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"But I was not unconscious. I sat in that chair and stared in the mirror with unwinking eyes for two solid hours while my image stared back. I could hear the clock tick and sounds outside my hut, but I could not move—will, energy, initiative, were dead. I can readily understand how anyone under the influence of kingo could be dragged into a gruesome form of thralldom. . . . It was just after four o'clock when the drug released me as quickly as it had taken hold. One moment I was as soulless as my image in the mirror, and the next I was absolutely normal. I felt no after-effects of any sort. It was an interesting test but I have never tried it since. One voluntary visit to the realm of the living dead is enough in the life of any man!"
At present Mr. Carnochan has a Manhattan organic chemist trying to isolate the effective poison in kingo root.
Another of his exciting adventures was killing a 40-lb. porcupine in its burrow deep underground. This he did as an apprentice in the guild of Porcupine-Men whose duty is to rid Wanyamwesi farms of that crop-destroying beast.
His great good friend, burly Queen Nzele of the Samue group, owned the most famed bed of Central Africa, a native-made fourposter, 7 x 8 ft. No one ever slept in it. She used a mat on the floor, like any native. Enlightened, she conscripted her subjects to build roads and drive away cattle on which pestilential tsetse flies lived. Considerate, she shared her wealth with the tribe by maintaining a squad of husbands and titularly "marrying" girls so that she could gain the right of giving them dowries. Such consideration ended when she became a Mohammedan, and therefore monogamous.
British administration has driven the practice of Snake medicine under cover. Mohammedanism is slowly filtering among the people. Christianity has no good roots. The only Christian institution among the 4,000,000 Wanyamwesi, said Young Python Carnochan in Manhattan last week, was a Catholic school for training native priests. During the past eleven years that Catholic school graduated only one priest.
*EMPIRE OF THE SNAKES—By F. G. Carnochan & H. C. Adamson—Stokes ($2.50).