“You’d hardly believe it, perhaps, unless you’re familiar with savages, but these poor, misguided, ignorant creatures took me straight to their kind of joss place to present me to the blessed old black stone there.  By this time I was beginning to sort of realise the depth of their ignorance, and directly I set eyes on this deity I took my cue.  I started a baritone howl, ‘wow-wow,’ very long on one note, and began waving my arms about a lot, and then very slowly and ceremoniously turned their image over on its side and sat down on it.  I wanted to sit down badly, for diving dresses ain’t much wear in the tropics.  Or, to put it different like, they’re a sight too much.  It took away their breath, I could see, my sitting on their joss, but in less time than a minute they made up their minds and were hard at work worshipping me.  And I can tell you I felt a bit relieved to see things turning out so well, in spite of the weight on my shoulders and feet.

“But what made me anxious was what the chaps in the canoes might think when they came back.  If they’d seen me in the boat before I went down, and without the helmet on—­for they might have been spying and hiding since over night—­they would very likely take a different view from the others.  I was in a deuce of a stew about that for hours, as it seemed, until the shindy of the arrival began.

“But they took it down—­the whole blessed village took it down.  At the cost of sitting up stiff and stern, as much like those sitting Egyptian images one sees as I could manage, for pretty nearly twelve hours, I should guess at least, on end, I got over it.  You’d hardly think what it meant in that heat and stink.  I don’t think any of them dreamt of the man inside.  I was just a wonderful leathery great joss that had come up with luck out of the water.  But the fatigue! the heat! the beastly closeness! the mackintosheriness and the rum! and the fuss!  They lit a stinking fire on a kind of lava slab there was before me, and brought in a lot of gory muck—­the worst parts of what they were feasting on outside, the Beasts—­ and burnt it all in my honour.  I was getting a bit hungry, but I understand now how gods manage to do without eating, what with the smell of burnt-offerings about them.  And they brought in a lot of the stuff they’d got off the brig and, among other stuff, what I was a bit relieved to see, the kind of pneumatic pump that was used for the compressed air affair, and then a lot of chaps and girls came in and danced about me something disgraceful.  It’s extraordinary the different ways different people have of showing respect.  If I’d had a hatchet handy I’d have gone for the lot of them—­they made me feel that wild.  All this time I sat as stiff as company, not knowing anything better to do.  And at last, when nightfall came, and the wattle joss-house place got a bit too shadowy for their taste—­all these here savages are afraid of the dark, you know—­and I started a sort of ‘Moo’ noise, they built big bonfires outside and left me alone in peace in the darkness of my hut, free to unscrew my windows a bit and think things over, and feel just as bad as I liked.  And Lord!  I was sick.