The tree-houses, six in number, were upon the tops of trees of great height, 50 feet round at the base, and all branches cleared off till near the summit, where two or three grew out at right angles, something after the manner of an Italian stone pine:—­

’From the top of the wall the ladder that led to one of these houses was 60 feet long, but it was not quite upright, and the tree was growing at some little distance from the bottom of the rock, and the distance by a plumb line from the floor of the verandah to the ground on the lower side of the tree was 94 feet.  The floor of the house, which is made first, was 23 feet long and about 11 broad; a narrow verandah is left at each end, and the inside length of the house is 18 feet, the breadth 10 feet, the height to the ridge pole 6 feet.  The floor was of bamboo matted, the roof and sides of palm-leaf thatch.  The ladders were remarkable contrivances:  a pole in the centre, from 4 to 6 inches in diameter, to which were lashed by vines cross pieces of wood, about two feet long.  To steady these and hold on by were double shrouds of supple-jacks.  The rungs of the ladder were at unequal distances, 42 upon the 50 feet ladder.’

The Bishop and Pasvorang, who had gone ashore together, beheld men, women, and children running up and down these ladders, and walking about the bare branches, trusting entirely to their feet and not touching with their hands.  The Bishop, in his wet slippery shoes, did not think it right to run the risk of an accident:  and though Pasvorang, who was as much at home as a sailor among the ropes of the ‘Southern Cross,’ made the ascent, he came down saying, ’I was so afraid, my legs shook.  Don’t you go, going aloft is nothing to it;’ but the people could not understand any dread; and when the Bishop said, ’I can’t go up there.  I am neither bird nor bat, and I have no wings if I fall,’ they thought him joking.  At the same time he saw a woman with a load on her back, quietly walking up a ladder to another tree, not indeed so lofty as that Pasvorang had tried, but as if it were the most natural thing in the world, and without attempting to catch hold with her hands.

‘At night,’ says the Bishop, ’as I lay ignominiously on the ground in a hut, I heard the songs of the women aloft as voices from the clouds, while the loud croaking of the frogs, the shrill noise of countless cicadas, the scream of cockatoos and parrots, the cries of birds of many kinds, and the not unreasonable fear of scorpions, all combined to keep me awake.  Solemn thoughts pass through the mind at such times, and from time to time I spoke to the people who were sleeping in the hut with me.  It rained heavily in the night, and I was not sorry to find myself at 7 A.M. on board the schooner.’