Through dense tangles of palm and fern, mangrove and moss I was borne in a rough hammock of fiber. Great soft-winged butterflies flapped across the course of our march. Brilliant birds fluttered off, twittering and screaming. I should have preferred walking, but my position prohibited it. To condescend meant to become a mere man.
In their squalid villages of grass hovels I found filth and the excitement of battle preparation. It was my first view of their home life--and my last. I was taken to the house of a chief or sub-king, who lay mortally hurt of an arrow wound, and who wished to have the blessing of the highest priest that his spirit might take its course honorably, and without curse, to the west. He lay on his mat dying, and was older and more repulsive to the eye than Ra Tuiki. His ears had been stretched by many huge ornaments, and the cartilage of his nose was torn and ragged where the chances of battle had pulled out rings and spikes. His eager eyes gazed up at me out of a face stiffened and set with elephantiasis, and by his mat lay, unwrapped from their fiber coverings, that they might comfort his passing spirit, two excellently preserved negroid heads. I shuddered, but I laid my hand on his slanting forehead--and I have seen men die with less dignity.
As night brought the closing in of choking jungle shadows, a half-dozen red fires leaped up to drive their ribbons of red flare into the blackness. They wavered fitfully and grotesquely upon twisting, leaping bodies, which were paradoxically preparing for the ordeal of the morrow by hideous orgies and dances and fatigue and nerve waste. But when the first light of sunrise attacked the reek of dew that veiled the jungle, while the dying fires still smouldered into gray ash and my throat labored in stifling gasps of wet, they trailed out silently into the bush. They were a long line of shadow shapes whose footfall made no sound, and whose pigmy bodies melted into the tangle as impalpably as the dissipating mists. My bearers carried me back to the shore. Two days later their delegation came chattering in hysterical delight and bringing in native triumph the head of the king who had three hundred stones about his house.