I have never been worried with the wish, or ambition to be a head-hunter
in the Dyak sense, but on this one occasion I did wish that it had been
possible, without violating any law, or doing anything to a
fellow-creature which I should not like done to myself, to have obtained
possession of this man's head, with its set of unique and terrible
teeth. For how, in the name of Evolution, did he come by them, and by
other physical peculiarities--the snarling habit and that high-pitched
animal voice, for instance--which made him a being different from
others--one separate and far apart? Was he, so admirably formed, so
complete and well-balanced, merely a freak of nature, to use an
old-fashioned phrase--a sport, or spontaneous individual variation--an
experiment for a new human type, imagined by Nature in some past period,
inconceivably long ago, but which she had only now, too late, found time
to carry out? Or rather was he like that little hairy maiden exhibited
not long ago in London, a reproduction of the past, the mystery called
reversion--a something in the life of a species like memory in the life
of an individual, the memory which suddenly brings back to the old man's
mind the image of his childhood? For no dream-monster in human form ever
appeared to me with so strange and terrible a face; and this was no
dream but sober fact, for I saw and spoke with this man; and unless cold
steel has given him his quietus, or his own horse has crushed him, or a
mad bull sored him--all natural forms of death in that wild land--he is
probably still living and in the prime of life, and perhaps at this very
moment drinking gin at some astonished traveller's expense at that very
bar where I met him.
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