Presages of all kinds of events and of fortune’s endless changes are to be met with in great numbers in every part of cannibal-land. What with sounds heard in the night—soft, ghostly hands touching sensitive bodies during sleep—animals running about in a wild and excited state—birds coming out of the woods at unusual seasons—fish springing out of the water and striking a canoe, or any of its passengers—dreams—strange lights hovering over graves—a first failure in any new enterprise—shooting stars—comets—various appearances in the western sky at sunset, and, as with other races,
“In the eastern sky the rainbow,”
one never need be at a loss to find something clearly ominous of something else.
Riddles, enigmas, and verbal conceits were always forthcoming when asked for in the cannibal hut, where the inmates would often chat long and pleasantly to while away the time. Now an old grey-headed man, glorying, as almost all old men do glory, in the golden days that have been, would open his mouth in parables, or tell long tales of great chiefs, who ruled the land as only they could rule it, and sailed fast canoes as none but they ever sailed them before or since. Or, if such subjects were thought too long and tedious, someone else would produce from his fruitful brain a lighter literature—a sort of “after-dinner talk.”
One evening I was lying full length among a number of dusky forms in the chief ambassador’s cottage. The subject of a recent village scandal had been well threshed out, and the silence which followed had been much too long. At last there was a stir, and an evident waking desire for talk, so a voice began—
“There’s a path that leads to no home. What is it?” Everybody tried, and of course, if only for courtesy’s sake, everybody “gave it up.” “It is the path of the traveller travelling, a stranger in strange lands!”
“The longing eye—whose is it?” Answer.—“The dog’s, looking and longing while we eat.”
“There is a wind that blows for many years without stopping, but at last there comes a lull—it stops—and a world falls. What wind is it that blows? and what is the world that falls when that wind ceases to blow?” Answer.—“The wind is the breath of man, and the world that falls is man himself.” A thought like this picked out of a savage mind is a poetic gem.
“We have just buried some old men, who, however, will ere long come back to us again, fresh and youthful. If you cannot unravel the matter, I will.” It was Long-Emptiness, the Court fool, who proved to be the intellectual Samson of the evening, who spoke. “Do you not know,” said he, with an air of triumph, “that we are just back from burying a lot of old yams, which six months hence will come to us again as young ones?”
Cannibal-land is not over rich in proverbs, or, if they can be said to abound in it, they are, for the most part, either far-fetched or unclean. One or two will suffice to show the character of this class of cannibal literature.