tell it to you here, in a civilised house, but at the time the sight of that weird
figure dancing in the moonlight, with its ungainly shadow, fairly scared me.
'She danced silently like that for some minutes; setting to the dead baby, and to
her own uncouth capering shadow, till the sight made me feel sick. If anybody
had told me that morning, that I should ever be badly frightened by an old
woman, I should have laughed; but I saw nothing to laugh at in the idea, while
that grotesque dancing lasted.
'When it was over she squatted down again with her back towards us, and took
up the baby. She nursed it as a mother might nurse her child. I could see the
curve of the thing's head beyond her thin left arm, and its little legs dangled
loosely near her right elbow. Then she began to croon to it, swinging it gently
from side to side. She rocked it slowly at first, but gradually the pace quickened,
until she was swaying her body to and fro, and from side to side, at such a pace,
that to me she looked as though she was falling all ways at once. And all the
time that queer crooning kept getting faster and faster, and more awful to listen
to. Then suddenly she changed the motion. She seized the thing she was nursing
by its arms, and began dancing it up and down, still moving at a fearful pace,
and crooning worse than ever. I could see the little puckered face of the thing
above her head, every time she danced it up, and then, as she danced it down
again, I lost sight of it for a second, until it reappeared once more. I kept my eye
fixed on the thing's face every time it came up, and—do not believe me if you
had rather not—it began to be alive. Its eyes seemed to me to be open, and its
mouth was working like a little child's when it tries to laugh and is too young to
do it properly. Juggins saw it too, for I could hear him drawing his breath harder,
and shorter than a healthy man should. Then, all in a moment, she did
something. It looked to me as though she bent forward and kissed it, and at that
very instant a cry went up like the wail of a lost soul. It may have been
something in the jungle, but I know my jungles pretty thoroughly, and I swear to
you that I have never heard any cry like it before or since. Then, before we knew
what she was doing, that old hag threw the body back into the grave, and began
dumping down the earth, and jumping on it, while the cry grew fainter and
fainter. It all happened so quickly, that I had not time to think of doing anything,
till I was startled back into action by the sharp crack of Juggin's pistol in my ear
as he fired at the hag.
'"She's burying it alive!" cried Juggins, which was a queer thing for a man to say,
who had seen the baby lying stark and dead more than thirty hours earlier, but
the same thought was in my mind too, and we started forward at a run. The hag