Waylao chanted on. The liquor fumes began to work to their full extent. With arms outspread, she danced along the _pae-pae_, her head close against the rocky roof. Nearer and nearer she glided, step by step, till with a cry she reached Abduh Allah’s side and swooned into his extended arms.
As soon as the breathless, staring crew recovered from their astonishment, the cavern echoed and re-echoed the encore: “Hasan! Kattar rheyrak!” (“Beautiful! Oh, thanks!”)
The four grey-bearded marabouts who were squatting on the mats of the dais opposite the _pae-pae_ lifted their eyes and turbaned heads; so overcome were they with envious admiration that their pointed beards were level with the rugged roof as they once again gasped out in sombre syllables: “Allah! O Mohammed’s beard! Bless its growth!”
Suddenly realisation flashed through Waylao’s brain. She stared with fright on the swarthy crowd of uplifted faces around her. Ere the men had fathomed the meaning of her terror, she had broken away. Like one demented she swept by them and, eluding their clutching hands, fled out of that cavern, back to the sight of heaven and the moonlit seas.
It is no wish of mine to dwell on the terrors, the abominations of that Indian Night Entertainment of Eastern Sensualism. All that I am out to tell is of the temptation that came to Benbow’s daughter. And so I have painted to the best of my ability all that is fit to tell of the scene and happenings in that harem cave near Tai-o-hae: a scene that is common enough in the Indian lines—as they call them—in Fiji and other plantation settlements which are the glory-holes of emigrant Mohammedanism in the South Seas. To this day the missionaries curse those swarthy men, who, I have been told, were not true Indians, but a mongrel race from the Malay Archipelago. However that may be, Abduh had lived in Calcutta, and they were all Mohammedans.
I may as well say and have done with it that Pauline was also lured into that cavern of iniquity. She too had crept behind that mockery in the shape of man, Abduh, expecting to see something that corresponded with her girlish conception of paradise. I do not wish to dwell on all that _she_ confessed to me; suffice it to say that Pauline swiftly saw through the veiled curtain that hid the monstrous inclinations of that human spider and his crew.