sly with the appearance of
the guards--for such they were--there emerged from the fetish-house a
man who appeared to be incredibly old, for his hair and beard were as
white as snow, and his once stalwart form was now bowed and wizened with
the passage of, as it seemed to me, hundreds of years. Yet, although in
appearance a very Methuselah in age, this individual had a pair of
piercing black eyes that glowed and sparkled with all the fire and
passion of early manhood, and, bowed as he was, and decrepit as he
appeared to be, he tottered across the intervening space with
extraordinary agility, and seated himself in the second chair. Thus I
found myself in the presence of the two most powerful men in the
district, namely, King Banda and Mafuta, the chief witch-doctor.

The contrast between these two men was most remarkable, for whereas
Mafuta appeared to be the living embodiment of extreme age, King Banda
could scarcely have been forty; and while Mafuta was an image of
decrepitude, Banda, despite his excessive corpulence, appeared to be--
what in fact he was--a man of immense physical strength. Yet,
notwithstanding this marked dissimilarity in their appearance, there was
one point of strong resemblance between them: the expression of their
faces, and particularly of their eyes, was ineffably cruel.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN.

KING BANDA'S DAUGHTER.

For the space of nearly a minute there now prevailed an intense silence
while King Banda sat glowering at our party, and especially at me, in a
manner that caused cold chills to run down my back, as I reflected that
this was the man who was responsible for the gruesome fruit borne by the
tree, the branches of which overshadowed us, and that if he should by
any chance take the fancy into his head to further decorate that tree by
nailing a white man to it, there was nobody but myself within some
hundreds of miles who would dream of saying him nay; and I somehow had a
conviction that my disapproval of such a course would not very strongly
influence him.

At length, when the prolonged silence was beginning distinctly to get
upon our nerves, the king spoke to the headman of our party, addressing
to him a few curt words in a decidedly ungracious tone of voice;
whereupon the headman, taking the precaution first to conciliate his
Majesty by prostrating himself and rubbing his nose in the dust in token
of abject submission, rose to his feet and proceeded to spin a long
yarn, of whi