The man’s madness became contagious. Figure after figure sprang within the lighted space about the serpent. Men, women, and even children all more or less nude, the few garments worn presenting a heterogeneal kaleidoscope of vivid, garish colors as the frenzied dancers whirled about in the irregular light of the torches and bonfires. Soon spouting streams of red stained the glistening black bodies, and joined the tide of white foam pouring from the protruding, gaping, blubber lips of the howling, frantic worshipers. The fanatic followers of Voo Dooism were wounding themselves in the delirium of irresponsible emotion. Blood gushed from long gashes made by sharp knives on cheeks, breasts, backs and limbs. The gyrations of the gory, crazed and howling mass were hideous to behold. When the tempest of curbless frenzy seemed to have reached a point beyond which increase appeared impossible, old Sybella rushed forward, like the wraith of the ancient witch of Endor, dashing the dancers aside, springing to the stump she seized the snake and winding its shining coils about her she waved aloft the long, glittering blade of the knife that she held in hand, and shrieked out, in the voice of an infuriated fiend, “Bring forth the hornless goat. Let Tu Konk taste the blood of the hornless one!” A crowd of perfectly naked and bleeding men darted forward bearing in their midst an entirely nude girl, who in a perfect paroxysm of terror fought, writhed and struggled fearfully, yelling wildly all the time, in the grip of her merciless and insensate captors. The men stretched the screaming wretch across the stump on which the snake had rested, pressed back the agonized girl’s head until her slender neck was drawn taut. Quick as the serpent’s darting tongue, Sybella’s bright, sharp blade descended, severing at one stroke the head almost from the quivering body. A fiercer, wilder cry arose from the insane devotees as a great tub nearly full of fiery native rum was placed to catch the gushing stream that flowed in a crimson torrent from the still twitching body of the sacrifice to Voo Doo. Sybella stirred the horrible mixture of blood and rum with a ladle, made of an infant’s skull affixed to a shin-bone of an adult human being, and having replaced the snake upon his throne, on the stump, in an abject posture presented to the serpent the ladle filled with the nauseating stuff. The re-incarnate Tu Konk thrust his head repeatedly into the skull-bowl and scattered drops of the scarlet liquid over his black and shining coils. Then Sybella using the skull-ladle began filling enormous dippers made of gourds, that the eager, maddened crowd about the Voo Doo altar held expectantly forth, craving a portion in the libation to Tu Konk. The maniacal host gorged themselves with the loathsome fluid, gulped down in frenzied haste, great draughts of that devilish brew, from the large calabashes that Sybella filled.