? 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