Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 129.djvu/425

## Dutch Guiana - Part IV-VI ## of the performers. Around the garden, and behind it, dark masses of palm, almond-tree, acacia, saman, and kindred growths, rose against the sky, loftier and denser in seeming than by day. The whole formed an oval picture of brightness and life amid a dark and silent frame-work of shadow, a scene part gay, part impressive, and very tropical above all.

The music, or what did duty for such, began. At first it was of a European character, or rather travestied from European — disintegrated quadrilles and waltzes to no particular time. The negroes around, shy as they always are when in the presence of those whose criticisms they fear (for no race is more keenly sensitive in regard to ridicule than the African except it be, perhaps, the semi-African Arab), did not at once venture to put forth all their prowess, and the performance opened with a few sporadic couples, women dancing with women, men pous-setting to men, and either seeming half-ashamed of their own audacity. But as the music continued and grew livelier, passing more and more from the imitation-European to the unfeigned African style of an unbroken monotonous drone with one ever-recurring cadence, a mere continuity of clanging sound, the dancers grew more animated. New couples, in which the proper interchange of sex was observed by the partners, formed themselves, till at last the larger group — that on our left — took up the genuine Ethiopian dance, well known in Oman, and witnessed by me there and elsewhere in the pleasant days, now long since gathered to the ineffectual past, when the East and I were one. A dance of life, where men ranged on one side and women on the other, advance, retreat, cross, join hands, break into whirling knots of twos and fours, separate, re-form in line, to blend again into a seeming maze of orderly confusion — a whirl of very madness, yet with method in it — the intoxication of movement and sound poured out in time and measure. He who has witnessed it, if there yet flow within his veins one drop of that primal savage blood without which manhood and womanhood too are not much better than mere titular names, cannot but yield himself up to the influence of the hour, cannot but drink of the bowl, join in the revel; and if any looker-on retains coolness enough to sneer or blame, why, let each follow his bent; but I for one had rather be on the side of David than of Michal, and the former had in the end, I think, the best of the jest and of the earnest, too.

A Bacchanalian orgie, yet one in which Bacchus himself had no share; Venus alone presided, and sufficient for all beside; or, if Bacchus seemed present to her aid, it was not he, but Cupid in disguise. Half an hour, an hour the revelry continued, while the tumult grew every minute louder, and the dance more vehement, till, with an impulse simultaneous in its suddenness, the double chorus broke up, and blending in one confused mass, surrounded his Excellency the governor, while, amid shouts, laughter, and huzzas, half-a-dozen sturdy blacks caught him up in their arms and bore him aloft in triumphal procession three times round the garden, while others gesticulated and pressed alongside, others danced before, all cheered, and we ourselves, aroused from our Africano-Oriental dream by the local significance of the act, hardly knew whether to laugh or to yield to the enthusiasm of the moment. That the governor, though maintaining as far as possible an appearance of passive dignity and deprecatory acquiescence, heartily enjoyed the spontaneous tribute of affection and loyalty thus tumultuously expressed, I have no doubt, and so would you have enjoyed it, my dear reader, had it been offered you. Besides, he told me as much when, after a tremendous outburst of huzzas, his living throne gently dissolved asunder and allowed him footing on the ground again.

Then after a half-hour's pause, congratulations exchanged, healths drunk, and cordial merriment, in which all shared alike — performers, spectators, Europeans, negroes, and the rest — once more to the dance, but now in calmer measure and to a gentler tune. By this the moon, small and dazzling, rode high in the purple heavens, diving warning of midnight near, when, escorted down to the water's edge by those whose sports we had witnessed, and perhaps in part shared, we reluctantly threaded the dark shades of the avenue river-wards, and re-embarked on our little steamer, that had yet to bear us a mile farther along the current before we reached the night's lodging and rest prepared for us by the district magistrate, in his large and comfortable residence at Ephrata, — so the place was named.

"I wished you to see something of our black creoles as they are among themselves," said the governor, as next morning we pursued our downward way to the river-junction at the Sommelsdyk Fort,