ks grotesque and uncanny, yet the pleasure in mere
noise and dancing is childish and harmless. The picture is imposing and
beautiful in its simplicity, gruesome in its wildness and sensuality,
and splendid with the red lights which play on the shining, naked
bodies. In the blackness of the night nothing is visible but that
red-lit group of two or three hundred men, careless of to-morrow,
given up entirely to the pleasure of the moment. The spectacle lasts
all night, and the crowd becomes more and more wrought up, the leaps
of the dancers wilder, the singing louder. We stand aside, incapable
of feeling with these people or sharing their joy, realizing that
theirs is a perfectly strange atmosphere which will never be ours.

Towards morning we left, none too early, for a tremendous shower came
down and kept on all next morning. I went up to the village again, to
find a most dismal and dejected crowd. Around the square, in the damp
forest, seedy natives stood and squatted in small groups, shivering
with cold and wet. Some tried to warm themselves around fires, but
with poor success. Bored and unhappy, they stared at us as we passed,
and did not move. Women and children had made umbrellas of large flat
leaves, which they carried on their heads; the soot which had formed
their festival dress was washed off by the rain. The square itself
was deserted, save for a pack of dogs and a few little boys, rolling
about in the mud puddles. Once in a while an old man would come out
of the gamal, yawn and disappear. In short, it was a lendemain de
fete of the worst kind.

About once in a quarter of an hour a man would come to bring a tusked
pig to the chief, who danced a few times round the animal, stamped his
heel on the ground, uttered certain words, and retired with short,
stiff steps, shaking his head, into the gamal. The morning was over
by the time all the pigs were ready. I spent most of the time out of
doors, rather than in the gamal, for there many of the dancers of the
evening lay in all directions and in most uncomfortable positions,
beside and across each other, snoring, shivering or staring sulkily
into dark corners. I was offered a log to sit on, and it might have
been quite acceptable had not one old man, trembling with cold,
pressed closely against me to get warm, and then, half asleep,
attempted to lay his shaggy, oil-soaked head on my shoulder, while
legions of starved fleas attacked my limbs, forcing me to beat a
has