Now came the apogee of the evening’s entertainment. This time the actor was no neophyte but a real dyed-in-the-wool fanatic such as I had seen in the dervish monasteries of Anatolia and Persia. Him I recognized as the real thing. His eyes glowed with the fires of fanaticism, his nostrils quivered like a race-horse’s, little streams of saliva trickled from the outer corners of his lips. It was plain that he was at the very height of religious frenzy; a man in that condition might do anything to himself—or to others. But when the marabout made a few passes about him and whispered in his ear he quieted like an excited dog which hears its master’s voice. From the folds of his garments the marabout produced a number of steel skewers, about the length of hat-pins. Opening his mouth, the dervish drove one of the steels through the fleshy part of his cheek until a good four inches of it protruded from his face. A second skewer he forced through the muscles of his upper arm; a third through his thigh; two more through his breasts. In scarcely more time than it takes to tell about it the man was a human pin-cushion. Little rivulets of blood, welling from the wounds, coursed down his naked body to form a crimson pool upon the floor. By now the other performers and the native spectators had worked themselves up to a very high pitch of excitement. “_Al-lah! Al-lah! Al-lah!_” they howled, rocking like automatons and beating themselves upon the breast. The drums boomed and thundered until it seemed as though the wave of sound would lift the roof. [Illustration: WHAT THE PIOUS MOSLEM EXPECTS TO FIND IN PARADISE Some of the maidens, particularly in the South, are very lovely, with slim, supple, full-breasted figures, and skins of brown satin shot with rose, and blue-black hair, and lustrous, seductive eyes. But the Moors prefer them fat, and unless nature provides them with the desired embonpoint they are systematically stuffed like Strasbourg geese until they are waddling mountains of flesh] The dervish wrenched out the skewers and dropped, panting, on a mat. Two superbly developed negroes, all but naked, took his place. Beneath the light from the guttering lamps their brown-black skins gleamed like bronzes in a museum. They approached each other on all fours, crouching, circling, snarling, purring. This was the panther dance, an all too realistic representation of the amorous relations of two great jungle cats. Now the religious ecstasy which had provided a pretext for the preceding performances was at an end; this was sheer animalism, frankly obscene and wholly unashamed. “I’ve had enough of this,” I said to my companion. “I think that I’ll go back to the hotel and take a bath and try to feel clean again.”