Noticing us, a man rushes playfully towards us, threateningly swinging his club, his eyes and teeth shining in the darkness; then he returns to the shouting, dancing mob around the fire. Half-grown boys sneak through the crowd; they are the most excited of all, and stamp the ground wildly with their disproportionately large feet, kicking and shrieking in unpleasant ecstasy. All this goes on among the guests; the hosts keep a little apart, near a scaffolding, on which yams are attached. The men circle slowly round this altar, carrying decorated bamboos, with which they mark the measure, stamping them on the ground with a thud. They sing a monotonous tune, one man starting and the others joining in; the dance consists of slow, springy jumps from one foot to the other.
On two sides of this dancing circle the women stand in line, painted all over with soot. When the men's deep song is ended, they chant the same melody with thin, shrill voices. Once in a while they join in the dance, taking a turn with some one man, then disappearing; they are all much excited; only a few old hags stand apart, who are past worldly pleasures, and have known such feasts for many, many years.
The whole thing looks grotesque and uncanny, yet the pleasure in mere noise and dancing is childish and harmless. The picture is imposing and beautiful in its simplicity, gruesome in its wildness and sensuality, and splendid with the red lights which play on the shining, naked bodies. In the blackness of the night nothing is visible but that red-lit group of two or three hundred men, careless of to-morrow, given up entirely to the pleasure of the moment. The spectacle lasts all night, and the crowd becomes more and more wrought up, the leaps of the dancers wilder, the singing louder. We stand aside, incapable of feeling with these people or sharing their joy, realizing that theirs is a perfectly strange atmosphere which will never be ours.
Towards morning we left, none too early, for a tremendous shower came down and kept on all next morning. I went up to the village again, to find a most dismal and dejected crowd. Around the square, in the damp forest, seedy natives stood and squatted in small groups, shivering with cold and wet. Some tried to warm themselves around fires, but with poor success. Bored and unhappy, they stared at us as we passed, and did not move. Women and children had made umbrellas of large flat leaves, which they carried on their heads; the soot which had formed their festival dress was washed off by the rain. The square itself was deserted, save for a pack of dogs and a few little boys, rolling about in the mud puddles. Once in a while an old man would come out of the gamal, yawn and disappear. In short, it was a lendemain de fête of the worst kind.