We were going away when the acute ears of Hans caught the sound of groans.  We searched about and in a clump of reeds near the foot of the mound, found an old woman with a great spear wound just above her skinny thigh piercing deep into the vitals, but of a nature which is not immediately mortal.  One of Robertson’s people who understood the language of these swamp-dwellers well, spoke to her.  She told him that she wanted water.  It was brought and she drank copiously.  Then in answer to his questions she began to talk.

She said that the Amahagger had attacked the village and killed all who could not escape.  They had eaten a young woman and three children.  She had been wounded by a spear and fled away into the place where we found her, where none of them took the trouble to follow her as she “was not worth eating.”

By my direction the man asked her whether she knew anything of these Amahagger.  She replied that her grandfathers had, though she had heard nothing of them since she was a child, which must have been seventy years before.  They were a fierce people who lived far up north across the Great River, the remnants of a race that had once “ruled the world.”

Her grandfathers used to say that they were not always cannibals, but had become so long before because of a lack of food and now had acquired the taste.  It was for this purpose that they still raided to get other people to eat, since their ruler would not allow them to eat one another.  The flesh of cattle they did not care for, although they had plenty of them, but sometimes they ate goats and pigs because they said they tasted like man.  According to her grandfathers they were a very evil people and full of magic.

All of this the old woman told us quite briskly after she had drunk the water, I think because her wound had mortified and she felt no pain.  Her information, however, as is common with the aged, dealt entirely with the far past; of the history of the Amahagger since the days of her forebears she knew nothing, nor had she seen anything of Inez.  All she could tell us was that some of them had attacked her village at dawn and that when she ran out of the hut she was speared.

While Robertson and I were wondering what we should do with the poor old creature whom it seemed cruel to leave here to perish, she cleared up the question by suddenly expiring before our eyes.  Uttering the name of someone with whom, doubtless, she had been familiar in her youth, three or four times over, she just sank down and seemed to go to sleep and on examination we found that she was dead.  So we left her and went on.

Next day we came to the edge of the Great River, here a sheet of placid running water about a mile across, for at this time of the year it was low.  Perceiving quite a big village on our left, we went to it and made enquiries, to find that it had not been attacked by the cannibals, probably because it was too powerful, but that three nights before some of their canoes had been stolen, in which no doubt these had crossed the river.