From the door of the galleries where the dancing was done, a confused uproar overflowed into the passages, as if several men of powerful physique were banging a number of pokers against a number of saucepans, and blowing whistles, and occasional catcalls, and now and then beating a drum and several sets of huge cymbals, and ceaselessly twanging at innumerable banjos, and at the same time singing in a foreign language, and shouting curses or exhortations or street-cries, or imitating hunting-calls or the cry of the hyena, or uniting suddenly in the final war-whoop of some pitiless Indian tribe. It was a really terrible noise. It hit you like the breath of an explosion as you entered the room. There was no distinguishable tune. It was simply an enormous noise. But there was a kind of savage rhythm about it, which made John think immediately of Indians and fierce men and the native camps which he had visited at the Earl's Court Exhibition. And this was not surprising; for the musicians included one genuine negro and three men with their faces blacked; and the noise and the rhythm were the authentic music of a negro village in South America; and the words which some genius had once set to the noise were an exhortation to go to the place where the negroes dwelt. To judge by their movements, John thought, many of the dancers had in fact been there, and carefully studied the best indigenous models. They were doing some quite extraordinary things. No two couples were doing quite the same thing for more than a few seconds; so that there was an endless variety of extraordinary motions and extraordinary postures. Some of them shuffled secretly along the edge of the room, their faces tense, their shoulders swaying faintly like reeds in a light wind, their progress almost imperceptible; they did not rotate, they did not speak, but sometimes the tremor of a skirt or the slight stirring of a patent leather shoe showed that they were indeed alive and in motion, though that motion was as the motion of a glacier, not to be measured in minutes or yards. And some, in a kind of fever, rushed hither and thither among the thick crowd, avoiding disaster with marvellous dexterity; and sometimes they revolved slowly and sometimes quickly, and sometimes spun giddily round for a moment like gyroscopic tops. Then they too would be seized with a kind of trance, or, it may be, with sheer shortness of breath, and hung motionless for a little in the centre of the room, while the mad throng jostled and flowed about them like the leaves in autumn round a dead bird. And some did not revolve at all, but charged straightly up and down; and some of these thrust their loves for ever before them, as the Prussians thrust the villagers in the face of the enemy, and some for ever navigated themselves backwards like moving breakwaters to protect their darlings from the rough seas of tangled women and precipitate men. Some of them kept themselves as