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"But Scundoo hath," La-lah made answer. "And likewise Klok-No-Ton. This we know." "How dost thou know, son of a fool?" Sime thundered, the choleric blood darkening his thick bull neck. "By the word of their mouths even so." Sime snorted. "A shaman is only a man. May not his words be crooked, even as thine and mine? Bah! Bah! And once more, bah!
And among them all, conscious of his supremacy, moved the keen and imperious Willamette. They all gazed wonderingly at Cecil, "the white man," the "long beard," the "man that came from the Great Spirit," the "shaman of strong magic," for rumors of Cecil and his mission had spread from tribe to tribe. Though accustomed to savage sights, this seemed to Cecil the most savage of all.
It will, of course, be admitted at once that the ancestors of our profession, historically, the earliest physicians, were the priest, the Shaman, and the conjurer, who even to this day in certain tribes bear the suggestive name of "medicine men." Indeed, this grotesque individual was neither priest nor physician, but the common ancestor of both, and of the scientist as well.
He was smiling, his upper lip raised in a curve suggesting the victory purr of a snow tiger. And he saluted with one hand. "There are two who will not trap men again! We believe you now, andas, comrades of battle, when you say you can go up against their fort and make it as nothing!" Hulagur came up behind the shaman, a modern automatic in his hand.
Regardless of the danger, they clustered together on the brink, and gazed at the shattered, mangled, gory mass beneath, which was once the body of one of their companions. The words of the shaman fell upon Tyope like another blow from above. They cowed him. To avoid the gaze which the old man fastened upon him still, he turned to fly, no longer a warrior, no longer the commander.
There was a curse on these weapons, on every bit of knowledge gathered in that warehouse of the towers. As Menlik had already noted, that curse was power, the power to control Topaz, and then perhaps to reach back across the stars to Terra. When the shaman spoke again his words were a half whisper. "It will take a powerful curse to keep these out of the hands of men."
Supernatural influences he could and did feel; but the drum and wild shrieks of the shamán showed how utterly he failed to understand their nature and teachings. The natural disposition of the Wandering Koraks is thoroughly good. They treat their women and children with great kindness; and during all my intercourse with them, extending over two years, I never saw a woman or a child struck.
"Good-bye," I answered rather faintly, understanding what the Khania and the old Shaman had meant when they said that we should be killed before we ascended the first slope of the Mountain.
He could not understand the words, but from the monotonous shaking of a rattle and the steps that seemed to be moving in some dance round and round from one part of the room to the other, Smith was certain that it was a shaman beginning the chant for some sacred ceremony.
The science of medicine has been divorced from superstition, but its twin brother religion lies as firmly bogged in the mire of superstition today as it did in the days of the incantations of the first theologist, the "shaman."
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