Page:Scented isles and coral gardens- Torres Straits, German New Guinea and the Dutch East Indies, by C.D. Mackellar, 1912.pdf/196

154 he was in high good humour, and this reflected itself on them all. They wore a short, bunchy skirt of grass, and some were comely. Of course they were used to seeing people at this place, but experience had taught them to beware of the white man.

We then visited a store, and, after a walk by a narrow path through the tropical jungle, called at the house of a German Protestant missionary, whose wife received us. I had to do all the talking for us strangers, as the others knew no German. The lady annoyed me because her mouth was all red and black with chewing betel-nut. Then, in company of Herr Muller, the postmaster, we went to the club, or “house kai-kai” as the natives call it, kai-kai being food. This is a roomy two-storied wooden building with a large dining-room and a billiard- room, with access to the roof—which was of matting or thatch—from whence a view over the green palm-tops to the distant mountains could be had. Here we all had cool drinks.

I was impatient, though, to reach the town and the railway station, so we did not linger.

There is no town; the whole place is merely a large plantation, and the different buildings are scattered wide apart amidst the palms and other trees. There are no shops of any sort—everything has to come from Singapore or elsewhere. There are about eight European houses, and then dwellings for the one hundred Malays, with forty women, and one hundred and ninety Chinese.

We were then taken to the “railway,” which turned out to be a curtained cart drawn by two small bullocks under charge of two Malay boys! It is true it ran on rails, and so it was a railway. I do not say this in depreciation of Stephansort, but as an illustration of how the expectations