Then she remembered that it would hardly bear adding to under the
circumstances, and contented herself with a satanic laugh.

Nor would it. In a short time the miserable man's body was black with
the repulsive insects. They swarmed into his ears and nostrils. His
struggles became fearful, as he writhed in the excruciating torment of
their poisonous bites. He foamed at the mouth. His eyeballs rolled and
strained in their sockets, and he shook his head and roared like a
beast. It would be impossible to exaggerate the agonies he was
undergoing. His frantic struggles availed not to shake off a single one
of the myriad insects swarming upon him. Already his eyes were half
eaten away.

It was a fiendish and appalling spectacle. The man was now raving mad.
He gnashed his teeth and howled. His contortions were fearful to
witness. Yet no spark of pity or compunction did the sight awaken in
the ferocious hearts of the spectators, many of whom were, up to the
moment of the fatal denunciation, his kindred and his friends. But
since his treatment of the witch-doctress all were chary of venturing
too close. Many of the superstitious barbarians had already began to
look upon Ngcenika with decreased respect. Vudana, suffering as a
wizard, had spat in her face, accompanying the act with a prophecy and a
curse. On no consideration would they run the risk of exposing
themselves to like treatment.

Eustace, forced to be a spectator of this blood-curdling scene, felt his
head swim with horror and disgust. The chastened gloom of the forest,
the gibing crowd of armed savages, the weird shrill singing of the
witch-doctress, and the frightful contortions and beast-like roars of
the miserable victim, who was being literally devoured alive, made up a
picture likely to haunt a man in his dreams for the rest of his life, to
start him suddenly awake in a cold sweat of terror. Still he remembered
that any exhibition of feeling would be in the highest degree dangerous,
and controlled himself accordingly.

All this had taken some time and now the frantic struggles of the
sufferer had subsided. A convulsive shudder would now and then run
through his limbs, and his sightless eyeballs would roll in a manner
hideous to behold, and ever the disgusting insects swarmed over him in a
horrible moving mass, now red with blood, and smothered beneath gouts of
saliva which had flown from the maniac's lips. Upon his violent
struggles had foll