D NATIVE WAR-DANCE. 



adapted to astonish than to please, exciting alarm 

 rather than admiration, and displaying in rapid suc- 

 cession the habits and ferocious passions of a savage 

 community. Let the reader picture to himself a 

 hundred or more unclad Africans, besmeared and 

 disfigured with copious defilements of red clay, and 

 assuming with frantic gestures all the characteristic 

 vehemence of a furious engagement. The dance com- 

 menced with a slow movement to a sort of humming 

 noise from the women in the rear, the men stamping 

 and beating time on the ground with their feet, until 

 the gradual excitement occasioned a simultaneous 

 spring with corresponding shouts, when the action 

 proceeded to an unnatural frenzy, and was calculated 

 to produce in the mind of a stranger the most 

 appalling sensations*. The dusky glare of the fire 

 blazing in front of these formidable warriors, during 

 their wild and unearthly evolutions, gave an addi- 

 tional degree of awful effect to this extraordinary 

 scene ; and all that I had ever read in poetry or 

 romance of the Court of Pandemonium, or the Hall 



* Foremost in these hideous revelries was the Chief himself, whose 

 ambition for unequalled excellence in such gymnastic feats had 

 occasioned, at an earlier period, the cruel and untimely death of a 

 blameless subject. It is related that, when a certain dependent of 

 his tribe appeared to surpass Gaika in these warlike exercises, and 

 unfortunately for himself, to obtain from the spectators a superior 

 tribute of approbation, the jealous and unrelenting tyrant, who could 

 " bear no brother near his throne," contrived by some insidious pre- 

 text to destroy his unhappy rival. 



