"Mgamu", uma breve história de Senhor Dunsany em sua coleção O quarto livro de Jorkens. A história é contada no Billiards Club por Jorkens, que está repetindo a história contada a ele por um homem chamado Polder que encontrou o sivver-verri.
"The sivver-verri," said Jorkens, "is described by the natives as a distinctly unpleasant beast. I have heard them describe him myself in Kenya. The Samburus know him and the Kikuyus, and of course the Wandoroboes. And even among the stout Masai I have met men that were afraid of the sivver-verri. When I found that the Masai were afraid of him, I knew that he was a very terrible beast. But the odd thing about all the stories I ever heard about it, barring the one I am going to tell you; and all the hints and whispers of him; was that no one had ever claimed to have seen the sivver-verri. It ws something that came very rarely to the huts of reed, and only by night, tearing its way in through the roof; and wherever it came it never left a survivor. All this I had heard; and so one day, when in the smoking-room of a ship in the Indian Ocean, going down the African coast, some men began to speak of the sivver-verri, I pricked up my ears, though I did not think it likely that I should hear anything new: on the contrary, I rather looked to telling them something they did not know, which I am afraid may be becoming rather a habit of mine, when conversation comes round to Africa."
[. . .] And I think I was about to tell them something that I had heard myself about this beast that guards his invisibility so successfully against every living native of Africa, when my breath was taken away. Literally taken away. I stopped breathing. A little man with a clipped grey moustache who had not spoken, and whom I had put down in my mind as a doctor in a small English village taking the one trip of his lifetime, said 'I have seen it.'
"'You have seen the sivver-verri?' we said.
"'I have seen it,' he said again And then he told us about the sivver-verri, the only man in the world who claimed to have seen it. So you see, things have been seen in Africa that I have not met. I merely mention it in case you should think that I claim to have met everything."
Again we made the right noises in our throats.
"Because that is not at all the case," went on Jorkens.
O título é o nome de um feiticeiro na história:
"'[. . .] And on the way I met a witch-doctor hanging about. He was the evillest-looking devil I ever saw. And he gave me a nasty look, making his face even more horrible and causing me to think that he was jealous of me. Quite a reasonable idea for me to have, because magic is what the natives had actually asked for, and I and my rifle must have seem to them very much like a man arriving with a machine-gun at a pheasant-shoot. For two reasons: the machine-gun would be far too powerful, and also ineffective.
[. . . .]
"'I asked them about the witch-doctor, wondering what they thought of his jealousy.
"'"That is Mgamu," they said.
"'But there are men in many countries, as I have often noticed, whom nobody talks about much; and Mgamu was evidently one of these.