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We would not think it was such a fine church. The walls were made of dry mud and sticks. The roof was made of palm-leaf mats. The floors were made of mud and so were the seats. But everything was polished and rubbed as smooth as possible. There were no windows or doors in the building. There were just holes in the wall to let in the light for windows and a larger hole to serve as an entrance.
And presently, from beneath the colonnades a sound of sweet music stole out again and filled the air; the serving-men hurried hither and thither, the black slaves plied their palm-leaf fans behind each guest, and the banquet was begun.
She arranged the folds of her shawl more carefully over her arm so as to show the pretty palm-leaf border, and then looked up with great approval to the row of great maples that shaded the broad sidewalk. "I wonder if we can't contrive to make time to go an' see old Miss Nancy Fell?" she ventured to ask Mrs. Flagg.
"Yes, sah," and the servant retraced his steps. "What about that turkey of mine that you stole last week? You can't go to camp-meeting with that on your conscience. Come, now, better take off your finery and repent in sackcloth and ashes." For an instant the negro was nonplused, then the palm-leaf was flourished grandiloquently, while its owner said in a voice of withering scorn, "Laws!
Peter promptly prepared the only dry place he could find, which was in the stern of the boat, by dragging down a portion of the bamboo and palm-leaf awning and laying the pieces across so as to form a little platform, where he stretched himself out, and before a minute had elapsed he was breathing so heavily that his companion began to peer up and down the river and think of the possibility of the sleeper being heard.
Clumps of fruit-trees marked the villages; slim palms put their nodding heads together above the low houses; dried palm-leaf roofs shone afar, like roofs of gold, behind the dark colonnades of tree-trunks; figures passed vivid and vanishing; the smoke of fires stood upright above the masses of flowering bushes; bamboo fences glittered, running away in broken lines between the fields.
As for Bonaventure, sitting beside her, you could just see his bare feet limply pendulous under his wide palm-leaf hat. And yet he was a very real personage.
It was only after the skies had been leaden for days at a time; when rain in torrents beat unceasingly upon the hastily erected shelters and found its way in rivulets through the palm-leaf roofs so that the earthen floors were converted into basins of mud; when game retreated to unknown or inaccessible places so that the procuring of food became an increasingly difficult problem; it was then, after the weeks of brooding and confinement that nerves snapped and the picture of war formed itself as a saving diversion before the blood-shot eyes of the savages.
The maiden continued to strike the strings of the mandore, and sang more and more softly the refrain of her song. Poëri slept. She stopped and fanned him with a palm-leaf fan thrown on the table. Poëri was handsome, and sleep imparted to his pure features an indescribable expression of languor and tenderness.
The holes that are shown in the floor are apparently connected with the construction, as they are not in the mid-line where pillars are likely. At the edge of chamber No. 2 is a cast of plaited palm-leaf matting on the mud mortar above this level, and the bricks are set back irregularly. This shows the mode of finishing off the roof of this tomb.
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