but King Banda, the
potentate whose will was law in this particular town, had carried his
cruelty to its utmost limit by adopting the time-honoured method of
nailing his victims to the tree with spike nails driven through the
hands and feet into the tough timber.

The enormous crowd who had followed us up from the beach were not
permitted to enter the palisaded enclosure, which was strictly taboo to
the common herd; our party therefore now consisted solely of those who
had brought me up the river, four individuals who had joined us outside
the gate--and whom I took to be officials of some sort--and my unworthy
self; and, for my own part, I would very willingly have waived the
distinction of forming one of the party. Marching up to what I
conjectured to be the king's house--from the fact that it was not only
by far the largest dwelling in the enclosure, but was also distinguished
by an exclusive embellishment in the form of a row of a dozen poles,
each surmounted by a human skull, planted upright in the ground before
it--we halted at a distance of some twenty paces from the entrance, with
our backs turned toward the crucifixion tree, the leafless branches of
which overshadowed us, and waited.

Ten minutes, twenty minutes, passed, and the sun was within a hand's-
breadth of the horizon when a man emerged from the "palace," bearing a
massive chair of ebony, quaintly-carved, and draped with a magnificent
leopard's skin, which he placed immediately before the open door, midway
between the house and ourselves, and departed. A moment later another
man appeared--this time from the fetish-house on the opposite side of
the square--also with a chair, decorated with most gruesome--looking
carvings, which he placed beside the first. Then a tall and enormously
stout man, clad in a leopard-skin _moucha_, and with a handsome leopard-
skin cloak on his shoulders, came forth from the palace, leaning upon
the shoulders of two other men, and advanced toward the chair which had
first been placed in position, into which he subsided heavily, casting a
strongly disapproving glance at the second chair as he did so. Then
there arose a sudden tramping of bare feet upon the dry earth, and from
somewhere in the rear of the palace there swung into view a hundred
picked warriors, armed like those who had mounted guard at the palisade
gate, who formed up behind and on each side of the chairs with very
commendable military precision. Simultaneou