She rose when Ralph Trenchard stood in the doorway looking across the hall in bewilderment, and, holding out her hands, descended the steps, her great glittering train spread out behind her like an enormous fan. She walked slowly, whilst the men whispered remarks, which were better left unprinted, the one to the other, and the fifteen mites leapt from the stools, upon which had stood the prisoners from Damascus, and ran to lift her train as she turned with her hand in Ralph Trenchard’s.
He looked at her from head to foot. He gazed at the superb figure, the jewels, the beautiful face, the crimson-tipped fingers, and, with all the perversity of the human, was suddenly overwhelmed with a longing for just one glimpse of the girl he had loved, in her riding kit, with her sweet, laughing, fair face turned up to the light of the stars.
“Thank God,” he said to himself as he walked up the steps by the side of the beautiful Arabian. “Thank heaven this is the end of this awful time, and I shall soon be riding back along the road I came with her, my Helen.”
He looked down at the men, to find their eyes fixed upon him, and wondered vaguely at the feeling of tension that pervaded the place; then forgot all about it at the sound of a drum outside the great door.
With great shouting and to the shrilling of reed pipes and the throbbing of drums the dancers burst through the doorway. They had been enticed across the desert by the biggest fee they had ever been offered in the whole of their vagrant life, and had thoroughly enjoyed the blindfolding and their mysterious entry into the strange camp where they had been so lavishly entertained.
Men and women, youths and girls, virile, joyous, burned deep brown by the sun and the storm, with the knowledge of life in their flashing eyes, the love of adventure in their hearts and the call of great spaces in their vagabond blood, they stood quite still for a moment and then moved.
They danced to the sound of the drum, the shrilling of reed pipes, the clapping of hands, the beating of bare feet. They danced in groups, in pairs; one, thin as a lath, supple as a snake, danced by herself, driving the men wellnigh mad, so that the silver lamps swung to their shouting until she dropped in a heap at the foot of the dais. They sang as they danced, until the echoes of the wild Arabian love songs and battle songs beat against the star-strewn, vaulted ceiling; they laughed and clapped their hands in joy, and swayed and rocked to a great moaning; they advanced to the foot of the dais, caring little, in the power of their ancestry, which stretches back beyond the days of the Pharaohs, for the imperious woman who sprang from Allah knew where, or the man who, handsome as he was, came from a foreign land.
They danced for two hours. Danced to earn their huge fee, to amuse, to entertain, to end in dancing for the sheer love of it.
In and out of the columns and amongst the men went their slender bare feet to the flashing of knives, the clash of cymbals and the call of the Arabian love songs. They met, they parted, they met again; whilst the girl as thin as a lath, as supple as a snake, sprang up and stood upon one spot, moving only from her waist upwards.