After Hamul-Kammesh had finished, his audience threw themselves chests downward on the ground, and remained thus for some minutes, mumbling unintelligibly to themselves. I observed that they all faced in one direction, the south; and I felt that this could not be attributed merely to chance. Then, as though at a prearranged signal, all the people simultaneously arose, reminding me of a church-meeting breaking up after the final prayer. Yet no one made any motion to leave; and I had an impression that we were nearer the beginning than the end of the ceremonies. This impression was confirmed when Hamul-Kammesh began to wave his arms before him with a bird-like rhythm, and when, like an orchestra in obedience to the band-master, the audience burst into song. I cannot say that the result pleased me, for there was in it a weird and barbarous note; yet at the same time there was a certain wild melody ... so that, as I listened, I came more and more under the influence of the singing. It seemed to me that I was hearing the voice not of individuals but of a people, a people pouring forth its age-old joys and sorrows, longings and aspirations. But how express in words the far-away primitive quality of that singing?--It had something of the madness and abandon of the savage exulting, something of the loneliness and long-drawn melancholy of the wolf howling from the midnight hilltop, something of the plaintive and querulous tone of wild birds calling and calling on their way southward. After the song had culminated in one deep-voiced crescendo, it was succeeded by a dance of equal gusto and strangeness. Singly and in couples and in groups of three and four, the people leapt and swayed in the wavering light; they flung their legs waist-high, they coiled their arms snake-like about their bodies, they whirled around like tops; they darted forward and darted back again, sped gracefully in long curves and spirals, tripped from side to side, or reared and vaulted like athletes; and all the while they seemed to preserve a certain fantastic pattern, seemed to move to the beat of some inaudible rhythm, seemed to be actors in a pageant whose nature I could only vaguely surmise. As they flitted shadow-like in the shadowy background or glided with radiant faces into the light and then back into the gloom, they seemed not so much like sportive and pirouetting humans as like dancing gods; and the sense came over me that I was beholding not a mere ceremony of men and women, but rather a festival of wraiths, of phantoms, of cloudy, elfin creatures who might flash away into the mist or the firelight.