the
realization of that magnificent moment.

CHAPTER III

THE MAKER OF STORMS

Everybody knows that water drawn from rivers is very bad water, for the
rivers are the Roads of the Dead, and in the middle of those nights when
the merest rind of a moon shows, and this slither of light and two
watchful stars form a triangle pointing to the earth, the spirits rise
from their graves and walk, "singing deadly songs," towards the lower
star which is the source of all rivers. If you should be--which God
forbid--on one of those lonely island graveyards on such nights you will
see strange sights.

The broken cooking-pots which rest on the mounds and the rent linen
which flutters from little sticks stuck about the graves, grow whole and
new again. The pots are red and hot as they come from the fire, and the
pitiful cloths take on the sheen of youth and fold themselves about
invisible forms. None may see the dead, though it is said that you may
see the babies.

These the wise men have watched playing at the water's edge, crowing and
chuckling in the universal language of their kind, staggering groggily
along the shelving beach with outspread arms balancing their uncertain
steps. On such nights when M'sa beckons the dead world to the source of
all rivers, the middle islands are crowded with babies--the dead babies
of a thousand years. Their spirits come up from the unfathomed deeps of
the great river and call their mortality from graves.

"How may the waters of the river be acceptable?" asks the shuddering
N'gombi mother.

Therefore the N'gombi gather their water from the skies in strange
cisterns of wicker, lined with the leaf of a certain plant which is
impervious, and even carry their drinking supplies with them when they
visit the river itself.

There was a certain month in the year, which will be remembered by all
who attempted the crossing of the Kasai Forest to the south of the
N'gombi country, when pools and rivulets suddenly dried--so suddenly,
indeed, that even the crocodiles, who have an instinct for coming
drought, were left high and dry, in some cases miles from the nearest
water, and when the sun rose in a sky unflecked by cloud and gave place
at nights to a sky so brilliant and so menacing in their fierce and
fiery nearness that men went mad.

Toward the end of this month, when an exasperating full moon advertised
a continuance of the dry spell by its very whiteness, the Chief
Koosoogolaba-Muchini,