Ten Sakai families were encamped up there and I exhorted them all to come down from that height of 5000 feet and occupy themselves in agriculture, for the cold during the night is sometimes severe and the poor things must suffer from it, as they have no clothes to keep them warm.
But all my persuasions were fruitless.
I resumed my journey and it must have been about ten o'clock in the morning when in the distance an old man who, as far as I could understand from the half twilight of the forest, made me signs of friendship.
I went towards him and saw that where he stood there had once been a village but its now miserable aspect made it a strange contrast to the riches of Nature with which it was surrounded.
The solitary inhabitant of that forsaken and dilapidated place offered us some fruit and I asked him the reason of the battered huts and general desolation. He told me with grief in his tones that the village had been devastated by armed enemies. "Many of my brethren were killed and many others were taken away as slaves and the rest have fled to safer and more inaccessible parts, but I could not find it in my heart to abandon this spot where I was born; where I grew up....".
This was indeed a strange sentiment for one whose people for the most lead a roving life either from habit or from superstition!
Armed enemies! and who were they? For certain they appertained to the scum of neighbouring peoples of which I have already spoken. Men who, though encompassed on all sides by civilization, still remain uncivilized; men who, shunned by their honest and laborious countrymen, make the free forest a field for their vile passions, and now that they can no longer give vent to their evil desires in depredation and bloodshed, because of the severe measures taken by the Government, continue to damage the poor Sakais in many odious and insidious ways without always drawing down upon their heads the punishment they deserve.
Who were they? Who are they? Delinquents by nature, such as are to be found in most of our large cities; people born with savage instincts; men who would rather pass their days in the midst of vice and open corruption than live a life of honour and opulence.
None of these delinquents are to be found in thorough-bred Sakai tribes, they may however be met with amongst the inhabitants of the plain where there is a mixture of race, the result of those forced unions which were the desperation of Sakai women when taken prisoners. In the children born of these unions one can often trace the natural impulse towards violence and robbery that they have inherited from their fathers.