This was the
convention.--But what was really happening on that sylvan, torchlit
stage that night was something as new as anything can be under the sun,
because it was something that had not happened for ten thousand years.--
We who are worn with novelty can never reconquer for ourselves the
thrill of an unmitigated wonder. We have sold the birthright. But
imagine the toppling of a hundred centuries! You could have seen it in
the eyes of those watchers, in their rapt, rapacious attention, in the
conflict that went on within them visibly; traitorous applause pent and
pitted against all the instinctive protest of an established art.--
"Yes, but this isn't _dancing_!"
Yet their bodies, one here, one there, would begin to sway--
Three Kanaka men, strangers to the island, sat cross-legged on the turf.
One had taken over a drum from a local musician. The other two had
instruments fashioned of dried gourds with fingering pieces of bamboo
and strings of gut--barbaric cousins to the mandolin. So, on this one
night in history, the music of another tribe had come to Taai. It just
escaped being an authentic "tune." How it escaped was indefinable. The
sophisticated ear would almost have it, and abruptly it had got away in
some provoking lapse, some sudden and bizarre disintegration of tone.
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