Mendana, the Spaniard. It was the head of one of Mendana's armourers,
lost in a beach scrimmage to one of Bashti's remote ancestors.

Still another head, the history of which was vague, was a white woman's
head. What wife of what navigator there was no telling. But earrings of
gold and emerald still clung to the withered ears, and the hair,
two-thirds of a fathom long, a shimmering silk of golden floss, flowed
from the scalp that covered what had once been the wit and will of her
that Bashti reasoned had in her ancient time been quick with love in the
arms of man.

Ordinary heads, of bushmen and salt-water men, and even of
schnapps-drinking white men like Borckman, he relegated to the canoe
houses and devil devil houses. For he was a connoisseur in the matter of
heads. There was a strange head of a German that lured him much. Red-
bearded it was, and red-haired, but even in dried death there was an
ironness of feature and a massive brow that hinted to him of mastery of
secrets beyond his ken. No more than did he know it once had been a
German, did he know it was a German professor's head, an astronomer's
head, a head that in its time had carried within its content profound
knowledge of the stars in the vasty heavens, of the way of star-directed
ships upon the sea, and of the way of the earth on its starry course
through space that was a myriad million times beyond the slight concept
of space that he possessed.

Last of all, sharpest of bite in his thought, was the head of Van Horn.
And it was the head of Van Horn that lay on his knees under his
contemplation when Jerry, who possessed the freedom of Somo, trotted into
Bashti's grass house, scented and identified the mortal remnant of
Skipper, wailed first in woe over it, then bristled into rage.

Bashti did not notice at first, for he was deep in interrogation of Van
Horn's head. Only short months before this head had been alive, he
pondered, quick with wit, attached to a two-legged body that stood erect
and that swaggered about, a loincloth and a belted automatic around its
middle, more powerful, therefrom, than Bashti, but with less wit, for had
not he, Bashti, with an ancient pistol, put darkness inside that skull
where wit resided, and removed that skull from the soddenly relaxed
framework of flesh and bone on which it had been supported to tread the
earth and the deck of the _Arangi_?

What had become of that wit? Had that wit been all of the arrogant,