When Travelling By Boat The Difficulties Are As Great
Or Greater, And They Are Not Diminished When The Journey Is By
Land.
It was absolutely necessary therefore to limit my
collections to certain groups to which I could devote constant
personal attention, and thus secure from destruction or decay
what had been often obtained by much labour and pains.
While Manuel sat skinning his birds of an afternoon, generally
surrounded by a little crowd of Malays and Sassaks (as the
indigenes of Lombock are termed), he often held forth to them
with the air of a teacher, and was listened to with profound
attention. He was very fond of discoursing on the "special
providences" of which he believed he was daily the subject.
"Allah has been merciful today," he would say - for although a
Christian he adopted the Mahometan mode of speech- "and has given
us some very fine birds; we can do nothing without him." Then one
of the Malays would reply, "To be sure, birds are like mankind;
they have their appointed time to die; when that time comes
nothing can save them, and if it has not come you cannot kill
them." A murmur of assent follow, until sentiments and cries of
"Butul! Butul!" (Right, right.) Then Manuel would tell a long
story of one of his unsuccessful hunts - how he saw some fine
bird and followed it a long way, and then missed it, and again
found it, and shot two or three times at it, but could never hit
it, "Ah!" says an old Malay, "its time was not come, and so it
was impossible for you to kill it." A doctrine is this which is
very consoling to the bad marksman, and which quite accounts for
the facts, but which is yet somehow not altogether satisfactory.
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