It was an exceptionally stormy morning when we started, so that Mr. F. advised me to postpone my departure; but in the New Hebrides it is no use to take notice of the weather, and that day it was so bad that it could not get any worse, which was some consolation. Soon we were completely soaked, but we kept on along the coast to some huts, where we were to meet our guide. Presently he arrived, followed by a crowd of children, as they seemed to me, who joined our party. While climbing inland toward the high mountains, I asked the guide if he knew anything about the little people; he told me that one of them was walking behind me. I looked more closely at the man in question, and saw that whereas I had taken him for a half-grown youth, he was really a man of about forty, and all the others who had come with him turned out to be full-grown but small individuals. Of course I was delighted with this discovery, and should have liked to begin measuring and photographing at once, had not the torrents of rain prevented.
I may mention here that I found traces later on of this diminutive race in some other islands, but rarely in such purity as here. Everywhere else they had mingled with the taller population, while here they had kept somewhat apart, and represented an element by themselves, so that I was fortunate in having my attention drawn to them here, as elsewhere I might easily have overlooked them.
The trail by which we were travelling was one of the worst I ever saw in the islands, and the weather did not improve. The higher up we went, the thicker was the fog; we seemed to be moving in a slimy mass, breathing the air from a boiler. At noon we reached the lonely hut, where a dozen men and women squatted, shivering with cold and wet, crowded together under wretched palm-leaf mats, near a smouldering fire. There were some children wedged into the gaps between the grown-ups. Our arrival seemed to rouse these poor people from their misery a little; one man after the other got up, yawning and chattering, the women remained sitting near the fire. We made them some hot tea, and then I began to measure and take pictures, to which they submitted quite good-humouredly.
I was much struck by the fact of these men and women living together, a most unusual thing in a Melanesian district, where the separation of the sexes and the "Suque" rules are so rigorously observed.