cs of white paint; their faces were
painted white, but their noses were covered with soot. They wore not a
scrap of clothing; but around their necks and on their arms and legs
they had a wealth of talismans--tiny figures fashioned from clay, from
iron, from copper and from stones, in which one might discern the
characteristics of Phoenician images debased by thousands of years of
savage inspiration. In their painted, plumed, bedizened immobility
they appeared inhuman, or perhaps less than human--the personifications
of Africa's blind and vivid soul, the full efflorescence of this
gloomy, white-splotched clearing.

They raised their heads as a seventh, crowned and painted as they were,
stood forth from a curtain of vines. On his left arm he wore a shield
covered with black-and-white patterns; above the shield rim glittered
the blades of three spears.

He described what he had seen.

He told of a train of dark-skinned men, guided by one with
unexceptional features, but with yellowish wool and a skin that
resembled the belly of a dead fish. These intruders served a personage
such as had never been seen. For she--if indeed a woman--was tall,
with a face the color of the highest mountain peaks, and eyes gleaming
like strange stones. She walked as if in a trance; but in her
trancelike face was a cold grief, or maybe a cold fury, like that of
some goddess whose taboos had been broken, and who was marching to
vengeance.

They sat awe-stricken, filled with that dread of the supernatural which
possesses the savage who is confronted with anything unheard of.
Besides, the spell of the dances was upon them, remote though they were
from that scene--the far-off frenzies that were preparing had begun to
trouble their nerves. But at last their leader rose. Moved by the
mysticism of the season, when every act must take on a liturgical
quality, he chanted the question:

"Who is the woman with the cold face who enters our country at the time
of the Dances of the Moon?"

All his companions repeated his question in a low, singing tone,
touching their amulets, and raising their whitened visages toward the
interlaced branches and vines.

The leader's high, tremulous voice was heard again:

"Is it a woman of flesh and blood; or is it the Lady of the Moon?"

It was the genius of the ancient Phoenicians, the spirit of Astoreth,
surviving distorted through all these ages in the depths of the jungle,
exerting its spell.

But a