The fighting stopped when they appeared, for they were strange to see. Painted like Chinese idols, covered with gold and glistening stones, the eyes half-closed, looking like little white slits, they advanced into our midst with the smiles of dead women, holding their arms in the air and spreading out their slender fingers, the long nails of which were enclosed in golden sheaths. At the same time came perfumes of balm and incense; little sticks had been set alight in a warming-dish, and an odorous, languorous smoke spread in a blue cloud. The gongs sounded louder now and the phantoms began to dance, keeping their feet motionless, executing a kind of rhythmic movement of the stomach with twistings of the wrists. Always the same set smile, the same white mask of death. It seemed that the only life there was in them was concentrated in their rounded hips and arched stomachs which moved with lascivious wrigglings; and in the rigid arms, the disturbing outspread hands which writhed unceasingly. Le Hello who, for some time past, had been asleep on the floor, hearing the loud sounding of the gongs, woke up, startled. "Why, you fool, it's the dancing-girls!" explained Barrada, jeering, laughing at him. "Oh! yes! the dancing-girls!" He got up and with his large paw, which groped in the air, uncertain, he tried to beat down these upraised arms and these gilded claws, stuttering, thick-voiced. "It's not good, you white faced guy, it's not good to move your hands like that, it's vulgar. . . . I think it's . . . I think it's . . . damnation!" And he sank to the floor again and went to sleep. Barrada, who also this evening had drunk more than was usual with him, reproached them for their yellow skin and told them about his, which was white. "White! White! White!" He insisted over and over again on this whiteness, which as a matter of fact he much exaggerated, and proceeded presently to show it to them. First his arm, then his chest. "Look!" he said. "Is it not true?" The little yellow dolls of Asia continued their slow, lugubrious, beast-like wrigglings, preserving always the mystery of their rictus and of their white elongated eyes. And now Barrada, completely nude, was dancing before them, looking like a Greek marble which had suddenly taken life for some ancient bacchanal. But the Burmese ladies, wound up like automata, danced on and on for long after he was tired. And presently, when all was over and the gongs were silent, the sailors were seized with fear at the idea that these women, paid for their pleasure, were waiting for them. One after another they slunk away in the direction of the shore, not daring to approach them. CHAPTER XXVI This Barrada, who had "wangled" things so that he sailed for a third time on the same ship with us, was the great friend of Yves.