All the faculties are sharpened mainly in the quest of food and of means to elude the enemy now closing round their farthest retreats in the upland forests. When hard pressed and escape seems impossible, they will climb trees and stretch rattan ropes from branch to branch where these are too wide apart to be reached at a bound, and along such frail aerial bridges women and all will pass with their cooking-pots and other effects, with their babies also at the breast, and the little ones clinging to their mother's heels. For like the Andamanese they love their women-folk and children, and in this way rescue them from the Malay raiders and slavers. But unless the British raj soon intervenes their fate is sealed. They may slip from the Malays, but not from their own traitorous kinsmen, who often lead the hunt, and squat all night long on the tree tops, calling one to another and signalling from these look-outs when the leaves rustle and the rattans are heaved across, so that nothing can be done, and another family group is swept away into bondage. From their physical resemblance, undoubted common descent, and geographical proximity, one might also expect to find some affinity in the speech of the Andaman and Malay Negritoes. But H. Clifford, who made a special study of the dialects on the mainland, discovered no points of contact between them and any other linguistic group[356]. This, however, need cause no surprise, being in no discordance with recognised principles. As in the Andamans, stone implements have been found in the Peninsula, and specimens are now in the Pitt-Rivers collection at Oxford[357]. But the present aborigines do not make or use such tools, and there is good reason for thinking that they were the work of their ancestors, arriving, as in the Andamans, in the remote past. Hence the two groups have been separated for many thousands of years, and their speech has diverged too widely to be now traced back to a common source.