For me--so valorous a person--"no torture," he answered magnanimously.

But he--Kua-ko--had made up his mind as to the form of torture he meant to inflict some day on his own person.

He would prepare a large sack and into it put fire-ants--"As many as that!" he exclaimed triumphantly, stooping and filling his two hands with loose sand.

He would put them in the sack, and then get into it himself naked, and tie it tightly round his neck, so as to show to all spectators that the hellish pain of innumerable venomous stings in his flesh could be endured without a groan and with an unmoved countenance.

The poor youth had not an original mind, since this was one of the commonest forms of self-torture among the Guayana tribes.