of his mop of hair. Then, he wore a small tin mirror hanging by a string from his nose, and when Baderoon had put on that prized possession he had said the last word in dandyism!
“Here, Baderoon-fellah, catch’m blanket!” said the curator, tossing him a spare one. “And mind you don’t wear it about your neck, the way the Wanderobos did when the English forbade them to come into town without a blanket to cover their nakedness!”
Baderoon exploded in a gust of merriment and tied the blanket decorously about his waist. At a sign of dismissal he went forward to rejoin Sadok. The proa was now tacking in through the coral reefs. A fleet of black canoes came out from the village on shore to meet her. The paddlers scrambled aboard and immediately surrounded the white men, pointing and gesticulating with unslaked Papuan curiosity. Their long noses hooked at them like parrots’ beaks as they cackled boisterously, fingering freely and unabashed the clothing and equipment of the whites.
In a final reach the proa ran hard aground on the white sand beach, and everyone prepared to jump ashore over her bow.