I sat down at one of the tables nearest the back of the hall, while a boy brought me tea and melon-pips. He had proposed fire-water first, but I thought not. The European who starts to swallow that unholy preparation may as well throw in his hand. After a while an eerie wailing of native violins rose from somewhere to one side of the stage, and the curtain was drawn crosswise, revealing a girl posed for the dance. She would have presented, to anybody enamoured of the type, an attractively exotic figure, her long brown-black hair flowing loose, her lithe limbs swaying to and fro with the evil grace of a snake, her oblique almond-shaped eyes half closed, and small round breasts heaving with an air of drugged passion. The dance was little more than a succession of postures, involved, elaborate, voluptuous, sometimes intentionally indelicate; and having watched many exhibitions of the kind before, I was not a little weary of it by the end. This came in the middle of an unusually plaintive scrape of the fiddles; the girl broke off suddenly and sank to the stage in a tinkle of jewellery, amid grunts of "_Hao! Hao!_" from all quarters. Then the company resumed its pipes, and the grumble of talk that had slackened ever so slightly during the dance grew loud again. There were several other performances on the primitive stage, but nothing that I could see of any novelty or interest, and I was sinking steadily deeper into boredom. I'd already made up my mind to clear out and look for adventure elsewhere, and was rising to do so, when there came under my eye the first sight to hold it that evening. By this time the room had filled up--though I could see no foreigner besides myself--and taken on a brisker air. Some few of the smokers, it is true, had dropped asleep and lay in queerly twisted attitudes across the side-couches, but others had come instead to the stage of exaltation. They sat up on the foot of the beds, drank from the chipped water jug which a boy was carrying round, and breathed in deeply, with that wild dilation of the eyes and glare of ecstasy of the opium fiend which always, though I have seen it often enough to get hardened, strikes me as such a loathsome distortion of the human countenance.