"Is such the custom?" I asked, with indescribable dismay.
"Benin borders on the kingdom of Dahomey, and all the world knows how the people there celebrate the obsequies of their kings."
"How?"
"Frequently by the massacre of thousands."
"Hartly! Hartly—we seem to go from bad to worse!"
"I have been in the Pongo Isles, along the coast of Guinea, and in the Bight of Benin before, and know all about the fiendish ways of their inhabitants. Jack, did you observe a great hole in the courtyard without?"
"Yes; and I can hear the shovels of the workers among the earth even now."
"When a king dies here, his body is laid in a kind of great hall, which, like that at Dahomey, has a ceiling ornamented by the jawbones of his enemies. There the very sleeping chambers of royalty are paved with human skulls, and have cornices entirely composed of them! Zabadie, the King of Benin, is just dead, and his son proposes to inter him with unusual splendour."
"In that hole?"
"Yes."