196 ROUGHING IT IN SOUTHERN INDIA 



and terrorised, into a given corner, it is met with a flight of 

 arrows. Once enmeshed, the strongest are helpless ; the 

 creature's struggles bring the net down round it, when it 

 is at the villainous mercy of its captors. The sort of things 

 these men find pleasure in are not to be written. 



However, they could not allow themselves such treats 

 very often, for it was difficult to keep the secret, and if the 

 Dor ay came to hear of it, they knew he had ways of making 

 them feel his displeasure very uncomfortably. No force of 

 example would ever avail here, only the fear of being found 

 out, and he worked upon that. The whole of the guilty 

 tribe would find itself excluded from his next expedition, 

 and could be left alone to punish those who had taken part 

 in the stolen one. Not all the men being able to leave their 

 villages at the same time, some were bound to be innocent. 



Negroes are known to be almost invariably musical, and 

 the African blood in the slave-folk told in the same way. 

 A melancholy strain ran through all their melodies ; they 

 were mostly tuneful enough, but some were nothing more 

 than a weird sort of wail. In this their songs belied their 

 natures, for they were a very merry set. As for their 

 dances, I delighted in watching them ; the wildest, most 

 fantastic ever seen, but with step and time harmoniously 

 true. For some one to tap softly, with measured beat, on 

 a little gourd tom-tom was quite enough to start the whole 

 crew of them lying about round the camp log, and in an 

 instant every muscle in every man's body was alive. As 

 happy, and, as far as we were concerned, as harmless as 

 kittens, though looking like nothing else but demons — their 

 faces alternately reddened in the glow of the fire and black 

 again in the shadow — they whirled round and round, waxing 

 more and more beside themselves every minute, till one 

 after another fell down from sheer exhaustion, and the rest 

 danced on and over them as long as they could keep it up. 



The musical instruments which these people always 



