For if a savage seriously believes that his life
is bound up with an external object, it is in the last degree
unlikely that he will let any stranger into the secret. In all that
touches his inmost life and beliefs the savage is exceedingly
suspicious and reserved; Europeans have resided among savages for
years without discovering some of their capital articles of faith,
and in the end the discovery has often been the result of accident.
Above all, the savage lives in an intense and perpetual dread of
assassination by sorcery; the most trifling relics of his
person--the clippings of his hair and nails, his spittle, the
remnants of his food, his very name--all these may, he fancies, be
turned by the sorcerer to his destruction, and he is therefore
anxiously careful to conceal or destroy them. But if in matters such
as these, which are but the outposts and outworks of his life, he is
so shy and secretive, how close must be the concealment, how
impenetrable the reserve in which he enshrouds the inner keep and
citadel of his being! When the princess in the fairy tale asks the
giant where he keeps his soul, he often gives false or evasive
answers, and it is only after much coaxing and wheedling that the
secret is at last wrung from him.
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