I fancy that if the dance has gained anything in propriety, which is hard to believe, it has lost in spirit. It might be passionate, dramatic, tragic. But it needs genius to make it anything more than a suggestive and repulsive vulgarity.
During the intervals, the girls sing to the music; the singing is very wild and barbaric. The song is in praise of the Night, a love-song consisting of repeated epithets:—
“O the Night! nothing is so lovely as the Night!
O my heart! O my soul! O my liver!
My love he passed my door, and saw me not;
O the night! How lovely is the Night!”
The strain is minor, and there is a wail in the voices which stridently chant to the twanging strings. Is it only the echo of ages of sin in those despairing voices? How melancholy it all becomes! The girl in yellow, she of the oblong eyes, straight nose and high type of Oriental beauty, dances down alone; she is slender, she has the charm of grace, her eyes never wander to the spectators. Is there in her soul any faint contempt for herself or for the part she plays? Or is the historic consciousness of the antiquity of both her profession and her sin strong enough to throw yet the lights of illusion over such a performance? Evidently the fat girl in red is a prey to no such misgiving, as she comes bouncing down the line, and flings herself into her ague fit.
“Look out, the hippopotamus!” cries Abd-el-Atti, “I 'fraid she kick me.”
While the dance goes on, pipes, coffee, and brandy are frequently passed; the dancers swallow the brandy readily. The house is illuminated, and the entertainment ends with a few rockets from the terrace. This is a full-blown “fantasia.”
As the night is still young and the moon is full, we decide to efface, as much as may be, the vulgarities of modern Egypt, by a vision of the ancient, and taking donkeys we ride to Karnak.