acred enclosure, lived his wives who, although forbidden to
their husband, were permitted a royal promiscuity. Just within the
precincts was a small replica of the temple where dwelt a young chief,
also bound to celibacy, whose duties were to keep the royal fire burning
as long as the king should reign. No one was allowed to converse with the
king, save on matters of state, except this man; through him was spoken
the royal will--what there was left of it--to the council which sat in a
long rectangular building opposite to the temple entrance and open to the
village, a body of witch-doctors and chiefs.

Solely the kingly office existed as a beneficent agent, a matter of
self-preservation on the part of the tribe. The King-God's functions were
divine; to make magic for the victory of his warriors and principally to
make rain, on which, of course, the alimentary needs of his subjects
depended--an incarnation of a god who was in reality the scapegoat of the
god's omissions.

The office was hereditary. Perhaps no one else would willingly accept such
an onerous post. The making of magic was performed before the god with the
assistance of the chief witch-doctor, an exceedingly lucrative post won
upon merit, occupied by one Bakahenzie, a tall muscular man in the prime
of life, whose bearing was that of the native autocrat, fierce and
remorseless. The King's personal wishes could be safely granted as long as
he did not endanger the existence of the people by a desire to break any
of the meshes of the tabus designed to ensure the safety of his sacred
body, and therefore that of the tribe, on the assumption that if the
incarnation were injured the god would be injured, and so would his
creations be affected: any infringement of these laws entailed the penalty
of death, a code which revealed the native logic in the confusion of cause
and effect, the concrete and the abstract.

In the door of a hut on the outskirts of the village squatted a wizened
man with a tuft of grey beard upon his chin. He was clad in a loin-cloth
fairly clean, and about his neck was suspended by a twisted fibre an
amulet wrapped in banana leaves containing the gall and toenail of an
enemy slain by a virgin warrior, a specific against black magic whose
powerful properties were proven by the undisputed influence and wealth of
the owner.

A tall lithe savage, bearing upon his arms and ankles the ivory bracelets
of the royal house and the elephant hair chaplet