9 pool, she throws them into the basket. Humour is put into the artist’s mimicry of the poor woman’s efforts to avoid the dripping water, while carrying the weight of a basket of wet clothes balanced on her head. Embodying as it does both dream-sentiment and comedy, the little pantomime is a pretty vehicle for versatility.
A serious story is that of the Mohammedan woman who, against her father’s wishes, has married a Jew. The representation opens with the woman’s entrance to the room where her father lies dying. Her hair falls loose in token of mourning or penitence. She kneels beside the death-bed, and strips off her many jewels. Her vow to re-enter the fold of Islam she shows by drawing a strand of her hair across her mouth, suggesting the face-covering of the women of Mohammedan faith. The father offers his hand to be kissed. Grateful, she slowly rises, crosses the room, closes and bolts the door, in token of shutting out all but the paternal faith.
The dance of mourning for the dead is a fixed composition only to the extent of including certain accepted postures; their sequence is not prescribed. “Here he lies dead; Allah takes him. I am as a fallen tree; I am alone. He held me in his arms; we played together; and he was my protector.” In such manner runs the widow’s lament for her departed husband. Pulsing through all is the solemn beat of “darabukkeh” undertoning the wails of mourners.
The Bedoui of the desert celebrate marriage, peace-compacts, declarations of war and other happy occasions with a gun-dance, which is known as a Fantasia or Fantaisie. It in no way conforms to the fundamentals of Arabic dancing, and in fact it is a dance in name only. But it is joyous exceedingly. Approximately rhythmic rifle-firing is continuous from beginning to end. Performers both mounted and afoot leap and whirl in maniac confusion, shooting up, down and all around in merry abandon. Dust, howls and powder-smoke attack ears, eyes and throat in unison, and the only unhappy ones in the gay assemblage are those that Allah wills to have been shot, stepped on by horses, or both.
Tangier is the setting of an occasional savage celebration of religious fanaticism; and these celebrations, too, fall into a category of quasi-dancing. They are demonstrations of a sect styled the Hamadsha. To a deafening accompaniment of fifes and drums, a few leaders start a crude hopping dance in the market-place. The number of participants grows rapidly; excitement increases with the number, until, at a point of frenzy, the leaping fanatics begin hacking their heads with axes. The example is so contagious that small boys dash into the mêlée and snatch axes from the hands of men, to inflict the same castigation. Christian spectators frequently faint at the spectacle, but fascination holds them at their windows until they are overcome. During the four hours or more that the blood-spilling continues, as well as during a period before and after, the street is a dangerous place for the unbeliever.
Ostrander, the traveller, while in Constantinople, found himself unaccountably in the midst of a celebration differing in character from those of the Hamadsha of Tangier only in the respect of being held at night. The resemblance in all essentials indicates the existence of Mohammedan undercurrents completely unknown to the Western world.