"What more can I do to show you that I love you, Bangana? I have initiated you into the mysteries of my people. You know the ceremonies of the dead, of those who become of age. I have shown you where the fire is kept from which, once a year, all the fires in my kingdom are rekindled. I have told you which mountains and streams are holy. I have admitted you even into the secret of my own divinity. Nay, I have done still more. I have let you see my people dance for the Lady of the Moon."
There was a silence.
Lawrence Teck remained as before, his bearded face bowed down; but a slight tremor of horror passed through his shoulders under the sun-blackened skin.
The Dances of the Moon! Yes, he had seen them, one time when he was weak from fever and despair. All the frightfulness of Africa had then been made manifest to him at last, as if the very soul of destruction had condensed itself out of the vapors, venoms and invisible menaces of these primeval forests, to assume, for one night, a horde of nearly human shapes. But he shuddered not at his memory of that spectacle, but at its effect on him—an effect that he had denied with a passionate, clanking gesture of his chained arms, yet that had remained in the depths of his brain like a serpent, which had always slept till then, and had ever since been gnawing at his thoughts.
He recalled the deafening thunder of the drums, the glare and the blood, the moon peering down through the branches like the face of a perverse divinity pale from pride, and the thought that had come to him there, in his sickness and lonely hopelessness—that while some in a fit of decrepitude and despair might turn to God, others might turn to the oblivion promised by evil.
Raising his head, he called out in a voice as strong as the king's:
"Still dreaming, Muene-Motapa? Awake, and let me go!"
The king leaped to his feet, to pace the earthen floor. His kilt of leopards' paws swayed from side to side; his amulets jingled; his shaven head glistened amid the shadows, like an ebony ball. His court bowed their naked bodies, muttering:
"Father of elephants! He shall stamp on this man, and his foot shall shake the whole earth!"
Muene-Motapa bitterly asked his captive: