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? This night it was my turn to go to sleep the first. I went to bed, but the impressions of the day had been too strong: I felt no inclination to sleep. I therefore offered to relieve my lieutenant of his watch; the poor fellow was like myself--the heads of the Guinans kept dancing before his eyes. He beheld them pale, bloody, hideous; then torn, pounded, broken to pieces; then the shocking beverage of the brains, that he also so courageously swallowed, came back to his mind, and he suffered sufficiently to make him repent our visit. "Master," said he to me, looking very much grieved, "why did we come among these devils? Ah! it would have been much better had we remained in our good country of Jala-Jala." He was not perhaps in the wrong, but my desire to see extraordinary things gave me a courage and a will he did not partake of. I answered him thus: "Man must know all, and see all it is possible to see. As we cannot sleep, and that we are masters here, let us make a night visit; perhaps we shall find things that are unknown to us. Light the fire and follow me, Alila." The poor lieutenant obeyed without answering a word. He rubbed two pieces of bamboo one against the other, and I heard him muttering between his teeth: "What cursed idea has the master now? What shall we see in this miserable cabin--with the exception of the Tic-balan, [7] or Assuan? [8] We shall find nothing else." During the Indian's reflections the fire burnt up. I lit, without saying a word, a cotton wick, plastered over with elemi gum, that I always carried with me in my travels, and I began exploring. I went all through the inside of the habitation without finding anything, not even the Tic-balan, or Assuan, as my lieutenant imagined. I was beginning to think my search fruitless, when the idea struck me to go down to the ground-floor of the cabin, for all the cabins are raised about eight or ten feet above ground, and the under part of the floor, closed with bamboos, is used as a store: I descended. Anyone who could have seen me--a white man, a European, the child of another hemisphere--wander by night, with a taper in my hand, about the hut of a Tinguian Indian, would have been really surprised at my audacity, and I may almost say, my obstinacy, in seeking out danger while pursuing the wonderful and unknown. But I went on, without reflecting on the strangeness of my conduct: as the Indians say: "I was following my destiny." When I had reached the
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