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We see many of the chiefs and warriors going about with human jawbones hanging as ornaments round their necks, and we learn that they are those of enemies slain in war. Sick at heart I accompany my shipmates. "Friend Golding, what do you now say of these pleasant-mannered, happy islanders?" I ask. "I knock under," says he.
In passing one of their cottages we happened to see about a score of human jawbones suspended from the roof, and anxious to get possession of one or two, I offered the most valuable articles I had about me in exchange. The answer was, 'palami, they are sacred. We ascertained afterwards that these were the jawbones of their enemies, preserved as trophies of victory."
They deafened me with their yells.... I did not lose my head, but pretending to feel perfectly assured, I seated myself on a stone close at hand.... The gestures of the savages left no doubt of their intentions; with their knives they simulated the action of cutting my throat, with their teeth they seemed to rend my arms, and they moved up and down their jawbones as if my flesh were already in their mouths.... Rising, I went straight to the nearest man, and striking him familiarly on the shoulder, I said, with a smile, half in Malay and half in Battah, 'Come, come, you will never have the heart to kill and eat a woman, and an old woman like me, whose skin is harder than leather!" A roar of laughter greeted this courageous speech, and the speaker was immediately received into the friendship of her savage auditors, who overwhelmed her with marks of goodwill and admiration.
FRANCIS. All on a sudden a tremendous peal of thunder struck upon my slumbering ear; I started up staggering and trembling; and lo, it seemed as if the whole hemisphere had burst forth in one flaming sheet of fire, and mountains, and cities, and forests melted away like wax in the furnace; and then rose a howling whirlwind, which swept before it the earth, and the sea, and heaven; then came a sound, as from brazen trumpets, "Earth, give up thy dead: sea, give up thy dead!" and the open plains began to heave, and to cast up skulls, and ribs, and jawbones, and legs, which drew together into human bodies, and then came sweeping along in dense, interminable masses a living deluge.
Little Papeete had been decapitated just where his skull lay now; the shrieks and wails of the tortured tore the sky above Berselius; but Adams heard nothing and saw nothing but Berselius raving amidst the remains. Bones lay here and bones lay there, clean picked by the vultures and white bleached by the sun; skulls, jawbones, femurs, broken or whole.
He grew thinner and thinner; his legs were shrunken, his cheeks, once so puffed out by contented bourgeois prosperity, were covered with wrinkles, and the outlines of the jawbones were distinctly visible; there were deep furrows in his forehead. In the fourth year of his residence in the Rue Neuve-Sainte-Genevieve he was no longer like his former self.
There was also a young solicitor from Lurky done in the horsey style, and there was a very little nervous man with a high brow and a face contracting below as though the jawbones and teeth had been taken out and the features compressed.
He had grown in other ways as well, and could see far into the needs for the future. So to his arms he had added a spearhead with a point like a needle. And now he took from an almost forgotten hiding-place a toy of his younger days. You would hardly know the use at first glance. Just two jawbones of some large animal, white and polished. But look closer at them.
Decorators were sending out for more size when I left. I can't go back there. Even if there were no spring-cleaning I couldn't go to Jawbones. Mabel gave me a list of things to buy in Dilborough. Glass soap and soft paper. I mean soft soap and glass paper. Lots of other things. I've forgotten to get any of them. All I can do is to sit here until the world comes to an end.
It was on a Sabbath afternoon that a band of Choctaws having just played a game of racquette behind the city and a similar game being about to end between the white champions of two rival faubourgs, the beating of tom-toms, rattling of mules' jawbones and sounding of wooden horns drew the populace across the fields to a spot whose present name of Congo Square still preserves a reminder of its old barbaric pastimes.
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