"I'll order wine," he said. "We can see that the cork hasn't been tampered with, and that's less likely to poison you than anything else."
"You're mighty cheerful, Major," laughed Muriel.
"Well, Miss Lister, we're in for it now, anyway. Don't blame me."
"I wouldn't have missed it for the world," put in Paul enthusiastically. "By Jove, Ursula, just look at that band! Did you ever see anything more comic in your life?"
Paul shortly forgot the stage, or nearly so. It was the audience that interested him, and the great glow of light that lost itself in the black desert about and shone on strange Eastern faces that came and went on the shadow-line of its edge. It was unusual, too, to sit with that fantastic noise in one's ears and yet to be able to look out to the silence yonder under the serene stars. There were two semi-European women at a table near, also, to whom his eyes constantly if surreptitiously returned. Fat, bulging, in tawdry lace and imitation jewels, they were nevertheless smiling, gay, human, he thought, and one of them kept a motherly eye on a child of seven or eight in a sailor suit who would wander from her side. He leant forward to draw Ursula's attention to them. And then he saw that her eyes were fixed on the stage.
Into the garish light, heralded with clashing cymbals, advanced three African girls with elaborately dressed woolly hair, thick rouged lips, bright laughing eyes. Their legs and feet were bare. Short coloured skirts reached only to the knee, and scarcely to that. Above the waist they wore only tiny bodices of vivid colour, red and yellow, which were bound tightly across breasts firmly outlined beneath them. Gaudy necklaces of beads and coins sparkled around their necks, and a host of jingling bangles decorated their bare arms. Each carried a tambourine, and to the accompaniment of native drums, they postured and danced.
It was no more than a danse du ventre, but it was at least a new experience for Paul.
A tense stillness settled gradually down on the audience, it seemed to him. The edge of the broken irregular circle of light filled up with faces, a grey and black wall of them, a fence of gleaming staring eyes. The drums beat in a wild rhythm, and shrill native pipes broke in. Wilder and wilder grew the dance. The protuberant posturings, the voluptuous writhings of which he hardly guessed the meaning, the extraordinary wheelings in swift steps during which the three performers shook their heavy buttocks brazenly at the gazing crowd, glancing over their shoulders the while, were abandoned for more reckless tossing of arms and legs, more shrill, more cacophonous music. Paul grew white. The Major leaned over towards the ladies. "Er—er," he stammered, red-faced. "I think perhaps it's getting late. Hadn't we better be going?"
"Certainly," said Muriel, getting up at once. Paul followed suit.
"Wait till this is over," said Ursula, coolly. "You can't leave in the middle of a turn."