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 natives then remove to houses near the sources of the small streams, where, in the shady depths of the forest, a small quantity of water still remains.

Even then many of them have to go miles for their water, which they keep in large bamboos and use very sparingly.