The cleared spot selected by Mother Sybella as the scene of her mystic
ceremonies and the gathering place of the worshipers of Voo Doo,
though scarcely beyond the outskirts of the city, was so screened by
the umbrageous growth of tropical forest, interlaced with vanilla and
grape-vines that festoon every woodland of Haiti, that its presence was
not even suspected save by the initiated.
On the night that Dictator Dupree entertained, among other guests the
wealthy Haitian, Walter Burton, partner in the great American house of
“J. Dunlap,” and husband of the heiress to the millions accumulated by
the long line of “J. Dunlaps” which had controlled the Haitian trade with
the United States, a strange and uncanny drama was enacted almost within
sound of the music that enlivened the Dictator’s banquet.
Through trees entwined by gigantic vines, resembling monstrous writhing
serpents, glided silently many dark forms carrying blazing torches of
resinous wood to guide the flitting figures through the intricacies of
the hardly definable pathways that ran in serpentine indistinctness
toward the clear spot, where Mother Sybella had set up the altar of
Tu Konk, and was calling her children to worship by the booming of an
immense red drum upon which she beat at short intervals.
In the center of the clearing, coiled upon the stump of a large tree,
was a huge black snake, that occasionally reared its head and, waving it
from side to side, emitted a fearful hissing sound as it shot forth its
scarlet, flame-like tongue.
Torches and bonfires illuminated the spot and cast gleams of light upon
the dark faces and distended, white and rolling eyes of the men and women
who, squatting in a circle back in the shade of the underbrush, chanted a
monotonous dirge-like invocation to the Voo Doo divinity called by them
Tu Konk, and supposed to dwell in the loathsome body of the serpent on
the stump.
By almost imperceptible degrees the blows upon the drum increased in
frequency; old Sybella seemed some tireless fiend incarnate as gradually
she animated the multitude and quickened the growing excitement of her
emotional listeners by the ceaseless booming of her improved tom-tom.
Soon the forest began to resound with hollow bellowing of conch shells
carried by many of the squatters about the circle. The chant became
quicker. Shouting took the place of the droning monotonous incantations
to Tu Konk.
Higher and higher grew the gale of excitement. The shouting grew in
volume and intensity. Wild whoops mingled with the more sonorous shouts
that made the forest reverberate.
Suddenly the half-clad figure of a man sprang into the circle of light
that girded the stump whereon the now irritated snake was hissing
continuously. The man was bare to the waist and without covering on his
legs and feet below the knees; his eyes glared about him, the revolving
white balls in their ebony colored setting was something terrifying to
behold. The man uttered whoop after whoop and began shuffling sideways
around the stump, every moment adding to the rapidity and violence of his
motions until shortly he was madly bounding into the air and with savage
shouts tearing at the wool on his head, while white foam flecked his bare
black breast.
The man’s madness became contagious. Figure after figure sprang within
the lighted space about the serpent. Men, women, and even children all
more or less nude, the few garments worn presenting a heterogeneal
kaleidoscope of vivid, garish colors as the frenzied dancers whirled
about in the irregular light of the torches and bonfires.
Soon spouting streams of red stained the glistening black bodies, and
joined the tide of white foam pouring from the protruding, gaping,
blubber lips of the howling, frantic worshipers.
The fanatic followers of Voo Dooism were wounding themselves in the
delirium of irresponsible emotion. Blood gushed from long gashes made by
sharp knives on cheeks, breasts, backs and limbs. The gyrations of the
gory, crazed and howling mass were hideous to behold.
When the tempest of curbless frenzy seemed to have reached a point
beyond which increase appeared impossible, old Sybella rushed forward,
like the wraith of the ancient witch of Endor, dashing the dancers aside,
springing to the stump she seized the snake and winding its shining coils
about her she waved aloft the long, glittering blade of the knife that
she held in hand, and shrieked out, in the voice of an infuriated fiend,
“Bring forth the hornless goat. Let Tu Konk taste the blood of the
hornless one!”
A crowd of perfectly naked and bleeding men darted forward bearing in
their midst an entirely nude girl, who in a perfect paroxysm of terror
fought, writhed and struggled fearfully, yelling wildly all the time, in
the grip of her merciless and insensate captors.
