Achmed Abdullah

“ He had bowed and, with his silent warriors, had stepped back into the jungle that had closed behind them like a curtain.
Even in that moment of stark, enormous horror, horror too great to be grasped, horror that swept over and beyond the barriers of fear—even in that moment Stuart McGregor had realized that, by leaving the choice to them, the Bakoto had committed a refined cruelty worthy of a more civilized race, and had added a psychic torture fully as dreadful as the physical torture of the little knives. ”

“ THE fact that the man whom he feared had died ten years earlier did not in the least lessen Stuart McGregor’s obsession of horror, of a certain grim expectancy, every time he recalled that final scene, just before Farragut Hutchison disappeared in the African jungle that stood, spectrally motionless as if forged out of some blackish-green metal, in the haggard moonlight. ”

“ Why—they would have welcomed a decent, square, honest white murder; a knife flashing in some yellow-haired Norse sailor’s brawny fist; a belaying pin in the hand of some bullying Liverpool tramp-ship skipper; some Nome gambler’s six-gun splattering leaden death; some apache of the Rue de Venise garroting a passerby. But here, in the African jungle—and how Stuart McGregor remembered it—the fear of death had seemed pregnant with unmentionable horror. ”

“ Farragut Hutchison had looked up, a gleam of hope in his eyes.
“Yes. Choice which one of you will die.” The Bakoto had smiled, with the same suave courtliness which had, somehow, increased the utter horror of the scene. “Die—oh—a slow death, befitting the insult to the juju, befitting the juju’s great holiness!”
Suddenly, Stuart McGregor had understood that there would be no arguing, no bargaining whatsoever ”

“ There will be the flying insects which follow the smell of blood and festering flesh. Too, there will be many, crimson-headed ants, many, ants—and a thin river of honey to show them the trail.”
He had yawned. ”

“ It is said that there is a morbid curiosity which forces the murderer to view the place of his crime. Some psychic reason of the same kind may have caused Stuart McGregor to decorate the walls and corners of his sitting room with the memories of that Africa which he feared and hated, and which, daily, he was trying to forget–with a shimmering, cruel mass of jungle curios, sjamboks and. ”