The opening scene in the Mandan customs, effectively described by Mr Catlin, begins with "a solitary human figure descending the prairie hills and approaching the village," "in appearance a very _aged_ man," "a centenarian white man," dressed in a robe of four white wolves' skins." He was met by the head chief and the council of chiefs, and addressed by them as "Nu-mohk-muck-a-nah" (the _first_ and only man.) "He then harangued them for a few minutes, reminding them that every human being on the surface of the earth had been destroyed by the water excepting himself, who had landed on a high mountain in the west in his canoe, where he still resided, and from whence he had come to open the medicine (mystery) lodge, that the Mandans might celebrate the _subsiding of the waters_, and make the proper sacrifices to the water, lest the same calamity should again happen to them." BURTON, ii. 38. "The ministers ... they were conducted by a 'Lali' or half-head, with right side of his pericranium clean shaven, and the left in a casing of silver that looked like a cast or a half melon." * * * * * Burton says (ii. 87), "One of the Dahoman monarch's peculiarities is that he is double, not merely binonymous, nor dual, like the spiritual Mickado and temporal Tycoon of Japan, but two in one. Gelele, for instance, is king of the city and addo-kpon of the 'bush'; _i.e._ of the farmer folk and the country as opposed to the city. This country ruler has his _official_ mother, the Dank-li-ke.... Thus Dahome has two points of interest to the ethnologist--the distinct precedence of women and the double king."--_Vide_ also p. 80. CATLIN, p. 30. Compare with the two athletic young men (_vide_ Plate XIII.) assigned to each of the young men who underwent the torture--"their bodies painted _one half red_ and the other blue, and carrying a bunch of willow-boughs in one hand."