The lines of bodily movement in the West are radically different from those of the East. The quality of action in the West is energy and abruptness; it tends to express itself in angles rather than in curves. The gesture of the East moves with the lethargy, the subtlety, interrupted by sudden bursts of violence, that are characteristic of the Eastern temper. Nothing could be less suitable to the tranquillity and torpor of the East than the swift and intricate dances of more bracing climes. It may be affirmed as a rough generalisation that Western dancing gives the greater importance to the feet, Eastern dancing to the body. In many of the most characteristic Oriental dances, the body revolves around its own axis, as it were, while the legs remain stationary. Equally with the motions of the body, the Eastern dance has made extraordinary use of the motions of the hands and arms. It has found an invaluable auxiliary in the extreme refinement of the Eastern woman’s hands, which always seem so infinitely more expressive than the passive oval mask of her face. For me the eternal, the essential gesture of the East is symbolised in the movement of a woman’s hand that I saw through the iron grating of a koubba on the edge of the Sahara--for where the Arab is, there is the East. The woman herself I did not see, for she was [Illustration: RUTH ST DENIS] crouching upon the floor against the tomb. But her whole body could not have expressed her character more revealingly than her hand, with its fingers stained at the tips with henna to a bright orange colour and as astonishingly slender as those of a Madonna in a primitive Italian painting. I think I should scarcely be believed if I tried to tell how much there was of resignation, how much of a refined voluptuousness, in its delicate gesture. Eastern dances, performed by really skilled Eastern dancers, have not yet been seen upon the European stage. Of course the Ouled-Nails and the hired _almées_ of the Algerian cafés introduced the _danse du ventre_ to Paris at the time of the first Exhibition. It would be easy to dismiss this dance with contempt if one had not seen it danced with a certain barbaric sincerity, far away from the atmosphere of cigarettes and liqueurs of the cafés of Biskra and Tunis. After all, a dance is very much like the Spanish inn of the olden days--you find in it principally what you bring to it. And so acute an observer as Lady Duff Gordon found in the _danse du ventre_ an intensity that gave it a kind of dignity. “I could not call it voluptuous,” she says, “any more than Racine’s _Phèdre_; it is Venus ‘tout entière à sa proie attachée,’ and to me it seemed tragic. It is far more realistic than the fandango and far less coquettish, because the thing represented is _au grand sérieux_, not travestied, _gazé_, or played with.”