"No good--no good."
The place was built among trees, palms there were of many strange kinds,
and an undergrowth of broad-leaved plantains and gigantic feathery
ferns, but some of the trees were so weirdly fantastic in shape that in
his present depressed state of mind they pained Harry to look at.
The ground here was somewhat higher, but it certainly was no oasis in a
desert.
If Harry expected his spirits to rise on entering this village he was
soon undeceived. It was the abode _par excellence_ of gloom and misery.
The leaf-built huts were mere kennels, the people themselves were black,
naked, decrepit, and puny, and the very children were paunchy and
old-looking.
Not a sign of welcome did they make, not the slightest show of
resistance; they but gazed on the expedition as it passed along with the
lack-lustre eyes of chronic apathy.
It was evident that here was a tribe or people slowly but surely dying
off the face of the earth. Harry soon found that they were cannibals,
and that they actually ate their dead. They had no king, no law, no
order; they were socialists, nihilists, and soon, doubtless, to be
annihilated.
Harry sought out an open space under the shelter of a splendid spreading
tree.
This tree was really a thing of beauty. It was larger than any oak, and
its branches were literally bathed in the beauty of trailing flowers,
while colonies of bees and birds made sweet soft music in its foliage.
Harry thought if he was a bird, it would not be anywhere near this
village he would build his nest and make his home.
Presently a native or two came round and stood up to stare, and after a
time one with more alacrity than the rest brought some squash-apples and
a chattee of beautiful honey.
There was something human after all even in this degraded race. Harry
did not care to eat honey from the hands of a cannibal, so he gave it to
his people.
The intelligent native soon squatted down beside Raggy, and from his
rolling eyes and woebegone face it was evident he was telling the boy a
dismal story.
"What is it, Raggy?" said Harry.
"Ebery night, sah, it is de same," replied Raggy. "He come now foh
more'n tree week, and ebery night he take somebody."
"What are you driving at, boy?"
"De lion, sa! De lion what come here ebery night, gobble up some poor
soul, den smack his lips and go away back to de jungle."
Now though much against his inclination, Harry had not the heart to go
away and leave this wretched tribe to the mercy of a relentless
man-eater.
This lion was evidently some very old and wily king of the forest, too
old to stalk bigger game. In this village he had "struck oil," as the
Yankees say, and was making the very best of it.