The Process Was Slow, As Both Question And Answer Had To Pass
Through Three Languages.
There was a very manifest desire to tell
the truth, and I think that their statements concerning their few
and simple customs may be relied upon.
I shall give what they told
me separately when I have time to write out my notes in an orderly
manner. I can only say that I have seldom spent a more interesting
evening.
About nine the stew was ready, and the women ladled it into lacquer
bowls with wooden spoons. The men were served first, but all ate
together. Afterwards sake, their curse, was poured into lacquer
bowls, and across each bowl a finely-carved "sake-stick" was laid.
These sticks are very highly prized. The bowls were waved several
times with an inward motion, then each man took his stick and,
dipping it into the sake, made six libations to the fire and
several to the "god" - a wooden post, with a quantity of spiral
white shavings falling from near the top. The Ainos are not
affected by sake nearly so easily as the Japanese. They took it
cold, it is true, but each drank about three times as much as would
have made a Japanese foolish, and it had no effect upon them.
After two hours more talk one after another got up and went out,
making profuse salutations to me and to the others. My candles had
been forgotten, and our seance was held by the fitful light of the
big logs on the fire, aided by a succession of chips of birch bark,
with which a woman replenished a cleft stick that was stuck into
the fire-hole. I never saw such a strangely picturesque sight as
that group of magnificent savages with the fitful firelight on
their faces, and for adjuncts the flare of the torch, the strong
lights, the blackness of the recesses of the room and of the roof,
at one end of which the stars looked in, and the row of savage
women in the background - eastern savagery and western civilisation
met in this hut, savagery giving and civilisation receiving, the
yellow-skinned Ito the connecting-link between the two, and the
representative of a civilisation to which our own is but an "infant
of days."
I found it very exciting, and when all had left crept out into the
starlight. The lodges were all dark and silent, and the dogs, mild
like their masters, took no notice of me. The only sound was the
rustle of a light breeze through the surrounding forest. The verse
came into my mind, "It is not the will of your Father which is in
heaven that one of these little ones should perish." Surely these
simple savages are children, as children to be judged; may we not
hope as children to be saved through Him who came "not to judge the
world, but to save the world"?
I crept back again and into my mosquito net, and suffered not from
fleas or mosquitoes, but from severe cold.
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