Tired of reading? Add this page to your Bookmarks or Favorites and finish it later.
|
|
A dolorous place it was, this canoe house, filled with groans and
sighs, corpses beneath the floor and composing the floor, creatures
soon to be corpses upon the floor, corpses swinging in aerial
sepulchre overhead, long black canoes, high-ended like beaked
predatory monsters, dimly looming in the light of a slow fire where
sat an ancient of the tribe of Somo at his interminable task of
smoke-curing a bushman's head. He was withered, and blind, and
senile, gibbering and mowing like some huge ape as ever he turned
and twisted, and twisted back again, the suspended head in the
pungent smoke, and handful by handful added rotten punk of wood to
the smudge fire.
Sixty feet in the clear, the dim fire occasionally lighted, through
shadowy cross-beams, the ridge-pole that was covered with sennit of
coconut that was braided in barbaric designs of black and white and
that was stained by the smoke of years almost to a monochrome of
dirty brown. From the lofty cross-beams, on long sennit strings,
hung the heads of enemies taken aforetime in jungle raid and sea
foray. The place breathed the very atmosphere of decay and death,
and the imbecile ancient, curing in the smoke the token of death,
was himself palsiedly shaking into the disintegration of the grave.
Toward daylight, with great shouting and heaving and pull and haul,
scores of Somo men brought in another of the big war canoes. They
made way with foot and hand, kicking and thrusting dragging and
shoving, the bound captives to either side of the space which the
canoe was to occupy. They were anything but gentle to the meat with
which they had been favoured by good fortune and the wisdom of
Bashti.
|