t his people's clinch upon life.

But he realized clearly the difference between that abstract thing, the
tribe, and that most concrete of things, the individual. The tribe
persisted. Its members passed. The tribe was a memory of the history
and habits of all previous members, which the living members carried on
until they passed and became history and memory in the intangible sum
that was the tribe. He, as a member, soon or late, and late was very
near, must pass. But pass to what? There was the rub. And so it was,
on occasion, that he ordered all forth from his big grass house, and,
alone with his problem, lowered from the roof-beams the matting-wrapped
parcels of heads of men he had once seen live and who had passed into the
mysterious nothingness of death.

Not as a miser had he collected these heads, and not as a miser counting
his secret hoard did he ponder these heads, unwrapped, held in his two
hands or lying on his knees. He wanted to know. He wanted to know what
he guessed they might know, now that they had long since gone into the
darkness that rounds the end of life.

Various were the heads Bashti thus interrogated--in his hands, on his
knees, in his dim-lighted grasshouse, while the overhead sun blazed down
and the fading south-east sighed through the palm-fronds and breadfruit
branches. There was the head of a Japanese--the only one he had ever
seen or heard of. Before he was born it had been taken by his father.
Ill-cured it was, and battered and marred with ancientness and rough
usage. Yet he studied its features, decided that it had once had two
lips as live as his own and a mouth as vocal and hungry as his had often
been in the past. Two eyes and a nose it had, a thatched crown of roof,
and a pair of ears like to his own. Two legs and a body it must once
have had, and desires and lusts. Heats of wrath and of love, so he
decided, had also been its once on a time when it never thought to die.

A head that amazed him much, whose history went back before his father's
and grandfather's time, was the head of a Frenchman, although Bashti knew
it not. Nor did he know it was the head of La Perouse, the doughty old
navigator, who had left his bones, the bones of his crews, and the bones
of his two frigates, the _Astrolabe_ and the _Boussole_, on the shores of
the cannibal Solomons. Another head--for Bashti was a confirmed head-
collector--went back two centuries before La Perouse to Alvaro de