n he was borne back
to the village on a grass bier and the women of his house decked
themselves with green leaves and arm in arm staggered and stamped
through the village street in their death dance, there was a suspicion
of hilarity in their song, and a more cheery step in their dance than
the occasion called for.

An old man named D'wiri, who knew every step of every dance, saw this
and said in his stern way that it was shameless. But he was old and was,
moreover, in fear for the decorum of his own obsequies if these
outrageous departures from custom were approved or allowed to pass
without reprimand.

When M'lama, the wife of G'mami, had seen her lord depart in the canoe
for burial in the middle island and had wailed her conventional grief,
she washed the dust from her body at the river's edge and went back to
her hut. And all that was grief for the dead man was washed away with
the dust of mourning.

Many moons came out of the sky, were wasted and died before the woman
M'lama showed signs of her gifts. It is said that they appeared one
night after a great storm wherein lightning played such strange tricks
upon the river that even the old man D'wiri could not remember parallel
instances.

In the night the wife of a hunter named E'sani-Osoni brought a dying
child into the hut of the widow. He had been choked by a fish-bone and
was _in extremis_ when M'lama put her hand upon his head and straightway
the bone flew from his mouth, "and there was a cry terrible to
hear--such a cry as a leopard makes when he is pursued by ghosts."

A week later a baby girl fell into a terrible fit and M'lama had laid
her hand upon it and behold! it slept from that moment.

Ahmet, chief of the Government spies, heard of these happenings and came
a three days' journey by river to Isongo.

"What are these stories of miracles?" he asked.

"_Capita_," said the chief, using the term of regard which is employed
in the Belgian Congo, "this woman M'lama is a true witch and has great
gifts, for she raises the dead by the touch of her hand. This I have
seen. Also it is said that when U'gomi, the woodcutter, made a fault,
cutting his foot in two, this woman healed him marvellously."

"I will see this M'lama," said Ahmet importantly.

He found her in her hut tossing four bones idly. These were the shanks
of goats, and each time they fell differently.

"O Ahmet," she said, when he entered, "you have a wife who is sick, also
a first-born bo