The men stretched the screaming wretch across the stump on which the
snake had rested, pressed back the agonized girl’s head until her slender
neck was drawn taut. Quick as the serpent’s darting tongue, Sybella’s
bright, sharp blade descended, severing at one stroke the head almost
from the quivering body.
A fiercer, wilder cry arose from the insane devotees as a great tub
nearly full of fiery native rum was placed to catch the gushing stream
that flowed in a crimson torrent from the still twitching body of the
sacrifice to Voo Doo.
Sybella stirred the horrible mixture of blood and rum with a ladle, made
of an infant’s skull affixed to a shin-bone of an adult human being, and
having replaced the snake upon his throne, on the stump, in an abject
posture presented to the serpent the ladle filled with the nauseating
stuff. The re-incarnate Tu Konk thrust his head repeatedly into the
skull-bowl and scattered drops of the scarlet liquid over his black and
shining coils.
Then Sybella using the skull-ladle began filling enormous dippers made
of gourds, that the eager, maddened crowd about the Voo Doo altar held
expectantly forth, craving a portion in the libation to Tu Konk.
The maniacal host gorged themselves with the loathsome fluid, gulped down
in frenzied haste, great draughts of that devilish brew, from the large
calabashes that Sybella filled.
Now hell itself broke forth. No longer were the worshipers men and
women. The lid was lifted from hell’s deepest, most fiendish caldron. A
crew of damned demons was spewed out upon earth. With demoniac screams
that rent the calmness of the night, they beat and gashed themselves,
their slabbering, thick lips slapping together as they gibbered, like
insane monkeys, sending flying showers of foam over their bare and
bleeding bodies. Human imps of hell’s creation fell senseless to the
ground or writhing in hideous, inhuman convulsions twined their distorted
limbs about the furious dancers who stamped upon their hellish faces and
brought the dancers shrieking to the earth.
In the midst of this pandemonium, redolent with the odor of inferno,
a dark figure, that, crouched in the deep shade of the clustering
palm plants, and covered with a dark mantle, had remained unnoticed a
spectator of the scene, sprang up, hurled to one side the concealing
cloak and bounded toward the stump whereon the serpent hissed defiance at
his adorers.
With an unearthly yell, half-groan, half-moan, but all insane, frantic
and wild, the neophyte leaped about in erratic gyrations of adoration
before the snake, that embodiment of Tu Konk, the Voo Doo divinity.
As whirling and, in an ecstacy of emotion, waving aloft his hands the
howling dancer turned and the light of the bonfire fell upon his face,
the brutalized features of Walter Burton were revealed.
Those refined, aesthetic features that had made the man “the observed of
all observers” at Miss Stanhope’s musicale in Boston, had scarcely been
recognized as the same in the strangely flattened nose, the thickened
lips, the popped and rolling eyes of the man who, in the forest glade of
Haiti danced before the Voo Doo god Tu Konk the serpent.
Burton’s evening dress was torn and disarranged, his hair disheveled, his
immaculate linen spotted with blood, his shoes broken and muddy, his face
contorted and agonized, as twisting and squirming in every limb he sprang
and leaped in a fiercely violent dance before the snake. Yells of long
pent-up savage fury rang through the dank night air, as Burton threw back
his head and whooped in barbarous license.
Sybella’s flashing eyes gleamed with joy as she gazed at this reclaimed
scion of the negro race. She stole toward the flying figure that spun
around, transported to the acme of insane emotion, singing in triumphant
screeches as she crept forward,
“Tu Konk, the Great one
Tu Konk, I thank thee
Back comes black blood
No longer childless
Tu Konk, I praise thee.”
* * * * *
Mr. Dunlap was aroused at daylight by a messenger wearing the naval
uniform of the United States, who waited below with an important
communication from Lieutenant Maxon.
Two hours before Mr. Dunlap heard the rap on his bedroom door, a pale
and trembling figure, clothed in a dilapidated evening suit, had slunk
stealthily past his chamber and entered the apartments occupied by the
husband of the Dunlap heiress.
“Dear Mr. Dunlap.—I am instructed by Admiral Snave to inform
you that an uprising of the blacks is imminent; that it will
be impossible to protect you in your exposed position should
such an event take place. The admiral suggests that you remove
your family at once to the American Consulate, where protection
will be furnished all Americans. Very respectfully,
Thomas Maxon, Lieut. U.S.N.”
“P.S.—Please adopt the Admiral’s suggestion. I think you had
better let Jack know about this.