My Winter on the Nile / Eighteenth Edition

by Charles Dudley Warner

There is no difficulty in getting at the meats; we tear off strips, mutually assisting each other in pulling them asunder; but there is more trouble about such dishes as pease and a purée of something. One hesitates to make a scoop of his four fingers, and plunge in; and then it is disappointing to an unskilled person to see how few peas he can convey to his mouth at a time. I sequester and keep by me the breast-bone of a chicken, which makes an excellent scoop for small vegetables and gravies, and I am doing very well with it, until there is a universal protest against the unfairness of the device.

Our host praises everything himself in the utmost simplicity, and urges us to partake of each dish; he is continually picking out nice bits from the dish and conveying them to the mouth of his nearest guest. My friend who sits next to All, ought to be grateful for this delicate attention, but I fear he is not. The fact is that Ali, by some accident, in fishing, hunting, or war, has lost the tip of the index finger of his right hand, the very hand that conveys the delicacies to my friend's mouth. And he told me afterwards, that he felt each time he was fed that he had swallowed that piece of the consul's finger.

During the feast there is music by performers in the adjoining hall, music in minor, barbaric strains insisted on with the monotonous nonchalance of the Orient, and calculated, I should say, to excite a person to ferocity, and to make feeding with his fingers a vent to his aroused and savage passions. At the end of the courses water is brought for us to lave our hands, and coffee and chibooks are served.

“Dinner very nice, very fine,” says Ali, speaking the common thought which most hosts are too conventional to utter.

“A splendid dinner, O! consul; I have never seen such an one in America.”

The Ghawazees have meantime arrived; we hear a burst of singing occasionally with the wail of the instruments. The dancing is to be in the narrow hall of the house, which is lighted as well as a room can be with so many dusky faces in it. At the far end are seated on the floor the musicians, with two stringed instruments, a tambourine and a darabooka. That which answers for a violin has two strings of horsehair, stretched over a cocoanut-shell; the bowstring, which is tightened by the hand as it is drawn, is of horsehair. The music is certainly exciting, harassing, plaintive, complaining; the very monotony of it would drive one wild in time. Behind the musicians is a dark cloud of turbaned servants and various privileged retainers of the house. In front of the musicians sit the Ghawazees, six girls, and an old women with parchment skin and twinkling eyes, who has been a famous dancer in her day. They are waiting a little wearily, and from time to time one of them throws out the note or two of a song, as if the music were beginning to work in her veins. The spectators are grouped at the entrance of the hall and seated on chairs down each side, leaving but a narrow space for the dancers between; and there are dusky faces peering in at the door.

Before the dance begins we have an opportunity to see what these Ghawazees are like, a race which prides itself upon preserving a pure blood for thousands of years, and upon an ancestry that has always followed the most disreputable profession. These girls are aged say from sixteen to twenty; one appears much older and looks exactly like an Indian squaw, but, strange to say, her profile is also exactly that of Rameses as we see it in the sculptures. The leading dancer is dressed in a flaring gown of red and figured silk, a costly Syrian dress; she is fat, rather comely, but coarsely uninteresting, although she is said to have on more jewelry than any other dancing-girl in Egypt; her abundant black hair is worn long and in strands thickly hung with gold coins; her breast is covered with necklaces of gold-work and coins; and a mass of heavy twinkling silver ornaments hangs about her waist. A third dancer is in an almost equally striking gown of yellow, and wears also much coin; she is a Pharaonic beauty, with a soft skin and the real Oriental eye and profile. The dresses of all are plainly cut, and straight-waisted, like an ordinary calico gown of a milkmaid. They wear no shawls or any other Oriental wrappings, and dance in their stocking-feet.

At a turn in the music, the girl in red and the girl in yellow stand up; for an instant they raise their castanets till the time of the music is caught, and then start forward, with less of languor and a more skipping movement than we expected; and they are not ungraceful as they come rapidly down the hall, throwing the arms aloft and the feet forward, to the rattle of the castanets. These latter are small convex pieces of brass, held between the thumb and finger, which have a click like the rattle of the snake. In mid-advance they stop, face each other, chassée, retire, and again come further forward, stop, and the peculiar portion of the dance begins, which is not dancing at all, but a quivering, undulating motion given to the body, as the girl stands with feet planted wide apart. The feet are still, the head scarcely stirs, except with an almost imperceptible snakelike movement, but the muscles of the body to the hips quiver in time to the monotonous music, in muscular thrills, in waves running down, and at intervals extending below the waist. Sometimes one side of the body quivers while the other is perfectly still, and then the whole frame, for a second, shares in the ague. It is certainly an astonishing muscular performance, but you could not call it either graceful or pleasing. Some people see in the intention of the dance a deep symbolic meaning, something about the Old Serpent of the Nile, with its gliding, quivering movement and its fatal fascination. Others see in it only the common old Snake that was in Eden. I suppose in fact that it is the old and universal Oriental dance, the chief attraction of which never was its modesty.

After standing for a brief space, with the body throbbing and quivering, the castanets all the time held above the head in sympathetic throbs, the dancers start forward, face each other, pass, pirouette, and take some dancing steps, retire, advance and repeat the earthquake performance. This is kept up a long time, and with wonderful endurance, without change of figure; but sometimes the movements are more rapid, when the music hastens, and more passion is shown. But five minutes of it is as good as an hour. Evidently the dance is nothing except with a master, with an actress who shall abandon herself to the tide of feeling which the music suggests and throw herself into the full passion of it; who knows how to tell a story by pantomime, and to depict the woes of love and despair. All this needs grace, beauty, and genius. Few dancing-girls have either. An old resident of Luxor complains that the dancing is not at all what it was twenty years ago, that the old fire and art seem to be lost.

“The old hag, sitting there on the floor, was asked to exhibit the ancient style; she consented, and danced marvelously for a time, but the performance became in the end too shameful to be witnessed.”