only not think,
but perhaps can't think. His brains are not trained to it. Give the
average man something with real, straight, original, first-hand thought
in it, and he's simply unable to tackle it. His brain has not been
cultivated. He wilts mentally. It's like putting the work of a man on a
boy. Catch what I mean? Now a savage gets more of a chance. It was that
way with Ista. She had thought out things for herself and had her own
beliefs, but they were not the beliefs the Tlingas were supposed to
hold. But after all she did not tell me much besides her own disbeliefs.
When you think of it, no one can tell another much. What you know you
have to discover alone. All she told me was what was going to be done,
and that was about as disappointing as the information you might get
about what would take place in initiation in a secret society. Some was
lost in transmission.

"Well, at last the ceremonial started up with a great banging of drums
and all that. It was a great scene, let me tell you, with the tumbled
vegetation, glaringly colored as if a scene painter had gone crazy.
There were the flashing birds--blood-colored and orange scarlet and
yellow, gold and green. Butterflies, too,--great gaudy things that
looked like moving flowers. And the noise and chatterings and whistlings
in the trees of birds and insects. There were flowers and fruits, and
eatings and speech-makings. As far as I could gather, the chief speakers
were congratulating the hearers upon their luck in belonging to the
Tlingas, which was the greatest tribe on earth and the favorite of Naol,
the lizard god. We capered round the tribal pole, I capering with the
rest of them of course. Somerfield took a picture of it. Then there was
a procession of prospective mothers with Ista among them. Rotten, I
thought it. Don't imagine female beauty, by the way, as some of the
writers on savage life would have you imagine it. Nothing of the kind.
White, black or yellow, I never saw a stark woman that looked beautiful
yet. That's all bunk. Muscular and strong, yes. That's a kind of beauty
in its way. True as God, I believe that one of the causes of unhappy
marriages among white folk is that the lads are fed upon false notions
about womanly beauty, and when they get the reality they think that
they've captured a lemon.

"Presently the crowd quieted down and the men were set around in a
semicircle with me and Somerfield at the end. Then a red-eyed old hag
tottered out