starvation and thirst
came to the relief of the sufferer would, one might suppose, be
considered a sufficiently severe punishment to satisfy every demand of
justice--to say nothing of the exactions of revenge; but such a death
was much too easy to be acceptable to a man whose lust of cruelty was so
insatiable as that of M'Bongwele. This monster's chief delight was to
gloat over the sufferings of others, and much of his time was very
agreeably passed in meditating upon and devising schemes of elaborate
cruelty for the punishment of those unhappy individuals who were so
unfortunate as to offend him, or incur the suspicion that they were his
enemies. Siswani, however, the present victim, was not undergoing any
experimental form of torture of M'Bongwele's own invention; he was
simply suffering a form of death that, from the protracted and
exquisitely excruciating character of its agonies, enjoys a very wide
popularity among African savages. It consists in the eyelids of the
victim being cut off, to expose the unprotected eyeballs to the fierce
glare of the sun--and, later, to other and even worse torments--after
which he is led out to some selected spot where an ants' nest of
suitable size is known to exist. Arrived there, four stout stakes are
driven deeply into the ground at a proper distance apart round the nest,
stout raw-hide thongs are attached to the victim's wrists and ankles,
and the whole of his naked body is then carefully anointed with honey,
after which he is thrown to the ground and stretched out on his back on
the top of the ants' nest, and there immovably bound to the four stakes.
Then the nest is broken under him and the fiercely exasperated little
insects are left to work their savage will upon his unprotected body, to
which they are strongly attracted by the odour of the honey.

The unhappy Siswani had thus been exposed for fully five hours, when von
Schalckenberg at length stood beside him, and his body was completely
hidden beneath a swarming mass of ants, the collective movements of
which suggested a horrible wave-like creeping movement to the surface of
the body. Apart from this, however, an occasional writhing of the
frightfully swollen form and limbs showed that life and feeling still
remained. But it was, perhaps, the mouth of the sufferer that bore most
eloquent testimony to the extremity of the tortured body's anguish: it
had been forced wide open by the introduction of a thick gag of hard