Exhausted by my sufferings, I now fell asleep, but was soon wakened by
loud cries of anguish uttered at no great distance. I started to my
feet, and beheld an extraordinary spectacle, which at once assured me
that I had fallen among natives of the worst and lowest type. The dark
places of the earth are, indeed, full of horrid cruelty.

The first cries which had roused me must have been comparatively distant,
though piercing, and even now they reached me confused in the notes of a
melancholy chant or hymn. But the shrieks grew more shrill, and I
thought I could distinguish the screams of a woman in pain or dread from
the groans drawn with more difficulty from a man. I leaped up, and,
climbing a high part of the river bank, I beheld, within a couple of
hundred yards, an extraordinary procession coming from the inner country
towards the mouth of the stream.

At first I had only a confused view of bright stuffs--white, blue, and
red--and the shining of metal objects, in the midst of a crowd partly
concealed by the dust they raised on their way. Very much to my surprise
I found that they were advancing along a wide road, paved in a peculiar
manner, for I had never seen anything of this kind among the heathen
tribes of the Pacific. Their dresses, too, though for the most part mere
wraps, as it were, of coloured stuff, thrown round them, pinned with
brooches, and often clinging in a very improper way to the figure, did
not remind me of the costume (what there is of it) of Samoans, Fijians,
or other natives among whom I have been privileged to labour.

But these observations give a more minute impression of what I saw than,
for the moment, I had time to take in. The foremost part of the
procession consisted of boys, many of them almost naked. Their hands
were full of branches, wreathed in a curious manner with strips of white