Читать книгу Lolóma, or two years in cannibal-land. A story of old Fiji онлайн

53 страница из 65

Breaking into a wild dance, full of animation and graceful movements, the girls, with rustling leaves and streamers of green about them, imitated the ebb and flow of the tide, counterfeiting the rippling and soft sighing of the water on some sandy beach with wonderful accuracy. After this they performed the flying-fox dance, mimicking with equal cleverness the gyrations of that animal as it lazily hangs from the branch of a tree, or, suddenly spreading its wings, takes its dive-like flight from some monarch of the wood to the lowest branch of a bread-fruit. The girls tripped as lightly over the grass as their fabled fairy elves, singing the while in merry measure—

“Away, away, away to the trees,

To dance, and dance as long as you please,

To sing and dance all night in the breeze,

As from trees the flying foxes!”

“Away to dance, the yellow-flow’r dance,

The white flow’r dance, the scarlet-flow’r dance!

Come dance and sing, and merrily dance.

For the world will soon be empty!”

While I was the unobserved witness of these pretty dramas of gesture I could not but think of the fabled dead dancing maidens whom the Germans call “The Willeis.” They are young brides who died the day before their happiness was to be consummated, but who, their passion for dancing still living within them, leave their graves at midnight, and give themselves up to the wildest measures, while the nearer the approach of the hour which recalls them to the silence of the tomb, the more deliriously they abandon themselves to the enjoyment of the fast-fleeting moments.