Page:Weird Tales Volume 5 Number 2 (1925-02).djvu/173

"In what, O Saking, do my people excel thine?"

Thus I questioned Saking, seer of the Mayoyao Igorots, mountaineers of the Philippines. A strange question for a white man to put to a naked, untutored savage? No, for be it known that the simple pagans consider themselves quite the equal, if not the superior, of any other race of whatever color.

But the question, coming from me, troubled Saking. How could he acknowledge openly that my race was in any way superior to his, even though I commanded the soldiers protecting his people from the head-hunting Gaddaans dwelling beyond the dividing mountain range?

Saking had yet another fear: he had no desire to offend me.

"Apo commandante," he began in his native tongue, "thy poor servant returned to his own roof only yesterday from Manila, where he had been sent to bring back stories of the wonders there created by the gods of the white man. Give thy servant Saking but an hour to ponder, then he will answer."

Saking's enigmatic request is plain to those who understand the untutored pagan. That which the pagan Malay does not understand he attributes to the gods. All the phenomena of nature: the rain, the lightning flash, the growth of plants, life and death, are to him inexplicable; hence they are the work of his gods. Automobiles, telephones, electric lights, street cars, steamships and radio were equally incomprehensible to the pagan mind; therefore they were the work of the gods of the white race possessing them. The handiwork of the gods not being comparable, something of purely human effort must be found for comparison.

The Mayoyao Igorots are agriculturists, driven by enemies, in centuries past, into the deep valleys of northern Luzon, where they have terraced the mountain slopes to an amazing height. Some terraces are five thousand feet above the valley floor. The irrigation of the tiny terraced fields created many problems; their solution frequently involved engineering feats worthy of the study of our modern college-trained engineers.

Saking had secured his tribal standing through his solution of the local irrigation problems; that skill he attributed to his own knowledge applied without the aid of the ancestral gods; so in irrigation he might make a comparison of the two races, white and brown. It had long been acknowledged as a fact that no Igorot could make water run up hill. If any Igorot had ever been bold enough to assert such power he would have been promptly labeled a fool. This knowledge and assurance gave Saking a cue. Were he to attribute such an impossible power to the white race his people would interpret his assertion as one of tact rather than fact.

Before the hour had passed Saking returned to answer my question.

"O wise commandante, truly I have found one effort in which thy race excels mine. Thy people need only to drive hollow pipes into the ground to make the water shoot high into the air, from whence it falls back to the earth like rain. Thy—people—can—make—water—run—up—hill."

Saking had seen a fountain.