"Time will show—we were nearly as desperately circumstanced when foul of the iceberg, or beset in the field ice."
"We have still a few days for deliberation; but meantime, tell me how you came here."
"I was brought to Benin by Amoo, who saved me from dying of hunger, or by the teeth and claws of wild animals in the Devil's wood, where some savages found me concealed, and bound me hand and foot by withes to a tree."
"Tell me all about this, Jack."
I related briefly all that had occurred to me since we had been separated at the cliff above the Gabon, where three of our hapless party perished; the destruction of poor Captain Baylis and his wife; and how I feared that he, Hartly, was the seaman who had been tortured in the basket of thorns; of my slavery with Amoo, and his squaw's felonious intentions with regard to my head; of my flight and recapture—to all of which he listened with varying expressions of anger and honest grief, for the loss of so many brave English seamen.
"And now, Bob," added I, "for your own story."
"I have little to relate that is not similar to what you have told me. On that fatal day when our boat's crew were captured, and we were separated, I was given by the King to a fetisher, or priest, a hideous old fellow who was covered with tattooing, and wore a copper ring in each of his ears, and had the dorsal fin of a shark through his nose, in sprit-sail-yard fashion.
"He employed me as his 'slavey,' in making and pointing arrows for the warriors, as the manufacture of that commodity is a perquisite, or portion of the priestly trade in Gabon, for the tips of the arrows are poisoned by a combination of herbs, of which these fetishers alone possess, or pretend to possess, the knowledge, and with true priestcraft take especial good care to keep the secret among themselves. If the monstrous negro race hereabout have any religion, it consists of an adoration of the Devil, to whom they never tire of sacrificing wild animals, and occasionally each other—which is a sacrifice of much less consequence."
"Have they no belief in a Supreme Being?"
"They know that some power superior to themselves created the skies and the earth; but because He is not an evil, but a good spirit, they deem it better policy to appease the Devil, and so they work in his service with all their might; and from all we have seen, they seem to have the gift of doing so to the utmost. My old master, the fetisher, professed to be on very intimate terms with Whirlwind Tom, and by his aid could always foretell what was to happen."