"Have mercy, sir," they moaned with the piteous wail of a dying child.
But Lim Ho had no mercy to show his wretched victims, he waved his hand to the executioners, who, at that sign, entirely changed their mode of operation, and now the gentle fanning was replaced by a severe downright flogging. The blows, laid on with the full strength of the sailors, rained down upon the bare bodies of the tortured wretches, their skin resounded under the pattering of the leaves, which, less barbarous than the men who wielded them, began to tear and fly from their stems.
As soon as that flogging commenced, the prisoners no longer moaned, they roared, they yelled, they howled with anguish. It was the cry of a wild beast wounded to death, which gathers up its remaining strength for one dying roar.
The limbs of the miserable men now not only shrank and writhed; but with the convulsive energy which only such extremity of torture could lend, they clasped with their legs the smooth trunks of the trees, they seemed to try and sink into them and bury themselves in the wood. It was an awful spectacle, and yet, strange to say, no wounds could be seen, no contusions, no livid spots even; nothing at all in fact to account for such unheard-of suffering. The skin only looked somewhat puffy, somewhat red and inflamed, and covered with very small blisters. The wounds which the bodies of the victims bore were serious enough, it is true; but they had nothing to do with the leaves of the terrible nettle. In their almost superhuman efforts to burst their bonds, and in their frantic contortions, the sufferers had forced the ropes into the flesh, and here and there the strands had cut their way to the bone, so that streams of blood were pouring along their arms, along their thighs and loins, and were forming broad red spots on the soft slippery soil. That anguish must have been acute enough in itself; but it was nothing compared to the torture occasioned by the leaves of the devil-thistle.
At length the instruments of torture had become well nigh stripped, there was left in fact only the bare twigs, on which here and there a few tattered leaves were still dangling, the poisonous leaves lay scattered in all directions, faded, torn, and shapeless about the feet of the sufferers. But, even then, Lim Ho did not think of causing the torture to cease, he seemed to be bent on utterly destroying his victims. He ordered the men to stop for a few moments. It was not because he felt any pity. Not at all, he merely caused the half dead bodies to be sprinkled with salt water, which, if possible, augmented the torments they endured. The monster was, in fact, on the point of resuming his inhuman flogging, when suddenly a cry was raised, "The police, the police!"