Making their progress with the unwonted rapidity which was attributable to their specific lightness, Servadac and his companions soon found themselves near a grove of sycamores and eucalyptus massed in picturesque confusion at the base of a little hill.
Here they halted.
"Ah! the vagabonds! the rascals! the thieves!" suddenly exclaimed Ben Zoof, stamping his foot with rage.
"How now?
Are your friends the birds at their pranks again ?" asked the captain.
"No, I don't mean the birds: I mean those lazy beggars that are shirking their work.

Look here; look there!" And as Ben Zoof spoke, he pointed to some scythes, and sickles, and other implements of husbandry that had been left upon the ground.
"What is it you mean ?" asked Servadac, getting somewhat impatient.
"Hush, hush! listen!" was all Ben Zoof's reply; and he raised his finger as if in warning.
Listening attentively, Servadac and his associates could distinctly recognize a human voice, accompanied by the notes of a guitar and by the measured click of castanets.
"Spaniards!" said Servadac.
"No mistake about that, sir," replied Ben Zoof; "a Spaniard would rattle his castanets at the cannon's mouth." "But what is the meaning of it all ?" asked the captain, more puzzled than before.
"Hark!" said Ben Zoof; "it is the old man's turn." And then a voice, at once gruff and harsh, was heard vociferating, "My money! my money! when will you pay me my money?
Pay me what you owe me, you miserable majos." Meanwhile the song continued: _"Tu sandunga y cigarro, Y una cana de Jerez, Mi jamelgo y un trabuco, Que mas gloria puede haver ?"_ Servadac's knowledge of Gascon enabled him partially to comprehend the rollicking tenor of the Spanish patriotic air, but his attention was again arrested by the voice of the old man growling savagely, "Pay me you shall; yes, by the God of Abraham, you shall pay me." "A Jew!" exclaimed Servadac.
"Ay, sir, a German Jew," said Ben Zoof.
The party was on the point of entering the thicket, when a singular spectacle made them pause.

A group of Spaniards had just begun dancing their national fandango, and the extraordinary lightness which had become the physical property of every object in the new planet made the dancers bound to a height of thirty feet or more into the air, considerably above the tops of the trees.

What followed was irresistibly comic.

Four sturdy majos had dragged along with them an old man incapable of resistance, and compelled him, _nolens volens_, to join in the dance; and as they all kept appearing and disappearing above the bank of foliage, their grotesque attitudes, combined with the pitiable countenance of their helpless victim, could not do otherwise than recall most forcibly the story of Sancho Panza tossed in a blanket by the merry drapers of Segovia.
Servadac, the count, Procope, and Ben Zoof now proceeded to make their way through the thicket until they came to a little glade, where two men were stretched idly on the grass, one of them playing the guitar, and the other a pair of castanets; both were exploding with laughter, as they urged the performers to greater and yet greater exertions in the dance.