As an accessory to the alarm our situation excited within us, close by where his Majesty sat was a negro, on whom a sentence of his had just been executed.
This miserable wretch had been tied to a stake, disembowelled alive, and had his body thereafter filled with hot salt. Despite the terrors of our own situation, his dying agonies suggested terrible thoughts of what our own fate might be. At last his contortions and quiverings ceased for ever, and then, on the hoarse beating of an old Arab drum, the pelting was stopped, the King of the Snakes laid aside his pipe, and while all his sable subjects, save those who guarded us, prostrated themselves on the turf, he commenced to address us; and Baylis, who knew something of his jargon, replied, and translated the conversation to us.
The Captain earnestly deprecated our treatment, as we had come among them with the peaceful intention of trading. He pled especially on behalf of his wife, and offered a great store of bottled rum, old firelocks, pots, kettles, brass buttons, and iron nails, as ransom for us all.
At these offers his sable Majesty, the Solon of the Snake River, before whom had been laid the entire contents of the gig, with the bloody garments of the poor fellows slain in her, only grinned from time to time, and then uttered a diabolical laugh, which boded us no good.
This savage chief presented a dreadful aspect. Black as ebony, tall, strong, and muscular in form, he had a horizontal slit in his nether lip (a custom of his people) through which he could loll his tongue at pleasure. This unusual aperture was so large as to give him the appearance of having two mouths; thus, when he grinned, the white teeth appeared at the upper, and the red cruel tongue through the lower. He wore long splints of wood through the lobes of his ears; one eye had a fiery red circle painted round it, the other a yellow. He wore the skin of an ape in front like an apron; and this, with a pair of sandals, formed of elephant hide, completed his attire. His weapons were a long asseguy of tough teak wood, having a point of iron; and a short sword of iron, curiously fashioned, with a great leathern tassel at the end of the sheath, hung on his left side.
Behind him a savage held the bridle of his dromedary, which was covered by a multiplicity of barbaric trappings.
"It is the law of Empungua," said the King, "that he who slays a man shall have a public trial in face of the tribe; and if he cannot justify the act, he and all his adherents are doomed to die."
"Then," replied Baylis, "I demand justice on those who slew two of my men, and plundered our boat."
"But how know we not that one or both killed the fetisher, who was at worship in the Wood of the Devil?" demanded the King, with a dreadful expression in his yellow eyeballs.
"Ya—ya—ya—yah!" chorused the tribe.