He Gets Out Of The Way Till He Has Heard All About The
Strangers, Or He Is Actually Out In The Fields Looking After His
Farms.
We once thought that when the headman came in from a visit of
inspection, with his spear, bow and
Arrows, they had been all taken
up for the occasion, and that he had all the while been hidden in
some hut slily watching till he heard that the strangers might be
trusted; but on listening to the details given by these men of the
appearances of the crops at different parts, and the astonishing
minuteness of the speakers' topography, we were persuaded that in
some cases we were wrong, and felt rather humiliated. Every knoll,
hill, mountain, and every peak on a range has a name; and so has
every watercourse, dell, and plain. In fact, every feature and
portion of the country is so minutely distinguished by appropriate
names, that it would take a lifetime to decipher their meaning. It
is not the want, but the superabundance of names that misleads
travellers, and the terms used are so multifarious that good scholars
will at times scarcely know more than the subject of conversation.
Though it is a little apart from the topic of the attention which the
headmen pay to agriculture, yet it may be here mentioned, while
speaking of the fulness of the language, that we have heard about a
score of words to indicate different varieties of gait - one walks
leaning forward, or backward, swaying from side to side, loungingly,
or smartly, swaggeringly, swinging the arms, or only one arm, head
down or up, or otherwise; each of these modes of walking was
expressed by a particular verb; and more words were used to designate
the different varieties of fools than we ever tried to count.
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