Arabs and Malays and natives from Allor, Savu, Roti, and Flores; besides a crowd in whose veins the degree of commingledness of blood of all these races would defy the acutest computation."[1] The Timorese themselves represent the Malay, the Papuan, and the Polynesian races. But they also offer exceptions which can not fail to strike the beholder with wonder. For instance, the same author writes: "While in the act of turning from watching this human hunt to continue my journey, my eye lighted on an object that riveted my interest more than all else among those savage marketers—a red-haired youth, first one, then a few others, some with straight, some with curly hair, with red eyelashes, blue eyes, and the hair over their body also reddish. I found, on inquiry, that a little colony of them, well known for their peculiar color of hair and eyes, lived at Aitûha, at no great distance off. Though they lived in a colony together, they were not shunned by their neighbors, who even intermarried with them. The offspring of these unions took sometimes after the one, sometimes after the other parent. In looking eagerly at their faces, I saw more than their features only; their presence there was an excerpt out of a long history. In imagination I saw past them down the dim avenues of Time—a far, far cry—to their early progenitors, and pictured their weary retreat, full of strange and romantic vicissitudes from a more northern clime, till forced off the mainland by superior might into exile in this remote isle, where, as a surviving remnant amid its central heights, they are living united, but not incorporated with the surrounding race whose pedigree has no link in common with their own."[2]
Space will not permit me to more than allude to the race-mixtures of Hindostan and its border-lands, of the Afghan frontier uplands, where Mongoloid and Caucasian still contend for the mastery,[3] of the important region once swayed by the scepter of Darius, of the lands of the Sultan, of the many-tongued realm of the Czar, and the long, deep range of Arab conquest in Africa.
Of what blood-fusion did for that part of the world, the broad seat of successive empires in the distant past, I have already briefly spoken. And the transformation is still going on. The sons of Joktan and Ishmael, with the Koran in their hands, have been trying for ages to convert the dark tribes of Africa to the creed of the Moslem, and, in preaching their gospel, they have not disdained to share their ancient lineage with their dusky disciples. Arabic scholars have, by the cruel fortunes of the slave-hunt, found themselves enthralled to Brazilian
- ↑ "A Naturalist's Wanderings," etc., p. 418.
- ↑ Ibid., pp. 464, 465.
- ↑ Mr. A. H. Keane ("Nature," January 8, 1885) divides the North-Afghan tribes into Caucasic and Mongolic; and, again, the former into Galchas and Iranians, and the latter into Mongols and Tartars. The Galchas are subdivided into Siah-Posh, Badakshi, Wakhi, and Shugnaris; the Iranians into Kohistani, Firuz-Khoi, Jemshidi, Tajiks, and Afghans. The Mongols are composed of Hazarahs and Airnaks, and the Tartars of Salor-Turkomans and Kataghani Uzbecks. The Caucasians number something over a million, and the Mongols over a million and a quarter.
