e curls in blue
clouds. Around a second fire the natives lie in ecstatic laziness,
smoking and talking softly, pigs grunt and dogs scratch busily about.

In the morning the storm had passed, and I could see that the house
was set on the slope of a high mountain, much as a chalet is, and
that we were at the end of a wild ravine, from every side of which
fresh rivulets and cascades came pouring. Owing to the mountainous
character of the country there are no villages here, but numerous huts
scattered all along the mountains, two or three families at the utmost
living together. The structure of the houses, too, was different from
those on the coast; they had side walls and a basement of boulders,
sometimes quite carefully built. Here men and women live together,
and a separation of the fires does not seem to exist, nor does the
"Suque" seem to have penetrated to this district.

We passed several hamlets where the mode of life was the same as in
this one. The dress of the men is the same as at the coast, except
that they wind strings of shell-money about their waists in manifold
rows. The women wear a bunch of leaves in front and behind. The weapons
are the same as elsewhere, except that here we find the feathered
arrows which are such a rarity in the Pacific. It is surprising to
find these here, in these secluded valleys among the pygmy race,
and only here, near Talamacco, nowhere else where the same race is
found. It is an open question whether these feathered arrows are an
original invention in these valleys, an importation or a remnant of
an earlier culture.

The population lives on the produce of the fields, mostly taro,
which is grown in irrigated lands in the river bottoms.

In appearance these people do not differ much from those of central
Santo, who are by no means of a uniform type. The most important
feature is their size, that of the men amounting to 152 cm., that
of the women to 144 cm. The smallest man I measured was 138.0 cm.,
others measured 146.0, 149.2, 144.2, 146.6, 140.6, 149.0, 139.6, 138.4
cm. The maximum size is hard to state, as even here the small variety
has mixed with taller tribes, so that we find all the intermediate
sizes, from the pygmy 139.6 cm. high, to the tall Melanesian of 178.0
cm. My object, therefore, was to find a colony of pure pygmies, and
I pursued it in many subsequent wanderings, but without success. The
following description is based on the type as I constructed it in
the c