essence of
horror; here was the source of all that she had trusted elsewhere in
countless perfidious disguises and refinements.

Poisonous in some subtle element behind its visible vapors, it
corrupted not only the flesh, but also the souls that had emerged
elsewhere into forms of affection and compassion. Two nights ago even
she had greeted the crack of the whips with the furious thought,
"Strike again!"--and now there stole into her brain, together with the
light hallucinations of fever, a hatred of these cringing black men who
for a moment had dared to stand before her as antagonists. The evening
breeze brought to her, from the porters' fires, the odor of savage
bodies that had labored and been beaten for the cause of love; and her
disgust was tinctured with the fierce intolerance of all those
impressionable beings from what is called civilization, whom Africa had
debased--or else, made "natural" again.

Through the buzz of insects there came from the forest, gradually
blending over wide distances, a gentle throbbing. The porters lifted
their round heads beyond the fires. The sharp profiles of the askaris
were motionless. A wail floated over the camp:

"The drums of the Mambava!"

The throbbing died away. But soon it began again in the north, then in
the south, and swelled to a continuous rumbling.

On the edge of the sky the moon appeared, blood red, nearly full.

There was a rush of feet, a scuffle in the bushes, and two askaris
advanced into the firelight, dragging between them a creature that they
seemed to have plucked out of some grotesque dream.

He was an albino. His gray skin, because of its lack of pigmentation,
was splotched with eczema; his wool was a dirty, yellowish white; his
features were permanently distorted because of his lifelong efforts to
keep the light from paining his pink eyes. The askaris threw this
monstrosity upon his face before Lilla's chair. He lay moaning and
feebly moving his hands, as if he were caressing the earth.

Suddenly he sat up on his haunches. His body jumped from the beating
of his heart. He fixed on Lilla a look that was the utmost caricature
of terror and entreaty.

An askari let out a neighing laugh:

"So this is one of the dangerous Mambava!"

But the albino was not one of the Mambava.

He was a man of the Manyazombe, who dwelt in the north--an exile, a
solitary wanderer, a lost soul. Who knew what aversion, what
indefinable dread, his dissimi