‘Yes,’ said Edgar, ‘I should very much like to see it.’
‘Then you shall. They have not given us anything in that line lately,’ said Brody.
He called a big, powerful-looking black, and spoke to him, and made signs.
‘I’ve promised them a good square meal if they give us a dance,’ said Brody.
Edgar thought it a wild scene as he looked at the dusky forms in the moonlight. As far as he could see the endless plain stretched out before him. The white, gaunt trees were ghostly and weird, and the hum of many insects was in the air.
In a few minutes Edgar heard a low, crooning sound, which gradually swelled into a hoarse roar, and then, with a loud shout from their leader, the black fellows commenced to dance. They stamped upon the hard ground with bare feet until the sound became like the tramp of soldiers. Having worked themselves up to a proper pitch of excitement, the wild fellows threw their limbs about in the most extraordinary fashion. Some of them leaped high into the air, and the women sat and clapped their hands and beat them on the ground.
The black men whirled their arms, and waved heavy sticks over their heads. Their faces became most repulsive. Most of them had thick, curly black hair, which hung down in shaggy locks. Their noses were big, coarse, and wide, and their cheek-bones high, while their mouths were of great size, and their lips thick.
As Edgar watched them dancing in this strange fashion in the moonlight he thought it was the wildest scene he had ever looked upon.
‘Do they never get tired?’ he asked, as the dance continued, and the efforts of the blacks did not relax.
‘They have great powers of endurance,’ said Ben Brody. ‘You see the big fellow there, to the right? I’ve known him go ninety miles between sunset and sunrise without so much as a halt. They are treacherous fellows, some of them, but Yacka is a cut above the others. He’s a strange fellow. He hails from South Australia, and the blacks around here seem afraid of him. Strange to say, he speaks English well, and is far better looking than the others. My own impression is that there’s a bit of white blood in his veins, although his skin is black. Eh, Yacka, come here!’ he shouted.