CHAPTER LXXXI

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Of the Island of Inferno or Teneriffe.

Meseemeth I find a betterment of life among those inhabitants of the island of Inferno, for they are well supplied with wheat and barley and vegetables, with many pigs and sheep and goats, and they go clothed in skins; but they possess not houses, but only huts and dens, in the which they spend their lives. Also they draw in their privy parts, as horses do, who only extend them when they have to generate issue, or to make water. And they hold it to be as evil to act otherwise as we do in the case of those who go about without small clothes. Their fighting is done with staves made of the inner wood of the pine, fashioned like great javelins, very sharp, burnt in the fire, and dry. And they number from eight to nine bands, each with a king, whom they must always take with them, although death come to him, until the other who succeedeth to the lordship after him happeneth to die, so that they always have with them one dead and the other alive. And so, when the other dieth and there are two dead, and they have to abandon one according to their bestial ordinance, or more rightly I will say, custom, they bear him to a pit in which they throw him, and he who carrieth him on his neck exclaimeth as he throws him--"May he go to salvation." And these men are strong and daring, and have wives of their own, and they live more like men than some of these others; they fight one with the other, and in this all their principal care consisteth, and they believe that there is a God.

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