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If we could grab the scout we could probably induce him by gentle persuasion to act as guide, but if he escaped us, we pictured ourselves stumbling over precipices and through dark caverns with the same lack of results as had marked our trip to the place of skulls. Maru was decreasing the distance by inches.
I choked down my wrath as Leith came crashing through from the rear, and the old egoist, flushed and ruffled, dropped back to meet him, evidently convinced of my insanity through my inability to appreciate his efforts to prove that the skulls of long-dead Polynesians possessed peculiar formations they were foreign to the islanders of the present day.
Man, he thinks, is a compound of the angel and the brute; the brute is to be humbled by being reminded of its “relation to the stalls,” and frightened into moderation by the contemplation of death-beds and skulls; the angel is to be developed by vituperating this world and exalting the next; and by this double process you get the Christian—“the highest style of man.” With all this, our new-made divine is an unmistakable poet.
Human skulls were the great ornaments of the chiefs' houses. Strips of bark were their only dress. The country was a pathless wilderness, with small cultivated patches of rice and vegetables, or clumps of fruit-trees, diversifying the otherwise unbroken forest.
Nothing was talked of but the hideous crimes of the woman abortionist. People lost sight of the war, then raging in Mexico, while listening to the stories of imaginative people about heaps of babies' skulls supposed to be mouldering beneath the floors of the Greenwich-street Golgotha. There were threats of mob violence, and of incendiary proceedings.
There is no fond antiquarianism; all the old Latin inscriptions and bas-reliefs that have been found have been mortared together at random into one wall; all the human bones that have been unearthed, and they are many, have been thrown unceremoniously into an open box. Even on the bare white ribs and ancient crumbling skulls, bourgeois visitors have written their twentieth-century names.
I have reason to suspect that some of the Fuegian tribes differ cranially from the typical Americans; and the Northern and Eastern American tribes have longer skulls than their Southern compatriots. But the ESQUIMAUX, who roam on the desolate and ice-bound coasts of Arctic America, certainly present us with a new stock.
The length of my letter precludes my dwelling on many particulars which, as I have not seen the recent publications on the subject, might be mere repetitions; and I will only mention, as briefly as I can, the skulls of these animals in my possession. From my late sad experience I am induced to this, that some brief record may be preserved from shipwreck.
Often the artist first makes a drawing of the statue in red, white and black paint on a board; and these same designs are used as patterns for tattooing, as well as on ear-sticks and other objects. Female statues are common, which is an unusual thing. I obtained a good number of skulls, which were thrown into the roots of a fig tree, where I was allowed to pick them up as I pleased.
Stowe's Mose and Pete called a "busting supper," the ladies wished to know whether we could read. On learning we could not, they said if we liked they would teach us. To this kind offer, of course, there was no objection. But we looked rather knowingly at each other, as much as to say that they would have rather a hard task to cram anything into our thick and matured skulls.
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