“They’re dancing to the chica jigs! Now for a ju-ju show!” chuckled Biglow. The gun-runner’s careless levity braced Clensy’s and Adam’s nerves wonderfully. “Come on, lads!” The next moment Biglow had boldly stood erect, and had run across the soft sands that separated the three of them from the cavern’s entrance. In another moment he had glanced hastily round, and seeing no sign of the vaudoux devotees, had slipped into the opening, the rocky cleft which led into the subterranean chambers of the secret vaudoux temples. Clensy and Adams immediately revealed their implicit faith in all that their courageous comrade did—they at once followed him.
“Keep close to me, lads,” said Biglow as he stole slowly along the side of the rocky wall of a passage that widened as it deepened.
“Well, now!” muttered Clensy. They could hear a voice singing a weird, sweet strain to words in a strange tongue. It was a woman’s voice, and the subterranean hollows produced a magical effect as the echoes of the song floating about and re-echoed, sounding like exiled strains of music in despair, calling for the brightness and beauty of the world outside.
“Gawd save me bacon!” said, or rather moaned Adams as the three of them dodged back into the deeper shadows, and hid behind the boulders that stood like massive pillars holding up the glittering crystalline subterranean roof. So silent were they as they stood there that they could hear each other’s breathing.
“All’s well, so far,” whispered Biglow. They were in a risky position though, for the slightest sound would betray their presence. The passage where they stood was about eighteen feet wide, so they were fortunately out of the way of anyone who might pass in or out of the fetish chambers. They stood still, breathless, like wonderfully chiselled statues, the highest thing in sculptural art, when a big mulatto fellow, clad in a surplice, walked down the passage from the chambers. They saw him go to the cavern’s entrance and peer cautiously out into the night. He was doing sentry duty, was on watch to give warning should anyone be seen approaching the vaudoux caves. The three hidden men saw his huge form glide by them as he passed along the passage on his way back to the hollow chambers. So close was he to Clensy that he felt a cool whiff of air touch his sweating face as the mulatto’s surpliced robe swished by.
“Come on,” whispered Biglow. The next moment they had arrived before the opening of some large inner chamber. By the dazzling glimmer of hanging lamps they knew they were close to the sacrificial altars of the terrible vaudoux, the altars that inspired strong Haytian men with fear, making them tremble when they passed through lonely forests by night, altars that inspired women and children with a vague terror of the devil as they whispered and stared with awestruck eyes by the firesides of the lonely homesteads round Port-au-Prince.
Biglow had already fixed his eye to a chink in the rocky wall. He could see all that was passing in the lofty chamber beyond. Adams, who had crouched behind Biglow, was vigorously chewing tobacco plug in an attempt to calm his excited nerves.
“Come you here, lad,” whispered Biglow; and Clensy, taking a place beside the intrepid gun-runner, at once fixed his eye to the chink. The sight Clensy saw made his brain swim in bewilderment. The scenic effect, while peeping through that tiny hole in the rocky wall, was as though he had fixed his eye to the tube of some marvellous telescope that revealed a scene of revelry on another world beyond the stars, some dim landscape faintly lit by a little sky, shining with the glittering light of starry constellations of stalactites. Had Clensy suddenly taken a peep at the heavens through a telescope and discovered God enthroned, hail-fellow-well-met with the devil on some infinite night-out, in a seraglio down a back alley of the constellation of Hercules, roaring forth the infinite laughter of the spheres, watching His own voluptuous houris and puppets dancing in the drama of some sensuous lapse, his face could not have expressed greater surprise. But the scene which Clensy saw had no kindredship with human conceptions of the mysteries of the unknowable overwatching the knowable. Relentless reality, unshadowy, full of mortal frailness and sensuous passion, and lacking that æsthetic sanctitude of beauty and coldness which mortals imagine when dreaming over immortal things, was vividly expressed on the faces of that secret assemblage. The weird atmosphere of indescribable remoteness which the scene conjured up in Clensy’s brain was intensified by the swinging glow of innumerable lamps which hung from the cavern’s wide roof, giving the scene of impassioned abandonment an unreal, misty effect, as the handsome mulatto girls and women and men whirled about, waving their arms, chanting melodies in Haytian patois. The creole women, clad in blue and yellowish diaphanous robes, specially fashioned for the vigorous performance of the chic and bambalou dances in their primitive form, moved their shadowy-like limbs rhythmically to the chanting accompaniment of stern-looking papaloi and negroes. Haytian chiefs, who stood by, staring with burning eyes, repeatedly raised their sacred goblets full of white rum, and murmured “Wanga Louye garou,” which was the cry of the terrible papaloi priests who were known as “Les Mystéres.”
Notwithstanding the terror, the lust and cruelty associated with the rites of the fetish, Clensy and Biglow came under the magic spell of the music, and the alluring movements of the dancing houris, for such they looked. Three of the Haytian girls appeared strikingly beautiful as they performed the mystical passes of the forbidden ritual. Suddenly they stopped whirling, and, forming rows, swayed in front of the dreaded papaloi making graceful obeisance to those fetish priests, holding their robes high, bowing with delicate grace before the burning eyes of the swarthy white-surpliced voluptuaries. Under the influence of the fetish drinks and frenzied fanaticism the girls’ and women’s eyes shone like living jewels.
“Holy Mary!” exclaimed Biglow. The misty forms of the dancers stood perfectly still, and the two coffins which Biglow and Clensy had seen at the cavern’s entrance, were suddenly dragged into view by two huge negroes.