We halted, they raised
their eyes. They stared, they rose in amazement at the sight
of those gods, Roderigo Jerez, Luis Torres and Juan Lepe.
They stood like statues with great eyes and parted lips. For
us, coming silently upon them, we had too our moment of
astonishment.
They were three copper men, naked, fairly tall and well
to look at. But each had between his lips what seemed a
brown stick, burning at the far end, dropping a light ash
and sending up a thin cloud of odorous smoke. These burning
sticks they dropped as they rose. They had seemed so
silent, so contented, so happy, sitting there with backs to
trees, a firebrand in each mouth, I felt a love for them!
Luis thought the lighted sticks some rite of their religion,
but after a while when we came to examine them, we found
them not true stick, but some large, thickish brown leaf
tightly twisted and pressed together and having a pungent,
not unpleasing odor. We crumbled one in our hands and
tasted it. The taste was also pungent, strange, but one
might grow to like it. They called the stick tobacco, and
said they always used it thus with fire, drinking in the smoke
and puffing it out again as they showed us through the
nostrils. We thought it a great curiosity, and so it was!
But to them we were unearthly beings. The men from
the sea told of us, then as it were introduced Diego Colon,
who spoke proudly with appropriate gesture, loving always
his part of herald Mercury--or rather of herald Mercury's
herald--not assuming to be god himself, but cherishing
the divine efflux and the importance it rayed upon him!
The three Indians quivered with a sense of the great
adventure! Their town was yonder.
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