a thing unknown, since even to barbarians
virtue is painted in so natural colors that they respect it naturally,
without more external credit than their native security.

This sole spark of good morals have I found among the so great darkness
in which the Subanos live. However, they have another custom belonging
to the same aspect of their lives, so vile that it is sufficient
to obscure greater lights than those of that small spark; for among
them is more acceptable the exchange that they make of their women
with one another--the husbands mutually agreeing upon this exchange,
and celebrating the hideous loan and the vile restitution with dances
and drunken revels, according to their custom. Their feasts are like
their customs, and one is the manifestation of the other.

CHAPTER XVII

Burials and marriages of those natives

I have kept these two acts, so contrary in their effects, in order
to present them in one place in this chapter, inasmuch as they are
of greater display and magnificence, and in them, in spite of the
simplicity of those natives, the serious predominates. In the first,
which is practiced with their dead, I know not whether to praise
more their piety or their generosity and grandeur, or to which of the
two virtues recognition is due; for both are carried to the greatest
extreme. For their liberality, the obligations of their piety (which
declares itself in those attentions a debtor to nature), passes by
and tramples under foot the laws of their poverty and the natural
simplicity of these Indians, and makes demonstrations superior to
their fortune, clothing their dead with the magnificence of princes. In
the shroud alone, they clothe the dead person in a hundred brazas of
fine muslin, which serves him as a shirt. Over that they place rich
patolas, which are pieces of cloth of gold, or of silk alone, worked
very beautifully, and of great value, pious generosity endeavoring to
give him the best and to clothe him in the finest and most precious
garments. It is a law, established by immemorial custom, that the
children and near relatives each clothe the deceased in a piece of
gauze or of sinampuli (another fabric of equal estimation) arranging it
with such loops and knots that they find space for it all. In regard
to the dress, this custom is in force even to this day, and no man
who respects himself has ever failed in this law. There is no one so
poor and so wretched that he does not own a p