The man and woman in the chair stared into a crystal ball whose depths were suffused with a milky cloud.
“Oh, Jim!” she murmured. “_The last time----!_”
“Shh!” he said, with a squeeze of her hand. “Look! It’s coming again!”
Once more the cloud parted--they peered, breath held for further revelations, into a crude contrast of bright light and intense shadow, upon a striped awning at an angle from a wall glaring in the sun, upon a narrow street where dust rose yellow like an illumined cloud above a dark throng of Asiatics, their white robes almost blue in the shadow, who gesticulated and pushed each other as they packed themselves into a semicircle of eager faces. Their vision adjusting itself to the violent juxtaposition of high light and deep shadow, they stared into the comparative sombreness under the awning, to the object which held the interest of the crowd.
In a cleared space, in front of a trio of barbaric musicians who squatted cross-legged upon the ground in serious management of pipe and tom-toms, a dancing-girl postured in fluidic attitudes of her lithe, slim body. Arms and legs covered with bracelets, she turned, stretched, and twisted herself in accompaniment to a rhythm which escaped them. Indefatigably she danced, heedless of the eager, appreciative eyes upon her, her face expressionless in a rapt absorption where consciousness of her environment seemed lost. The crowd shouted inaudible encouragements in flashes of gleaming teeth, flung flowers and small coins on to the mat whereon she danced, swayed with contagious waves of enthusiasm. The girl danced on, indifferent to the applause, ecstatically absorbed in the perfection of her art. Only one or other of the serious musicians lifted an occasional bright, sharp glance to the increasing spread of coins upon the mat.
Suddenly there was a commotion in the rear of the crowd, a jostling and elbowing which propagated itself to the front rank. The throng parted, with alarmed turns of the head to some disturbance behind them. A huge elephant appeared, gliding forward with slow and stately motion to the rhythmic wave of its sensitive trunk. Upon the gorgeous cloth of its back was poised a richly carved and gilt _howdah_ surmounted by a gigantic umbrella in scarlet and gold. Beneath that umbrella reposed a languid young man, handsome with aquiline nose and splendid eyes under the magnificent turban which crowned his dark head. He lifted his hand in a gesture to the mahout perched on the neck of the elephant, and the great animal stopped, left in a clear space by the crowd which fell back reverently from its neighbourhood.