“Then near them Djeba heard the fall of feet and he saw the man advancing through the bush. He saw his shape plain and black against the glow beyond the leaves; the shape of that fur hat he remembered, in the form of a deep drum, tilted wildly; the shoulders thrust out with that tunic of silver buttons, the elbows swaggering. And he saw that the figure was drunk and lustful and that he came in cunning silence amongst the leaves, and he knew that the time of his revenge was at hand. “So Djeba sprang through the leaves and caught the man’s neck in his fingers. They fell down in the dark on the ground, and there they fought. But Djeba’s powerful hands were about the man’s throat, and the man lay quiet and breathed no more. Then Djeba went back, but the terrified woman was gone. “Then Djeba returned across the field toward the stockade, calling Moa’s name again, and in the field near the stockade he saw lying the body of a man. The man was despoiled of his clothes and naked, and his head cut three-quarters from his trunk. And Djeba looked and saw that it was that driver. “Then Djeba said to himself, ‘The night is full of infernal creatures, witches and _djinoun_. I have slain the driver in his finery in the bush, and here he lies an hour dead and naked in the field. The night is red with devil-work.’ A fear came on him and his teeth knocked together. Nevertheless he went back to the bush, laid hold of that other man’s feet, and pulled him through the bush to the field, and there he looked at the face of the man he had slain. “_He looked at the face of the man he had slain!_” The syllables of the loud repetition went away across the sleeping floor of the square and played among the invisible arcades, echoes deep-toned, momentous, tragic. And in the glow of the embers I saw the lip of that oblivious clay pulsing, pulsing, with the same laggard and monotonous beat. I continued to stare at it. You may be certain now that I stared. The short hairs at the back of my skull stood up and pricked the skin. For the wonder of it. Even to that Senegal orator himself the saga he repeated remained fabulous, an epic of equatorial rivers. Chanted first by son and then by grandson at a hundred feasts and under a hundred village council-trees and grown into the body of mid-African legendry, not till this night had it come to ears that heard; to eyes that saw with the eyes of that ancient, moribund, blind, black wanderer. For now I knew that I had heard the tale of that incendiary night on a “Djoja planting” before, not once, but many, many times; not in the glow of a Sahara camp-fire, but in the ember light of a Hancock County chimney-nook, where my own grandmother Peyton used to sit before bedtime thirty years agone, reciting a saga of her own. The narrator’s voice was heard again, rushing, staccato.