Out of the silence and gloom of the forest the traveller will emerge into the full light of a clearing. Though it is the site of a tribal headquarters there is no village, no cluster of huts, except among some of the tribes on the lower Apaporis. There is but one great house, thatched and ridge-roofed like a gigantic hay-rick, standing four-square in the open. This is the home of some three score Indians.

The immediate signs of their occupancy are but few. There is hardly any litter cumbering the homestead ; whatever of refuse there be is cleared more speedily by the ants than it would be by the most up-to-date sanitary authority of London. Back here in the untouched districts, away from the Rubber Belt and the commerce-bearing rivers, there are none of the leavings of civilisation : no broken bottles, no battered tins, no torn and dirty scraps of paper—indeed if bottle or tin ever found its way to these wilds it would be esteemed a most rare and valuable treasure. No village dogs bark their challenge at the stranger's approach, no domestic fowls clutter away to safety. A naked child or a startled old woman may scurry into the saving murk of the maloka otherwise the silence and solitude appear little less profound than in the forest.

That is the picture as the artist or camera would reproduce it. The details, the essentials, must be sought within.