Beatrice Grimshaw

“ It grew darker in the chief-house, there where we sat on the bamboo sleeping-shelf, listening to the unvarying roar of the rain and watching the excited waving of the head-plumes in the corner where the cannibals held their conference—the plumes were all we could see now, for a naked Papuan becomes rapidly and completely invisible once it begins to grow dark.
The Marquis was very much quieter than usual, but I do not think he was at all afraid. I think he reckoned on having a fight by and by, and liked the idea. As for myself, well, a man with any sense isn't afraid in a tight place ”

“ The cannibals gave us a liberal share and offered us a bamboo full of water to drink out of. They tore and gnawed their food in a way that was not pleasant to watch—remembering those long ovens on the hill.
“Sacred name of a camel, what a lecture I will give!” sighed the Marquis, with his mouth full of sweet potato. “Look at their chests all blowed out with the climbing, and their feet that have monkey toes, and the cords on the insteps, and the nostril of the pig that they have! See how they jump, they flitter, they are all the time nervous and distracted! ”

“ And the diamond was still ours,
“Heaven tempers the wind to the lame dog: we are well out,” said the Marquis, looking up at the top of the ridge, as we paused in the river-bed below. The sorcerer, far away against the skyline, was faintly visible, feeling his jaw.
“I wager, on sunrise to-morrow morning, there shall be some sore teeth in the chief-house!” said the Marquis with a chuckle. ”

“ The Marquis got his man clean through the temple, and dropped him as neatly as one could wish. Mine was hit in the ribs; he fell over the precipice, and his cry as he went down grew thin, like the whistle of a train running away in the distance, until we ceased to hear it. We had not much leisure for listening, in any case. The Koiroros had bolted at the first shot, as natives usually do; but they were busy throwing spears from cover now, and the Marquis and I had to use more ammunition than we liked, firing at random into the green, before we succeeded in stopping them. ”

“ Without, precipices, tree-tops, clouds, and plunging steps, all drenched in roaring rain; within, a gloomy, damp-smelling house of rotten thatch; white skulls gleaming through the dusk from the place where they hung aswing upon the rafters; shadowy men-things, more than half brute, glowering at us from their corner. And out upon the hill-side, just a few yards away, the long stone ovens waiting. ”

“ I trusted a good deal to our revolvers: firearms will go far among men who have never seen them; but the mountain tribes are good fighters, for Papuans, and I did not anticipate that it would be easy to get away, if we had occasion to try.
They led us into the largest house of the village, a ramshackle shanty of a place, with spears and shields hung up on the walls and bamboo shelves to sleep on. ”

“ This is a devil of a country, where one may see twenty men encounter death out there at one's eyes and sit and look as calm as this! My Flint, if I am mad, then you are it also, because you have no emotion no more than me.”
“We're neither of us mad, or bad either,” I said. “We'll be sorry enough when we've had time to realize that poor old Tommy Gregg is gone, and Jensen and the rest; but we're shipwrecked ourselves, and in a bit of a fix, Marky, and that's going to take all our thinking for some time.”
“Where are we?” asked the Marquis, looking round. ”

“ They were armed, besides the spears, with stone-headed clubs and long daggers made of human thigh-bone. It seemed plain that they had had no dealings with civilized men; and this was so much the worse for us.
The chief seemed pleased with the gifts, and said something to the man who could speak Mambare. It appeared that he wanted us to come to his village, which was only a little way off. He said that he would give us guides; but I noticed that he looked at the ground as he spoke and did not face us.
“We had better go,” I told the Marquis. ”

“ The Marquis, of course, did not quite understand how bad a fix we were in. I did, and I had no time to spare for anything but consideration of our case.
Kara Bay is a hundred miles or more from anywhere along the coast. The sea-line is precipitous thereabout; there is no easy beach to follow, as in the western country. A boat is your only chance. But when you have no boat?
The Kara River runs into the sea close at hand. It comes from the Kiloki Range, a rampart of rock and forest eleven thou sand feet high. It is a succession of rapids and falls. ”

“ Of course the greater number of Papuan inland tribes are cannibals now and then; I was accustomed to that sort of thing, and had even seen human joints made ready for cooking—not, of course, the killing of the game, which I shouldn't have allowed for a moment. But cannibalism, among most of the tribes, is not at all an every-day affair; it is the sequel of a big, victorious raid, or the end of some unusually bitter private quarrel.
There are tribes, however, who eat man whenever and wherever they get the chance ”

“ I moved over as I spoke, and the Marquis followed me.
We ate as men eat who do not know where their next meal is to come from; we filled our pockets quietly, when we could swallow no more. The Koiroros were so busy chattering among themselves that they did not notice what we were doing. ”

“ They seemed dissatisfied, but they came out of the brush into the clearing, and we were able to see them.
“Marky,” I said, “we've got to keep our eyes skinned; these seem to be Koiroros, and they're among the worst cannibals in New Guinea. Probably they've never seen white men before, up here: it's all unexplored country.”
“Do you suppose we shall be eat?” asked the Marquis.
“Not necessarily. Cannibals aren't always eating other people. We may be able to make friends, and get them to guide us.” ”

“ I do not love them,” he commented. “See, then, how they are every one bended back from the waist like a man who has a tetanus fit, because of the climbing they always do. When we go away from here—” He looked about again. “If we go away from here,” he amended coolly, “you shall see that I will give a lecture to the scientifics in Paris, a most blooming learned lecture.”
“I hope you will, Marky,” I said.
We were sitting on the bamboo bed-place now, smoking a little of our cherished tobacco, and wondering when, or if, the Koiroros would give us something to eat. ”

“ Still—considering the speed the Koiroros could keep up in this mountain country when they chose—it certainly did look as if they were not pursuing us. The Marquis was jubilant.
“They are not spiritual, those people,” he declared, scrambling like a cockroach in my rear. “By gum, I think their mentality is far back in the scale of evolution: they are blessed idiots. They lock the stable-door when the milk is spilt ”