a head like it. Besides, I would cure it well. I would take
months and months. The moons would come and the moons would go,
and the smoke would be very slow, and I should myself gather the
materials for the curing smoke. The skin would not wrinkle. It
would be as smooth as your skin now."

He stood up, and from the dim rafters, grimed with the smoking of
countless heads, where day was no more than a gloom, took down a
matting-wrapped parcel and began to open it.

"It is a head like yours," he said, "but it is poorly cured."

Bassett had pricked up his ears at the suggestion that it was a
white man's head; for he had long since come to accept that these
jungle-dwellers, in the midmost centre of the great island, had
never had intercourse with white men. Certainly he had found them
without the almost universal beche-de-mer English of the west South
Pacific. Nor had they knowledge of tobacco, nor of gunpowder.
Their few precious knives, made from lengths of hoop-iron, and
their few and more precious tomahawks from cheap trade hatchets, he
had surmised they had captured in war from the bushmen of the
jungle beyond the grass lands, and that they, in turn, had
similarly gained them from the salt-water men who fringed the coral
beaches of the shore and had contact with the occasional white men.

"The folk in the out beyond do not know how to cure heads," old
Ngurn explained, as he drew forth from the filthy matting and
placed in Bassett's hands an indubitable white man's head.

Ancient it was beyond question; white it was as the blond hair