Their headquarters are in a weather-beaten-frame-barn of a place, and we stood outside for a long time before the doors were open. Inside it was hot and close and crowded, and everybody twisted this way and that and stood up on things to get a look. I held two women together on one chair--they were standing up--and I expected to give out any minute and turn loose a disaster that would break up the show. There wasn't anything to see, either; not a thing, for hours. We were in a sort of circular gallery and the dancing-floor was below. We could see squatted there a ring of men--a dozen or so bowed, solemn, abstracted high priests in gowns of different colors and tall fezzes. These were the dervishes, no doubt, but they didn't do anything--not a thing--and we didn't care to stare at them and at the dancing-floor and the rest of the suffering audience forever. Then we noticed in our gallery a little reserved section with some more abstracted men in gowns and fezzes, and after a long time--as much as a thousand years, I should think--there was an almost imperceptible movement in this reserved compartment, and one of the elect produced some kind of reed and began to blow a strain that must have been born when the woods were temples and the winds were priests--it was so weirdly, mournfully enthralling. I could have listened to that music and forgotten all the world if I hadn't been busy holding those two women on that chair. The perspiration ran down and my joints petrified while that music droned on and on. Then there was another diversion: a man got up and began to sing. I don't know why they picked that particular man--certainly not for his voice. It was Oriental singing--a sort of chanting monotone in a nasal pitch. Yet there was something wild and seductive about it--something mystical--and I liked it well enough. Only I didn't want it to go on forever, situated as I was. I wanted the dancing to begin, and pretty soon, too. It didn't, however. Nothing begins soon in the Orient. But by-and-by, when that songster had wailed for as much as a week, those high priests on the dancing-floor began to show signs of life. They moved a little; they got up; they went through some slow evolutions--to limber themselves, perhaps--then they began to whirl. The dance is a religious rite, and it is supposed to represent the planets revolving about the sun. The dancers serve an apprenticeship of one thousand and one days, and they can whirl and keep on whirling forever without getting dizzy. The central figure, who represents the sun, has had the most practice, no doubt, for he revolves just twice as fast as the planets, who are ranged in two circles around him. His performance is really wonderful. I did not think so much of the others, except as to their ability to stand upright. I thought I could revolve as fast as they did, myself, and I would have given four dollars for a little freedom just then to try it.