But I waited and watched long before daring to pass across the wide open space in the centre of which the fire had been kindled.

The torture-post yet stood there, black and charred, while the ground beneath was littered with dead ashes.

The bodies of three white men, two of them naked and marked by fire, lay close at hand, just as they had been carelessly flung aside to make room for new victims; yet I dared not stop to learn who they might have been in life.

The sight of their foul disfigurement only rendered me the more eager to reach the living with a message of hope.
I moved like a snake, dragging my body an inch at a time by firmly grasping with extended hands the tough grass-roots, and writhing forward as noiselessly as if I were stalking some prey.

There were times when I advanced so slowly it would have puzzled a watcher to determine whether mine was not also the body of the dead.