sylvan, torchlit
stage that night was something as new as anything can be under the sun,
because it was something that had not happened for ten thousand years.--

We who are worn with novelty can never reconquer for ourselves the
thrill of an unmitigated wonder. We have sold the birthright. But
imagine the toppling of a hundred centuries! You could have seen it in
the eyes of those watchers, in their rapt, rapacious attention, in the
conflict that went on within them visibly; traitorous applause pent and
pitted against all the instinctive protest of an established art.--

"Yes, but this isn't _dancing_!"

Yet their bodies, one here, one there, would begin to sway--

Three Kanaka men, strangers to the island, sat cross-legged on the turf.
One had taken over a drum from a local musician. The other two had
instruments fashioned of dried gourds with fingering pieces of bamboo
and strings of gut--barbaric cousins to the mandolin. So, on this one
night in history, the music of another tribe had come to Taai. It just
escaped being an authentic "tune." How it escaped was indefinable. The
sophisticated ear would almost have it, and abruptly it had got away in
some provoking lapse, some sudden and bizarre disintegration of tone.
And the drumbeat, bringing it back, ran like a fever pulse in a man's
blood.

In the center of the sward, her back to the musicians, a solitary female
danced; a Kanaka woman, clothed in a single shift of the sheerest
crimson cotton, tied at one shoulder and falling to mid-thigh. Not from
Taai did this woman come; one saw that; not from any near island or
group. Her beauty was extraordinary, like that of the Marquesans, with
that peculiar straightness of all the lines, at once Grecian, austere,
and incalculably voluptuous.--

The dance, as I saw it for the first time that night, I will not speak
of. I have traded to many islands in many groups--even the Low
Archipelago--but the island where that dance was indigenous I am sure
I've never touched. Compared with any of the _hulas_, set and fixed in
each locality as the rites of Rome, it was sophisticated; it gave an
illusion of continuous invention and spontaneity; it was flesh swept by
a wind and shattered; it ravished the eyes.

I don't know how long I watched; how long all the immortal flame in me
lent itself to the histrionic purposes of that woman. But I shall never
forget it. Never! Never!

I looked away. I saw two faces. One of them hung over