Lane, as we all know, lavished long explanatory notes upon the tales; the margins of this volume had been filled with additions, question marks, and sometimes corrections, all in the same hand as that of the manuscript. From those marginalia, one might almost conclude that the reader of the volume was less interested in Scheherazade's wondrous tales than in the customs of Islam. About David Brodie, whose signature (with its fine artistic flourish) is affixed to the end of the manuscript, I have been able to discover nothing save that he was a Scottish missionary, born in Aberdeen, who preached Christianity throughout central Africa and later in certain parts of the jungles of Brazil, a country to which he was led by his knowledge of Portuguese. I do not know when or where he died. The manuscript has never, so far as I know, been published.
I will reproduce the manuscript and its colorless language verbatim, with no omissions save the occasional verse from the Bible and a curious passage treating the sexual practices of the Yahoo, which Brodie, a good Presbyterian, discreetly entrusted to Latin. The first page of the manuscript is missing.
. . .
... of the region infested by the Apemen is the area wherein one finds the Mich.[1] Lest my readers should forget the bestial nature of this people (and also because, given the absence of vowels in their harsh language, it is impossible to transliterate their name exactly), I will call them Yahoos. The tribe consists, I believe, of no more than seven hundred individuals; this tally includes the Nr, who live farther south, in the dense undergrowth of the jungle. The figure I give here is conjectural, since with the exception of the king, queen, and various witch doctors, the Yahoos sleep wherever they may find themselves when night falls, in no fixed place. Marsh fever and the constant incursions of the Apemen have reduced their number. Only a very few have names. To call one another, they fling mud at each other. I have also seen Yahoos fall to the ground and throw themselves about in the dirt in order to call a friend. Physically they are no different from the Kroo, except for their lower forehead and a certain coppery cast that mitigates the blackness of their skin. Their food is fruits, tubers, and reptiles; they drink cat's and bat's milk and they fish with their hands. They hide themselves when they eat, or they close their eyes; all else, they do in plain sight of all, like the Cynic school of philosophers. They devour the raw flesh of their witch doctors and kings in order to assimilate their virtue to themselves. I upbraided them for that custom; they touched their bellies and their mouths, perhaps to indicate that dead men are food as well, or perhaps— but this is no doubt too subtle—to try to make me see that everything we eat becomes, in time, human flesh.
In their wars they use rocks, gathered and kept at hand for that purpose, and magical imprecations. They walk about naked; the arts of clothing and tattooing are unknown to them.
I find it worthy of note that while they have at their disposal a broad expanse of grassy tableland, with springs of fresh water and shady trees, they have chosen to huddle together in the swamps that surround the base of the plateau, as though delighting in the rigors of squalor and equatorial sun. Furthermore, the sides of the plateau are rugged, and would serve as a wall against the Apemen. In the Scottish Highlands, clans build their castles on the summit of a hill; I told the witch doctors of this custom, suggesting it as a model that they might follow, but it was to no avail. They did, however, allow me to erect a cabin for myself up on the tableland, where the night breeze is cooler.
The tribe is ruled over by a king whose power is absolute, but I suspect that it is the four witch doctors who assist the king and who in fact elected him that actually rule. Each male child born is subjected to careful examination; if certain stigmata (which have not been revealed to me) are seen, the boy becomes king of the Yahoos. Immediately upon his elevation he is gelded, blinded with a fiery stick, and his hands and feet are cut off, so that the world will not distract him from wisdom. He is confined within a cavern, whose name is Citadel (Qzr)*; the only persons who may enter are the four witch doctors and a pair of female slaves who serve the king and smear his body with dung. If there is a war, the witch doctors take him from the cavern, exhibit him to the tribe to spur the warriors' courage, sling him over their shoulders, and carry him as though a banner or a talisman into the fiercest part of the battle. When this occurs, the king generally dies within seconds under the stones hurled at him by the Apemen.
In another such citadel lives the queen, who is not permitted to see her king. The queen of the Yahoos was kind enough to receive me; she was young, of a cheerful disposition, and, insofar as her race allows, well favored. Bracelets made of metal and ivory and necklaces strung with teeth adorned her nakedness.
She looked at me, smelled me, and touched me, and then—in full sight of her attendants—she offered herself to me. My cloth and my habits caused me to decline that honor, which is one granted generally to the witch doctors and to the slave hunters (usually Muslims) whose caravans pass through the kingdom.
She pricked me two or three times with a long golden needle; these pricks are the royal marks of favor, and not a few Yahoos inflict them upon themselves in order to make it appear that they have been recipients of the queen's attentions. The ornaments which I have mentioned come from other regions: the Yahoos believe them to be objects that occur in nature, as they themselves are incapable of manufacturing even the simplest item. In the eyes of the tribe, my cabin was a tree, even though many of them watched me build it, and even aided me. Among other items, I had with me a watch, a pith helmet, a compass, and a Bible; the Yahoos would look at these objects and heft them and ask where I had found them. They would often grasp my hunting knife by the blade; one supposes they saw it differently than I. It is difficult to imagine what they would make of a chair. A house of several rooms would be for them a labyrinth, though they well might not get lost inside it, much as a cat is able to find its way about a house though it cannot conceive it. They all found my beard, which was at that time flaming red, a thing of wonder; they would stroke and caress it for long periods at a time.
The Yahoos are insensitive to pain and pleasure, with the exception of the pleasure they derive from raw and rancid meat and noxious-smelling things. Their lack of imagination makes them cruel.
I have spoken of the king and queen; I will now say something about the witch doctors. I have mentioned that there are four of them; this number is the largest that the Yahoos' arithmetic comprehends.
They count on their fingers thus: one, two, three, four, many; infinity begins at the thumb. The same phenomenon may be seen, I am told, among the tribes that harass the region of Buenos-Ayres with their raids and pillaging. In spite of the fact that four is the largest number they possess, the Yahoos are not cheated by the Arabs who traffic with them, for in their exchanges all the goods are divided into lots of one, two, three, or four items, which each person keeps beside himself. The operation is slow, yet it allows no room for error or trickery. Of all the nation of the Yahoos, the witch doctors are the only persons who have truly aroused my interest. The common people say they have the power to transform anyone they please into an ant or a tortoise; one individual who noted my incredulity at this report showed me an anthill, as though that were proof. The Yahoos have no memory, or virtually none; they talk about the damage caused by an invasion of leopards, but they are unsure whether they themselves saw the leopards or whether it was their parents, or whether they might be recounting a dream. The witch doctors do possess some memory, though to only a very small degree; in the afternoon they can recall things that happened that morning or even on the previous evening. They also possess the ability to see the future; they quite calmly and assuredly predict what will happen in ten or fifteen minutes. They may say, for example: A fly will light on the back of my neck, or It won't be long before we hear a bird start singing. I have witnessed this curious gift hundreds of times, and I have thought about it a great deal. We know that past, present, and future are already, in every smallest detail, in the prophetic memory of God, in His eternity; it is curious, then, that men may look indefinitely into the past but not an instant into the future. If I am able to recall as though it were yesterday that schooner that sailed into port from Norway when I was four years old, why should I be surprised that someone is able to foresee an event that is about to occur? Philosophically speaking, memory is no less marvelous than prophesying the future; tomorrow is closer to us than the crossing of the Red Sea by the Jews, which, nonetheless, we remember.