began to come back again. You know their way. First a couple of men came and
looked at us. Then I gave them some baccy, and spoke a word or two to them in
Sĕ-noi, that always reassures them. Then they went back and fetched the others,
and presently we were as comfortable as possible, though we had a dozen Sâkai
to share our hut with us. Juggins complained awfully about the uneven flooring
of boughs, which you know is pretty hard lying, and makes one's bones ache as
though they were coming out at the joints, but we had had a tough day of it and I
slept in spite of our hosts. I wonder why it is that Sâkai never sleep the whole
night through like Christians. I suppose it is their animal nature, and that, like the
beasts, they are most awake by night. You know how they lie about in the warm
ashes of the fireplaces till they are black as sweeps, and then how they jabber. It
is always a marvel to me what they find to yarn about. Even we white men run
short of our stock of small-talk unless something happens to keep things going,
or unless we have a beggar like you to jaw to us. They say that Englishmen talk
about their tubs, when they run dry on all other subjects of conversation, but the
Sâkai cannot talk about washing, for they never bathe by any chance, it makes
that filthy skin disease they are covered with itch so awfully. It had rained a bit
that night, when they were hiding away in the jungle, and I could hear their nails
going on their dirty hides whenever I woke, and Juggins told me afterwards that
they kept him awake by their jabber, and that each time he thought they had
settled down for the night, he was disgusted to find that it was only another false
start. Juggins tried to get a specimen of the bacillus that causes the skin disease,
but I don't know whether he succeeded. I fancy it is due to want of blood. The
poor brutes have never had enough to eat for a couple of hundred generations,
and what food they do get is bloating beastly stuff. They do not get enough salt
either, and that generally leads to skin disease. I have seen little brats, hardly
able to stand, covered with it, the skin peeling off in flakes, and I used to
frighten Juggins out of his senses by telling him that he had caught it, when his
nose peeled with the sun.
'Well, in the morning we got up just in time to see the poor little dead baby, that
I told you about, put into a hole in the ground. They fitted it into a piece of bark,
and stuck it in the grave they had made for it on the edge of the clearing, and
they put a flint and steel, and a wood-knife, and some food and things in with it,
though no living baby could have had any use for half of them, let alone a dead
one. Then the old medicine man of the tribe recited the ritual over the grave. I
took the trouble to translate it once. It goes something like this:—
[235]"O Thou who hast gone forth from among those who dwell upon the surface of