The plumes continued to nod for a few moments and then, representing the sprouting and growth of the young trees, the prostrate dancers, to the accompaniment of a low chanting, rose inch by inch to their full heights. Now the Trade-wind was blowing through their tops, and they bowed and swayed and bent and recovered, while the muffled nasal chanting rose and fell undulatingly like the gusty southeast breeze. Now it was harvest time, and new figures wove in and out among the swaying trees gathering the ripe fruit, and chesty "boom-booms" in the bass told of the cast-down nuts striking the ground underneath.
After a few minutes of indistinguishable pantomime which had to do with the husking and drying of the nuts for copra, a change came over the spirit of the quiet mimetic dance. The hum of the wind rose to a shrill whistle, the low monotone of the surf on the reef changed to the deep-mouthed roars of crashing combers as hard-smitten drum-logs sent forth throbbing peals of heavy thunder. A hurricane was bursting upon the coconut grove. No longer the trees bent to the caressing touch of the gentle Trade. Torn by conflicting gusts, they jerked now this way and now that, thrashing limbs striking each other in the pantomime of bare arms and hands banging with resounding thwacks upon bare backs and breasts. The wind and surf and thunder blend in a raucous roar as the storm grows more furious, and now the trees are snapping and falling before the terrific onslaught. Down they go, now falling alone, now striking others and going to the earth together. In a few moments all but two firmly rooted giants in the heart of the grove are tossing on the ground, and these—represented by two magnificently muscled men—lean together for support and defy the hurricane for a brief space longer. Then they, too, give way, falling to the ground interlocked, and the "Dance of the Coconuts" is over.
"My word!" gasped W——, as the roar of the storm gave way to laughter and chatter, "what wouldn't it be worth to the man who could put that on at Covent Garden or the Hippodrome?"
"Himmel!" snorted the doctor impatiently. "You'd haf der whole island to London to move also und der ferdamte British glimate would right away der whole thing kill."
While the dancers rested and slaked their thirsts with orange wine, our host gave us a graphic description of the "Volcano Dance," which is performed in the dark of the moon by the light of a huge bonfire. An imitation crater of long creepers is built at a point where there is a smooth grass chute of thirty or forty yards in length ending in the jungle below. On the side opposite the spectators the dancers, swathed in wreaths of red hibiscus, enter the crater through a small opening, leap high in the air like erupting lava and go rolling off down the chute to the thunder of drums and the subterranean growls of the male chorus. From the lower end of the chute a back trail leads up to the "stage-entrance" of the artificial crater, so that fifty or more dancers, with a sufficiency of orange wine on tap at the crater door, have no difficulty in keeping up a continuous eruption.
W—— asked how long the red hibiscus trimmings stood the rolling down part of the eruption, but before the doctor could reply the opening drum-beat of the next dance sounded and this weighty question was never answered.
With short, sharp yells, a compact body of girls came charging out of the "green room" like a "flying wedge" in the good old days of mass play in football, and went scurrying straight across into the shadows of the opposite side of the crater. This was the "launching of the ship" for the "Pearling Schooner Dance." Directly canoefuls of stout paddlers came towing her back into the moonlight with liana hawsers, and all in an instant, as each of the dancers threw aloft a square of white tapa, she was under sail and off to sea. Now she threaded, in short tacks, the passage through the reef, and now, to low, sweet crooning like a lullaby, she bowed and curtesied and pitched and rolled in the swift-running ocean swells.
Presently she threaded another passage, anchored and took in her sails in a still lagoon. Here, with the barely perceptible motion of the schooner showing in the rhythmic rocking of the dancers, divers went over the side and brought up pearl shell. One lusty diver lent colour to his pantomime by bringing up a huge coconut, the incalculable value of so sizable a "pearl" being told with a facility of gesture that would have put to shame a moving picture "heavy."
But the comedy hit of this dance was the hooking and landing of a shark on a strand of liana. Baited with the coconut pearl, the creeper line was thrown over the rail, to attract the instant attention of a school of glistening man-eaters, which, with crooked-elbow dorsals, went wriggling about the grass under the schooner's bows. After an amazingly clever bit of "shark-play" about the bait, one of the "monsters" rolled over on his back and "swallowed" it, the crew promptly "tailing on" to the liana to bring it aboard.
The "shark," as was explained to us afterwards, had drunk considerably more orange wine than should have fallen to his share, and the fight he put up before being landed and "cut to pieces" came pretty near to sinking the graceful pearler then and there.