But the best is the Pera-hera, at midnight, under the tropical stars,
With a pale little wisp of a Prince of Wales, diffident, up in a small pagoda on the temple side
And white people in evening dress buzzing and crowding the stand upon the grass below and opposite:
And at last the Pera-hera procession, flambeaux aloft in the tropical night, of blazing cocoa-nut,
Naked dark men beneath,
And the huge frontal of three great elephants stepping forth to the tom-tom’s beat, in the torch-light,
Slowly sailing in gorgeous apparel through the flame-light, in front of a towering, grimacing white image of wood.
The elephant bells striking slow, tong-tong, tong-tong,
To music and queer chanting:
Enormous shadow-processions filing on in the flare of fire
In the fume of cocoa-nut oil, in the sweating tropical night,
In the noise of the tom-toms and singers;
Elephants after elephants curl their trunks, vast shadows, and some cry out
As they approach and salaam, under the dripping fire of the torches
That pale fragment of a Prince up there, whose motto is Ich dien.
Pale, dispirited Prince, with his chin on his hands, his nerves tired out,
Watching and hardly seeing the trunk-curl approach and clumsy, knee-lifting salaam
Of the hugest, oldest of beasts in the night and the fire-flare below.
He is royalty, pale and dejected fragment up aloft.
And down below huge homage of shadowy beasts; barefoot and trunk-lipped in the night.
Chieftains, three of them abreast, on foot
Strut like peg-tops, wound around with hundreds of yards of fine linen.
They glimmer with tissue of gold, and golden threads on a jacket of velvet,
And their faces are dark, and fat, and important.
They are royalty, dark-faced royalty, showing the conscious whites of their eyes
And stepping in homage, stubborn, to that nervous pale lad up there.
More elephants, tong, tong-tong, loom up,
Huge, more tassels swinging, more dripping fire of new cocoa-nut cressets
High, high flambeaux, smoking of the east;
And scarlet hot embers of torches knocked out of the sockets among bare feet of elephants and men on the path in the dark.
And devil dancers luminous with sweat, dancing on to the shudder of drums,
Tom-toms, weird music of the devil, voices of men from the jungle singing;
Endless, under the Prince.
Towards the tail of the everlasting procession
In the long hot night, mere dancers from insignificant villages,
And smaller, more frightened elephants.
Men-peasants from jungle villages dancing and running with sweat and laughing,
Naked dark men with ornaments on, on their naked arms and their naked breasts, the grooved loins
Gleaming like metal with running sweat as they suddenly turn, feet apart,
And dance, and dance, forever dance, with breath half sobbing in dark, sweat-shining breasts,
And lustrous great tropical eyes unveiled now, gleaming a kind of laugh,
A naked, gleaming dark laugh, like a secret out in the dark,
And flare of a tropical energy, tireless, afire in the dark, slim limbs and breasts,
Perpetual, fire-laughing motion, among the slow shuffle
Of elephants,
The hot dark blood of itself a-laughing, wet, half-devilish, men all motion
Approaching under that small pavilion, and tropical eyes dilated look up
Inevitably look up
To the Prince
To that tired remnant of royalty up there
Whose motto is Ich dien.
As if the homage of the kindled blood of the east
Went up in wavelets to him, from the breasts and eyes of jungle torch-men,
And he couldn’t take it.
What would they do, those jungle men running with sweat, with the strange dark laugh in their eyes, glancing up,
And the sparse-haired elephants slowly following,
If they knew that his motto was Ich dien?
And that he meant it.
They begin to understand
The rickshaw boys begin to understand
And then the devil comes into their faces,
But a different sort, a cold, rebellious, jeering devil.