Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 165.djvu/646

640 said, ‘I am glad.’ Somebody had been writing to him about me. These special recommendations again. The volume of tone he emitted without effort, almost without the trouble of moving his lips, amazed me. A voice! a voice! It was grave, profound, vibrating, while the man did not seem capable of a whisper. However, he had enough strength in him—factitious no doubt—to very nearly make an end of us, as you shall hear directly.

“The manager appeared in the doorway, so I stepped out at once and he drew the curtain after me. The Russian, eyed curiously by the pilgrims, was staring at the shore. I followed the direction of his glance.

“Several bronze figures could be made out in the distance, moving indistinctly against the gloomy border of the forest, and near the river two were standing leaning on spears in the sunlight, under fantastic head-dresses of spotted skins, warlike, and still in statuesque repose. And from right to left along the lighted shore moved a wild and gorgeous apparition of a woman.

“She walked with measured steps, draped in striped and fringed cloths, treading the earth proudly, with a slight jingle and flash of barbarous ornaments. She carried her head high; her hair was done in the shape of a helmet; she had brass leggings to the knee, brass wire gauntlets to the elbow, a crimson spot on her tawny cheek, innumerable necklaces of glass beads on her neck; bizarre things, charms, gifts of witch-men, that hung about her, glittered and trembled at every step. She must have had the value of several elephant tusks upon her. She was savage and superb, wild-eyed and magnificent; there was something ominous and stately in her deliberate progress. And in the hush that had fallen suddenly upon the whole sorrowful land, the immense wilderness, the colossal body of the fecund and mysterious life seemed to look at her as though it had been looking at the image of its own tenebrous and passionate soul.

“And we men also looked at her—at any rate I looked at her. She came abreast of the steamer, stood still, and faced us. Her long shadow fell to the water’s edge. Her face had a tragic and fierce aspect of wild sorrow and of dumb fear mingled with the pain of a struggling, half-shaped emotion. She stood looking at us without a stir, and like the wilderness itself with an air of brooding over an inscrutable purpose. A whole minute passed, and then she made a step forward. There was a low jingle, a glint of yellow metal, a sway of fringed draperies, and she stopped. Had her heart failed her, or had her eyes, veiled with that mournfulness that lies over all the wild things of the earth, seen the hopelessness of longing that will find out sometimes even a savage soul in the lonely darkness of its being? Who can tell. Perhaps she did not know herself. The young fel-