tinguishing the moon's rays, and throwing darting shadows among the tall gum trees, black-stemmed and hoary with moss. The gins leaned forward, their bare black bosoms palpitating, their arms swinging, their boomerangs and nullas clashing. White and red tipped spears quivered in the earth, making a sort of palisade against the scrub.
Then dancing began. Troop after troop of demoniac beings pressed from the scrub and ranged themselves round the centre idol. They were naked save for a belt about the loins. All were painted in white and red and yellow; some to represent skeletons, others had crawling snakes meandering upon their limbs, others fishes, others in a nightmare pattern meaning nothing; and on their heads were cockatoo feathers, white and pale yellow, and plumes from the parrot's breast. They danced round the idol, making all kinds of graceful silent gestures in time to the music, which changed as the figures of the dances varied.
Elsie sat as if in a dream. She had been seated between Frank Hallett and Blake. Her dress touched Blake. She was conscious almost of something electrical, highly charged in him—a suppressed agitation, though he sat perfectly still. An odd fancy struck her that he would not move lest he should lose the contact of her dress. Was it a dream—the hellish merriment, the savage gestures, the fiendish shouts and yells, in which there seemed a note of such unutterable melancholy? And the brassy glow rising and falling, the solemn idol with its staring painted eyes and outstretched arms, the circle of gins, women like herself—torn perhaps by love and longing, as she was torn now. ... And the wide silent Bush, and all the vast barbaric world. And here this little group of civilized beings, the old world and the new meeting. Lord and Lady Waveryng, Lord Horace, In a, Frank, Blake, Trant. She heard Trant speak at the moment. He was bidding good-bye to Lady Horace and Mrs. Jem Hallett, saying that he meant to take advantage of the moonlight and go back to the Gorge to meet a butcher he was expecting the first thing in the morning.
