But the savage, while he acknowledges the mysterious influence, has not the least notion as to its origin. To his hazy mind the word “incomprehensible” is synonymous with “evil,” and the most incomprehensible thing to him, and consequently the most evil, is death. With us it is anxiety as to hereafter that makes death terrible; with the savage death is detestable only as a gravedigger, a malicious spirit who snatches him away from the world--where his children and his wives are, and where tobacco grows, and palm-trees yield good wine,--who snatches him away from all these good things and every other, and shuts him in the dark damp earth to decay like a rotten branch. Death therefore is, in his eyes, the king of evil, and all minor evils agents of the king, and working with but one aim though with seeming indirectness. This it is that makes the savage a miserable wretch--despite nature’s great bounty in supplying him with food without reaping or sowing, and so “tempering the wind” that the shelter of the boughs makes him a house that is warm enough, and the leaves of the trees such raiment as he requires. Through his constant suspicion he is like a man with a hundred jars of honey, of the same pattern and filled the same, but one--he knows not which--is poisoned. Taste he must or perish of hunger, but taste he may and perish of poison; and so, quaking all the time, he picks a little and a little, suspecting this jar because it is so very sweet, and that because it has a twang of acid, and so goes on diminishing his ninety-nine chances of appeasing his hunger and living, to level odds, that he will escape both hunger and poison and die of fright. Death is the savage’s poisoned honey-pot. He may meet it in the wind, in the rain; it may even (why not? he has known such cases) come to him in a sunray. It may meet him in the forest where he hunts for his daily bread! That bird that just now flitted by so suddenly and with such a curious cry may be an emissary of the king of evil, and now hastening to tell the king that there is he--the victim--all alone and unprotected in the forest, easy prey for the king if he comes at once! No more hunting for that day though half-a-dozen empty bellies be the consequence; away with spear and blow-gun, and welcome charms and fetiches to be counted and kissed and caressed all the way home--aye, and for a long time afterwards, for that very bird may still be perched a-top of the hut, peeping in at a chink, and only waiting for the victim to close his eyes to summon the grim king once more. In his tribulation he confides the secret of his uneasiness to his wife, who with affectionate zeal runs for the gree-gree-man, who, on hearing the case, shakes his head so ominously, that though even the very leopard-skin that hangs before the doorway be the price demanded for it, the most powerful charm the gree-gree-man has to dispose of must be obtained.