"
"But they should be taught not to take white men's heads," Sheldon
argued.
She nodded approval, and said, "If we find one head we'll burn the
village. Hey, you, Charley! What fella place head he stop?"
"S'pose he stop along devil-devil house," was the answer. "That big
fella house, he devil-devil."
It was the largest house in the village, ambitiously ornamented with
fancy-plaited mats and king-posts carved into obscene and monstrous forms
half-human and half-animal. Into it they went, in the obscure light
stumbling across the sleeping-logs of the village bachelors and knocking
their heads against strings of weird votive-offerings, dried and
shrivelled, that hung from the roof-beams. On either side were rude
gods, some grotesquely carved, others no more than shapeless logs swathed
in rotten and indescribably filthy matting. The air was mouldy and heavy
with decay, while strings of fish-tails and of half-cleaned dog and
crocodile skulls did not add to the wholesomeness of the place.
In the centre, crouched before a slow-smoking fire, in the littered ashes
of a thousand fires, was an old man who blinked apathetically at the
invaders. He was extremely old--so old that his withered skin hung about
him in loose folds and did not look like skin.
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