“All very fine! and I wish I could speak like that,” Johannes interrupted sharply. “How blind man becomes when he is indulging in poetical rhapsody, or rather how differently he views things from what they really are. True, we have neither seen the smoke of factories nor heard the whistle of flying locomotives or steamboats on the lake; no industrious manufacturers are there pushing their way amid restless merchants; but those are subjects more for lamentation than for rapture. Instead of them, what did we find? In place of the dense smoke of factories we saw the spiral wreaths of wood fires, at which the murderer was roasting the captured heads of human beings in order to remove their flesh. Instead of a steam-whistle we heard the war cry of those fiends as they sprang upon their sleeping prey, that cry which serves as a warning of death, from which the attacked can only escape by becoming a murderer himself. And you dare compare all this to a diamond just escaped from the hands of the Creator and say that you felt yourself as if in the presence of God? Is that all the glory you give the Almighty? What about the savages who came against us with their naked sword? What about the Dayaks who surrounded us on the raft? Were they not human beings? Alone, and alone with God! No, we were undoubtedly brought into contact with men, and men of the lowest type. Some of them brutes, eager for murder; men who delight in the sound of the death-rattle and the gurgling of blood.” “Stop, stop!” interrupted Wienersdorf. “I don’t wish to defend head-hunting. I fully endorse your abhorrence of it. But the other Dayaks whom we have seen are surely men who do their share in the labor of life. Those people are content with an existence passed, for months together, in a wilderness where they toil to rob the forest of its treasures—men like Bapa Andong.” “Bapa Andong and his class have their faults, as I could show you,” said Johannes; “but even they are an exception to the general rule. You will find few rich Dayaks, and this fact, considered with the abundant resources of their forests, will serve to prove what a poor, improvident race they are. Look at their dwellings; they are the most miserable hovels on earth; notice their dress which, when a Dayak is in full costume, consists only of dirty and miserable rags mostly woven from bark and scarcely different from the skin which an animal has for its sole covering. You will have ample opportunities of seeing this in the upper countries.” “What you tell me is very deplorable,” Wienersdorf remarked somewhat bitterly. “Man is almost a curse to this beautiful island.” “On the contrary, the country is the curse of man,” Schlickeisen answered vehemently. “The country is too rich, it yields its treasures without compelling man to fixed labor. He has only to stoop to pick them up. This makes him lazy; and laziness, as you know, is the root of all evil.”