sted to Marnier that, perhaps, it would
be interesting to look in there for a moment.

"'All right,' he responded, with his most donnish manner. 'But I expect
it will be rather an unwashed crowd.'

"A quantity of native soldiers--the sort that used to be called
Turcos--were gathered round the door. We pushed our way through them,
and entered. The cafe was large, with big white pillars and a double row
of divans in the middle, and divans rising in tiers all round. On the
left was a large doorway, in which gorgeously-dressed painted women,
with gold crowns on their heads, were standing, smoking cigarettes,
and laughing with the Arabs; and at the end farthest from the street
entrance was a raised platform, on which sat three musicians--a
wild-looking demon of a man blowing into an instrument with an immense
funnel, and two men beating tomtoms. The noise they made was terrific.
The piper wore a voluminous burnouse, and as the dancers came in in
pairs from the big doorway, which led into the court where they all live
together, each in her separate little room with her own front door, they
threw their door keys into the hood that was attached to it. As soon as
they had finished dancing they went to the hood, and rummaged violently
for them again. And all the time the piper blew frantically into his
instrument, and rocked himself about like a man in a convulsion.

"We sat on one of the raised divans, with coffee before us on a
wooden stool, and Marnier observed it all with a slightly supercilious
coldness. The women, who were dressed in different shades of red, and
were the most amazing trollops I ever set eyes on, came and went in
pairs, fluttered their painted fingers, twittered like startled birds,
jumped and twirled, wriggled and revolved, and inclined their greasy
foreheads to the impenetrable spectators, who stuck silver coins on
to the perspiring flesh. And Marnier sat and gazed at them with the
aloofness of one who watches the creatures in puddle water through a
microscope. I could scarcely help laughing at him, but I wished him
away. For to me there was excitement, there was even a sort of ecstasy,
in the utter barbarity of this spectacle, in the moving scarlet figures
with their golden crowns and tufts of ostrich plumes, in the serried
masses of turbaned and hooded spectators, in the rocking forms of the
musicians, in the strident and ceaseless uproar that they made.

"And through the doorway where the Tur-cos--I