Her they found; but nobody had seen her walking to death. Some people thought she had been taken by Ochori fishermen, others favoured a devil notorious for his amorous tricks. They brought the body back along the village street, and all the married women made skirts of green leaves and stamped the Death Dance, singing strangely.

Aliki, squatting before his fire, watched the procession with incurious eyes. He was sorry he had killed the Thing that was carried shoulder high, and, dropping his gaze to the dull fire, was even more sorry, for the hot lizard was leering up at him, his bulging eyelids winking at a great rate.

So he had taken the wrong sacrifice.

His eyes rose, rested on the slim figure of a woman, one hand gripping the door-post of her brother’s hut. And there came to Aliki a tremendous conviction.

The lizard had vanished from the heart of the fire when he looked down.

No time was to be lost; he rose and went towards the virgin of Chimbiri.

“I see you, Agasaka,” he said. “Now this is a terrible shame to come to your brother’s house, for men say that this woman Loka had a lover who killed her.”

She turned her big eyes slowly towards him. They were brown and filled with a marvellous luminosity that seemed to quiver as she looked.

“Loka died because she was a fool,” she said, “but he who killed her was a bigger. Her pain is past, his to come. Soon Sandi malaka will come, the brown butcher bird, and he will pick the eyes of the man who did this thing.”

Aliki hated her, but he was clever to nod his agreement.

“I am wise, Agasaka,” he said. “I see wonders which no man sees. Now before Sandi comes with his soldiers, I will show you a magic that will bring this wicked man to the door of your brother’s hut when the moon is so and the river is so.”

Her grave eyes were on his; the sound of the singing women was a drone of sound at the far end of the village. A dog barked wheezily in the dark of the hut and all faces were turned towards the river where the body was being laid in a canoe before it was ferried to the little middle island where the dead lie in their shallow graves.

“Let us go,” she said, and walked behind him through an uneven field of maize, gained the shelter of the wood behind the village, and by awkward paths reached the outliers of the forest, where there was no maize, for this place was too sad for the weaver birds and too near to the habitation of man for the little monkeys who have white beards. Still he walked on until they made a patch of yellow flowers growing in a clearing. Here the trees were very high, and ten men might have stood on one another’s heads against the smooth boles, and the topmost alone could have touched the lowermost branch.

He stopped and turned. At that second came an uneasy stirring of the tree-tops, a cold wind and the rumbling of thunder.

“Let us sit down,” he said. “First I will talk to you of women who loved me, and of how I would not walk before them because of my great thoughts for you. Then we will be lovers–“

“There is no magic in that, Aliki,” she said, and he saw that she was against him and lifted his spear.

“You die, as Loka died, because of the word which the lizard of fire brought to me,” he said, and his shoulder hunched back for the throw.

“I am Loka!” said the girl, and he looked and his jaw dropped. For she was truly Loka, the woman he had killed. Loka with her sly eyes and long fingers. And she had Loka’s way of putting a red flower behind her ear, and Loka’s long, satiny legs.

“Oh, ko!” he said in distress, and dropped his spear. Agasaka bent in the middle and picked it up, and in that moment became herself again. There was no flower and her fingers were shorter, and where the sly smile had been, was the gravity of death.

“This is my magic,” she said. “Now walk before me, Aliki, killer of Loka, for I am not made for love, but for strange power.”

Without a word the bemused man walked back the way he had come and Agasaka followed, and, following, felt the edge of the spear’s broad blade. Though she touched lightly, there was a line of blood on her thumb where blade and skin had met. The wood was growing dark, the wind was alternately a shriek and a whimper of sound. Near the pool at the edge of the forest she swung the spear backward over her left shoulder as a cavalry soldier would swing his sword, and he half turned at the sound of the whistle it made…

The first wife of her brother was by the pool gathering manioc root from a place where it had been left to soak–the head of Aliki fell at her feet as the first flash of lightning lit the gloom of the world.

The sun was four hours old when a river gunboat, a white and glittering thing, came round the bluff which is called The Fish because of its shape. The black waters of the river were piled up around its bows, a glassy hillock of water, tinged red at its edges, for the Zaire was driving against a six-knot current. Every river from the Isisi to the Mokalibi was in spate, and there were sand shoals where deeps had been, and deeps in the places where the crocodiles had slept open-mouthed the last time Mr. Commissioner Sanders had come that way.

He stood by the steersman, a slim and dapper figure in spotless white, his pith helmet at a rakish angle, for an elephant fly had bitten him on the forehead the night before, and the lump it had induced was painful to the touch. Between his regular, white teeth was a long, black cheroot.