Part 15 (1/2)

For he had lived so long, and so luckily, that he had watched the waning to extinction of all the vigorous appetites and desires He had knoives and children, and the keen-edge of youthful hunger He had seen his children grow to randfathers,knoohts of eating, he had passed on beyond Food? Scarcely did he know its er, that bit hi since ceased to stir and prod him He ate out of a sense of necessity and duty, and cared little for what he ate, save for one thing: the eggs of the apodes that were, in season, laid in his private, personal, strictly tabooedflesh thrill As for the rest, he lived in his intellect, ruling his people, seeking out data froer and rivet his people's clinch upon life

But he realized clearly the difference between that abstract thing, the tribe, and that s, the individual The tribe persisted Its members passed The tribe was a memory of the history and habits of all previousmembers carried on until they passed and becaible sum that was the tribe He, as a member, soon or late, and late was very near, must pass But pass to what? There was the rub And so it was, on occasion, that he ordered all forth frorass house, and, alone with his proble-wrapped parcels of heads of men he had once seen live and who had passed into the ness of death

Not as a miser had he collected these heads, and not as ahis secret hoard did he ponder these heads, unwrapped, held in his two hands or lying on his knees He wanted to know He wanted to knohat he guessed they one into the darkness that rounds the end of life

Various were the heads Bashti thus interrogated--in his hands, on his knees, in his dirasshouse, while the overhead sun blazed down and the fading south-east sighed through the palm-fronds and breadfruit branches There was the head of a japanese--the only one he had ever seen or heard of Before he was born it had been taken by his father

Ill-cured it was, and battered and e Yet he studied its features, decided that it had once had two lips as live as his own and a ry as his had often been in the past Two eyes and a nose it had, a thatched crown of roof, and a pair of ears like to his oo legs and a body it must once have had, and desires and lusts Heats of wrath and of love, so he decided, had also been its once on a tiht to die

A head that amazed hirandfather's tih Bashti knew it not Nor did he knoas the head of La Perouse, the doughty old navigator, who had left his bones, the bones of his crews, and the bones of his two frigates, the _Astrolabe_ and the _Boussole_, on the shores of the cannibal Solomons Another head--for Bashti was a confirmed head- collector--went back two centuries before La Perouse to Alvaro de Mendana, the Spaniard It was the head of one of Mendana's are to one of Bashti's remote ancestors

Still another head, the history of which was vague, was a white wo But earrings of gold and e to the withered ears, and the hair, two-thirds of a fathoolden floss, flowed from the scalp that covered what had once been the wit and will of her that Bashti reasoned had in her ancient time been quick with love in the arms of man

Ordinary heads, of bush white ated to the canoe houses and devil devil houses For he was a connoisseur in the e head of a German that lured him much Red- bearded it was, and red-haired, but even in dried death there was an ironness of feature and a massive brow that hinted to him of mastery of secrets beyond his ken No more than did he know it once had been a German, did he knoas a German professor's head, an astronomer's head, a head that in its tie of the stars in the vasty heavens, of the way of star-directed shi+ps upon the sea, and of the way of the earth on its starry course through space that was a ht concept of space that he possessed

Last of all, sharpest of bite in his thought, was the head of Van Horn

And it was the head of Van Horn that lay on his knees under his contemplation when Jerry, who possessed the freedorass house, scented and identified the mortal remnant of Skipper, wailed first in woe over it, then bristled into rage

Bashti did not notice at first, for he was deep in interrogation of Van Horn's head Only short months before this head had been alive, he pondered, quick it, attached to a two-legged body that stood erect and that swaggered about, a loincloth and a belted automatic around its middle, more powerful, therefrom, than Bashti, but with less wit, for had not he, Bashti, with an ancient pistol, put darkness inside that skull where wit resided, and removed that skull from the soddenly relaxed framework of flesh and bone on which it had been supported to tread the earth and the deck of the _Arangi_?

What had becoant, upstanding Van Horn, and had it gone out as the flickering flaoes out when it is quite burnt to a powder-fluff of ash? Had all that made Van Horn passed like the flame of the splinter?

Had he passed into the darkness for ever into which the beast passed, into which passed the speared crocodile, the hooked bonita, the nettedthat was fat to eat? Was Van Horn's darkness as the darkness of the blue-bottle fly that his fly-flapping ht of the air?--as the darkness into which passed the , and that, despite its perfectness of flight, with alht action, he squashed with the flat of his hand against the back of his neck when it bit him?

What was true of this white man's head, so recently alive and erectly dominant, Bashti kneas true of hih the dark gate of death, would happen to hiht speak to hi of life, and theof death that inevitably laid life by the heels

Jerry's long-dral of woe at sight and scent of all that was left of Skipper, roused Bashti froolden- brown puppy, and immediately included it in his reverie It was alive

It was like er and love It had blood in its veins, like ush forth and denude it to death Like the race of man it loved its kind, and birthed and breast-nourished its young And passed Ay, it passed; for , as well as a human, had he, Bashti, devoured in his hey- dey of appetite and youth, when he knew only th out of the calabashes of feasting

But froed, with a snarl writhen on his lips, and with recurrent waves of hair-bristling along his back and up his shoulders and neck And he stalked not the head of Skipper, where rested his love, but Bashti, who held the head on his knees As the olf in the upland pasture stalks the mare mother with her newly delivered colt, so Jerry stalked Bashti And Bashti, who had never feared death all his long life and who had laughed a joke with his forefinger blown off by the bursting flint-lock pistol, slee was intellectual and in adrown puppy whom he rapped on the nose with a short, hardwood stick and compelled to keep distance No matter how often and fiercely Jerry rushed him, hethe puppy's courage,at the stupidity of life that impelled him continually to thrust his nose to the hurt of the stick, and that drove him, by passion of reain and again

This, too, was life, Bashtipuppy away fro and silly and hot, heart-pro love to his wo to the death with any other young man over a matter of passion, hurt pride, or thwarted desire As much as in the dead head of Van Horn or of any ht reside the clue to existence, the solution of the riddle

So he continued to rap Jerry on the nose away fro within him that impelled him to leap forward always to the stick that hurt hith and the unreasoning of youth he knew it to be, and he ade for it all his lean grey wisdo, sure soht have uttered in Van Horn's fashi+on of speech Instead, in beche-de-mer, which was as habitual to hiht:

”My word, that fella dog no fright along e wearied sooner of the play, and Bashti put an end to it by rapping Jerry heavily behind the ear and stretching hi the ht Bashti's speculative fancy The stick, with a single sharp rap of it, had effected the change Where had gone the anger and wit of the puppy? Was that all it was, the flaust of air? One instant Jerry had raged and suffered, snarled and leaped, willed and directed his actions The next instant he lay limp and crumpled in the little death of unconsciousness In a brief space, Bashti knew, consciousness, sensation, motion, and direction would flow back into the wilted little carcass But where, in the one all the consciousness, and sensitiveness, and will?