[Typee by Herman Melville]@TWC D-Link book
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CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
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At this the women who had congregated in the groves, set up the most violent clamours, as they invariably do here as elsewhere on every occasion of excitement and alarm, with a view of tranquillizing their own minds and disturbing other people.

On this particular occasion they made such an outrageous noise, and continued it with such perseverance, that for awhile, had entire volleys of musketry been fired off in the neighbouring mountains, I should not have been able to have heard them.
When this female commotion had a little subsided I listened eagerly for further information.

At last bang went another shot, and then a second volley of yells from the hills.

Again all was quiet, and continued so for such a length of time that I began to think the contending armies had agreed upon a suspension of hostilities; when pop went a third gun, followed as before with a yell.

After this, for nearly two hours nothing occurred worthy of comment, save some straggling shouts from the hillside, sounding like the halloos of a parcel of truant boys who had lost themselves in the woods.
During this interval I had remained standing on the piazza of the 'Ti,' which directly fronted the Happar mountain, and with no one near me but Kory-Kory and the old superannuated savages I have described.


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