Once,
at a sharp turn where a man's shoulder would unavoidably brush against a
screen of leaves, the bushman displayed great caution as he spread the
leaves aside and exposed the head of a sharp-pointed spear, so set that
the casual passer-by would receive at the least a nasty scratch.
"My word," said Binu Charley, "that fella spear allee same devil-devil."
He took the spear and was examining it when suddenly he made as if to
stick it into the bushman. It was a bit of simulated playfulness, but
the bushman sprang back in evident fright. Poisoned the weapon was
beyond any doubt, and thereafter Binu Charley carried it threateningly at
the prisoner's back.
The sun, sinking behind a lofty western peak, brought on an early but
lingering twilight, and the expedition plodded on through the evil
forest--the place of mystery and fear, of death swift and silent and
horrible, of brutish appetite and degraded instinct, of human life that
still wallowed in the primeval slime, of savagery degenerate and abysmal.
No slightest breezes blew in the gloomy silence, and the air was stale
and humid and suffocating. The sweat poured unceasingly from their
bodies, and in their nostrils was the heavy smell of rotting vegetation
and of black earth that was a-crawl with fecund life.
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