When She Picked Up The Wood She
Noticed That It Was Covered With The Same Sticky Abomination She Had
Met
Before that evening, and it smelt of the same faint smell she
had noticed as soon as she had reached
Her house, and by now the
whole air seemed oppressive with it.
As soon as the lamp was alight she saw what the stuff was, namely,
blood. Blood was everywhere, the rest of the sticks in the fire had
it on them, it sizzled at the burning ends, and ran off the other in
rills. There were pools of it about her clean, sandy yard. Her own
room was reeking, the bed, the stools, the floor; it trickled down
the door-post; coagulated on the lintel. She herself was smeared
with it from the things she had come in contact with in the dark,
and the slaves seemed to have been sitting in pools of it. The
things she picked up off the table and shelf left rims of it behind
them; there was more in the skillets, and the oil in the open palm-
oil lamps had a film of it floating on the oil. Investigation
showed that the whole of the rest of her house was in a similar
mess. The good lady gave a complete catalogue of the household
furniture and its condition, which I need not give here. The slave
girls when the light came were terrified at what they saw, and she
called in the aristocracy of the village, and asked them their
opinion on the blood palaver. They said they could make nothing of
it at first, but subsequently formed the opinion that it meant
something was going to happen, and suggested with the kind, helpful
cheerfulness of relatives and friends, that they should not wonder
if it were a prophecy of her own death. This view irritated the
already tried lady, and she sent them about their business, and
started the slaves on house-cleaning. The blood cleaned up all
right when you were about it, but kept on turning up in other
places, and in the one you had just cleaned as soon as you left off
and went elsewhere; and the morning came and found things in much
the same state until "before suntime," say about 10 o'clock, when it
faded away.
I cautiously tried to get my stately, touchy dowager duchess to
explain how it was that there was such a lot of blood, and how it
was it got into the house. She just said "it had to go somewhere,"
and refused to give rational explanations as Chambers's Journal does
after telling a good ghost story. I found afterwards that it was
quite decided it was a case of "blood come before," and at Okyon,
Miss Slessor told me, in regard to the similar case there, that this
was the opinion held regarding the phenomenon. It is always held
uncanny in Africa if a person dies without shedding blood.
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