Ten minutes after that we were surrounded by naked black giants, all armed with spears and a personal smell that outstank one's notions of Gehenna.
We had nothing to offer them, except money, for which they obviously had not the slightest use.

None of us knew their language.

From their point of view we were thieves taken in the act, all but one of us unarmed as far as they knew, to be judged by the tribal standard that for more centuries than men remember has decreed that the thief shall die.

They were most incensed at the four unhappy islanders, probably on the same principle that dogs pick on the weakest, and fight most readily with dogs of a more or less similar breed.
It was Coutlass who saved that situation.

He instantly went crazy, or the next thing to it, wrinkling up his black-whiskered face into a caricature, yelling a Greek monologue in a refrain consisting of five notes repeated over and over, and dancing around in a wide ring with one leg shorter than the other and his arms executing symbols of witchcraft.
The chief was the biggest man--not an inch less than seven feet--black as ebony, from the curly hair, into which his patient wives had plaited fiber to hang in a greasy lump over his neck, all down his naked body to the soles of his enormous feet.