# IX: A Little Foot explained — She

> Chapter companion for She by H. Rider Haggard.

## What happens

After the cannibal attack, Holly awakens to find Leo wounded and Ustane tending to him. Billali arrives and explains the local custom of 'hot-potting' strangers, praising their fight. Billali later visits Holly in a sepulchral chamber, recounts a childhood memory of a preserved female corpse, and retrieves a perfectly embalmed woman's foot from under a stone bench. Holly keeps the relic. Leo recovers over three days, and they prepare to journey to Kôr to meet She.

## Themes in this chapter

### Mortality and Immortality

Billali's story of the preserved corpse and the recovered foot highlight the tension between decay and preservation, and the fleeting nature of life.

### Colonialism and the Other

The cannibal custom and Billali's matter-of-fact explanation underscore the exoticization and moral judgment of the Amahagger.

## Character check-ins

### Horace Holly

Narrator; awakens after the fight, converses with Billali, examines the preserved foot.

### Leo Vincey

Lying wounded with a spear cut in his side; tended by Ustane; recovers over three days.

### Ustane

Bending over Leo, washing and binding his wound.

### Job

Uninjured but bruised and trembling after the attack.

### Billali

Directs the binding of surviving cannibals; praises the fight; recounts a childhood story of a preserved corpse and retrieves a woman's foot.

### Mahomed

Dead; killed by Holly during the cannibal attack; his body lies by the fire-stained pot.

## Key lines

> It is a custom, he answered, with a shrug. Myself I think it an evil one; but then, he added by an afterthought, I do not like the taste of strangers, especially after they have wandered through the swamps and lived on wildfowl.

Billali dismisses the cannibal custom as evil but admits he personally dislikes the taste of swamp-fed strangers.

_Billali's casual attitude toward the hot-potting custom reveals cultural relativism and dark humor._

> I learned to love that dead form, that shell which once had held a life that no more is. I would creep up to her and kiss her cold face, and wonder how many men had lived and died since she was, and who had loved her and embraced her in the days that long had passed away.

Billali recalls as a boy falling in love with a preserved female corpse, kissing her and pondering the lives of those who had known her.

_Billali's necrophilic reminiscence underscores themes of beauty, death, and obsession._

> Poor little foot! I set it down upon the stone bench where it had lain for so many thousand years, and wondered whose was the beauty that it had upborne through the pomp and pageantry of a forgotten civilisation.

Holly reflects on the foot's journey through life and death, imagining the beauty and history it once supported.

_Holly's poetic meditation on the foot emphasizes the transience of life and the mystery of the past._

## Links

- HTML: https://www.betterreads.online/discover/she_se/chapters/ix-a-little-foot
- Book: https://www.betterreads.online/discover/she_se
- All chapters: https://www.betterreads.online/discover/she_se/chapters