More than half-way through The Devil-Tree of El Dorado, Jack Templemore is finally enlightened as to the terrible secret that haunts the people of Manoa. The corrupt priesthood of this degenerate kingdom has been maintaining its power by sacrificing citizens to the anthropophagous tree. The reader will not be surprised by this outcome – an illustration of a writhing human body encoiled within the tentacles of the tree faces the title-page of the book – but the revelation of the secret is nonetheless played to great dramatic effect. Templemore, “oppressed by a dim unshapen foreshadowing of some new and nameless horror,” watches breathlessly as a “something” is regurgitated from the maw of the tree and passed about the mobile and twisting branches (p. 249, emphasis in text). The text lingers over the details of Templemore's sickness and pallor as he finally recognizes the obvious – “Great heavens! It is a human body!” (p. 250; emphasis in text) – and lingers as well over the death-agonies of the next human victim selected by the tree and consumed “with an awful deliberation and absence of hurry” (p. 252).

All of this should be enough, to quote the review of Devil-Tree mentioned in chapter 2, “to satisfy the most blasé amateur of the gruesome.” Into a single scene, unfolded by means of a heightened gothic rhetoric of indefinition and suspense, are condensed the themes of gothic nature, the Thing-ness of the consumed human body, spectatorial nausea, and white barbarism or degeneracy (signaled by the practice of human sacrifice). And yet Aubrey goes the extra mile, so to speak, for his reader.