[Note: this transcription was produced by an automatic OCR engine]

SANTO I 49

had crawled into my shoes, my books, my luggage,
they were crawling, flying, dancing everywhere.
Perfectly disgusted, I threw off all my clothes, and
had my boys shake and clean out every piece. For
a week I had to have everything cleaned at least
once a day, and even then I found the loathsome
creatures in every fold, under straps, in pouches.

On that afternoon I had a great success as an
artist. My drawings of pigs, trees and men went
the rounds and were quite immoderately admired,
and preserved as we would a sketch of Holbein’s.
These drawings have to be done as simply as possible
and fairly large, else the natives do not understand
them. They consider every line essential, and do
not understand shadows or any impressionistic treat-
ment. We must remember that in our civilized art
we work with many symbols, some of which have
but a vague resemblance to the object they represent,
whose meaning we know, while the savage does not.
This was the reason why I had often no success at
all with What I considered masterpieces, while the
natives went into raptures over drawings I thought
utter failures. At any rate, they made me quite a
popular person.

The sick chief complained to me that a late wife
of his had been poisoned, and as he took me for a
great “witch~doctor,” he asked me to find out the
murderer. To the native, sickness or death is not
natural, but always the consequence of witchcraft,
either on the part of enemies or spirits. The terribly
high death-rate in the last years makes it seem all