The Elder gets up and says in a loud voice:
"Hearken! hearken, all you who are here assembled: they who were at a distance are now together; they who were separate are now united".
The bridal couple then take each other tenderly by the hand, and some rice is presented to them upon a leaf. The woman takes up a few grains and puts them into the mouth of her husband and then they both partake of that light, symbolical repast from the same leaf. The nuptial ceremony finishes here, without the intervention of Alà or any sort of ecclesiastical or civil authority. How they are to be envied!
A banquet immediately follows and the company cram down everything that they find eatable. The menu consists of every sort of edible article known in the Sakai cuisine, and when they have stuffed themselves to their utmost, they dance, sing and draw from their instruments the sharpest notes that ever rent the human ear whilst the furious beating of bamboos give out the sound of wooden bells. Terminated in this way the wedding festival, the newly-made husband and wife return, with the relations of the former, to their own group of huts, where a new one, a nest of love, has been prepared for them.
Love among the Sakais never becomes a passion or a delirium. It is a quiet calm sentiment, a physiological necessity such as the good soul of Schopenhauer interpreted it, to the great scandal of a certain class of lovers.
Men and women are united from a feeling of cordial sympathy, by a spontaneous act of their own wills which would never suffer the least restraint.
No personal or family interest suggests or determines the important step. The only thing that may be said to inspire love (and bring about a marriage) in the jungle is that supreme and inviolable law of nature for the conservation of the species.
But what is to be admired in the unions of these good, simple people is the fidelity which follows them throughout life.
The Sakais are not, I repeat, very ardent spirits, nor are they excessive in sacrificing to Venus perhaps because sensual satisfaction arrives when physiological development imposes it, instead—as too often happens in civilized society, with great damage to morality and race—of after a long and wearisome vigil, always waiting for financial conditions to permit the formation of a family.