dancers', and opposite to where I and Rocket
squatted. There were two pretty sisters, trying
to keep within bounds the caprice and restlessness
of a lovely baby boy loosely dressed in a
round brown skull-cap tied under the chin, and
in a little flimsy suit of blue, pink, and yellow.
Beautiful beyond even the ordinary beauty of
Turkish children, this Puck raced in and out
among the dancers, chattered to himself, clapped
his fat little hands in royal approval, stared at
the sheikh whose bland resigned melancholy
nothing could shake, ran up and down to his
seat, and behaved with intense disrespect to the
Mahomedan dissenters whose rites he was
witnessing. He was eventually borne off, a
struggling Ganymede in the arms of young
Scheherazade and her sister Dinarzade, treating
the round world as if it were his football,
and all the men in it as the toy inhabitants of
his Noah's Ark.

All this time the deep-breathed flute, never
hushed yet never mute, chased through wreaths
of giddy cunning, the echoes fleet before it
running, winding in and winding out, swift
as dancer, lithe as scout, and below all throbbed
the drum, ever low, but never dumb.

Yet, as Rocket observed, this strange dance
was not altogether unintermittent; for, though
the music in the gallery never ceased, occasionally
the circlers slowly subsided into rest, and retired
to their places, throwing on the cloaks handed
them by the master of the ceremonies, and
wiping the big hot drops that poured down
their fired cheeks. Then again the music soared
and whirled in its mimic whirlpool, and as if
driven by the Eumenides, or inflamed by the fury
of some old Arabian incantation, the votaries
again pivoted off into the spherical dance,
with the same half-shut eyes, floating hands, and
rapt, concentrated stare at an ideal vacuity.

Then there was more kneeling, more stripping
off gowns, more defiling past the sheikhs, more
Mamamouchi bowing to each other. Then a
sliding into the dance, and, da capo, the rhapsody
and ecstasy of the old Sabæan planet worship.
Again the white gowns swerved out into moving
pyramids, again the bare feet tumbled over each
other, again the T-like hands swayed round
rapturously, like those of so many ballet-masters
gone stark distraught on the religious road to
the great cracked house of madness.

Now the music, by breaths and to-whoos and
throbs and groans, died away, and as if they
expected it, and were not sorry of the summons,
the brothers threw on their gowns, and finally
resumed their places. A reader, leaning against
a gallery pillar, with his grave face turned to
Mecca, and his head thrown back, dwelling on
one minor note, and seldom wandering far up or
down, droned out his dole of the Koran. A few
more prayers, one deep and solemn one in a low
voice full of feeling from the sheikh, more
gamut thumps of the knees, and the dervishes,
resuming their Bluchers (sic) at the door,
quitted the chapel.

That day at Misseri's ponderous hotel dinner,
as the herd of visitors were running through the
usual travellers' common-places about the
dervish dances being "absurd," "ridiculous,"
"childish," Windybank, the oldest inhabitant of
the hotel, a gentleman engaged in raising a small
capital of nine millions for the Grand Central
Chimborazo Railway, pompously enlightened our
feeble capacities by telling us that the dervish
dances were of deep significancy, and were
intended to represent the motions of the spheres,
and their cadenced revolutions in measured
orbits round the sun, who was represented by the
sheikh.

The howling dervishes have their habitation
across the Bosphorus, over in Scutari, and there
one Friday I went to see them. I could scarcely
find the little shed of a chapel again; but I
knew it was somewhere high up on the slope of
a street leading out of the miles of dark cypress
groves that watch the great Turkish cemetery
on that Asian side of the Sick Man's empire.
We met nothing in the street but a running
funeral, and an insolent fat pasha preceded by
the usual chiboukdars, carrying his
amber-mouthed pipes in long black cases, such as
fishing-rods are put in.

At the porch of the cottage like chapel, where
a crowd of barelegged Turks idled as English
villagers do round a public-house door when a
fiddle is going, we took off our shoes: a process
that always leads to much grumbling on the part
of misguided Franks: and passed up a staircase to
a gallery above, where white sheepskins and mats,
not unfrequented by dervish fleas, were strewn for
us by doorkeepers, not unmindful of backsheesh.
Below, outside the balustrade at the mihrab
(altar) end of the little chapel, were Turkish
peasants and children, very reverent and credulous,
as it appeared to me, in their quiet, grave, immovable
way. In the chapel there was a trophy of
faded banners, maces, daggers, spears, and huge
steel halberds, inlaid with brass drums,
cymbals, ferocious-looking hooks, and regimental
spoons, such as the Janissaries once carried
as their palladia; these, I believe, were once
borne in foreign wars by raving dervish preachers,
who long since had death's silencing hand clapped
on their raving mouths. Even now I have heard
that these dervishes appear sometimes in the
market-places, at special moments of enthusiasm,
brandishing these terrible and gigantic weapons,
to the infinite danger of all true and untrue
believers.

On the sheikh—an old feeble man, with yet a
certain power and calibre about him—entering
the chapel, after all the dervishes had kissed
his hand, the service began with a nasal
intonation of the Fatha, as a stifling thick
smoke from the gilt brass censers began to
rise, and prepare to enslave the senses by stifling
those watchmen of the mind, so the better to
depose and debase the reason. Some religions
use incense, as farmers do sulphur for bees—to
confuse the senses and so steal the honey of the
mind.

There was something maniacal even in the deep
ejaculations of "O mediator!" "O beloved!"