rove their
personal appearance, which is common alike to civilised and savage,
plucked out the little beard with which nature had endowed them by means
of tweezers, deeming it no doubt wiser on the whole to pluck up the
beard by the roots than to cut it off close thereto, as indeed it was,
seeing that the former process did not need regular repetition. Others
were still busy with the turtle-egg ragout, unable, apparently to decide
whether or not appetite was satisfied. Two somewhat elderly but deeply
interested savages whiled away the time with a game of cup-and-ball,
turn and turn about, with imperturbable gravity.

This game was different from that of Europe to the extent of being
played on precisely opposite principles. It was not he who caught the
ball on the point of the sharp stick that won, but he who failed to
catch it, for failure was more difficult to achieve than success! The
explanation is simple. The handle was a piece of pointed wood, about
the thickness of a ramrod, and a yard or so in length. To this, by a
piece of string made from fibres of the palm, was attached the ball,
which was formed of the skull of a turtle, carefully scraped. There was
no "cup" in the game. It was all point, and the great point was to
touch the ball a certain number of times without catching it, a somewhat
difficult feat to accomplish owing to the dozen or more natural cavities
with which the skull-ball was pierced, and into one of which the point
was almost always pretty sure to enter.

At last the shades of night descended on the scene, and the Indians,
laying aside ragout, tweezers, cup-and-ball, etcetera, went down to the
sand-flats, and crouched, kneeled, or squatted under the leafy ajoupas.
Of course their visitors accompanied them.

It was a profoundly dark night, for during the first part of it there
was no moon, and the stars, although they lent beauty and lustre to the
heavens, did not shed much light upon the sands. There is a weird
solemnity about such a scene which induces contemplative thought even in
the most frivolous, while it moves the religious mind to think more
definitely, somehow, of the near presence of the Creator. For some time
Lawrence, who crouched in profound silence beside Pedro, almost forgot
the object for which he was waiting there. The guide seemed to be in a
similarly absent mood, for he remarked at last in a low voice--

"How striking would be the contrasts presented to us constan