Limekiller!

“There is no „Well“ about it! Mr. Limekiller, in some places, we are still living in the seventeenth century.! Sounds which no one in your world has heard in living memory except perhaps in the farthest wilderness, almost everyone here has heard. The panther’s scream: (The ‘lion,’ we call it here.) The wild hogs in their hundreds, like a flight of aeroplanes, they sound! Everything that moves, walks, or crawls or… or whatever… in your forests have been recognized and classified a thousand over. Even the creatures which are extinct, in your country, you know what they were, and you have their skins and bones in your museums: But not here. There are still things alive and quick in the remoter parts of our own nation, and if they do not seem remote upon the map, try to reach them, try7 to reach them by way of a path too narrow' for a mule or along a stream wYhch has to be portaged every quarter of a miles you will realize very soon how remote; there are things living there which have not only never been classified, they have scarcely ever been seen!

“. sometimes their tracks have been seen. sometimes their dead and decomposed bodies have been seen. sometimes: not.

“— and so far I am speaking to you only of simple animals and reptiles and so on so forth: but there are other aspects of life than that. down here! Not five years ago — not five years ago, Mr. Limekiller, we had a report of a dying man in one of the back places in one of the Out-Districts, there was no Anglican priest there just then, so Father Swift went to bring the Sacrament and I went with him: it took us almost a week to get there and the man was already dead, he had been bitten, Mr. Limekiller, and he had been mauled, Mr. Limekiller, and things worse than that had been done to him, Mr. Limekiller: we could give him Christian burial, but we could not identify the nature of the teeth wrhich bit him nor the claws w'hich mauled him, and when w7e were shown the tracks of whatever it was which had done these things to him, we photographed them: and the photographs are still in one of the public offices: and they have never been identified: and even this, Mr. Limekiller, is merely, oh, do I dare say merely? — physical. And as for that which is perhaps not physical in any way we recognize in this our twentieth century of Christian knowledge.

“I tell you, Mr. Limekiller: where one lives, still, in the seventeenth century, seventeenth century things still happen. "

In how many different centuries did this small country live? — and in, nevertheless, one and the same time? Bigger than Rhode Island, the USA’s smallest State? Bigger than Prince Edward Island, Canada’s smallest Province? Yes. but, then, what wasn't? “No bigger than New Jersey,” it was said: and, “No bigger than Wales. Even Wales had its witches and New Jersey, its Jersey Devil, though.

But. something else had been said. And Bathsheba had said it. They had been on their way to a small stall kept by some old grandy-woman or other, who sold otherwise-almost-obsolete sweets: Roppadura, a form of the ancient brown-sugar-loaf, but moister, smaller, and more, well, lopsided, as it were: and, anyway, via the hands of Grandy Whatso- or Whosoever, flavored with ginger; she also sold catabru, a kind of archaic coconut candy — for Bathsheba had not only of a swift sudden developed a sweet tooth, she had developed one for the sweets of her childhood: Fry and Nestle and Hershey, go away: some other day, but not today.

He and Bathsheba, then, had been threading their way through a maze of lanes where, seemingly, she knew' everyone — and there happened also to be passing by, on the other side (like the Levite in the parable?) a man as thin as a stick; small and spare and of a reddish complexion, yet not ruddy: a White Creole? Maybe — she hid her face in her hand as they passed him, this man; he did not look at them; God knows that she did not look at him; what his name was Limekiller could not recollect, only that, as he wondered why she behaved thus, it came to his mind that -

— the man had passed on past the likelihood of hearing —

“He’s an obeah-man, isn’t he?” asked Jack, just then.

She made no answer. She trembled. Only so very, very slowly did she lower her protecting hand. My God, she is afraid of him — no: she is terrified of him! the thought came. What? Bathsheba? How calm and how sure she seemed in re all other things; how — suddenly — yet he had now to admit — there had been other and earlier hints — how utterly terrified of the uncanny and the supposedly diabolical. her very color had turned from its birth-right tan to something leaden and liverish.