He was a brisk young man, not very tall, or even as good-looking as some of the others, but more active and courageous. He alone was painted, and his face was decorated with a circle of white paste round his eyes, a white streak down his forehead and nose, while white patterns were painted on his breast and arms. He and his people had unpleasant looks, and seemed to Dampier more savage than any human race he had ever met with. They were rendered additionally ugly by their blinking eyes, due to the flies which gathered round the eyelids in teasing numbers. Their skins were black and the hair bushy and frizzled. It was found that at their camps, when they did not use the shelter of anthills, they would stick three or four leafy boughs into the ground against the prevailing wind blowing off the sea. Near these they made their fireplaces, and thus obtained shelter and warmth during the night. At each fireplace were great heaps of the shells of oysters, mussels, cockles, &c., the chief sustenance of these savages. Unlike the natives whom Dampier had encountered farther north, in his first glimpse of Australia, these people seemed to live entirely on shellfish, and made no weirs to catch fish at the ebbing of the tide. From this place they obtained only four hogsheads of brackish water by digging wells in the sand, while engaged in which work they were pestered with the flies, whose attentions they felt far more than the blazing sun. Indeed, by inference, we may gather that Dampier experienced on the tropical coast of West Australia the same immunity from sunstroke as is characteristic of other parts of Australia. The land of this region (which would be the southern part of the vast Kimberley district) was level, and although terribly waterless by no means devoid of vegetation, being more or less covered with flowering shrubs and bushes and bright with red, white, blue, and yellow flowers, most of them belonging to some kind of pea or bean, which also bore ripened seeds in pods. He notes the number of "rocks" in the vast plains, 5 or 6 feet high, round at the top, like a haycock, red, or in some cases white. These were obviously the anthills built by a termite or "white ant". Farther inland beyond these plains was a thin forest, and along the creeks of the seashore grew a few dwarf mangrove trees. Animals were scarce and consisted chiefly of lizards, snakes, and a few marsupial mammals (probably kangarus) and wandering dingoes "like hungry wolves". As to birds, there were "crows just like ours in England" (see p. 41), small hawks and kites, turtle-doves, and a variety of small birds about the size of larks.