Men and women danced in separate lines, approaching and retreating. To our surprise we saw that many of the latter wore not only white robes but white coiffures as well; for their crisp, dark wool was covered with a dressing of native chalk or pale-tinted clay, while the faces were often streaked with white lines, giving them an appearance indescribably ghost-like. To and fro, backward and forward, co-mingling at one moment and the next in clearly defined lines, moved the dancers to the monotonous tom-toming of their strange orchestra, which somehow managed to suggest things beyond the power of words--the fall of the first rains upon the parched earth; the enfolding of soft mists, from whose gentle embrace springs a stirring and quickening, changing her barrenness into fruition; the swelling of grain and root crops in the dark ground; the first feeble upward striving of young shoots, later to spring into radiant verdure in the free air above; the passion of pride, of life and strength and love--all that is poignantly felt but can seldom be expressed save perhaps by the monotonous beat of the tom-tom, the strange soughing of elephant horns and thrumming of savage lyres on such a night as this. Only one air evolved by a northern musician gives any idea of the effect of these weird African melodies--that is the Braut March in _Lohengrin_, which, written on so few notes, yet beats with a strange persistence on certain fibres of the human instrument. In this, too, the theme is much the same--the bringing of the Earth Bride to the arms of her mystic bridegroom. Each thema, monotonous in itself, changed imperceptibly into another equally monotonous but built on different notes and shadowing forth a very infinitude of meaning. In and out among the dancers crept strange shapes, elaborately coiffured and with whitened faces, much in the style of some Ibo masks, at the time of unknown origin, which wandered into our collection several years ago. These have since been explained as typifying the moon, much after the manner of the so-called Isis masks of the Pangwe Moon Goddess So; or again as representing those strange wanderers from the ghost realm, the spirits of beneficent ancestors who watch over the harvests of their descendants. Hardly daring to breathe, we watched the strange phantasmagoric figures pass to and fro in the intricate mazes of the dance--the lines merging and separating in oozy triangles, squares and circles such as those woven by Ka for the perdition of the Banda Log.