While I talked, I could hear the dance getting ready in the village: feet were stamping; drums were throbbing with the intoxicating triple beat that all Papuan travelers know; loud, brassy voices were rising and falling in a monotonous chorus. I was glad to hear them, for I know the difference between songs of peace and songs of war, and this was not one of the latter.
Still—many years in New Guinea have given me an instinct for danger that has nothing at all to do with sight or hearing; and it was stirring, ever so slightly, now. I watched the sorcerer’s face as I talked.
It was still a blank; you could no more have read it than you could read a stone wall. Mo replied to my address that he had been making magic all day and was tired. Another day, he said, he would show us some. Tonight we could give him that tobacco and salt he saw, and he would think and prepare himself. Magic, he explained, took much preparation.
I did not care for the whole thing—a nigger is a nigger to me, and I can’t stand seeing them put on airs. Besides, I do not believe in their nonsense. But the Marquis did, and he was very anxious to see something; so I swallowed my own feelings and told Mo we should be glad to see his performance tomorrow, if that would suit him, and in the meantime he might have the tobacco—not the salt: that would come when he had done something to earn it. Salt is precious in the interior of New Guinea, and I was not minded to throw any of it away.
The Marquis was almost ready to cry—he had been looking forward to an immediate satisfaction of his curiosity, and he was like a child when disappointed.
“Ask him something,” he demanded. “Ask him at least what it is that he has in his bamboo, and why he carries a human hand round his neck, and what is in that string bag of his. Not to hear anything tonight, my Flint, that would indeed be the long lane that breaks the camel’s back. I’m not made of patience!”
“That’s right; you’re not,” said I. “Well, Koppi Koko, ask him.”
But here our interpreter went on strike. He was “too much fright,” he declared. He would not ask Mo what was in the bamboo, or about the hand, or anything else. It struck me that he already knew, since he came from the coast, only a few days away. But if he did, he would not tell.
“You need not worry,” I said to the Marquis. “I know all that’s in his old bag without looking. I’ve seen other sorcerers’ bags. There’ll be a lot of trash like lizards’ tails and bats’ wings, and frogs’ feet, and there’ll be queer-shaped stones he has picked up, and bits of carved wood, and dried leaves and plants, and there’s sure to be some quartz crystals—that’s great magic, with them—and there’ll very likely be a dagger made of human bone, and a native fork or two, and a betel-chewing outfit—poker-worked gourd, with a boar-tooth stopper, nuts, nice little spatula with carved head. That’s about all.”
“There could be nothing of more interest in the world,” declared the Marquis. “Ethnologically, you can see, without doubt, the connection between the Witches of Macbeth——”