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If one looks merely at the half-nude bodies, made repulsive by a coating of reddish black paint, with dabs of whitewash in several places, at their faces painted with the reddish black stuff, at the strings of white beads around their necks, and the snake whips in their hands, then indeed it is easy to say that they are hideous.
As well put a gentleman in modern evening dress en face with a half-nude scornfully beautiful statue of Apollo, as trot out threadbare, insincere commonplaces in the hearing of this clear-eyed child of nature, whose pure, perfect face seemed to silently repel the very passing shadow of a falsehood.
And without consciously grasping what the air was I had suffered an abrupt voyage through space. I saw a torch-lit sward, ringed with blue and saffron faces and high forest walls; I saw the half-nude, golden loveliness of a Polynesian woman shaken like a windy leaf. And the beat of a goat-hide drum was the beat of my blood. I felt my shoulders swaying. I looked at the young man.
She has shown this, for the skirt is torn in several places, and the bodice, plucked open, displays her bosom, half-nude, heaving under the wild thoughts which agitate it. She accompanies them, but not us a companion. She has the air of a prisoner, the air of the eagle whose wings have been clipped. She regards neither mother nor sister. Their constant kindness has failed to impress her.
Behind surged a mob of warriors, women, and children, half-nude bodies striped with red and yellow, a malignant demoniacal crew, yelling and pushing under the flaming lights, rushing tumultuously forward to fling themselves prostrate before the altar. It seemed they would never cease pouring forth from the narrow tunnel, a struggling, gesticulating stream.
They congested the defences of the camp. They had even breathed their last agony within the precincts which they had sought to conquer. Mean, undersized, dusky-skinned, half-nude creatures sprawled everywhere, revealing in their attitudes something of that last suffering before the great release. Doubtless the price had been paid with little enough regret, for that is the savage way.
Such was the effect of these words upon the eager and excited, yet thoroughly solemnized crowd, that when the shutters were thrown open, they would hardly have been surprised to see the bar covered with golden goblets and bowls of wassail, surrounded by lordly revellers and half-nude women, with the stricken Belshazzar at the head of the feast.
Bart watched them go off in excellent order right away out into the plain, the orange rays of the setting sun seeming to turn the half-nude figures into living bronze.
In the meantime, the man in the yellow coat had been fumbling in the fob of his waistcoat, without any one having noticed his movements. Besides, the other travellers were drinking or playing cards, and were not paying attention to anything. Cosette contracted herself into a ball, with anguish, within the angle of the chimney, endeavoring to gather up and conceal her poor half-nude limbs.
An hour or two afterwards, as the ship that had landed him at Lêla sailed slowly past the white line of surf which fringed the northern side of the island, the captain, looking shoreward from his deck, saw the white man and his boy walking along the beach towards a lonely native house on the farthest point. Behind them followed a number of half-nude natives, carrying mats and baskets of food.
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