A MODERN MUSICIAN.
The dancers were young women, who were rather fantastically dressed. They wore "rings on their fingers and bells on their toes," as the old nursery rhyme has it, and their heads and necks were covered with a profusion of jewellery, consisting principally of gold and silver coins strung closely together, and so arranged that they jingled every time the wearers moved. A richly embroidered jacket, and a long skirt which nearly touched the floor, were the outer garments worn by the dancers. The dresses of the four were precisely alike, and the Doctor said the costume was pretty much the same all through Egypt, where fashions rarely change from one year to another.
The boys had read of the wonderful beauty of the Egyptian dancers, and the great novelty of the scene they were about to witness. The Doctor said nothing, but there was a smile on his features when the dance began. He knew that the youths were doomed to be disappointed, and in the first pause of the dance he asked them what they thought of it.
"If that is what they call dancing," said Frank, "I'm glad to know it. It seems more like the efforts of people learning to skate."
"About as lively as the performance of the figures on a hand-organ," Fred remarked. "I wonder why travellers have written so much nonsense about it."
"Some travellers have described the Egyptian dance in the most enthusiastic language," answered the Doctor, "and others thought they must do the same. It requires considerable courage to fly in the face of opinions that have been given over and over again by others, and consequently the fashion that was set long and long ago has been kept up.
"I have seen a good many dances in Egypt," he continued, "and never yet knew one that approached the most of the descriptions I have read. Sometimes the girls are fairly pretty, but the great majority are of an ordinary type, and the dancing consists of that gliding and sliding from side to side which you have just witnessed. It is more suggestive of skating than of what is called dancing in Western countries."
The dance was resumed after a brief rest, and it continued with several intermissions for something over an hour. Coffee was served two or three times in the course of the evening, and when the entertainment was ended our friends returned to the steamer. Before they retired the conductor collected five francs from each passenger who had attended the dance, in order to remunerate the consul for his outlay. He said the consul went through the form of inviting strangers to an entertainment, but expected them to pay for it in a roundabout way.
"Not at all unusual in the East," the Doctor remarked, "and certainly no one could expect a consul to spend his money in the entertainment of every party of strangers that comes along. We can imagine we were his guests, and forget that we have paid for what we saw. The illusion is very thin, but it does no harm to any one."