第75章

After about an hour of this amusement, in the latter part of which Job did not participate, the mutes by signs indicated that Billali was waiting for an audience.Accordingly he was told to "crawl up," which he did as awkwardly as usual, and announced that the dance was ready to begin if She and the white strangers would be pleased to attend.Shortly afterwards we all rose, and Ayesha having thrown a dark cloak (the same, by the way, that she had worn when I saw her cursing by the fire) over her white wrappings, we started.The dance was to be held in the open air, on the smooth rocky plateau in front of the great cave, and thither we made our way.About fifteen paces from the mouth of the cave we found three chairs placed, and here we sat and waited, for as yet no dancers were to be seen.The night was almost, but not quite, dark, the moon not having risen as yet, which made us wonder how we should be able to see the dancing.

"Thou wilt presently understand," said Ayesha, with a little laugh, when Leo asked her; and we certainly did.Scarcely were the words out of her mouth when from every point we saw dark forms rushing up, each bearing with him what we at first took to be an enormous flaming torch.Whatever they were they were burning furiously, for the flames stood out a yard or more behind each bearer.On they came, fifty or more of them, carrying their flaming burdens and looking like so many devils from hell.Leo was the first to discover what these burdens were.

"Great heaven!" he said, "they are corpses on fire!"I stared and stared againhe was perfectly rightthe torches that were to light our entertainment were human mummies from the caves!

On rushed the bearers of the flaming corpses, and, meeting at a spot about twenty paces in front of us, built their ghastly burdens crossways into a huge bonfire.Heavens! how they roared and flared! No tar barrel could have burned as those mummies did: Nor was this all.Suddenly I saw one great fellow seize a flaming human arm that had fallen from its parent frame; and rush off into the darkness.Presently he stopped, and a tall streak of fire shot up into the air, illumining the gloom, and also the lamp from which it sprang.That lamp was the mummy of a woman tied to a stout stake let into the rock, and he had fired her hair.On he went a few paces and touched a second, then a third, and a fourth, till at last we were surrounded on all three sides by a great ring of bodies flaring furiously, the material with which they were preserved having rendered them so inflammable that the flames would literally spout out of the ears and mouth in tongues of fire a foot or more in length.

Nero illuminated his gardens with live Christians soaked in tar, and we were now treated to a similar spectacle, probably for the first time since his day, only happily our lamps were not living ones.

But although this element of horror was fortunately wanting, to describe the awful and hideous grandeur of the spectacle thus presented to us is, I feel, so absolutely beyond my poor powers, that I scarcely dare attempt it.To begin with, it appealed to the moral as well as the physical susceptibilities.There was something very terrible, and yet very fascinating, about the employment of the remote dead to illumine the orgies of the living; in itself the thing was a satire, both on the living and the dead.Caesar's dustor is it Alexander's? may stop a bunghole, but the functions of these dead Caesars of the past was to light up a savage fetish dance.To such base uses may we come, of so little account may we be in the minds of the eager multitudes that we shall breed, many of whom, so far from revering our memory, will live to curse us for begetting them into such a world of woe.

Then there was the physical side of the spectacle, and a weird and splendid one it was.Those old citizens of Ko^r burned as, to judge from their sculptures and inscriptions, they had lived, very fast, and with the utmost liberality.What is more, there were plenty of them.As soon as ever a mummy had burned down to the ankles, which it did in about twenty minutes, the feet were kicked away, and another one put in its place.

The bonfire was kept going on the same generous scale, and its flames shot up, with a hiss and a crackle, twenty or thirty feet into the air, throwing great flashes of light far out into the gloom, through which the dark forms of the Amahagger flitted to and fro like devils replenishing the infernal fires.We all stood and stared aghastshocked, and yet fascinated at so strange a spectacle, and half expecting to see the spirits those flaming forms had once enclosed come creeping from the shadows to work vengeance on their desecraters.

"I promised thee a strange sight, my Holly," laughed Ayesha, whose nerves alone did not seem to be affected; "and, behold, I have not failed thee.Also, it hath its lesson.Trust not to the future, for who knows what the future may bring! Therefore, live for the day, and endeavor not to escape the dust which seems to be man's end.What thinkest thou those long-forgotten nobles and ladies would have felt had they known that they should one day flare to light the dance or boil the pot of savages? But see, here come the dancers; a merry creware they not? The stage is litnow for the play."As she spoke, we perceived two lines of figures, one male and the other female, to the number of about a hundred, each advancing round the human bonfire, arrayed only in the usual leopard and buck skins.They formed up, in perfect silence, in two lines, facing each other, between us and the fire, and then the dancea sort of infernal and fiendish cancanbegan.