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

OUR EASTERN EXODUS 339
along the road comes the well-known yell of advancing
soldiers : a yell this that stabs Swiva to the bone and
makes the shamming corpse lie as still as the real thing.
And now they pour into the bereaved (?) village, the
cannibal song drowning the mock death-wail — what
next? The dance begins outside the Chiefs house, a
dance jigged to a vampire song telling of the singer's
deadly intent. Be assured, my reader, that whenever
the double entente of that dark song reached poor
Swiva's ears, as he lay, tied up like a mummy in six mats,
he wished he were really dead, and not shamming it.
But Swiva is a man of sixty summers, and there lies the
wily old Chief motionless, still hoping against hope that the
wild protestations of his own people outside will restrain
the cannibals from making a sorry supper off his body.
Ah, now it is the song he so often laughed over begins
to be crooned over his own creeping flesh.
" We rescue thee," crooned the dirge, " corpse,
from the cold wet ground, and honour thee with mouth
interment."
What happens ? Poor old hypothetically dead Swiva
through a chink in his mummy-wrappings sees the gleam
of a knife, and nay, not one word more dare I add.
Sufficient if I hereby officially inform you that all the
smothered wrongs and amenities of a down-trodden Chief
were uttered in that one rending shriek of Swiva. In
scorn, he tore the trappings of the grave from him, and
in deadly fear the cannibals tore out of the Chiefs hut.
Needless to say, as from the dead, he did there and then