“This is not so bad,” thought the marionette.
After a time his bearers laid him gently upon the ground and commenced to examine him. Pinocchio decided to make believe he was dead.
For that reason he kept his eyes shut tightly and lay still.
Suddenly there was a great noise. He was startled. Opening one eye, he saw approaching a chief followed by a crowd of attendants. Judging from the manner in which the new arrivals were received, they were persons of high rank. At their approach the savages knelt down, raised their hands high in the air, and bent their foreheads to the ground.
A man stepped out from the ranks and came toward Pinocchio. He examined the marionette from head to foot, while all the others looked on in silence.
When the examination was over the marionette hoped to be left in peace, but another approached him and went through the same performance. Then came a third, a fourth, a fifth, and so on.
Pinocchio was somewhat tired of this. As the last one came up he muttered, “Now I shall see what they are going to do with me.”
The man who had first examined Pinocchio now approached him again, and calling the bearers, said, in a tongue which, curiously enough, the marionette understood, “Turn the little animal over!”
Upon hearing himself called an animal, Pinocchio was seized with a mad desire to give his tormentor a kick, but he thought better of it.
The bearers advanced, took the marionette by the shoulders, and rolled him over.