When Crocodiles Can Easily
Obtain Abundance Of Fish - Their Natural Food - They Seldom Attack Men;
But When Unable To See To Catch Their Prey, From The Muddiness Of The
Water In Floods, They Are Very Dangerous.
Many men and boys are employed in gathering the buaze, in preparing
the fibre, and in making it into long nets.
The knot of the net is
different from ours, for they invariably use what sailors call the
reef knot, but they net with a needle like that we use. From the
amount of native cotton cloth worn in many of the southern villages,
it is evident that a great number of hands and heads must be employed
in the cultivation of cotton, and in the various slow processes
through which it has to pass, before the web is finished in the
native loom. In addition to this branch of industry, an extensive
manufacture of cloth, from the inner bark of an undescribed tree, of
the botanical group, Caesalpineae, is ever going on, from one end of
the lake to the other; and both toil and time are required to procure
the bark, and to prepare it by pounding and steeping it to render it
soft and pliable. The prodigious amount of the bark clothing worn
indicates the destruction of an immense number of trees every year;
yet the adjacent heights seem still well covered with timber.
The Lake people are by no means handsome: the women are VERY plain;
and really make themselves hideous by the means they adopt to render
themselves attractive.
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