Books: Human Candle

BURNERS OF MEN—Marcel Griaule— Lippincott ($2.50).

Long before the danger of war focused the world’s attention on Ethiopia, that wild country had served as a magnet for such dissimilar imaginations as those of Evelyn Waugh (Black Mischief) and the late L. M. Nesbitt (HellHole of Creation). While both volumes made the country and its people out in strange, terrifying terms, they emerge as even more formidable in the account of Marcel Griaule, whose description of a French scientific expedition that traveled from the Nile to Addis Ababa has the quality of a nightmare sustained beyond human endurance.

The strange half-Oriental, half-African flavor of the book is concentrated in the scene that gives it its title. A criminal in Addiet, remote mountain city, was sentenced to “death by fire, in muslin,” for having shot at the native prince. Rolls of muslin were dipped in hot wax and honey, wrapped in layers around the prisoner, almost entirely covering him except for his eyes and nose. Stiff-legged, he was stood up in the centre of a small fire. “It was early morning; cows lowed. The witnesses smelled the perfume of honey given out by the living candle. . . . At this precise moment some slight things happened which did honor to humanity. One of the Whites present at the ceremony fainted; and the other can state that the Prince, the dignitaries . . . the executioners and all the rest breathed through the mouth in short breaths. . . .”

Eight natives formed a circle around the man who became a pillar of fire, “repelled him with precautionary blows of the lance . . . so as not to make mortal wounds.” widening and contracting the circle, shouting at the top of their lungs, while the flames soared 15 feet high. The only part of the prisoner that did not crumble to ashes was his eyeballs.