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deep crimson on the inside.  The edible portion is pure white, and consists of from five to seven segments of juicy, delicate, slightly acidic fruit.  Kanari nuts are tender, white, rather like almonds in flavor.  Each nut unfolds into closely packed segments, and in fact consists of tiny new leaves, ready to unfold and sprout.  Sago bread is heavy and tasteless, and is baked in a mold which turns out five little loaves all joined together across the bottom.

After lunch we tasted our first durian.  The odor when the fruit is cut is of sourness and decay.  Inside are large white segments of fruit, and you take one in your fingers and get a violent smell of limburger cheese.  Summoning up your courage you bite into it, and find a rich, custardy fruit, that tastes like strawberries and chocolate and coffe with cream.  We thought that the flavor had been slightly overestimated, the smell, however, is not quite as bad as we had been led to believe, though it is far from pleasant.  In fact, as the day wore on, and the odor of durian pervaded the house and the beach and the forest, it was a little sickening.

Rain threatened all afternoon.  We slept, and sat on the verandah and watched the bay through the coconut palms, and at six o'clock the lights of Ambon showed on the opposite shore.  B. heard that a man in the next village had two cuscus, and we sent out a runner to see if we could buy them.  He started off with a flashlight along the beach, for a five-hour walk each way.  B. explained that the nearby village was Christian, and that Christians shot the cuscus, so they were very shy and hard to catch.  The village farther away was Mohammedan, and as they did not hunt the cuscus it was much easier to catch themthere.

Dinner was a similar reistafel to the one we had at noon.  Bill and I gorged ourselves on mangosteens, which are now at the height of the season, and fresh off the tree.  As I reached for my sixteenth a voice out of a dark corner said in English "Eat more fruit."  Startled I turned to find Tais Papalayo, [[strikethrough]] our [[/strikethrough]] a hunting companion of B's grinning at me.  He is Ambonese, with a strange collection of tags of English which I think he has picked up at the movies.  He whistles fairly recent jazz, and is always coming out with some remark such as "O.K.", "Yes we Have No Bananas"  The movies are a great help to students of English!  B. tells us that he learned his English in school in Java and in Holland, but keeps in practise by listening carefully to the dialogue in the films.

April 17 -

Up early and went for a walk along the beach.  Hundreds of hermit crabs in the gaudiest shells imaginable scurried about.  Most of them were tiny things, but each shell was different - some striped, so e pearly, some with long tails on them, and of every color of the rainbow.  Fairy crabs flitted about.  Coral is on the beach in quantities.  Also huge jellyfish, sea urchins, and the shells of both the pearly nautilus and the cha bered nautilus.  We walked through a neighbor's plantation, and picked up Willem, a youngster but a good bush boy, with keen eyes.  Bill found Polyrachus, making two different kinds of nests of silk and chewed-up bark, and Odontomachus of the Imperator group, as well as something that he thinks is Rogeria and possibly a new species.  Willem located several Polyrachus nests for

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