seriously. There were occasional lulls, now, in the carnival, but
explosions of sound still broke the stillness, and phantoms of the
restless throng began to chase each other through my brain. The exotic
costumes of the Albanian girls in their green and gold wove themselves
into dreams and called up colours seen in Northern Africa during still
wilder festivals--negro festivals such as Fro-mentin loved to depict. In
spectral dance there flitted before my vision nightmarish throngs of
dusky women bedizened in that same green and gold; Arabs I saw, riding
tumultuously hither and thither with burnous flying in the wind; beggars
crawling about the hot sand and howling for alms; ribbons and flags
flying--a blaze of sunshine overhead, and on earth a seething orgy of
colour and sound; methought I heard the guttural yells of the
fruit-vendors, musketry firing, braying of asses, the demoniacal groans
of the camels----

Was it really a camel? No. It was something infinitely worse, and within
a few feet of my ears. I sprang out of bed. There, at the very window,
stood a youth extracting unearthly noises out of the Basilicata bagpipe.
To be sure! I remembered expressing an interest in this rare instrument
to one of my hosts who, with subtle delicacy, must have ordered the boy
to give me a taste of his quality--to perform a matutinal serenade, for
my especial benefit. How thoughtful these people are. It was not quite 4
a.m. With some regret, I said farewell to sleep and stumbled out of
doors, where my friends of yesterday evening were already up and doing.
The eating, the dancing, the bagpipes--they were all in violent
activity, under the sober and passionless eye of morning.

A gorgeous procession took place about midday. Like a many-coloured
serpent it wound out of the chapel, writhed through the intricacies of
the pathway, and then unrolled itself freely, in splendid convolutions,