The boys did not care about night work and usually sat round the camp fire smoking, spinning yarns, or crooning their charmingly plaintive mountain melodies until about 1 A.M., when they curled up under the verandah and went to sleep. Occasionally one or two very hard-up young gentlemen, whose need of tobacco was urgent, would volunteer to assist in the moth-catching, but for the most part they preferred free evenings like the young working people of more advanced nations. Visitors from Dinawa dropped in until the camp became a thronged resort. Then unfortunately things began to disappear, and it was necessary to keep the natives at a greater distance and restrict liberty of entrance. “No admission except on business” became the rule for outsiders. On my own boys, I found it was best to impose no cast-iron regulations. Nor were these all our occupations. Besides the lepidoptera, there were ornithological and botanical specimens to collect and preserve. Of the last, the more succulent required constant care and changing, and some took three weeks to dry. Photography proved a pleasant change, and on nights unfavourable for moths, we darkened the house with blankets and had a spell of developing. At such times one realised poignantly the limitations of a savage country, and the value of things that at home are too commonplace to be remarked. Our chief lack was a good flat shelf. Amateur photographers with luxurious equipment should figure to themselves the discomforts of a ridgy shelf of split bamboo on which no bottle will stand upright. Groping in the dim red light among one’s materials on that crazy ledge was as productive of maledictions as the royal and ancient game itself. [Illustration: THE NATIVE VILLAGE OF DINAWA. ] The natives were, at first, very much frightened at the camera, the women especially, and some of them were never reconciled to it. I showed them stereoscopic slides of Papuan views on Negretti and Zambra’s veroscope. One fellow, on seeing his own portrait stand out in bold relief, dropped the stereoscope and ran up a tree. I occasionally allowed a few privileged natives to come into the dark room to watch the developing. At first they were rather alarmed at the red light, but gradually they became interested in the process, and as the image appeared we heard the inevitable “lo-pi-ang.” Such was our daily life at Dinawa—very enjoyable in the crisp and bracing mountain air that reminded one of an English October. But for the unavoidable cares of camp management and fears for the endurance of our food supply and the safety of our specimens, it would have been altogether ideal. CHAPTER VI _VICISSITUDES AND A DIGRESSION_