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The steamer's first halt on the wild eastern coast of Celebes is the gold-mining settlement of Todok, where the Company's rustic offices of palm-thatched bamboo border an enchanting bay, with a string of green islets studding the shoaling blue and purple of the gleaming depths.
"I don't know," said Bob, laughing; "a pound of candles, perhaps." "No, not yesterday," cried Tom Long; "but I did have to take him a packet of composite candles, one day. Only fancy, you know, an officer in Her Majesty's service marching with a fatigue party, up to a palm-thatched barn, to take a coffee-coloured savage a packet of candles for a present!"
It is one of the pleasantest towns on the river. The houses are all roofed with tiles, and are mostly of substantial architecture. The inhabitants, at least at the time of my first visit, were naive in their ways, kind and sociable. Scarcely any palm-thatched huts are to be seen, for very few Indians now reside here.
Tonight they sat gossiping about their cooking fires, the older members of the tribe; or, if they were young, paired off in the shadows cast by the palm-thatched huts. Tarzan dropped lightly into the village, and sneaking stealthily in the concealment of the denser shadows, approached the hut of the chief, Mbonga. Here he found that which he sought.
The gaudily-painted houses, many stories high, with wooden balconies and projecting windows, were interspersed with ruinous palm-thatched bamboo huts and grotesquely decorated temples filled with fat priests and hideous, ochre-daubed gods, and noisy with the incessant blare of conch shells and the jangling of bells.
We walked with him to a grove of cocoa-nut trees, passing a number of the people as we passed through, but no one attempted to follow us; and after about a quarter of an hour's walk he led us to a roughly-built palm-thatched shed, where we could hear the sounds of chopping and hammering, and on entering we found, to our surprise, that the shed was far larger than we had expected, and that in it were four men busy at work making a boat similar to one that lay there evidently but lately built.
Streets of palm-thatched stalls, alleys of eating-houses, and the wide enclosure of a Mule-Fair, cover an open meadow, fringed by great sago-palms, the central grain and rice Market crowded with picturesque figures in striped sarong and gold-flecked turban.
The adobe houses standing in orange groves, the long stretches of jungle, wild tangles of rank growth, cactus, giant ferns, brake and netted vines; birds of gorgeous plumage and discordant note, alligators basking on the sunny bank of a sluggish stream, half-dressed natives at work in coffee fincas, sugar-cane and cotton fields; nude children standing in the doorways of palm-thatched huts, staring with still and stupid wonder at the train, and looking like inanimate clay models of a fairer, finer race to come.
Ships of archaic form, with banks of rowers; palm-thatched huts built on piles, in the unchanging fashion of the Malay races; graceful bedayas, the Nautch girls of Java, performing the old-world dances still in vogue; and women with lotahs on their heads, passing in single file to palm-fringed tanks, might be represented with equal truth in this twentieth century.
Sometimes the dry season was the hindrance; more frequently residence in a town or village not close to virgin forest, and surrounded by other houses whose lights were a counter-attraction; still more frequently residence in a dark palm-thatched house, with a lofty roof, in whose recesses every moth was lost the instant it entered.
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