The men were clad entirely in dirt white, with their long hair done up in a curious knot on their pates--the marriage knot, as I was afterward to learn, and also, as I was to learn, a handy thing to clutch hold of with one hand whilst you clouted with the other when an argument went beyond words.
The boat went back to the village for help, and most of the villagers, most of their gear, and most of the day were required to get us down.
They were a poor and wretched folk, their food difficult even for the stomach of a sea-cuny to countenance.

Their rice was brown as chocolate.
Half the husks remained in it, along with bits of chaff, splinters, and unidentifiable dirt which made one pause often in the chewing in order to stick into his mouth thumb and forefinger and pluck out the offending stuff.

Also, they ate a sort of millet, and pickles of astounding variety and ungodly hot.
Their houses were earthen-walled and straw-thatched.

Under the floors ran flues through which the kitchen smoke escaped, warming the sleeping- room in its passage.

Here we lay and rested for days, soothing ourselves with their mild and tasteless tobacco, which we smoked in tiny bowls at the end of yard-long pipes.