Page:Travels in West Africa, Congo Français, Corisco and Cameroons (IA travelsinwestafr00kingrich).pdf/584

 carry off the crew. Some of them have been brought for trial but no complete case has been made out against them!" In comment upon this account, which is evidently written by some one well versed in the affair, I will only remark that sometimes, instead of the three-pronged forks, there are fixed in the paws of the leopard skin sharp-pointed cutting knives, the skin being made into a sort of glove into which the hand of the human leopard fits. In one skin I saw down south this was most ingeniously done. The knives were shaped like the leopard's claws, curved, sharp-pointed, and with cutting edges underneath, and I am told the American Mendi Mission, which works in the Sierra Leone districts, have got a similar skin in their possession. In Calabar and Libreville, these murders used to be very common right in close to the white settlements; but in Calabar white jurisdiction is now too much feared for them to be carried on near it, and in Libreville the making of the "Boulevard" between that town and Glass has cleared the custom out from its great haunt along by the swamp path that was formerly there. But before the existence of the Boulevard, when the narrow track was intercepted by patches of swamp, and ran between dense bush, it was notoriously unsafe even for a white man to go along it after dark. In the districts I know where human leopardism occurs (from Bonny to Congo Belge) the victims are killed to provide human flesh for certain secret societies who eat it as one of their rites. Sometimes it is used by a man playing a lone hand to kill an enemy.

The human alligator mentioned, is our old friend the witch crocodile—the spirit of the man in the crocodile. I never myself came across a case of a man in his corporeal body swimming about in a crocodile skin, and I doubt whether any native would chance himself inside a crocodile skin and swim about in the river among the genuine articles for fear of their penetrating his disguise mentally and physically.

In Calabar witch crocodiles are still flourishing. There is an immense old brute that sporting Vice-Consuls periodically go after, which is known to contain the spirit of a Duke Town chief who shall be nameless, because they are getting on at such a pace just round Duke Town that haply I