The music brooded everywhere. It beat in my ears like the far-off
cadences of the Sault Ste. Marie rapids, that rise and leap and
throb--like a storm hurling through the fir forest--like the
distant rising of an Indian war-song; it swept up those mighty
archways until the gray dome above me faded, and in its place
the stars came out to look down, not on these paleface kneeling
worshippers, but on a band of stalwart, sinewy, copper-coloured
devotees, my own people in my own land, who also assembled to do
honour to the Manitou of all nations.
The deep-throated organ and the boy's voices were gone; I heard
instead the melancholy incantations of our own pagan religionists.
The beautiful dignity of our great sacrificial rites seemed to
settle about me, to enwrap me in its garment of solemnity and
primitive stateliness.
Beat of the Drum.
The atmosphere pulsed with the beat of the Indian drum, the
eerie penetrations of the turtle rattle that set the time of the
dancers' feet. Dance? It is not a dance, that marvellously slow,
serpentine-like figure with the soft swish, swish of moccasined
feet, and the faint jingling of elks'-teeth bracelets, keeping
rhythm with every footfall. It is not a dance, but an invocation
of motion.
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