In The Evening We Paid It A Visit, And
Landed At The Village Of Dorey, To Look Out For A Place Where I
Could Build My House.
Mr. Otto also made arrangements for me with
some of the native chiefs, to send men to cut wood, rattans, and
bamboo the next day.
The villages of Mansinam and Dorey presented some features quite
new to me. The houses all stand completely in the water, and are
reached by long rude bridges. They are very low, with the roof
shaped like a large boat, bottom upwards. The posts which support
the houses, bridges, and platforms are small crooked sticks,
placed without any regularity, and looking as if they were
tumbling down. The floors are also formed of sticks, equally
irregular, and so loose and far apart that I found it almost
impossible to walls on them. The walls consist of bits of boards,
old boats, rotten mats, attaps, and palm-leaves, stuck in anyhow
here and there, and having altogether the most wretched and
dilapidated appearance it is possible to conceive. Under the
eaves of many of the houses hang human skulls, the trophies of
their battles with the savage Arfaks of the interior, who often
come to attack them. A large boat-shaped council-house is
supported on larger posts, each of which is grossly carved to
represent a naked male or female human figure, and other carvings
still more revolting are placed upon the platform before the
entrance. The view of an ancient lake-dweller's village, given as
the frontispiece of Sir Charles Lyell's "Antiquity of Man," is
chiefly founded on a sketch of this very village of Dorey; but
the extreme regularity of the structures there depicted has no
place in the original, any more than it probably had in the
actual lake-villages.
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