ni (for
that was the artist's name) recoiled in horror. But I was not to be
moved, and simply refused restitution, for I had long wondered why a
people who displayed, in their tattooing, so great a gift of arabesque
invention, should display it nowhere else. Here, at last, I had found
something of the same talent in another medium; and I held the
incompleteness, in these days of world-wide brummagem, for a happy mark
of authenticity. Neither my reasons nor my purpose had I the means of
making clear to Poni; I could only hold on to the stick, and bid the
artist follow me to the gendarmerie, where I should find interpreters
and money; but we gave him, in the meanwhile, a boat-call in return for
his sandal-wood. As he came behind us down the vale he sounded upon this
continually. And continually, from the wayside houses, there poured
forth little groups of girls in crimson, or of men in white. And to
these must Poni pass the news of who the strangers were, of what they
had been doing, of why it was that Poni had a boat-whistle; and of why
he was now being haled to the vice-residency, uncertain whether to be
punished or rewarded, uncertain whether he had lost a stick or made a
bargain, but hopeful on the whole, and in the meanwhile highly consoled
by the boat-whistle. Whereupon he would tear himself away from this
particular group of inquirers, and once more we would hear the shrill
call in our wake.

_August 27._--I made a more extended circuit in the vale with Brother
Michel. We were mounted on a pair of sober nags, suitable to these rude
paths; the weather was exquisite, and the company in which I found
myself no less agreeable than the scenes through which I passed. We
mounted at first by a steep grade along the summit of one of those
twisted spurs that, from a distance, mark out provinces of sun and shade
upon the mountain-side. The ground fell away on either hand with an
extreme declivity. From either hand, out of profound ravines, mounted
the song of falling water and the smoke of household fires. Here and
there the hills of foliage would divide, and our eye would plunge down
upon one of these deep-nested habitations. And still, high in front,
arose the precipitous barrier of the mountain, greened over where it
seemed that scarce a harebell could find root, barred with the zigzags
of a human road where it seemed that not a goat could scramble. And in
truth, for all the labour that it cost, the road is regarded even b