There was no doubt at all that this new god was an extremely powerful one. Three hours from the city the Zaire came up to a long canoe with four men standing at their paddles singing dolefully. Sanders remembered that he had passed a village where women, their bodies decked with green leaves, wailed by the river's edge.
He slowed down till he came abreast of the canoe, and saw a dead man lying stark in the bottom.
"Where go you with this body?" he asked.
"To Isisi, lord," was the answer.
"The middle river and the little islands are places for the dead," said Sanders brusquely. "It is folly to take the dead to the living."
"Lord," said the man who spoke, "at Isisi lives a god who breathes life; this man"—he pointed downwards—"is my brother, and he died very suddenly because of a leopard. So quickly he died that he could not tell us where he had hidden his rods and his salt. Therefore we take him to Isisi, that the new god may give him just enough life to make his relations comfortable."
"The middle river," said Sanders quietly, and pointed to such a lone island, all green with tangled vegetation, as might make a burying ground. "What is your name?"
"Master, my name is N'Kema," said the man sullenly.
"Go, then, N'Kema," he said, and kept the steamer slow ahead whilst he watched the canoe turn its blunt nose to the island and disembark its cargo.