picture. The pack of dark, tattered figures touched off every here and there with the bright colors of a Madras tignon. The squatting, cross-legged musicians. The low-roofed, embowered town off in front, with here and there a spire lifting a finger of feeble remonstrance; the flat, grassy plain stretching around and behind, dotted with black stumps; in the distance the pale-green willow undergrowth, behind it the cyprière—the cypress swamp—and in the pale, seven-times-heated sky the sun, only a little declined to south and westward, pouring down its beams.
With what particular musical movements the occasion began does not now appear. May be with very slow and measured ones; they had such that were strange and typical. I have heard the negroes sing one—though it was not of the dance-ground but of the cane-field—that showed the emphatic barbarism of five bars to the line, and was confined to four notes of the open horn.
But I can only say that with some such slow and quiet strain the dance may have been preluded. It suits the Ethiopian fancy for a beginning to be dull and repetitious; the bottom of the ladder must be on the ground.
The singers almost at the first note are many. At the end of the first line every voice is lifted up. The strain is given the second time with growing spirit. Yonder glistening black Hercules, who plants one foot forward, lifts his head and bare, shining chest, and rolls out the song from a mouth and throat like a cavern, is a candio, a chief, or was before he was over thrown in battle and dragged away, his village burning behind him, from the mountains of High Soudan. That is an African amulet that hangs about his neck—a greegree. He is of the Bambaras, as you may know by his solemn visage and the long tattoo streaks running down from the temples to the neck, broadest in the middle, like knife-gashes. See his play of
