CHAPTER XLVII.
THE WOOD OF THE DEVIL.
Making signs that I was a friend, or wished to be considered one, by casting away my asseguy, and placing my hands upon my head and breast, I advanced with a resolute aspect, but with a quaking heart, towards them.
By what I heard then, and learned afterwards, I had violated the sanctity of a holy place—the abode of a fetish—as this wood had for ages been dedicated to the Devil, whom these savages, like those of Benin, worship as a dreadful spirit, not to love, but to conciliate.
No one entered this wood, which was composed of giant chestnuts, palm, orange, and lime trees, all growing wild for many leagues, as the spirit of evil was alleged to harbour in its inmost recesses.
Here then, on its skirts, a mother and her infant were sometimes sacrificed with tortures too terrible for description, to propitiate this dark spirit; though in some rare instances a husband might ransom his doomed wife with a poor female slave, captured from a hostile tribe.
So sacred is this wood deemed, that if a person accidentally enters it by one path, he must force his way through it to the very end without turning or looking back—a feat none ever performed, as it teems with wild beasts, whose fangs and claws speedily dispose of the intruder. Even a foreign negro, or his wives, dare not enter it; then, what punishment was due to me, a white man, for having ventured to do so?
Dapper, a very old traveller, and a bold fellow, too, mentions that, to ridicule the faith of the people in this forest, he went shooting into it, and deliberately turned back when about half way through.
"What will the Devil think of this?" he asked the negro priests, who were scared by his audacity, and confounded by his return in safety.
"He does not trouble himself about white men," was their response; and, singular to say, our traveller was permitted to go unscathed, for savages generally admire courage and temerity.
However, the negroes into whose hands I had unfortunately fallen seemed of a different opinion from Mr. Dapper's friends; and after a noisy palaver, to which I listened with an agonizing interest, my life being in the balance, they laid violent hands upon me.