It is not long before work gets tedious to the girls. They jump up and daub their faces in a grotesque manner. With palm leaves they mark out a space of some yards square that has to be reserved for the dancers, and then commences the women's song to which is soon added the stronger voices of the men. At times the chorus is accompanied by an orchestra of those instruments that the Sakais know how to play.
They will take two bamboo canes of six, eight or more inches in diameter, being careful to select a male and female reed. These they beat violently one against the other, the result being a deep note with prolonged vibrations which awake the forest echoes but not the old people and the children who are sleeping.
There is also the krob a very primitive kind of lyre that consists of a short but stout piece of bamboo on which two vegetable fibres are tightly drawn. The plectrum used by the player is equally primitive being a fish-bone, a thorn or a bit of wood. The sound caused by grating the two strings is more harmonious than one might suppose.
But the Sakais possess besides a wind instrument that claims more study both in the making and the playing.
It belongs to the flute family and, of course, is made of bamboo. Like all its brothers in the world it is open at one end, with three or four holes on the top side.
Before playing it the performer carefully stops up one of his nostrils with leaves and then applies the other to the first hole into which he gently blows with his nose. From the instrument issues a sweet, melancholy note. By leaving all the holes open a clear sol (G) is obtained; by shutting them all a mi bemolle (E flat); the first hole gives the note mi (E) and the second fa (F).
The ciniloi[15] (for so it is called) is not artistic to the eye and loses all its poetry when one sees its owner blowing his nose into it but the notes emanating from it breathe a vague sense of melody and sadness not entirely unpleasant.
Some of the Sakais are quite masters of this instrument and the women too prefer it to the krob. They seem to find extreme delight in sending forth those long sustained and plaintive sounds as though lulled by a dream, or absorbed in some pathetic thought.
On festive occasions when the solemnity of the entertainment increases in proportion to the noise made, there is a full orchestra. The choruses bawl, the bamboos deafen one with their loud noise like that of huge wooden bells, the krobs sob desperately at the way they are treated by the plectrum, the ciniloi whistles and laments, and all without any fixed measure of time or modulation of tones, in a confusion of sounds so discordant as to recall a very, very faint echo of the infernal nocturnal concerts of the forest.