do—they all come to life again."
After a little while, and a good deal of talking among themselves, he began
again—"I know all about it—oh yes! Before you came we had rain every day—
very wet indeed; now, ever since you have been here, it is fine hot weather. Oh,
yes! I know all about it; you can't deceive me." And so I was set down as a
conjurer, and was unable to repel the charge. But the conjurer was completely
puzzled by the next question: "What," said the old man, "is the great ship, where
the Bugis and Chinamen go to sell their things? It is always in the great sea—its
name is Jong; tell us all about it." In vain I inquired what they knew about it;
they knew nothing but that it was called "Jong," and was always in the sea, and
was a very great ship, and concluded with, "Perhaps that is your country?"
Finding that I could not or would not tell them anything about "Jong," there
came more regrets that I would not tell them the real name of my country; and
then a long string of compliments, to the effect that I was a much better sort of a
person than the Bugis and Chinese, who sometimes came to trade with them, for
I gave them things for nothing, and did not try to cheat them. How long would I
stop? was the next earnest inquiry. Would I stay two or three months? They
would get me plenty of birds and animals, and I might soon finish all the goods I
had brought, and then, said the old spokesman, "Don't go away, but send for
more things from Dobbo, and stay here a year or two." And then again the old
story, "Do tell us the name of your country. We know the Bugis men, and the
Macassar men, and the Java men, and the China men; only you, we don't know
from what country you come. Ung-lung! it can't be; I know that is not the name
of your country." Seeing no end to this long talk, I said I was tired, and wanted
to go to sleep; so after begging—one a little bit of dry fish for his supper, and
another a little salt to eat with his sago—they went off very quietly, and I went
outside and took a stroll round the house by moonlight, thinking of the simple
people and the strange productions of Aru, and then turned in under my
mosquito curtain; to sleep with a sense of perfect security in the midst of these
good-natured savages.
We now had seven or eight days of hot and dry weather, which reduced the
little river to a succession of shallow pools connected by the smallest possible
thread of trickling water. If there were a dry season like that of Macassar, the
Aru Islands would be uninhabitable, as there is no part of them much above a
hundred feet high; and the whole being a mass of porous coralline rock, allows
the surface water rapidly to escape. The only dry season they have is for a month
or two about September or October, and there is then an excessive scarcity of
water, so that sometimes hundreds of birds and other animals die of drought. The