"Oh, I suppose, having set their piquets for the night, we are safe." And I took the glass from my eye, and banged the joints of it one into another, when De Walden spoke.
"Please look again, sir—please look again." I did so. The gibbet sort of erection that I had been inspecting, was now lit up by a sudden glare of bright crimson flame. The dark figures, and the bows and sides of the attendant canoes, and the beams of the gallows-looking machine itself, were all tinged with a blood-red light, and presently the sound of the Eboe drums and flutes was borne down on the night-wind with startling distinctness, and louder than before, drowning the snoring of the toads, and chir-chir-chirring, and wheetle-wheetling of the numberless noisy insects that floated off from the bank on either side of us.
"What is that—do you see that, Master de Walden?" said I, as a dark struggling figure seemed to be transferred by force from one of the canoes that showed a light into a smaller one. De Walden could not tell—and the small skiff into which, whatever it was, it had been transhipped, gradually slid away, apparently in the direction of the raft, into the impervious darkness that brooded over the river, above the three advanced canoes with the watch-fires.
I was about resigning the glass once more, when I noticed the raft again suddenly illuminated, and a great bustle among the people on board. Presently a naked human being was dragged under the gallows, and one arm immediately hoisted up, and fastened by cords to one of the angles—a black figure, who had perched himself astride on the cross beam, evincing great activity on the occasion.
For some purpose that I could not divine, the fire was now carried by a group of savages from the foremost part of the raft, that is, from the end of it next us, to the opposite extremity beyond the gibbet, the immediate effect of which was to throw off the latter, and the figure suspended on it, as well as the persons of the people who crowded round, in high relief against the illuminated night damps lit up by the fire, that hung as a bright curtain or background beyond it. In a few seconds, the other arm was drawn up to the opposite corner: and—my blood curdles as I write it—we could now make out that a fellow-creature was suspended by the wrists from the corners of the gibbet, directly under the centre of the beam, as if the sufferer had been stretched on the cross.
The fire increased in intenseness—the noise of the long drums, and the yells of the negroes, came down stronger and stronger; and although I could notice two assistants holding the legs of the suspended figure, yet its struggles seemed to be superhuman, and once or twice I said to young De Walden, "Heaven help me—did you hear nothing?"
"Nothing particular, sir, beyond the infernal howling and drum-beating of these monsters."
A pause—then another terrible convulsion of the suspended victim, as it struggled to and fro with the dark figures that clung to its lower limbs like demons.
"There—heard you nothing now?"
"Yes, sir—oh, yes," gasped my young ally—"such a yell!"