, and I was
congratulating myself with having thus compromised the matter, when he intimated
that as a thing of course my face was first to undergo the operation. I was
fairly driven to despair; nothing but the utter ruin of my face divine, as the
poets call it, would, I perceived, satisfy the inexorable Mehevi and his chiefs,
or rather that infernal Karky, for he was at the bottom of it all.
    The only consolation afforded me was the choice of patterns: I was at
perfect liberty to have my face spanned by three horizontal bars, after the
fashion of my serving-man's; or to have as many oblique stripes slanting across
it; or if, like a true courtier, I chose to model my style on that of royalty, I
might wear a sort of freemason badge upon my countenance in the shape of a
mystic triangle. However, I would have none of these, though the king most
earnestly impressed upon my mind that my choice was wholly unrestricted. At
last, seeing my unconquerable repugnance, he ceased to importune me.
    But not so some other of the savages. Hardly a day passed but I was
subjected to their annoying requests, until at last my existence became a burden
to me; the pleasures I had previously enjoyed no longer afforded me delight, and
all my former desire to escape from the valley now revived with additional
force.
    A fact which I soon afterward learned augmented my apprehension. The whole
system of tattooing was, I found, connected with their religion; and it was
evident, therefore, that they were resolved to make a convert of me.
    In the decoration of the chiefs it seems to be necessary to exercise the
most elaborate pencilling; while some of the inferior natives looked as if they
had been daubed over indiscriminately with a house-painter's brush. I remember
one fellow who prided himself hugely upon a great oblong patch, placed high upon
his back, and who always reminded me of a man with a blister of Spanish flies
stuck between his shoulders. Another whom I frequently met had the hollow of his
eyes tattooed in two regular squares, and his visual organs being remarkably
brilliant, they gleamed forth from out this setting like a couple of diamonds
inserted in ebony.
    Although convinced that tattooing was a religious observance, still the
nature of the connection between it and the superstitious idolatry of the people
was a point upon which I could never obtain any information. Like the still more
important system of the taboo, it always appeared inexplicable to me.
    There is a marked similarity, almost an identity, between the
