“Ne-ha aba ne ha aba muta,
Sagmuk labsa abona
Sag aba don,”
were not entirely strange to him, but they had no real meaning for him. He had heard his Caribs sing them around his camp fire. They were the words of a strange native song. As for the thunder, it was merely the wild beating of a barrel drum. And the flash of orange and gold was a girl, a very beautiful girl, swaying gracefully in a sort of rhythmic exercise to the beating of the drum.
He stared in unbelieving astonishment. The thing was not real. He was still dreaming. He tried to put up a hand to rub the illusion away, but finding this difficult because of weakness, contented himself with staring about the room where the golden vision continued to sway and whirl and the reverberating drum shook dust from the ceiling.
Slowly familiar objects came to view. The roof of the palm thatched cabin looked familiar. He had lain beneath it some time. That might have been long ago, or was it yesterday? He remembered the holes in the roof. The holes, one had been triangular, another round. The spots were still there, but instead of sunlight streaming through, the holes were covered by a fresh green palm leaf thatch.
He looked again at the swaying spot of gold that was the girl. The girl seemed almost real. Her face was flushed. It would be, if she swayed to music in such a clime. The black woman, like an ebony statue, sat beating the drum as she sang:
“Ne-ha aba ne ha aba muta.”
Then a sudden thought struck Johnny. The dancing girl was not black; she was not golden-brown like the Indian, not the brown of the Mexican, either. She was white like himself. A very comely white girl she was, too; red cheeks, tossing curly hair, freckles, slightly turned-up nose—a real girl.
“It’s a dream,” he told himself. “A white girl in the heart of this wilderness? I’m dead. This is Heaven. She’s an angel.”