No one entered this wood, which was composed of giant chestnuts, palm, orange, and lime trees, all growing wild for many leagues, as the spirit of evil was alleged to harbour in its inmost recesses.
Here then, on its skirts, a mother and her infant were sometimes sacrificed with tortures too terrible for description, to propitiate this dark spirit; though in some rare instances a husband might ransom his doomed wife with a poor female slave, captured from a hostile tribe.
So sacred is this wood deemed, that if a person accidentally enters it by one path, he must force his way through it to the very end without turning or looking back--a feat none ever performed, as it teems with wild beasts, whose fangs and claws speedily dispose of the intruder. Even a foreign _negro_, or his wives, dare not enter it; then, what punishment was due to me, a white man, for having ventured to do so?
Dapper, a very old traveller, and a bold fellow, too, mentions that, to ridicule the faith of the people in this forest, he went shooting into it, and deliberately turned _back_ when about half way through.
"What will the Devil think of this?" he asked the negro priests, who were scared by his audacity, and confounded by his return in safety.
"He does not trouble himself about white men," was their response; and, singular to say, our traveller was permitted to go unscathed, for savages generally admire courage and temerity.
However, the negroes into whose hands I had unfortunately fallen seemed of a different opinion from Mr. Dapper's friends; and after a noisy palaver, to which I listened with an agonizing interest, my life being in the balance, they laid violent hands upon me.
I was dragged to a tall palm-tree, which grew on the verge of the forest, with some of its fibrous roots extending among the grassy border on one side, and into the dry sand of the desert on the other.
I was placed with my back against the stem; and there they bound me hard and fast by drawing my arms round it and tying my wrists securely by the tendrils of a convolvolus--one of the climbing kind, which, when tough and green, is strong as a new inch-rope.
They then retired, mocking and grinning, and ever and anon threatening to launch their asseguys at me; thus I fully expected to be martyred like St. Sebastian, as we see him in Guido's picture at Dulwich; but they left me, and disappeared round an angle of the forest, abandoning me to my fate and my own terrible reflections.