But Mu-senyui, because of the greatness of his love, comforted himself with a truism.
"It is better," he reflected, "to kiss the full, indescribable lips of Mpatanasi's daughter than to face the forest-devil! It is more comfortable—but, if necessary, I shall face the god! A woman is worth many monsters!"
It is difficult to forgive Mu-senyui for reasoning so platitudinously, but Mpatanasi’s daughter had addled his wits.
Mpatanasi took the pipe out of his mouth and knocked out a thimbleful of bluish ashes.
"I should hardly feel justified in demanding a king's head—but, are you sure that he abuses his head?"
Mu-senyui was sure of it.
"Only this morning," drawled Mu-senyui, with an amazing note of triumph in his voice, "only this morning he made little poems out of his head, and sang them to the women. The poems were treasonous!"
Mpatanasi sat up very stiff and straight and asked Mu-senyui what sort of poems were not treasonous.
"Do you think," he said, "that any man in his right mind would make silly little rimes on pieces of blank paper? I do not care who or what the man is, if he sits about and reads, his days and nights will be filled with wo. The torture of the sixty-seven stripes would be a most excellent remedy. I wonder—"
"But Mpatanasi would not torture a king!"
"That is true. Mpatanasi has not fallen so low. There is but one way to bring him to reason—we must have his head!"
"Mpatanasi has said it!"
"Not yet. But call in the chanters and I shall pronounce a doom."
Mu-senyui, smiling broadly, backed to the door and disappeared. The daughter of Mpatanasi concealed her face with her hands, and no one saw the hideous breadth of her grin.
Mpatanasi walked out into the cool of the morning, and stretched his long, scraggy arms toward the summer sky. His face twitched convulsively and his knees trembled. He did not want to pronounce a doom. He was a man of peace, and he loved quiet and the soothing sounds of the forest; the tireless drone of millions of jade-green insects, the swish, swish, swish of the great aloe palms as they swayed in the wind against the white, agitated dawn, and the shrill screams of naked children baking and blistering in the sun. The turmoil of the forest was a sweet music to him, and he loved to watch the multicolored parrakeets, and the rich red lips of orchids that seemed alive. He disliked the pronouncing of dooms, and he disliked his chorus of old women that put the seal of the forest-devil upon all dooms and made them irrevocable.
But he knew that he could not escape, for his words were necessary and would accompany men's souls on their last, long, tedious journey, and he was but the instrument of the forest-devil and the slave of his own words. The words that he pronounced were lethal words, and they carried weight, and wo to the man or woman who put them lightly aside. As Mpatanasi stood in the clearing in front of his small, round dwelling, and watched the half-nude, swaying procession of black forest-women advance leeringly and mockingly from between the bifurcated boles of incredibly ancient trees, he lost all sense of immediate time and place. The universe existed for him no longer: he became a divine machine, a pronouncer of dooms, an emissary of the forest-god.
His eyes glazed, and his lean, black body grew rigid. He ran his hands rapidly through his hair and spat on the ground. The procession of women swayed hideously in the sunlight, and came dancing toward him over the
