neck, hacking into
his spine until the head was severed. Then there arose a loud shout of
triumph. The offering to the fetish was the signal for the most
enthusiastic rejoicing, and the shouts of adulation were deafening. The
people, ground down by a crafty priesthood, and steeped in the most
degrading superstitions, looked upon the wholesale butchery that followed
without a shudder. King, courtiers and slaves seemed seized with an
insatiable desire for blood, and as one head fell after another, the
cries of the victims drowned by the vociferous shouts of the onlookers,
Omar and I stood shackled and trembling.

One after another the victims were thrown across the bowl and their
life-blood gushed into it as the cruel swords descended, while the King
gloated over the sight with an expression of pleasure upon his oily
sinister face, until the heap of headless trunks grew large, and the
number sacrificed must have been over a hundred.

Suddenly the chief executioner took one of his knives which had a human
skull upon the hilt, and holding it up, commanded silence.

Then spoke the Ocra Betea, who, rising from his stool, waved his hand
across the veritable Golgotha, crying:

"Behold! Tremble! The King makes the great yam custom. The death-drum
beats, and to the fetish we offer sacrifice. Who is so great as the King
of all the Ashantis, and who is so powerful as the fetish? Yonder are the
graves of the great kings, and the marks on yonder walls show the number
of men who were sacrificed when their graves were watered. Listen! The
mighty King Prempeh is about to sacrifice. To-day he sends five hundred
men to the dark world as a thank offering for the harvest, and as an
offering to the fetish to enable us to eat up our enemies, the whites.
When our mighty King says war, we will arm against them, and their heads
shall fill many baskets. Of a truth our lord Prempeh is the greatest
monarch who has ever sat upon the stool. The earth quakes when he speaks,
and his enemies are paralysed by fear. Betea has spoken."

Then the crowd set up a series of wild shrieks and yells, they
gesticulated, fired guns indiscriminately, and danced wildly, while some
of the enthusiasts pressing forward, dipped their hands into the blood
already in the bowl, and besmeared themselves with it; and others,
turning upon myself and my companion as we stood silent and trembling,
heaped every insult upon us.

In a few moments, however, the crowd was drive