The dragoman had arranged the whole affair, and early in the evening we left the landing-place and travelled the somewhat rough road to Keneh. There were fourteen of us, and there were six nationalities represented in the auditory, or rather viditory, as we had come to see rather than to hear.
Under the guidance of the dragoman we went to an obscure house in a narrow street, and were shown up a flight of somewhat rickety stairs, and into a room that was anything but palatial.
There were divans on three sides of the room, and on these we were seated; the dancers and the musicians occupied the floor in the centre, and as soon as we were seated, the performance began. The music consisted of a couple of drums, shaped like a squash, with the large end cut off and covered with a piece of drum-leather, and of a sort of violin or guitar, and a kind of reed flute. There was also a tambourine, but it had less prominence than the drums, which were the real pieces de resistance. The drums were beaten with the fingers in rather a slow measure; the music was of a melancholy, barbaric character, and consisted mainly of time without much melody. Some of the musicians were men, I think only two of them, but as they were all squatted on the floor, and there was a general similarity of dress, it was hard to distinguish the sexes.
The dancing girls wore white dresses that flowed down to the heels and were very short in the waist On the upper part of the body is a jacket, cut very short, and frequently separated an inch or two from the dress below it. The jacket is sometimes richly embroidered, and I saw several dresses that were rather regal in appearance.
The head-dress consists of the natural hair braided in ringlets, and where this is small in quantity it is supplemented with store hair, as our own belles supplement theirs. In either case there is a liberal decoration of small coins and pendants braided into the hair or attached to it, and the display of jewelry is generally quite profuse.
The drums which were all the time kept in operation, was quite unlike anything in the ballet as seen in Europe or America. There was none of the dancing of the kind for which Fanny Ellsler and Taglioni are famous, and from an occidental point of view it was rather disappointing as a dance. But the strangeness of the scene, in many of its features, made up for the absence of saltatorial activity. Certainly the dance was a new The musicians struck up, and the girls—six in number—took their positions in a circle.
