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.

They themselves had been on the path to such and such a place, but now would they turn and go with us, and when we went again to the sea they, if it were permitted, would accompany us and view for themselves our amazing canoes! All this to our companion.