For my own part, though feeling materially better than I had done
the preceding evening, I could not look at the limb that had
pained me so violently at intervals during the last twenty-four
hours, without experiencing a sense of alarm that I strove in
vain to shake off. Unwilling to disturb the flow of my comrade's
spirits, I managed to stifle the complaints to which I might
otherwise have given vent, and calling upon him good-humouredly
to speed our banquet, I prepared myself for it by washing in the
stream. This operation concluded, we swallowed, or rather
absorbed, by a peculiar kind of slow sucking process, our
respective morsels of nourishment, and then entered into a
discussion as to the steps is was necessary for us to pursue.

'What's to be done now?' inquired I, rather dolefully.

'Descend into that same valley we descried yesterday.' rejoined
Toby, with a rapidity and loudness of utterance that almost led
me to suspect he had been slyly devouring the broadside of an ox
in some of the adjoining thickets. 'What else,' he continued,
'remains for us to do but that, to be sure? Why, we shall both
starve to a certainty if we remain here; and as to your fears of
those Typees--depend upon it, it is all nonsense.'

'It is impossible that the inhabitants of such a lovely place as
we saw can be anything else but good fellows; and if you choose
rather to perish with hunger in one of these soppy caverns, I for
one prefer to chance a bold descent into the valley, and risk the
consequences'.

'And who is to pilot us thither,' I asked, 'even if we should