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Updated: June 3, 2025
My indefatigable Yamba and a few of her women friends set to work then and there, and positively in less than an hour the grass hut was ready for occupation!
Besides, I had fixed upon a plan of my own; and, as the very fact of my presence in the camp was sufficient protection for the girls, I implored them to wait patiently and trust in me. That very night I called Yamba to me and despatched her to a friendly tribe we had encountered in the King Leopold Ranges perhaps three days' journey away.
Black and white birds, not quite so large as pigeons, were very plentiful, as also were eggs. Soon my Yamba had a nice meal ready for me, and then we lay down for a much-needed rest. After this we steered for a large island some nine or ten miles distant, and as we approached we could see that this one was inhabited, from the smoke- signals the natives sent up the moment they caught sight of us.
He fitted me out with a good stock of provisions, including a quantity of beche-de-mer, cabbage-palm, fruit, &c. I arranged my buffalo skin over my provisions as a protection, turtle-back fashion. Our preparations completed, Yamba and I and the dog pushed out into the unknown sea in our frail canoe, which was only about fifteen feet long and fourteen inches wide.
One glorious morning we three Yamba, her husband, and myself repaired to the fatal lagoon that hemmed in my precious boat, and without more ado dragged it up the steep bank by means of rollers run on planks across the sand-spit, and then finally, with a tremendous splash and an excited hurrah from myself, it glided out into the water, a thing of meaning, of escape, and of freedom.
She wished him all kinds of glory and prosperity, and wound up by assuring him that none would be better pleased on his return than she. The country through which these tracks led us was for the most part a mere dry, sandy waste, covered with the formidable spinifex or porcupine grass. Yamba walked in front peering at the tracks.
Yamba, of course, accompanied me, as also did my dog, and we were escorted across the bay by a host of my native friends in their catamarans. I pitched upon a fine bold spot for our dwelling-place, but the blacks assured me that we would find it uncomfortably cold and windy, to say nothing about the loneliness, which I could not but feel after so much intercourse with the friendly natives.
He said he thought he and his family could easily return to their friends on the mainland by means of the catamaran that had brought them. And Yamba, that devoted and mysterious creature, solemnly pointed out to me a glowing star far away on the horizon. There, she said, lay the home of her people.
All that Yamba carried was a basket made of bark, slung over her shoulder, and containing a variety of useful things, including some needles made out of the bones of birds and fish; a couple of light grinding-stones for crushing out of its shell a very sustaining kind of nut found on the palm trees, &c.
I then reverted to the inevitable sign language, giving them to understand that I wished to sleep with them a night or two; but they still continued to brandish their spears ominously. Yamba presently whispered in my ear that we had better not trouble them any further, as they were evidently inclined to be pugnacious.
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