In One Skin I Saw Down South
This Was Most Ingeniously Done.
The knives were shaped like the
leopard's claws, curved, sharp-pointed, and with cutting edges
underneath, and I am told the American Mendi Mission, which works in
the Sierra Leone districts, have got a similar skin in their
possession.
The human alligator mentioned, is our old friend the witch
crocodile - the spirit of the man in the crocodile. I never myself
came across a case of a man in his corporeal body swimming about in
a crocodile skin, and I doubt whether any native would chance
himself inside a crocodile skin and swim about in the river among
the genuine articles for fear of their penetrating his disguise
mentally and physically.
In Calabar witch crocodiles are still flourishing. There is an
immense old brute that sporting Vice-Consuls periodically go after,
which is known to contain the spirit of a Duke Town chief who shall
be nameless, because they are getting on at such a pace just round
Duke Town that haply I might be had up for libel. When I was in
Calabar once, a peculiarly energetic officer had hit that crocodile
and the chief was forthwith laid up by a wound in his leg. He said
a dog had bit him. They, the chief and the crocodile, are quite
well again now, and I will say this in favour of that chief, that
nothing on earth would persuade me to believe that he went fooling
about in the Calabar River in his corporeal body, either in his own
skin or a crocodile's.
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