'I felt him jump to his feet, but I clutched at him, and pulled him back.
'"Keep still, man!" I whispered. "Let us see what the old hag is doing. It is not the brat's mother, is it?"
'"No," whispered Juggins, "this is an older woman. What a ghoul it is!"
'Then we were silent again. Where we squatted we were hidden from the hag by a few tufts of rank lâlang grass, and the shadow from the jungle also covered us. Even if we had been in the open, I doubt whether that old woman would have seen us, she was so eagerly intent upon her work. For five minutes or more—I know it seemed an age to me at the time—we sat there watching her scrape, and tear, and scratch at the earth of the grave, and all the while her lips kept going like a shivering man's teeth, though no sound, that I could hear, came from them. At length she got down to the corpse, and I saw her draw the bark wrapper out of the grave, and take the baby's body out of it. Then she sat back on her heels, and threw her head up, just like a dog, and bayed at the moon. She did it three times, and I do not know what there was in the sound that jangled up one's nerves, but each time I heard it my hair fairly lifted. Then she laid the little body down in a position that seemed to have something to do with the points of the compass, for she took a long time arranging it before she was satisfied with the direction of its head and feet.
'Then she got up and began to dance round and round the grave. It was not a pretty sight, out there in the semi-darkness, and miles away from every one and everything, to watch this abominable old hag capering uncleanly, while those restless, noiseless lips of hers called upon all the devils in Hell, in words that we could not hear. Juggins pushed harder against me than ever, and his hand on my arm gripped tighter and tighter. I looked at his face, and saw that it was as white as chalk, and I daresay mine was not much better. It does not sound much, as I tell it to you here, in a civilised house, but at the time the sight of that weird figure dancing in the moonlight, with its ungainly shadow, fairly scared me.
'She danced silently like that for some minutes; setting to the dead baby, and to her own uncouth capering shadow, till the sight made me feel sick. If anybody had told me that morning, that I should ever be badly frightened by an old woman, I should have laughed; but I saw nothing to laugh at in the idea, while that grotesque dancing lasted.
'When it was over she squatted down again with her back towards us, and took up the baby. She nursed it as a mother might nurse her child. I could see the curve of the thing's head beyond her thin left arm, and its little legs dangled loosely near her right elbow. Then she began to croon to it, swinging it gently from side to side. She rocked it slowly at first, but gradually the pace quickened, until she was swaying her body to and fro, and from side to side, at such a pace, that to me she looked as though she was falling all ways at once. And all the time that queer crooning kept getting faster and faster, and more awful to listen to. Then suddenly she changed the motion. She seized the thing she was nursing by its arms, and began dancing it up and down, still moving at a fearful pace, and crooning worse than ever. I could see the little puckered face of the thing above her head, every time she danced it up, and then, as she danced it down again, I lost sight of it for a second, until it reappeared once more. I kept my eye fixed on the thing's face every time it came up, and—do not believe me if you had rather not—it began to be alive. Its eyes seemed to me to be open, and its mouth was working like a little child's when it tries to laugh and is too young to do it properly. Juggins saw it too, for I could hear him drawing his breath harder, and shorter than a healthy man should. Then, all in a moment, she did something. It looked to me as though she bent forward and kissed it, and at that very instant a cry went up like the wail of a lost soul. It may have been something in the jungle, but I know my jungles pretty thoroughly, and I swear to you that I have never heard any cry like it before or since. Then, before we knew what she was doing, that old hag threw the body back into the grave, and began dumping down the earth, and jumping on it, while the cry grew fainter and fainter. It all happened so quickly, that I had not time to think of doing anything, till I was startled back into action by the sharp crack of Juggin's pistol in my ear as he fired at the hag.
'"She's burying it alive!" cried Juggins, which was a queer thing for a man to say, who had seen the baby lying stark and dead more than thirty hours earlier, but the same thought was in my mind too, and we started forward at a run. The hag had vanished into the jungle like a shadow. Juggins had missed her, he was always a shocking bad shot, but we did not trouble about her. We just threw ourselves upon the grave, and dug at it with our hands until the baby lay in my arms. It was cold and stiff, and putrefaction had already begun its work. I forced open its mouth, and saw something that I expected. The tip of its tongue was missing. It had been bitten off by a set of very bad teeth, for the edge of it was like a saw.
'"The thing is quite dead," I said to Juggins.
'"But it cried! it cried!" sobbed Juggins, "I can hear it now. Oh to think that we let that hag kill it."