connecting links and the distances which one must retrace one's
steps from the paths' ends to find them that a Mezop often reaches
man's estate before he is familiar even with those which lead from
his own city to the sea.

In fact three-fourths of the education of the young male Mezop
consists in familiarizing himself with these jungle avenues, and
the status of an adult is largely determined by the number of trails
which he can follow upon his own island. The females never learn
them, since from birth to death they never leave the clearing
in which the village of their nativity is situated except they be
taken to mate by a male from another village, or captured in war
by the enemies of their tribe.

After proceeding through the jungle for what must have been upward
of five miles we emerged suddenly into a large clearing in the
exact center of which stood as strange an appearing village as one
might well imagine.

Large trees had been chopped down fifteen or twenty feet above the
ground, and upon the tops of them spherical habitations of woven
twigs, mud covered, had been built. Each ball-like house was
surmounted by some manner of carven image, which Ja told me indicated
the identity of the owner.

Horizontal slits, six inches high and two or three feet wide, served
to admit light and ventilation. The entrances to the house were
through small apertures in the bases of the trees and thence upward
by rude ladders through the hollow trunks to the rooms above. The
houses varied in size from two to several rooms. The largest that