"What is it?" she cried. "Hark, Lee,
that horrible sound." The air was filled with a drumming wail, a
dislocated savage music, that affected him like a nightmare grown
audible.
"It's coming from across the street, from the Opera House," he told
her; "some kind of a dance, I'm certain." Patently it was an orchestra,
but the instruments that composed it, the measures woven of frantic
screaming notes and dull stale iterations, he had no means of
identifying. "Bedlam in the jungle," he said soothingly. She wished it
would stop. Soon he agreed with her; without pause, without variation,
with an insistence which became cruel, and then unbearable, it went on.
Lee Randon, after an uneasiness which culminated in an exasperated
wrath, found a degree of exactness in his description: it was,
undoubtedly, the jungle, Africa, debased into a peculiarly harrowing
travesty of later civilized emotions. Finally he lost the impression of
a meaninglessness; it assumed a potency, a naked reality, more profound
than anything in his previous knowledge. It was the voice of a crazed
and debased passion. To Lee, it seemed to strip him of his whiteness,
his continence, his integrity, to flay him of every particle of
restraint and decency, and set him, bestial and exposed, in a ball room
with glass-hung chandeliers.
Incomprehensibly the fluctuating clamor--he could distinguish low
pitched drums--brought him the vision, pale and remote and mysteriously
smiling, of Cytherea.
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