Haiti continued - The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands - page 167

his chin hung loose. Then, as though an invisible fist had dealt him a heavy blow, he fell to the ground
and lay there, with his head stretching backwards in a rictus of anguish until the tendons of his neck
and shoulders projected like roots. One hand clutched at the other elbow behind his hollowed back as
though he were striving to break his own arm, and his whole body, from which the sweat was streaming,
trembled and shuddered like a dog in a dream. Only the whites of his eyes were visible as, although his
eye-sockets were now wide open, the pupils had vanished under the lids. Foam collected on his lips. The
priest stooped over him with his rattling implements, and after a few minutes the young man rose to one
knee and, like a sleepwalker, regained his feet; and at last, with the same painful expression, as though his
whole body were on fire, danced a few disjointed steps. The howling anthem and the drums burst upon
him. Slowly, slowly, though his face lost nothing of the blank agony of its abstraction, his limbs regained
their co-ordination. 'He's mounted by the Lwa,' the whisper ran, as the possessed figure began to evolve.
' Li gain Loa! ' It was the beginning of a long, unconscious ballet.
Now the Houngan, dancing a slow step and brandishing a cutlass, advanced from the fireside, flinging
the weapon again and again into the air, and catching it by the hilt. In a few minutes he was holding it by
the blunted end of the blade. Dancing slowly towards him, the Houngenikon reached out and grasped the
hilt. The priest retired, and the young man, twirling and leaping, spun from side to side of the tonnelle .
The ring of spectators rocked backwards as he bore down upon them whirling the blade over his head,
with the gaps in his bared teeth lending to his mandril face a still more feral aspect. The tonnelle was
filled for a few seconds with genuine and unmitigated terror. The singing had turned to a universal howl
and the drummers, rolling and lolling with the furious and invisible motion of their hands, were lost in a
transport of noise.
Flinging back his head, the novice drove the blunt end of the cutlass into his stomach. His knees
sagged, and his head fell forward as he sank in a mock death. In the instant that he seemed about to
crumple up, a dancer rushed from the ring of spectators and bound a scarlet cloth round his middle. A
dance of death-agony followed. The Houngenikon gyrated and sank and recovered, the muscles of his
arm taut with the effort to thrust the sword home. Shuffling and singing, the dancers crept back on to the
floor, closing round the throes of the young priest, who, lurching round and round across the floor, dis-
appeared into the houmfor as the wave seemed about to submerge him. The monotony of flux and reflux
began again.
But not for many minutes. The door of the houmfor swung open, and the drums beat a retreat. The
young priest burst into the emptied peristyle, and danced violently to the middle. His back was hollowed,
his shoulders squared and his head carried arrogantly erect. It was a complete metamorphosis. In every
line in his body and every step and movement, death and dissolution had been replaced by pride and tri-
umph and life. The cutlass was still held to his middle and the cloth still made its scarlet smear. But in
his left hand he held a bottle of rum, and in the corner of his mouth a long cigar was stuck, leaving in
the air, as he twirled and sprang, spirals and arabesques of smoke. Leaping backwards on his heels in a
flaunting hornpipe, he took the cigar from his mouth, bent his head back and swallowed a long draught
from the bottle. Then, leaping across the tonnelle with his legs bent at right angles, he began to revolve
on one heel while the other leg, raised high in the air, swept him round on this pivot with a scythe-like
revolution. As he appeared about to lose his balance, he changed legs with a stamp, looping and coiling
in this manner round the amphitheatre in a series of arcs which dwindled in radius until they brought him
to the middle for the triple libations to the pillar, and then to the drums. Halting here, he stuck the neck
of the bottle between the teeth of each of the drummers in turn.