Alphonse Maria Mucha Heidsieck and Co painting

Alphonse Maria Mucha Heidsieck and Co paintingAlphonse Maria Mucha Fruit paintingAlphonse Maria Mucha Flower painting
swarms of flies. Everyone went about in gauze clothing from head to toe, and all the doors and windows had screens. Postwand assumed the flies would bite savagely, but found they didn't; they were annoying, he says, but one scarcely felt their bites, which didn't swell up or itch. He wondered if they carried some disease. He asked the islanders, who disclaimed all knowledge of disease, saying nobody ever got sick except mainlanders.
At this, Postwand got excited, naturally, and asked them if they ever died. "Of course," they said.
He does not say what else they said, but one gathers they treated him as yet another idiot from the mainland asking stupid questions. He becomes quite testy, and makes comments on their backwardness, bad manners, and execrable cookery. After a disagreeable night in a hut of some kind, he explored inland for several miles, on foot since there was no other way to get about. In a tiny village near a marsh he saw a sight that was, in his words, "proof that the islanders' claim of being free from disease was mere boastfulness,