The enormous crowd who had followed us up from the beach were not permitted to enter the palisaded enclosure, which was strictly taboo to the common herd; our party therefore now consisted solely of those who had brought me up the river, four individuals who had joined us outside the gate--and whom I took to be officials of some sort--and my unworthy self; and, for my own part, I would very willingly have waived the distinction of forming one of the party. Marching up to what I conjectured to be the king's house--from the fact that it was not only by far the largest dwelling in the enclosure, but was also distinguished by an exclusive embellishment in the form of a row of a dozen poles, each surmounted by a human skull, planted upright in the ground before it--we halted at a distance of some twenty paces from the entrance, with our backs turned toward the crucifixion tree, the leafless branches of which overshadowed us, and waited. Ten minutes, twenty minutes, passed, and the sun was within a hand's- breadth of the horizon when a man emerged from the "palace," bearing a massive chair of ebony, quaintly-carved, and draped with a magnificent leopard's skin, which he placed immediately before the open door, midway between the house and ourselves, and departed. A moment later another man appeared--this time from the fetish-house on the opposite side of the square--also with a chair, decorated with most gruesome--looking carvings, which he placed beside the first. Then a tall and enormously stout man, clad in a leopard-skin _moucha_, and with a handsome leopard- skin cloak on his shoulders, came forth from the palace, leaning upon the shoulders of two other men, and advanced toward the chair which had first been placed in position, into which he subsided heavily, casting a strongly disapproving glance at the second chair as he did so. Then there arose a sudden tramping of bare feet upon the dry earth, and from somewhere in the rear of the palace there swung into view a hundred picked warriors, armed like those who had mounted guard at the palisade gate, who formed up behind and on each side of the chairs with very commendable military precision. Simultaneously with the appearance of the guards--for such they were--there emerged from the fetish-house a man who appeared to be incredibly old, for his hair and beard were as white as snow, and his once stalwart form was now bowed and wizened with the passage of, as it seemed to me, hundreds of years. Yet, although in appearance a very Methuselah in age, this individual had a pair of piercing black eyes that glowed and sparkled with all the fire and passion of early manhood, and, bowed as he was, and decrepit as he appeared to be, he tottered across the intervening space with extraordinary agility, and seated himself in the second chair. Thus I found myself in the presence of the two most powerful men in the district, namely, King Banda and Mafuta, the chief witch-doctor.