he white light of the moon showed over the trees, throwing into
profound shade all else, save where the glow of the fire showed red. The
air grew chill now the sun had gone, and it was long since the men had
fed; but they still sat silent round the smouldering fire.

Suddenly one arose with a gesture of impatience, and, stepping back
behind the old man, flung off the ragged shirt and trousers that he
wore, and shook out the tangled mass of his hair free from the
compression the slouch hat he had been wearing left on it. A lump of
white clay lay on either side of the old man, and the younger, yielding
to some impulse which was upon him, stooped and daubed himself over with
it in streaks and splashes, and then went back to the fire and sat down
again.

The old man sang neither louder nor faster, nor gave any sign that he
saw or understood; but another of the men got up and flung away the
clothes he was wearing, and daubed the white clay on his naked skin, and
came back to the fire again. Then another did the same; then another,
and another, until all were naked, and all were daubed with clay, and
all were sitting round the fire, silent, as the old man crooned.

As the last one came back he looked up. Presently he ceased his dirge
and spoke, telling in an apparently unimpassioned way of the doings of
the warriors when he was a young man. He spoke of the pride the tribe
felt when one of their men faced and fought, single-handed, the band of
another tribe; and told how once one man had followed the enemy day and
night, while the moon grew old and died, and grew again before he caught
them--caught and slew them. Tales of daring, tales of vengeance, of
wrongs redressed, of vows redeemed; tales of the tribal might in the
days when their fathers ruled, he told them; and as they heard,
something of the old spirit came again to them as the inherited
instincts of countless generations stirred their blood and warmed their
hearts. The sloth they put on with the cast-off clothes of the white
invader fell away from their natures as the voice of the old man droned
in their ears. Half-forgotten memories of the war corroborees, danced in
the far-off days when the tribe was ever moving and ever fighting
against the white men; recollections of blood-stained figures of
warriors, left on the camping-ground when the rest of the tribe fled
before the storm of the white men's bullets, flitted through their
brains; stray shreds of tribal wails