It was all music of a type unfamiliar to me of Earth. The intellectuality of our Earth music was missing. This music of Venus was built upon queer minor strains; unfinished cadences; a rhythm of the sort we of Earth could never encompass. I listened, and felt the appeal of my senses. The lavish, abandoned music of barbarism? I had almost thought it that. Yet it was not. Rather was it decadent. This whole scene; the color, the music, the heavy cloying scents with which the night air was redolent; the warm, sensuous abandonment, felt rather than made obvious--it was not barbarism, but decadence. And I realized then how close are the two extremes. A reversion to type, merely. And I knew, then, that from the pinnacle of civilization which we of Earth had reached, naught lay before us but this.
Music everywhere throughout the festival. And movement. As we floated out of the canal, passing slowly along one of the broader waterways, boats and barges slipped past us. Barges crowded with revelers. And the small boats, generally with but a man and a girl--fugitive couples with the holiday spirit upon them, seeking the shadowed nooks of islands for their love-making.
In one lagoon we came upon such a boat. The man in it--a gay youth in red and black motley, with the mask fallen from his laughing, perspiring face--was in its stern, manipulating it with a long, thin paddle. The girl was lying face down on cushions in its prow. She was facing forward, with her long white hair tumbling about her. Around the boat were clustered a number of other boats. Each was small, with only a man in it. A ring of boats, besieging the girl. Our barge paused to watch. A boat would dash forward, its occupant standing up to thrust it on. But the girl, swung to meet it by the efforts of her escort, would turn her cylinder of _alcholite_[19] upon the attacker. Befuddled, her adversary would retreat; or another, momentarily drunk, would fall into the water to be sobered.
[Footnote 19: A scent or perfume, highly intoxicating.]
All with gay shouts of laughter; until at last the couple were victorious and scurried away to their island.
We passed on. There were mimic battles often on the islands. A hidden couple found out and dragged back. A lone man attacked and pelted with flowers by a band of marauding girls. A diving platform at one end of an oval lagoon. Girls mounting it to dive into the red-shimmering water, where waiting youths were swimming, and by their prowess in downing other contenders would seize upon the girls and carry them off to where a barge was loading its passengers for the main island.