THE MODE OF CARRYING BABIES; THE SOLE OF THE BABY’S FOOT MAY BE SEEN AT THE END OF THE HAMPER
CHAPTER X
PERCEPTION OF COLOUR
It must be indeed a strange world to live in where black, blue, and green are identical in colour; yet apparently it is in such a world that the men of Uap live. As far as the colour of their heads and hands is concerned, they might as well be Jumblees, whose heads, according to Edward Lear “were green and whose hands were blue;” to them such freaks would not be amiss; for all I could make out, the verdant coconut frond, the azure sky, and their own dark bodies are all of one colour. To them blue and green are only lighter shades of black; the word rungidu is applied to all three.
One day, to test their perception of colours, I painted squares in my note-book of every colour in my paint box; on asking many men the names of the colours, I learned from the answers of all, that only black, red, yellow, orange, and white had distinctive names; all the shades of blue and green were ignored; or, occasionally, they would say a deep blue was the colour of the deep sea, and light green was the colour of young coconut leaves, but in the abstract these colours were both rungidu. The carmine was at once picked out as rau; emerald green, ultramarine blue, and black were all rungidu, chrome yellow was reng-reng, orange was mogotrul, and white (the blank paper) was vetch-vetch; the white foam of the breakers was known as uth.
They were never at loss in naming or distinguishing the colour, and gave such qualifying adjectives as “mouldy” colour; “dirty” colour; “close to the colour of blood;” the strangest and most poetic was an adjective applied to rose madder, which one man said was a “lazy” colour. When asked to explain, he replied: “When a man feels sleepy and lazy and rubs his eyes, he sees this colour.”
Among women, however, I found that some did recognize blue and green as separate colours, and gave distinctive names to them.
CHAPTER XI
TATTOOING
A desire to add to Nature’s scanty endowments of beauty, seems to be one of our earliest endeavours, after we have shed our fur and abandoned the arboreal abodes of our four-handed and conservative brothers. Whether, or not, we have in every instance, succeeded in improving on Nature’s unadorned charms must remain pretty much a matter of taste.
The fashion of elaborate tattooing, which seems to have been prevalent among the men of the past generation in Uap, is at present decidedly on the wane. There are still some few middle-aged men who proudly display a complete suit of tattooing, but I am afraid that they are looked upon by the dandies of the day somewhat in the same light as the wearer of a frilled shirt-front and lace cuffs would be regarded by the exquisites of our own day,—just a tinge of respect for old age but a devout thankfulness that such fashions are not the demand of this enlightened and superior era.