A native girl emerged from the bungalow's interior. She moved shadow-like on bare feet, bearing a tray in her hands. Her bare breasts seemed to lift in invitation.

Shyly the meri, or native girl, flicked a glance at me. The amusement I saw in her eyes seemed to mock me with understanding, indicating that she could well comprehend a white man's thoughts.

"Take a look." I said, revealing my armoury. The rack held a variety of guns. They were mostly cut down .303s, sporting types, all heavily oiled. Tom counted fourteen. He looked lovingly at the precision-built German Mannlicher with mounted telescopic sight. There were two Browning automatic shotguns, two .22 French Uniques, and four underwater gas-operated spear guns.

"No pistols?" he queried, when I slid the panels shut. I leaned over and pushed aside the cushion in the corner of the settee.

"Ah! Your Luger! What happened to the Yankee Colt, the one we pinched from that oaf in the Cooktown brawl?"

"Alex takes care of it."

"Of course you keep your psitol licence handy," Tom said cynically.

"Of course!" I grinned.

I said nothing of my hoard of gelignite, the grey time-fuse, the instantaneous white gun-cotton fuse, the electric wire-fuse, and the boxes of shiny primers. There was no reason to mention my home-made bazooka, my private "crunch-gun" for use if things got too hot or out of hand."

As I buckled on the heavy gun I shook my head. This was a hell of a way to make a living, I thought. From here on I would have to carry a gun. Sitting at breakfast or on the lavatory, the Luger have become a 'must'.

I felt the sorcerer was the kind of native who had to be watched. There was burning hate in his sharp eyes. An over-powering stench emanated from the two high-ranking gentry, who had smeared greese over their bodies. It was pig-fat, even possibly human fat, intended as a protective coating against mosquito stings."

To neglect caution, even for a single moment, would have been the height of folly. Too many men have died for making that mistake.

It was not darkness that filled the interior of the Tambaran house, but pungent drifts of smoke rising from several open fires wafted through the entire length of the building. Considering its length, approximately eighty feet, the building was surprisingly narrow, hardly wider than twenty feet at the most.

"Him proper fellow kanaka all right," Lulu observed as he stared at one of the walls.

My tongue sucked up against the roof of my mouth as I beheld the shrivelled heads stuck on bamboo pegs, lining the wall in a triple wall. As far as I could see in the dim interior there seemed to be dozens, perhaps hundreds, of heads, in the smoke-hazed interior.

"God Almightly!" Alex gasped. "What a charnel chamber!"

I tore my gaze away from the cruel relics of death and victory and stumbled after the luluai and the sorcerer. As we went along we saw the wall opposite had been ornamented in a different manner. It displayed the weapons those heads had fallen victim to. Staring from the niches in the wall were man-sized masks that were worn by the sorcer and his helpers at tume of sacricifial offerings.

The lulai and the sorcerer had ranged themselves closely before a wooden block. The lulai leaned forward and hissed guttural words to Boro, who listened carefully and then interpreted: "Maybe you better keep straight face, Skipper. On the block behind the luluai and sorcerer the cut-off heads belong swamp raiders are waiting."

There was a fiendsih grin on the faces of the luluai and the sorcerer as they stepped aside and revealed their pagan altar and its grisly offerings. There on the wooden block lay two severed heads. We stared at the empty eye-sockets, still oozing blood. The lips of one of the heads were turned up as if in a snarl of boundless savagery, revealting its black betel-nut stained teeth. The other head had no mouth at all. Where that had been there was nothing but a soggy mess of gristle, flesh, gums and bone. A wooden war-club had done its destructive work. From this head, too, the eyes had been removed, leaving nothing but blood-clotted hollows.

"Well, I've seen them shrivelled, dried, stuffed, moth-eaten and tattered with age, but these two heads are the first I've seen only hous after they rode on some poor unfortunate bastard's neck," Alex observed quietly.

...

The sorcerer walked over to one of the fires smouldering on a slab of burned clay. The embers had been banked around a small ring of stones which supported a vessel also made of burned clay. He stirred the contents of the small cauldron with a flat wooden ladle. At last he straightened up and lifted the ladle carefully from the simmering soup - to reveal the privy parts of the two enemies whose heads were on show upon the carved block. Next, the magician brought up the cooked eyes and a hand from the bottom of that crude vessel, and dropped them back into the broth.