The time was up, and the soldiers knew. They ranged up, chattering and laughing, and all at once, as if produced from nowhere, two rhinoceros hide whips appeared in the hands of two of the tallest of the blacks. Rhinoceros hide is more than an inch thick; it is clear and almost translucent when properly prepared. In the form of a whip it is less an instrument of punishment than a weapon. These whips were not the smoothly prepared whips used for light punishment; they had angles that cut like sword edges. One wonders what those sentimental people would say—those sentimental people who cry out if a burly ruffian is ordered twenty strokes with the cat—could they see a hundred chicotte administered with a whip that is flexible as india-rubber, hard as steel.
Two soldiers at the yelping orders of Meeus cut the old woman apart from her fellows and flung her on the ground.
The two soldiers armed with whips came to her, and she did not speak a word, nor cry out, but lay grinning at the sun.
Papeete, seeing his old grandmother treated like this, dropped his tomato tin and screamed, till a soldier put a foot on his chest and held him down.
“Two hundred chicotte,” cried Meeus, and like the echo of his words came the first dull, coughing blow.
The villagers shrieked and cried altogether at each blow, but the victim, after the shriek which followed the first blow, was dumb.
Free as a top which is being whipped by a boy, she gyrated, making frantic efforts to escape, and like boys whipping a top, the two soldiers with their whips pursued her, blow following blow.
A semicircle of blood on the ground marked her gyrations. Once she almost gained her feet, but a blow in the face sent her down again. She put her hands to her poor face, and the rhinoceros whips caught her on the hands, breaking them. She flung herself on her back and they beat her on the stomach, cutting through the walls of the abdomen till the intestines protruded. She flung herself on her face and they cut into her back with the whips till her ribs were bare and the fat bulged through the long slashes in the skin.
Verily it was a beating to the bitter end, and Meeus, pale, dripping with sweat, his eyes dilated to a rim, ran about laughing, shouting—
“Two hundred chicotte. Two hundred chicotte.”