But her question remained unfinished, for the girl had pranced, still pirouetting, into the center of the bright spot. She paused in her turning and with both hands clutching the remaining veils modestly across her chest, signaled with a motion of her head to the leader of the musicians. Immediately the volume of the music began to increase and the tempo to speed, and Salome whirled faster and faster in time with the music’s crescendo. As she spun on the balls of her bare feet, the veils that had been hanging to her knees streamed out in a kaleidoscope of whirling color. The flutes more insistently joined their whining pleas to the deeper invitations of the harps and the dulcimers and the rhythmical throaty demands of the drums; the girl’s black hair, standing out from her head as she whirled, made a dark spinning disk above the circular rainbow of the scarves.
Now Salome lifted one arm above her head, while she held the other protectively before her, so that the dark whirling of her hair had above it as well as beneath it a spinning rainbow of color.
“I think I know what she’ll do next,” Claudia said, leaning to her right to speak to Cornelius above the steadily mounting volume and frenzy of the music.
Antipas, too, must have anticipated it. “The other arm!” he shouted, as he leaned forward, his eyes blazing with lechery. “Raise the other arm, my dear child!”
But Salome did not obey the Tetrarch. Instead, as she came pirouetting nearer him, she lowered the arm she had just raised, and the two whirling circles of color merged into one fast, revolving gossamer flame. Faster the girl spun, and faster, faster the musicians played, and higher swelled their instruments’ invitation to abandoned revelry.
Antipas, who had sat back when the girl failed to heed his demand, reached for his goblet, gulped his wine, and was replacing the slender-stemmed glass when suddenly Salome, whirling hardly two paces from his table, lifted both arms high into the air. The transparent veils twisted upward with them to form above the girl’s swirling black hair a spinning canopy of weaving and shifting bright colors.
Once more the Tetrarch overturned his goblet, and the wine spilled across the table. But when a servant came racing to his aid, Antipas waved him away. The Tetrarch’s amazed eyes had focused upon the dancing girl; he would permit nothing to obstruct, even for an instant, his view of her.
The spinning Salome in the circle of light from the wall lamp was nude from the small gossamer triangle of her loins’ covering to the crown of her head, and in the rapidity of her turning she appeared to be entirely divested of clothing.
Antipas caught at the edge of the table and pushed himself, swaying, to his feet. “Nearer, child, nearer!” he shrieked. “Come closer! Come closer to us! Come....” But his frenzied words were choked in a swirling cloud of silken transparencies, for his stepdaughter had let go all her veils and one had dipped full into the flushed, round face of the Tetrarch of Galilee and Peraea.
As Antipas struggled to free himself of the clinging, vision-obscuring fluff of silk, the guests around the tables grabbed merrily for the descending veils. But by the time the Tetrarch had jerked the scarf away from his face, Salome had already disappeared; she had darted across the spotlighted mosaic floor into the enfolding privacy of the triclinium’s antechamber. Behind her, her audience thundered its applause.