"We hear about you the first time you try trip," Mnathl said. "Everybody know. No other men your color in Fyhon." His color. Ericson began to understand. Mnathl's devotion, her self-sacrificing tenacity, her long kindness to him, everything--had all been nothing but the prelude to a ritual meal in which his rare blonde body was to be the chief support. No doubt a man of his color would be an especially choice offering to the gods. The gleam he had seen in Mnathl's eyes had been not love, but a kind of religious gluttony. He began to laugh. Irony had always appealed to him; and besides he was remembering a sentence in the Ethnographic Commission's preliminary survey: "There is no doubt that ritual cannibalism is unknown among the natives of Fyhon." "O.K., Mnathl," he said, recalling what he had been saved from, what he had seen and learned. "I'm ahead, no matter how you look at it. It's O.K." He was still smiling when the axman on the right struck and Ericson's severed head went rolling along the surface of the pyramid. End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Garden of Evil, by Margaret St. Clair