_Scheherazade_ is an illuminated page torn from the book of “The Thousand and One Nights.” The music, the scenery, the dances, the costumes, the appointments, all the circumstances of the ballet are designed to create a heavy perfumed atmosphere of Eastern voluptuousness. The severity and simplicity of the Egyptian temple is exchanged for the semi-barbaric sumptuousness of the harem of an Arabian palace. A massive curtained canopy of an impure green stained with purple hangs in billowy folds over the scene; massy silvern lamps depend from a ceiling splendid with arabesques and floral designs; a latticed window gives upon a garden of tainted verdure; the floor is inlaid with blood-coloured porphyry. The sensuous lines of M. Bakst’s _décor_ are echoed in the throbbing waves of Rimsky-Korsakov’s music. Here again is the complete sympathy between musician and decorator, which fuses these ballets into an organic whole. In spite of the wealth of the accessories, there is not an irrelevant line or tone; there is economy and constraint even in the splendour, so that the spectator receives an impression of singleness and unity like that of Greek drama. At the very commencement the keynote is given in the dance of three odalisques, in which languor intertwines with the energy of desire. As the ballet proceeds the gust of passion blows more strongly, and the riot begins after the departure of the two sultans, when the Grand Eunuch unlocks first a bronze door, through which enter negroes clothed in copper-coloured costumes, and then a silver door, which gives entry to another band of negroes attired in silver. Zobeide, the favourite faithless wife of the sultan Schahriar, still remains without her consort. She crouches half fearfully against a curtain, which at last is pulled aside and her lover, a gorgeous negro in a golden dress, leaps upon her with one tremendous panther-like bound. Undoubtedly the climax of the ballet is reached in the ecstatic dances of Nijinsky as the slate-coloured negro. He has learnt a whole new grammar of grotesque, savage gestures. Part monkey, part tiger, part human, he fawns, he caresses, he grimaces, he passes from delirium to devotion, from awe to lust, his body elemental fire, motion, passion. At times his swiftness renders him momentarily almost invisible; at times he becomes a living boomerang, and after a marvellous circuit in space returns unerringly to his point of departure; one moment he is an arrow shot through the air, the next a crouching, servile beast worshipping the feet of his mistress. And in the mad final orgy he is the vortex of the swirling throng, the happy, leaping heart which shoots its ecstasy to the outermost limits of the coiling maze of lovers. With a sound of dismay the music signals the return of the betrayed sultans. The harem becomes a slaughter-house. A flashing scimitar cuts down the golden negro. Zobeide drives the dagger into her breast and falls grasping the feet of her outraged lord.