A stream flowed noiselessly at our feet. Canoes drifted by us, with dusky and nude forms bowed over the paddles. Each occupant greeted us, being guests in the valley, just lifting their slumberous eyelids,—masked batteries, that made Felix forget his danger; they seldom paused, but called back to us from the gathering darkness with inexpressibly tender, contralto voices.
Thereupon we were summoned to dinner in another apartment, screened with vines. The faint flicker of the tapers suggested that what breath of air might be stirring came from the mountain, and it brought with it a message from the orangery up the valley. "How will you take your oranges?" queried Felix; "in pulp, liquid, or perfume?"—and such a dense odor swept past us at the moment, I thought I had taken them in the triple forms. "You are just in time," said our host. "Why, what's up?" asked I. "The moon will be up presently, and after moonrise you shall see the hula-hula."
Felix desired to be enlightened as to the nature of the what-you-call-it, and was assured that it was worth seeing, and would require no explanatory chorus when its hour came.
It was at least a mile to the scene of action; a tortuous stream wound thither, navigable in spots, but from time to time the canoe would have to take to the banks for a short cut into deeper water.
"I can never get there," growled Felix; "I'm full of needles and pins"; to which the host responded by excusing himself for a few moments, leaving Felix and me alone. It was deathly still in the valley, though a thousand crickets sang, and the fish smacked their round mouths at the top of the water. Evening comes slowly in those beloved tropics, but it comes so satisfactorily that there is nothing left out.
A moonlight night is a continuous festival. The natives sing and dance till daybreak, making it all up by sleeping till the next twilight. Nothing is lost by this ingenious and admirable arrangement. Why should they sleep, when a night there has the very essence of five nights anywhere else, extracted and enriched with spices till it is so inspiring that the soul cries out in triumph, and the eyes couldn't sleep if they would?
At this period, enter to us the host, with several young native girls, who seat themselves at our feet, clasping each a boot-leg encasing the extremities of Felix and myself.
Felix kicked violently, and left the room with some embarrassment, and I appealed to the hospitable gentleman of the house, who was smiling somewhat audibly at our perplexity.
He assured me that if I would throw myself upon the mats in the corner, two of these maids would speedily relieve me of any bodily pain I might at that moment be suffering with.
I did so: the two proceeded as set down in the verbal prospectus; and whatever bodily pain I may have possessed at the beginning of the process speedily dwindled into insignificance by comparison with the tortures of my novel cure. Every limb had to be unjointed and set over again. Places were made for new joints, and I think the new joints were temporarily set in, for my arms and legs went into angles I had never before seen them in, nor have I since been able to assume those startling attitudes. The stomach was then kneaded like dough. The ribs were crushed down against the spine, and then forced out by well-directed blows in the back. The spinal column was undoubtedly abstracted, and some mechanical substitute now does its best to help me through the world. The arms were tied in bow-knots behind, and the skull cracked like the shell of a hard-boiled egg, worked into shape again, and left to heal.