One by one they leapt with the most desperate energy, each man being
allowed to make three attempts, and Alan noted that this novel jumping
competition was watched with the deepest interest by all the audience,
at the time he knew not why.
The first two were evidently elderly men who failed to come anywhere
near the mark. Their failure was received with shouts of derision. They
sank exhausted to the ground and from the motion of his body Alan could
see that one of them was weeping, while the other remained sullenly
silent. Then a younger man advanced and at the third try almost grasped
the fetish. Indeed he would have grasped it had he not met with foul
play, for the Asika, seeing that he was about to succeed, lifted it an
inch or two, so that he also missed and with a groan joined the band of
the defeated. Next appeared a fourth priest, even more horribly arrayed
than those before him, but Alan noticed that his mask was of the
lightest, and that his garments consisted chiefly of paint, the main
idea of his make-up being that of a skeleton. He was a thin active
fellow, and all the watching thousands greeted him with a shout. For
a few seconds he stood back gazing at the mask as a wolf might at an
unapproachable bone.
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