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Updated: June 22, 2025
It was to humor one of her tastes already known to the reader, that he said to her one morning, "Come, Elsie, take your castanets, and let us have a dance." He had struck the right vein in the girl's fancy, for she was in the mood for this exercise, and very willingly led the way into one of the more empty apartments.
Out from the boats rushed music in clouds like incense; wild, African music of chanting voices, beating tom-toms, or clapping hands that clacked together like castanets. Very old men and very young youths thumped furiously on earthen drums shaped like the jars of Elephantine, once so famous that they travelled the length of Egypt filled with wine.
He even lingered a little while in front of a café, where men were playing guitar and mandolin, and girls were dancing with castanets. The sight of light and life pleased the boy who had been so long in prison. These people were diverting themselves and they smiled and laughed.
This was undoubtedly the animal that had escaped which was making toward him with great leaps and savage growls, as though it had already marked him for its prey. His teeth chattered like castanets; his eyes fairly bulged from their sockets; the breath came in hot gasps from his white lips; his brain reeled, as he took in, in that rapid glance of horror, his awful doom.
The drummer, with his round instrument resting on one knee, beat the parchment with rhythmical strokes, while his companion blew on a long, wooden flute, carved with primitive designs. The Little Chaplain was flipping castanets as enormous as the shells brought in by Tío Ventolera.
Near San José he saw the Spanish flag floating over the roof of the alcalde's office, while the hollow beating of a drum, the bucolic quavering of a flute, and the snapping of castanets, reached his ears. The dance took place in front of the church. The young people were formed into groups, standing near the musicians, who occupied low seats.
These lips were especially conspicuous, for each individual was rushing on open-mouthed, with snout raised aloft all of them cracking their teeth like castanets, uttering, as they ran, a confused chorus of short, sharp grunts and squeaks expressive of anger. As soon as Alexis saw them, he recognised the peril of the situation in which he and his brother were placed.
Around the room a large and powerful negress, scantily attired, with her head adorned with feathers, was dancing wildly, accompanying herself with bone castanets. It looked like some terrible fetich. I did not lose my calmness.
"'Tra! lalala, la! la! la! Tra! lalala, la! la! la! Tra! lalalalalalalalalalala!" And she danced about the room, snapping her fingers instead of castanets. "Don't be so reckless and wicked, my love," said Mrs. Wylie. "You will break your poor mother's heart." Miss Wilson and Mr. Jansenius entered just then, and Agatha became motionless and gazed abstractedly at a vase of flowers.
It pays no attention, except to ridicule them, to the problems that vex high and serious souls: What is right and wrong? What is ugly and beautiful? What is holy and what is profane? It either refuses to admit the existence of these questions or else asserts that, as insoluble, they are also negligible problems. To all such stupid moralizing it prefers the click of the castanets!
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