It was a pandemonium, a babel, an unspeakable hell.

To count was impossible, but the great room was filled with bodies, and rang with guttural, inarticulate cries.

The busily flitting priests stirred up the wood until the blaze leaped nearly to the roof, mumbling as they worked, the incessant moaning of the tribesmen deepening into a weird chant.

The frenzied singers leapt into the air, flinging their limbs about in wild contortion, their movements increasing in violence, their grotesquely painted faces becoming hellish from awakening passion.

They became brutes, fiends, whose only thought was cruelty.