Now a pellmell of bizarre figures broke out. They were bedecked fantastically: some of them were painted with white clay; one was clad in the skins of beasts. There was no rhythm or order to their entrance; but immediately they began to dash here and there shouting.
"It is the Lion Dance, memsahib," Cazi Moto told her in a low voice. "That one is the lion; and they hunt him with spears in the long grass."
The chase went forward with some verisimilitude, and yet with a symbolic syncopation that indicated the Lion Dance was a very ancient and conventional ceremony. These dancers gave way to a chorus of singers. For interminable hours, so it seemed, they chanted a high, shrill recitative, carried in fugue by deeper voices. The burden of the song was evidently an impromptu. Occasionally some peculiarly apt or pleasing phrase was caught up for endless repetition. And in the background, against the farther background of the undistinguished masses, those who had formerly carried on their performances in the full glare of front-row publicity and the campfire, now continued their efforts almost unabated. The impressive utterers of the goom-zup shibboleth, the slayers of the symbolical lion, carried on still. Indeed as the night wore on, and one group of dancers succeeded another, the homogeneous crowd began to break into varied activity. Each took his turn as principal, then fell back to form part of the variegated background. Each dance was different. Warriors fully armed clashed shield and spear; witch doctors crouched and sprang; women stamped in rhythm; the elephant was hunted, the crops sown and gathered, all the activities of community and individual life were danced, the frankness of some saved from obscenity only by the unconscious earnestness of their exposition and the evidence of their symbolism that they were not the expression of the moment but very ancient customs.
The Leopard Woman watched it all with shining eyes. The emotion of the picturesque, the call of savage wildness, the contagion of a mounting community excitement caused the blood to race through her veins. The drums throbbed against her heart as the pulse throbbed against her temples. She resisted an actual impulse to rise from her chair, to throw herself with abandon into an orgy of rhythm and motion. Perfectly she understood those who, having reached the breaking point, dashed madly through the fire scattering embers and coals, or who darted forward to kiss ecstatically the white man's feet, or who reached a wild paroxysm of nerves to collapse the next instant into exhaustion. She was brought to herself by Kingozi's calm voice.
"Sweet riot, isn't it?" he remarked. "They're working themselves up to a high pitch. It's always that way. You would think they'd drop from sheer weariness."
"How long will they keep it up?" she asked, drawing a deep breath, and trying to speak naturally.
"So it got you, too, a little, did it?" he said curiously.
"What do you mean?"
"The excitement. It's contagious unless you are accustomed to it. I've seen safe and sane youngsters go quite off their heads at these shows, and dash down and caper around like the maddest shenzi of them all. Felt it myself at first. It draws you; like wanting to jump off when you look down from a high place." He was talking evenly and carelessly. "Enough of this sort of thing will make a crowd see anything. Devil-worshippers for instance, they see red devils, after they work up to it, not a doubt of it."
"Thank you," she answered his evident purpose of bringing her to herself.