My Friends the Savages. Giovanni Battista Cerruti

would have reassured them, at my appearance the huts were rapidly deserted amidst cries of terror.

      My three guides, however, managed to get into communication with their brethren and after a while led them to me without their making any resistance.

      I got their consent to let me settle down near them on the condition that I did not seek to enter their huts. The reason of this interdiction I learnt later on. It had been a prescription of the Alà, a sort of sorcerer, who believed, or made believe that my presence would have an evil effect upon a sick mother and her new-born babe.

      The Sakais, stimulated by my presents, built me a solid and pretty comfortable cabin near a rivulet and not far from them, and I installed myself there forthwith.

      The first day of our acquaintance it happened that I accidentally called them Sakais. They changed face and some of them protested angrily:

      "You are not good, because you insult us and call us bad names!".

      It was a dangerous slip of the tongue and I hastened to make my peace by explaining that I had heard the term used by the other people but that I knew they were really May Darats whose kindness and gentleness had often been abused by their neighbours, and in the future I meant to save them from being cheated and deceived by their former aggressors.

      This declaration calmed their resentment and I was able to begin a quiet, tranquil life amongst those simple, sincere beings, a life so calm and undisturbed that I have never had cause, then or now, to regret the civilized society from which I had voluntarily withdrawn myself, persuaded that if my character and habits incapacitated me for the dubious and not always straightforward transactions of the commercial world, the same moral qualities which impeded me from becoming a business man might find good ground for bringing forth fruit in the pure hearts and minds of a primitive people, who knew neither fraud, nor hypocrisy.