He would not "roll the bullet." He would not
witness the game of chungke, expressly played in honor of his visit. He
even refused to join in the dance, although young and nimble. But it
chanced that the three circles were awhirl on the sandy spaces
contiguous to the "beloved square" when the first break in the cohesion
of his pertinacity occurred. The red sunset was widely aflare; the dizzy
rout of the shadows of the dancers, all gregarious and intricately
involved in the three circles, kept the moving figures company. These
successive circles, one within another, followed each a different
direction in their revolutions to the music of the primitive flute,
fashioned of the bone of a deer (the tibia), and the stertorous
sonorities of the earthen drums; and as the fantastically attired
figures whirled around and around, their dull gray shadows whisked to
and fro on the golden brown sand, all in the red sunset glow.
Tscholens, quitting the council-house, glanced but indifferently at them
and then away at the lengthening perspective of the azure mountains of
the Great Smoky range. The harbingers of the twilight were advancing in
a soft blue haze over the purple and garnet tinted slopes near at hand,
their forests all leafless now, although the autumn had lingered long,
and the burnished golden days of the Indian summer were loath to go.
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