we at last reached a small iron gate. Opening
it, we were in a small enclosure, at the
end of which a flight of stone steps led to
the dervishes' chapel, the doors of which were
open. Opposite the doors, were some outbuildings,
where I could see dervishes putting on
their dancing robes, and smilingly arranging
their brown felt caps. Outside these cottage
sheds was a great heap of earth, thrown up as if
from an immense plague-pit, which it bethought
me (the conspiracy still hanging over us) might
have been dug with the best intentions, to
receive the bodies of the murdered Christians of
Pera, including your humble servant. In plain
fact, however, I believe the enormous hole was
merely intended for the vulgar purpose of a
well.

On a little terrace by the door stood an old
grey-bearded Turk, in a faded yellow flowered
dressing-gown, and shuffling red slippers, whom,
I felt convinced, I had met before somewhere
in the Arabian Nights. He dangled in his
wrinkled brown hand a string of tickets, which
I found to be duplicates for the shoes left in his
keeping at the entrance, for no one is allowed to
enter a chapel or mosque but with bare feet.
Till the time to begin, we sat on a second flight
of steps, leading to a large wing of the convent,
and bought luncheon of a cake merchant, who was
there with his stand, talking to the American
consul's cavass, whose silver-mounted pistols
and gilt sabre give him a sham state look, half
fierce, half absurd. The cake was yellow and
spongy, and beautifully clean and well made, as
Turkish street food always is. We "put away,"
as Rocket called it, some ponderous slices, and
by that time a hand clapping at the door, the
cavass's signal, announced that we may enter.

We entered a square, flat-roofed room,
the floor of which was covered with coarse
straw-coloured matting. Little jelly glass oil
lamps hung in circles from the ceiling. A low
open work railing, with balustrades, shut in the
centre enclosure where the dancing was to take
place, to about the height of the altar rails in
an English church. Round this we squatted,
cross-legged—at least those of us who could bear
that torture. All round the room ran a gallery,
latticed like a dairy window, behind which birdcage
trellising women were admitted, and in an open
part of which, opposite the niche facing Mecca,
sat the reader and the musicians, who, as soon
as the sheikh entered, began to "play him in"
with a soft breathing of "Lydian flutes," and a
wild, monotonous hand-tapping of drums strained
over earthen jars.

One by one the brotherhood came in, and,
entering the low wicket, took their places in a
circle round the balustrade, each first falling
down, and touching the floor with his forehead,
before the sacred niche, above which was a great
painted legended scutcheon, blue and gilt. One
wore a girdled folding brown robe; another, a
purple one; a third, a black; a fourth, a green;
a fifth, a chocolate-coloured; but of all the
thirty-four not one shone in crimson, blue,
or yellow. A Quaker-like sobriety of colour
seemed the fashion of the sect; each had
the brown flower-pot felt cap, and under it
a white one; each wore under his coloured
wrapper a white jacket, a white inner coat
folded across the breast, short, loose white
drawers, and a white petticoat reaching nearly to
the ankles, with a weighted quilted border—to
balance them, I suppose, in their mystical
gyrations.

Just as I had gone through the faces of these
fanatics, naming each man in my own mind, as
a shepherd marks his sheep to connect them with
some special mark of recognition—as one, "the
Roman Nose;" another, "the Old Boy;" a
third, "the Fat Negro;" a fourth, "the Young
Soldier," and so on, the sheikh rose from his
prostrations on the prayer-carpet, and, standing
up in his tea-green robe, scarfed with
black, a green turban bandaging round his
felt cap, began to intone the Fatha, or
initiatory prayer of the Moslems, as the low
hissing reed flute and calabash drum grew
now more uproarious and rejoicing than ever.
The sheikh is a pale, ascetic looking man, with
sunken yet penetrating eyes, and is evidently of a
mental calibre infinitely higher than the greasy,
cheating, sly-looking fanatics who surround
him. In a moment his eye had passed round
the motley group of soldiers, Syrians, Arabs,
Persians, Turks, and Franks who sat with us
outside the rails, and I could see his keen
glances dissecting us; sifting the mere
lounger from the observer, the mocker and
sneerer from the votary; classing us all in a
moment, and then withdrawing his mind
back again into its own dim chapel of
passionate, secret, and silent belief. His prayer
was solemn and devout, as if it had come from
a fourteenth century archbishop, his slow
bendings, with pale hand upon his breast, were
studies for a Spanish painter of Ribera's time.
His voice was low and fervid, and beautifully
modulated, a sweet look of resignation and
suffering, as on the brow of a martyr passing to the
fire, was upon his face. That man had the
countenance of a king, but of a king turned monk. You
might hunt all the convents of Europe through
and not find so much intellect in a fanatic's face
as was visible in that sheikh's.

All this time the breathing flute was not for
a moment mute, hissing like a desert snake,
stirring in the dry cane brake, soaring like a lark
that springs to the sun with throbbing wings, so
the music rose in whirls, as the incense mounts
in curls; one, two, one, two, went the drum,
never loud, yet never dumb; one, two, one,
two, only throbbing, yet not dumb; one, two,
two, one.

Still now and then a dervish adjusting his newly
donned robe, or pressing down his felt helmet,
joined the squatting circle; first kneeling in
prayer, then rising and kissing the sheikh's hand
before he took his place. One of these late
comers greeted Roman Nose with a sly smile,
such as a thimble-rig man greets his "bonnet,"
the plethoric grazier, with.

Round and round flew the sound of the flutes;