Though these magicians possess power, its joy has its limitations; for, becoming possessed by a familiar spirit, through whose aid they make their invocations and incantations and under whose influence they fall into cataleptic trances or are thrilled with Delphic rages, if they should happen to offend that "familiar," it may destroy them by "eating" out their life, as their phrase is. On Corisco Island, in 1863, a certain man had acquired prominence as a magic doctor; he finally died of consumption. His friends began a witchcraft investigation to find out who had "killed" him. A post-mortem being made, cavities were found in the lungs. Ignorant of disease, they thereupon dropped the investigation, saying that his own "witch" had "eaten" him. Captain Guy Burrows, a British officer, formerly in the service of the Kongo Free-State, left it unwilling to be a participant in the fearful atrocities allowed by the King of Belgium; and he has recently made a scathing exposure of the doings of Belgian agents that have made the Kongo a slave-ground of worse horrors than existed in the old days of the export slave-trade. He thus jocularly describes what he saw of fetich at the town of Matadi on the Kongo, where there is an English Baptist Mission: "Outside the small area, under the direct influence of the mission, there is but one deity,--the fetich. The heathen in his blindness, in bowing down to wood and stone, bows, as Kipling says, to 'wood for choice.' He carves a more or less grotesque face; and the rest is a matter of taste. I came across one figure whose principal ornament consisted of a profusion of ten-penny nails and a large cowrie shell.[33] But anything will do; an old tin teapot is another favorite fetich decoration. I have generally found that the uglier they are, the more they seem to be feared and reverenced.