In that reeking atmosphere, heavy with the smoke of half-extinguished lamps, they fed on the voluptuous abandon of the dancers till passion itself fainted with exhaustion.
"That was a dance of death, was it not, Felix?" Felix lay on his mat, sleeping heavily, and evidently unmindful of a single word I had uttered.
Our time was up at daybreak, and, with an endless deal of persuasion, Felix followed me out of the valley to the little chapel on the cliff. Our horses took a breath there, and so did we, bird's-eying the scene of the last night's orgie.
Who says it isn't a delicious spot,—that deep, narrow, and secluded vale, walled by almost perpendicular cliffs, hung with green tapestries of ferns and vines; that slender stream, like a thread of silver, embroidering a carpet of Nature's richest pattern; that torrent, leaping from the cliff into a garden of citrons; the sea sobbing at its mouth, while wary mariners, coasting in summer afternoons, catch glimpses of the tranquil and forbidden paradise, yet are heedless of all its beauty, and reck not the rustling of the cane-fields, nor the voices of the charmers, because—because these things are so common in that latitude that one grows naturally indifferent?
As for Felix, who talks in his sleep of the hula-hula, and insists that only by the lomi-lomi he shall be saved, he points a moral, though at present he is scarcely in a condition to adorn any tale whatever; and said moral I shall be glad to furnish, on application, to any sympathetic soul who has witnessed by proxy the unlawful revels of those night-dancers of Waipio.
PEARL-HUNTING IN THE POMOTOUS.
