“My curiosity was somewhat aroused, and I questioned him, whereupon he told me that the drug, being tasteless, was given in food or drink, and that the victim was seized with a terrible and immeasurable sadness and depth of despair, in which life appeared too horrible to endure, and which the unfortunate always ended by seizing a weapon of some sort and killing himself; and the chief, being of an inquiring mind, had caused the poison to be administered to a man who was carefully guarded and allowed no weapon.

“‘And what did he do?’ I queried, for the chief assured me that the drug itself did not produce death, but only caused an irresistible desire for it.

“The chief did not reply in words, but with a meaning smile, pointed to a vein on his black wrist, and set his sharp, pointed teeth against it, in a way that was a reply.

“I was anxious to see for myself, naturally, suspecting some hocus-pocus, so I ventured to be respectfully dubious.

“The chief was in an amiable mood; he bade me visit his tent with my servant at moon-rise, and he would prove that this was no lie, but the truth.

“When we went out, it was about eleven o’clock, and the surrounding jungle was full of the horrible noises of an African night; the wail of the small lemur, that sounds like the death-moan of a child; the more distant roar of the lion in the black depths of the forest, too thick for the moonlight to ever penetrate; the giant trees of the bombax around the encampment, wreathed with llianes and parasitical poison vines that cast fantastic shadows on the ground, white with the perfectly white moonlight of the tropics, that reminds one of the electric light in its purity of ray and the blackness of the shadows that contrast with it.

“Noiselessly my black servant and I proceeded to the chief’s enclosure.  His slaves permitted us to pass, by his orders, and we found ourselves in his tent, where he sat in grave silence on a pile of skins, the flare of a torch revealing fitfully the ugly face of the medicine-man, crouched with due humility on the earthen floor at his master’s feet.  After an exchange of compliments, his highness informed me that he had ordered one of his female slaves to be brought, that the poison had already been administered without her knowledge, and he also briefly remarked, as a proof of his clemency, that it was fortunate for her that the white man had doubted the drink, as otherwise she would have been given over to torture, since she had proved unfaithful to her lord, the chief having bestowed her on one of his sentries, whom she had betrayed with a soldier.

“As he spoke sounds were heard outside, and, between two guards, the unfortunate woman was dragged into the tent.  It was not lawful for her to address the chief, so she stood, panting, dishevelled, but silent, in the yellow torchlight.  Her hair was nearly straight and hung in tangles on her beautiful shoulders; without so much as a girdle for covering, she felt no shame, but only looked about with rolling, terrified eyes, the picture of a snared animal.