Thinking black; 22 years without a break in the long grass of Central ...

OUR EASTERN EXODUS 333
their title, because they get all the crushing. Your big
Chief escapes in Africa, and so do the negro gentry, only
the scum of heathendom left to bear the pangs of imprison-
ment. Let them make a try for liberty and see what
befalls them. A band of these miserables rushed off one
day, hoping to break through to their old homes.
"Deserters," they were called, and followed up; but on
asking the local Chief which way they had passed, he
pointed eloquently to his mouth and smacked his lips
in a way that told the whole story. They had all been
eaten save one, and he an old boy of Hinde's.
More revokes man-eating. Kapidly incriminating
evidence is very soon forthcoming on this marrow-freezing
theme. Here, at my feet, is a young lad, Lumba, his
story at sunset appropriately set off against a blood-red
sky. Parting carefully his clotted hair, he discloses an
ugly hole in his skull, the dig this from a cannibal axe.
As serious as mathematics he makes a careful count of
the living and the dead, and quite eighty of his friends
were cooked and eaten before his eyes—licked clean up,
bones and gravy. Very young as he was, these blatant
cannibals offered him his life on condition that he would
eat his own brother, and twice the laddie shut his little
jaws like a rat-trap and snapped refusal. This vile perse-
cution ran on into two days, and ,
if
Monday saw him
treated to whips, Tuesday was certainly reserved for their
scorpions. Finally, making a wild dash for freedom,
clean over the pot of his boiling brother, he sprang into
the bush, the cannibal guard sending an axe whizzing