audience,
skirted the great white building and came in time to his own cousin,
who swept the stables of His Excellency the Administrator. And here, in
the coolness of the stone-walled mews, he learnt much about the
Administrator; little tit-bits of information which were unlikely to be
published in the official gazette. Also he acquired a considerable
amount of data concerning the giving of honours, and after a long
examination and cross-examination of his wearied relative he left him as
dry as a sucked orange, but happy in the possession of a new
five-shilling piece which Bosambo had magnificently pressed upon him,
and which subsequently proved to be bad.

IV

By the River of Spirits is a deep forest which stretches back and back
in a dense and chaotic tangle of strangled sapling and parasitic weed to
the edge of the Pigmy forest. No man--white or brown or black--has
explored the depth of the Forbidden Forest, for here the wild beasts
have their lairs and rear their young; and here are mosquito in dense
clouds. Moreover, and this is important, a certain potent ghost named
Bim-bi stalks restlessly from one border of the forest to the other.
Bim-bi is older than the sun and more terrible than any other ghost. For
he feeds on the moon, and at nights you may see how the edge of the
desert world is bitten by his great mouth until it becomes, first, the
half of a moon, then the merest slither, and then no moon at all. And on
the very dark nights, when the gods are hastily making him a new meal,
the ravenous Bim-bi calls to his need the stars; and you may watch, as
every little boy of the Akasava has watched, clutching his father's hand
tightly in his fear, the hot rush of meteors across the velvet sky to
the rapacious and open jaws of Bim-bi.

He was a ghost respected by all peoples--Akasava, Ochori, Isisi,
N'gombi, and Bush folk. By the Bolengi, the Bomongo, and even the
distant Upper Congo people feared him. Also all the chiefs for
generations upon generations had sent tribute of corn and salt to the
edge of the forest for his propitiation, and it is a legend that when
the Isisi fought the Akasava in the great war, the envoy of the Isisi
was admitted without molestation to the enemy's lines in order to lay an
offering at Bim-bi's feet. Only one man in the world, so far as the
People of the River know, has ever spoken slightingly of Bim-bi, and
that man was Bosambo of the Ochori, who had no respect for any ghosts
sav