Two giant rats were tugging at some bone, most human in shape; each trying to tear it from the teeth of the other, as squealing they circled around the fire. In corners toads blinked their bead-like eyes, while darting lizards flashed across the floor. Slowly crawling along between the unplastered logs of the walls snakes of many colors moved about or coiled in the thatch of the roof hung head downward and hissed as they waved their heads from side to side. Along the wall a bark shelf stood. On it were two small skulls with handles made of cane. These ghastly vessels were filled with milk. Conch shells and utensils made of dried gourds were scattered on the shelf, among which a huge and ugly buzzard stalked about. An immense red drum hung from a pole fixed in a crevice of the rock and by its side dangled a long and shining knife. A curtain of woven grass hanging at the rear of the hovel seemed to conceal the entrance to some cavern within the hill’s rock-ribbed breast. When the blaze of the burning fagots cast a glow over the grewsome interior of this temple of Voo Doo, Sybella, the High Priestess, turned upon the cowering man, upon whose ashy-hued face stood great drops of ice-cold sweat, tearing from her head the scarlet turban that had hidden her bare, deathly skull, and beckoning him with her skeleton hand to approach, in guttural, hissing voice commanded: “Say over what you told me on the hill! Say, if you dare, you dog, here in my lair where Tu Konk dwells, that my daughter’s grandson, the last of my blood, has mated with a white cow.” Benumbed by the dazzling light that poured from the black pits in her naked, fleshless skull, the mulatto could not walk, but falling on his hands and knees he moved toward her; prostrate at her feet, overcome by fear, he whined faintly: “Burton, Walter Burton, married a white woman in Boston the twentieth of last month.” The hag grasping his ears drew his head up toward her face, and thrusting her terrible head forward she plunged her gaze like sword points down into the man’s very soul. With a cry like that of a wounded wild-cat, she jumped back and throwing her skinny arms up in the air began waving them above her head, screaming: “He does not lie! It is true! It is true!” In impotent rage she dug the sharp nails of her fingers into the skin of her bald head and tore long ridges across its smooth bare surface. Suddenly she seized the mulatto, now half-dead from terror, crying: “Come! Goat without horns, let us tell Tu Konk.” Manuel, limp, scarcely breathing, staggered to his feet. The hag held him by the bleeding ears that she had half torn from his head. Pushing him before her they passed behind the curtain suspended against the rock wall at the rear of the room.