Chapter 30—Royal Obsequies
On the following morning the town of Kazonndé presented an aspect of unwonted desolation. Awe-struck at the event of the previous evening, the natives had all shut themselves up in their huts. That a monarch who was to be assumed as of divine origin should perish with one of his ministers by so horrible a death was a thing wholly unparalleled in their experience. Some of the elder part of the community remembered having taken part in certain cannibal preparations, and were aware that the cremation of a human body is no easy matter, yet here was a case in which two men had been all but utterly consumed without any extraneous application. Here was a mystery that baffled all their comprehension.
Old Alvez had also retired to the seclusion of his own residence; hav
