Into the garish light, heralded with clashing cymbals, advanced three African girls with elaborately dressed woolly hair, thick rouged lips, bright laughing eyes. Their legs and feet were bare. Short coloured skirts reached only to the knee, and scarcely to that. Above the waist they wore only tiny bodices of vivid colour, red and yellow, which were bound tightly across breasts firmly outlined beneath them. Gaudy necklaces of beads and coins sparkled around their necks, and a host of jingling bangles decorated their bare arms. Each carried a tambourine, and to the accompaniment of native drums, they postured and danced. It was no more than a _danse du ventre_, but it was at least a new experience for Paul. A tense stillness settled gradually down on the audience, it seemed to him. The edge of the broken irregular circle of light filled up with faces, a grey and black wall of them, a fence of gleaming staring eyes. The drums beat in a wild rhythm, and shrill native pipes broke in. Wilder and wilder grew the dance. The protuberant posturings, the voluptuous writhings of which he hardly guessed the meaning, the extraordinary wheelings in swift steps during which the three performers shook their heavy buttocks brazenly at the gazing crowd, glancing over their shoulders the while, were abandoned for more reckless tossing of arms and legs, more shrill, more cacophonous music. Paul grew white. The Major leaned over towards the ladies. "Er--er," he stammered, red-faced. "I think perhaps it's getting late. Hadn't we better be going?" "Certainly," said Muriel, getting up at once. Paul followed suit. "Wait till this is over," said Ursula, coolly. "You can't leave in the middle of a turn." Paul moistened his lips. And then, from the wings, into the blaze and noise, danced a swift figure. The girl was perhaps an Abyssinian with maybe French blood in her veins;--she was known at any rate to the crowd who cheered as one man and shouted her name. Regularly featured, superbly framed, her raven-black hair flowed loose about her, crowned with a scarlet flower. Her skirt was diaphanous and spangled; a sort of loose white scarf was held by a clasp between her breasts but floated in a cloud around her as she moved. Her shapely back bare, her curved and lithesome body firm, her twinkling little feet light, her colour too was at any rate white by comparison with the previous performers. The barbaric clamour of music died down. The three negro girls collapsed on one side. The audience subsided with tense expectancy. She danced in silence and alone.