Haiti continued - The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands - page 168

The dancers had fallen to their knees in a ring. The Houn-genikon wove his way towards a young
hounci, and, striking her on the arm with the flat of his cutlass, danced round the circle and back to her
once more, and forced the bottle-neck into her mouth. Then, remaining in one place, but marking time
with a complicated step, he held out his arm. The hounci rose, and, resting her hand on his crooked fin-
gers, pirouetted in a complete circle, then back, and then round once more, and retreated shuffling and
shaking in the steps of the mahi dance. Moving to the next kneeling figure, he repeated the same gestures,
and the girl made the same stately revolutions, motions as grave as the pirouette in a seventeenth-century
pavane , and danced away. The delicate urbanity of this evolution struck a surprising note among the pro-
longed barbarian spasms of the dance. Could it have slipped into the ritual in the time of Louis XV? At
the same period, perhaps, that St. Claire and St. Rose of Lima unwillingly gate-crashed the Olympus of
Dahomey? When the cycle of salutes had finished, all were dancing again, many of them with an almost
stationary, burglarious prowl, or in couples which stalked round and round each other, or leaped up and
down in solitary accesses of elation. The floor could hold no more. In the centre, dominating everything
from the plinth of the pillar, stood the Houngenikon with his head and torso reared backwards and his
legs planted wide. His right arm was still down-stretched with the thrust of the cutlass, and his left hand,
grasping the nearly empty bottle, rested on his hip. He was bathed in sweat and quivering slightly all
over. The bared teeth and the whites of his eyes shone like the apertures of a dark mask lying on the
snow, while the combustion of his cigar and the long dragon-like prongs of smoke that he fired down his
nostrils turned his head into a steaming black thurible. Although the pupils were slowly reappearing, his
eyes retained a look of the remotest abstraction.
Motions of disorder erupted at short intervals as the Lwas effected their entrance into one or other of
the dancers. They writhed and staggered and fell and lay twitching and gasping, and slowly rose again
transformed, and evolving with the impotence of somnambulists under the control of their immanent deit-
ies. The road from Olympus had been thrown open. Less ceremony attended these later avatars. Each
time the drummers battered out a pattern of deafening impacts, their slapping and rod-wielding hands
rising high over their heads, while their heckling snarls stressed the fury of the music. The Lwas were
falling out of the sky as thick as leaves, and by the time, hours later, that we extricated ourselves to go,
the tonnelle had become a running, stamping, howling, gasping and shrieking theodrome.
Climbing through the squatting figures into the outer darkness, I caught a sudden glimpse of the gypsy
figure that had struck me so forcibly, on the night of the Mackandal play, leaning relaxed and aloof
against one of the supporting posts. He was gazing sardonically into the lighted circle with a cigarette in
the corner of his mouth. Half a dozen Negroes stood up and he was blotted out.
The moon had set half a dozen hours ago, and the rattle of the drums faded as we followed the beam of
Rodolfe's torch. Faded, but as they died, others sounded and, as we advanced, grew louder. Going home
was unthinkable. Plainly the only thing to do was to continue till we fell asleep, or till everything had
come to an end.
The following hours were spent in two different tonnelles —theatres, like the first, of multiple incarn-
ation.
The drums all fell silent at last. On our way home we passed our original temple. The fire of Marinette
was smouldering to extinction. An odd sandal and a number of empty bottles had been tidied into a
corner, and two of the drums leant against the step of the pillar. The other had rolled a couple of yards
away near the door, and two or three of the dancers were sleeping on mats. The Houngenikon lay quite
straight on his back out-side the houmfor, sound asleep. The Lwas had abandoned the husks which had