about eleven o'clock
`` The chief did not reply in words , but with a meaning smile , pointed to a vein on his black wrist , and set his sharp , pointed teeth against it , in a way that was a reply . `` I was anxious to see for myself , naturally , suspecting some hocus-pocus , so I ventured to be respectfully dubious . `` The chief was in an amiable mood ; he bade me visit his tent with my servant at moon-rise , and he would prove that this was no lie , but the truth . `` When we went out , it was about eleven o'clock , and the surrounding jungle was full of the horrible noises of an African night ; the wail of the small lemur , that sounds like the death-moan of a child ; the more distant roar of the lion in the black depths of the forest , too thick for the moonlight to ever penetrate ; the giant trees of the bombax around the encampment , wreathed with llianes and parasitical poison vines that cast fantastic shadows on the ground , white with the perfectly white moonlight of the tropics , that reminds one of the electric light in its purity of ray and the blackness of the shadows that contrast with it . `` Noiselessly my black servant and I proceeded to the chief 's enclosure . His slaves permitted us to pass , by his orders , and we found ourselves in his tent , where he sat in grave silence on a pile of skins , the flare of a torch revealing fitfully the ugly face of the medicine-man , crouched with due humility on the earthen floor at his master 's feet . After an exchange of compliments , his highness informed me that he had ordered one of his female slaves to be brought , that the poison had already been administered without her knowledge , and he also briefly remarked , as a proof of his clemency , that it was fortunate for her that the white man had doubted the drink , as otherwise she would have been given over to torture , since she had proved unfaithful to her lord , the chief having bestowed her on one of his sentries , whom she had betrayed with a soldier .