Page:Further India; (IA furtherindia00clif).pdf/60

Another interesting passage about Basma is as follows:

"I may tell you moreover that when people bring home pigmies which they allege come from India, 't is all a lie and a cheat. For these little men, as they call them, are manufactured on this Island, and I will tell you how. You see there is on this Island a kind of monkey which is very small and hath a face like a man's. They take these, and pluck out all the hair, except the hair of the beard and on the breast, and then they dry them and stuff them and daub them with saffron and other things until they look like men. But you see it is all a cheat; for nowhere in India nor anywhere else in the world were there ever men seen so small as these pretended pigmies."

The creature here referred to is obviously the yellow gibbon, found in great numbers in the Malay Peninsula and in Sumatra, an ape of peculiarly human aspect, tail-less, and though of a purely arborial habit unable to walk save upon its hind legs. If Polo is right, the manufacture of "freaks" would seem to be by no means a modern or an American invention!

Of Dagroian, which would seem to have occupied the position of the little State now known as Pêdir, Polo tells us that the natives were in the habit of devouring their ailing relatives, whose death they caused by suffocation as soon as their recovery had been declared to be impossible by the medicine-men. The reason of this custom, as given by Polo, is curious:

"And I assure you," he says, "they do suck the very bones till not a particle of marrow remains in them; for