Note 5 — Chapter VI
I. Stone Sanpietro translation
The sikoi grows on high mountains and the women have to take great pains in cleaning it before it is cooked. It is a grain something like our millet and has good nutritive qualities.
The Sakays mix it with water and make a sort of "polenta" cooking it, as usual, in their bamboo saucepans. It is a favourite dish with them when eaten with monkey flesh, rats, pieces of snake, lizards, beetles and various other insects which would be of rare entomological value to any museum that possessed them.
Ignorant of the repugnant compound, that gave such a savoury taste to the sikoi, at the beginning of my sojourn with the Sakays, I ate it with relish after seasoning it with a little salt, an article not much used amongst my mountain friends. But when I came to know what ingredients gave it flavour I refused it, as kindly as I could not to offend their susceptibilities, because my stomach rebelled against the mess.