ere hard at work worshipping me. And I can tell you I felt a bit relieved
to see things turning out so well, in spite of the weight on my shoulders
and feet.

"But what made me anxious was what the chaps in the canoes might think
when they came back. If they'd seen me in the boat before I went down, and
without the helmet on--for they might have been spying and hiding since
over night--they would very likely take a different view from the others.
I was in a deuce of a stew about that for hours, as it seemed, until the
shindy of the arrival began.

"But they took it down--the whole blessed village took it down. At the
cost of sitting up stiff and stern, as much like those sitting Egyptian
images one sees as I could manage, for pretty nearly twelve hours, I
should guess at least, on end, I got over it. You'd hardly think what it
meant in that heat and stink. I don't think any of them dreamt of the man
inside. I was just a wonderful leathery great joss that had come up with
luck out of the water. But the fatigue! the heat! the beastly closeness!
the mackintosheriness and the rum! and the fuss! They lit a stinking fire
on a kind of lava slab there was before me, and brought in a lot of gory
muck--the worst parts of what they were feasting on outside, the Beasts--
and burnt it all in my honour. I was getting a bit hungry, but I
understand now how gods manage to do without eating, what with the smell
of burnt-offerings about them. And they brought in a lot of the stuff
they'd got off the brig and, among other stuff, what I was a bit relieved
to see, the kind of pneumatic pump that was used for the compressed air
affair, and then a lot of chaps and girls came in and danced about me
something disgraceful. It's extraordinary the different ways different
people have of showing respect. If I'd had a hatchet handy I'd have gone
for the lot of them--they made me feel that wild. All this time I sat as
stiff as company, not knowing anything better to do. And at last, when
nightfall came, and the wattle joss-house place got a bit too shadowy for
their taste--all these here savages are afraid of the dark, you know--and
I started a sort of 'Moo' noise, they built big bonfires outside and left
me alone in peace in the darkness of my hut, free to unscrew my windows a
bit and think things over, and feel just as bad as I liked. And Lord! I
was sick.

"I was weak and hungry, and my mind kept on behaving like a beetle on a
pin, tremendous ac