But pass to what?
There was the rub.

And so it was, on occasion, that he ordered all forth from his big grass house, and, alone with his problem, lowered from the roof-beams the matting-wrapped parcels of heads of men he had once seen live and who had passed into the mysterious nothingness of death.
Not as a miser had he collected these heads, and not as a miser counting his 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 know what he guessed they might know, now that they had long since gone into the darkness that rounds the end of life.
Various were the heads Bashti thus interrogated--in his hands, on his knees, in his dim-lighted grasshouse, 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.