Tramp, tramp, tramp! The stamping of innumerable feet. The murmur of innumerable voices. The waving of arms, the jangle of iron anklets, and the rising cloud of dust beneath the trampling of bare toes. The dancers range themselves in a wide circle, which slowly revolves in the light of the moon, now lighting up this part, anon the other part, giving a grey and ghostly look to the naked shoulders and close-cropped heads. Aah! Aah! Aah! The chant rises and falls, monotonous, barbaric. Bracelets and anklets, amulets and charms clash and clang again as the wearers thereof bend this way and that, crouching, stooping, flinging the upper part of their bodies backwards, raising high the knee and bringing down the leg with thunderous stamp, shaking themselves from head to foot like a dog emerging from his bath. Naked bodies, but for a strip of jagged leather falling athwart the hips; naked, lithe bodies on which the moon sheds her beams. Aah! Aah! Aah!
And with it the sound of the drum, the everlasting drum; stimulus to labour, spirit of the dance, dirge at the death-bed, call to the feast, frenzy-lasher at the religious ceremonial, medium of converse, warner of peril, bearer of news, telephone and telegraph in one. Go where you will, you cannot escape the drum—where human life is. The everlasting drum which heralds the setting sun, which ushers in the morn, which troubles your sleep and haunts your dreams. Borne across the silent waters, booming through the sombre forest, rising from the murmuring town, cheering on the railway cutters—the fascinating, tedious, mysterious, maddening, attractive, symbolic, inevitable, everlasting African drum.
I suppose they must be thirsty like every other living thing in the glare of the sun and the heat of the sky and the dust of the track, for they crowd thick and fast about the kurimi, the narrow belt of vegetation (a blessed sight in the “dries”) where the stream cuts the road. Pieridæ with white and yellow wings; Lycaenæ shot with amethyst and azure; Theklas, too, or what I take for such, with long, fragile, waving extremities, infinitely beautiful. Now and then a black and green Papilio, flashing silver from his under wing, harbinger of spring. Or some majestic, swift-flying Charaxes with broad and white band on a centre of russet brown—not the castor, alas! nor yet the pollux—I have yet to live to see them afloat ’neath the African sun. Narrow veins of muddy ooze trickle from the well-nigh dried-up bed. And here they congregate in swarms, proboscis thrust into the nectar, pumping, pumping up the liquid, fluttering and jostling one another for preferential places even as you may see the moths do on the “treacles” at home. The butterfly world is much like the human world after all in its egotism.