MISSION STATION 213

were often retained as charms and 'fed', and there
were masks, even apart from the man who wore them,
which it was fatal to a woman to see: fatal presum-
ably because the devil's agents would exact retribu-
tion, with the knife or with poison, but to what extent
was this human punishment also supernatural?

'Devil', of course, is a word used by the English-
speaking native .to describe something unknown in
our theology: it has nothing to do with evil. One
might equally call these big bush devils angels—for
they have the angelic properties of alacrity and in-
visibility—if that word contained no element of
'good'. In a Christian land we have grown so accus-
tomed to the idea of a spiritual war, of God and Satan,
that this supernatural world, which is neither good
nor evil but simply Power, is almost beyond sympa-
thetic comprehension. Not quite: for those witches
which haunted our childhood were neither good
nor evil. They terrified us with their power, but we
knew all the time that we must not escape them.
They simply demanded recognition: flight was a
weakness.

That night Dr. Harley showed us a grotesquely
horrible collection of devils' masks. Each one had
obviously been made by a conscious artist. No effect
was accidental. Here were the two-faced masks of a
woman's society; here male masks which women
were forbidden to see. These were different from the
masks worn by the dancing devils. Those had been
part human, part animal, these were modelled closely
on human features. There was one with a thin beard
made of chicken's feathers, and another, the oldest
(it looked at least three hundred years old), had dje