"What's he doing now?" the Boy ventured to whisper under cover of the devil's sudden loud remonstrance, the sick man at this point breaking into ghastly groans.
"He puts on the Kamlayka. Sh!"
The Shamán, still enveloped head and body, began to beat softly, keeping time with the eagle's feather. You could follow the faint gleam of the ivory wand, but on what it fell with that hollow sound no eye could see. Now, at intervals, he uttered a cry, a deep bass danger-note, singularly unnerving. Someone answered in a higher key, and they kept this up in a kind of rude, sharply-timed duet, till one by one the whole group of natives was gathered into the swing of it, swept along involuntarily, it would seem, by some magnetic attraction of the rhythm.
"Ung hi yah! ah-ha-yah! yah-yah-yah!" was the chorus to that deep, recurrent cry of the Shamán. Its accompanying drum-note was muffled like far-off thunder, conjured out of the earth by the ivory wand.
Presently a scream of terror from the bundle of skins and bones in the corner.
"Ha!" Muckluck clasped her hands and rocked back and forth.
"They'll frighten the old man to death if he's conscious," said the Boy, half rising.
She pulled him down.
"No, no; frighten devil." She was shaking with excitement and with ecstacy.
The sick man cried aloud. A frenzy seemed to seize the Shamán. He raised his voice in a series of blood-curdling shrieks, then dropped it, moaning, whining, then bursting suddenly into diabolic laughter, bellowing, whispering, ventriloquising, with quite extraordinary skill. The dim and foetid cave might indeed be full of devils.