He was only a young man, and a dandy at that, his face blackened with charcoal, his hair whitened with wood-ashes, with the freshly severed tail of a wild pig thrust through his perforated nose, and two more thrust through his ears.

His only other ornament was a necklace of human finger-bones.

At sight of their other prisoner he chattered in a high querulous falsetto, with puckered brows and troubled, wild-animal eyes.

He was disposed of along the middle of the line, one of the Poonga-Poonga men leading him at the end of a length of bark-rope.
The trail began to rise out of the jungle, dipping at times into festering hollows of unwholesome vegetation, but rising more and more over swelling, unseen hill-slopes or climbing steep hog-backs and rocky hummocks where the forest thinned and blue patches of sky appeared overhead.
"Close up he stop," Binu Charley warned them in a whisper.
Even as he spoke, from high overhead came the deep resonant boom of a village drum.

But the beat was slow, there was no panic in the sound.
They were directly beneath the village, and they could hear the crowing of roosters, two women's voices raised in brief dispute, and, once, the crying of a child.