on her beautiful shoulders; without so much as a girdle for covering,
she felt no shame, but only looked about with rolling, terrified eyes,
the picture of a snared animal.

"No one spoke. She stood swaying from side to side, her beautiful figure
pliant as grass.

"Finally, with a long moan, she threw herself at the chief's feet. He
regarded her impassively, and she gathered herself into a sitting
posture, rocking to and fro, her head buried in her arms."

"And you made no remonstrance?" I said.

"The poison had already been administered, my dear Lewis," said Hilyard.
"And beside, it was in the interest of science. It really seemed a
shame to pick out such a beautiful creature; they are so rare in those
tribes," he continued, regretfully.

"Well, we sat there, perfectly mute, for about half an hour, I suppose.
The chief was almost as impassive as an Englishman. I have seen the
Almehs in Cairo, but I have never seen real poetry of motion--mind more
completely expressed by matter--than that woman's body translating the
anguish she endured; languor turning to deep weariness, weariness to
agony, agony to despair. There was not a note in the gamut of mental
suffering that she left unstruck--that savage, whom one would not guess
possessed a mind. There came a pause. She looked about with a wild,
fixed purpose in her eyes; like a panther she leaped on me with her
sinuous body, in a second she had snatched the knife from my belt, and
had fallen on the earthen floor, her head almost severed from the trunk
by the violence of the blow she had struck at her throat with the keen