After a little delay the dance was announced, and the dancers made their appearance. There were four of them, and they were accompanied by two musicians, one playing the nay, and the other the darabookah, both of which have been already described. The musicians settled on the floor in one corner of the apartment, and the dancers stepped to the middle of the room. At a signal from the master of the house the dance began.
The dancers were young women, who were rather fantastically dressed. They wore "rings on their fingers and bells on their toes," as the old nursery rhyme has it, and their heads and necks were covered with a profusion of jewellery, consisting principally of gold and silver coins strung closely together, and so arranged that they jingled every time the wearers moved. A richly embroidered jacket, and a long skirt which nearly touched the floor, were the outer garments worn by the dancers. The dresses of the four were precisely alike, and the Doctor said the costume was pretty much the same all through Egypt, where fashions rarely change from one year to another.
The boys had read of the wonderful beauty of the Egyptian dancers, and the great novelty of the scene they were about to witness. The Doctor said nothing, but there was a smile on his features when the dance began. He knew that the youths were doomed to be disappointed, and in the first pause of the dance he asked them what they thought of it.
"If that is what they call dancing," said Frank, "I'm glad to know it. It seems more like the efforts of people learning to skate."
"About as lively as the performance of the figures on a hand-organ," Fred remarked. "I wonder why travellers have written so much nonsense about it."
"Some travellers have described the Egyptian dance in the most enthusiastic language," answered the Doctor, "and others thought they must do the same. It requires considerable courage to fly in the face of opinions that have been given over and over again by others, and consequently the fashion that was set long and long ago has been kept up.
"I have seen a good many dances in Egypt," he continued, "and never yet knew one that approached the most of the descriptions I have read. Sometimes the girls are fairly pretty, but the great majority are of an ordinary type, and the dancing consists of that gliding and sliding from side to side which you have just witnessed. It is more suggestive of skating than of what is called dancing in Western countries."