A week ago on the island just opposite the club, where lies a good-sized village, containing an old church, there was a religious festival, which lasted all the week. This was the Fiesta of Pandacan, and all the natives for miles around came pouring down by our veranda, in bancas and barges, on their way across the river. Every night during the week, bands of music played on one side of the stream and on the other side, and then crossed to their respective opposites, playing in transitu, and then setting up shop on shore again. Then there were fireworks, bombs, and rockets galore, so that the early night was alive with noise and sparks. On the evening of the grand wind-up we crossed over to see the sights, in one of the usual hollowed-out tree-trunk ferryboats. Crowds of gayly dressed natives surged around the plaza, near the old church, while everywhere along the edges squatted old men and women, cooking all sorts of greasy "chow" on those peculiar Philippine stoves described in the last chapter. Everybody smoked, as well as the pots and kettles, and the air was therefore foggy. The little, low-thatched houses were jauntily decorated with lanterns and streamers, and at all the open fronts leaned out rows of grinning natives.
Here and there were small "tiendas," or little booths, where cheap American toys, collar-buttons, pictures, and little figures of the Saviour were sold, and great was the hubbub. The houses, as well as the people, are very low of stature, and as we walked along the narrow, almost cunning streets, our shoulders level with the eaves of many of the shanties, and above the heads of many of the people, we felt indeed like giants. Many were the pianos in those native huts, and peculiar mixtures of strikingly decent playing fell upon the ear from all sides.
The whole circus wound up with a grand pyrotechnical illumination of the old church from base to tower, and a score of loud explosions, caused by the setting off of many dozen bombs at the same time, made up in noise what the religious celebration lacked in spirituality. Then all the bands came back and played their lungs out as they crossed the river, and all the people rushed for bancas, and came chattering home. Thus did this pretty little religious show consume, in noise and sparks, the contributions of a very long time.