“One is never safe from the god, lord, especially in his own House,” and he shook his silly head and went on, “How can we be safe when there is nowhere to go and even the trees are too big to climb?”
I looked at them, it was true. They were huge and ran up for fifty or sixty feet without a bough. Moreover, it was probable that the god climbed better than we could. The Kalubi began to move inland in an indeterminate fashion, and I asked him where he was going.
“To the burying-place,” he answered. “There are spears yonder with the bones.”
I pricked up my ears at this—for when one has nothing but some clasp knives, spears are not to be despised—and ordered him to lead on. In another minute we were walking uphill through the awful wood where the gloom at this hour of approaching night was that of an English fog.
Three or four hundred paces brought us to a kind of clearing, where I suppose some of the monster trees had fallen down in past years and never been allowed to grow up again. Here, placed upon the ground, were a number of boxes made of imperishable ironwood, and on the top of each box sat, or rather lay, a mouldering and broken skull.
“Kalubi-that-were!” murmured our guide in explanation. “Look, Komba has made my box ready,” and he pointed to a new case with the lid off.
“How thoughtful of him!” I said. “But show us the spears before it gets quite dark.” He went to one of the newer coffins and intimated that we should lift off the lid as he was afraid to do so.
I shoved it aside. There within lay the bones, each of them separate and wrapped up in something, except of course the skull. With these were some pots filled apparently with gold dust, and alongside of the pots two good spears that, being made of copper, had not rusted much. We went on to other coffins and extracted from them more of these weapons that were laid there for the dead man to use upon his journey through the Shades, until we had enough. The shafts of most of them were somewhat rotten from the damp, but luckily they were furnished with copper sockets from two and a half to three feet long, into which the wood of the shaft fitted, so that they were still serviceable.
“Poor things these to fight a devil with,” I said.
“Yes, Baas,” said Hans in a cheerful voice, “very poor. It is lucky that I have got a better.”