The Houses Were
Scattered About Among Rudely Cultivated Clearings.
Two which I
visited consisted of a central passage, on each side of which
opened short passages, admitting to two rooms, each of which was
a house accommodating a separate family.
They were elevated at
least fifteen feet above the ground, on a complete forest of
poles, and were so rude and dilapidated that some of the small
passages had openings in the floor of loose sticks, through which
a child might fall. The inhabitants seemed rather uglier than
those at Dorey village. They are, no doubt, the true indigenes of
this part of New Guinea, living in the interior, and subsisting
by cultivation and hunting. The Dorey men, on the other hand, are
shore-dwellers, fishers and traders in a small way, and have thus
the character of a colony who have migrated from another
district. These hillmen or "Arfaks "differed much in physical
features. They were generally black, but some were brown like
Malays. Their hair, though always more or less frizzly, was
sometimes short and matted, instead of being long, loose, and
woolly; and this seemed to be a constitutional difference, not
the effect of care and cultivation. Nearly half of them were
afflicted with the scurfy skin-disease. The old chief seemed much
pleased with his present, and promised (through an interpreter I
brought with me) to protect my men when they came there shooting,
and also to procure me some birds and animals. While conversing,
they smoked tobacco of their own growing, in pipes cut from a
single piece of wood with a long upright handle.
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