‘The Dark Swallow!’ said Balthazar and clapped his hands for more drink to be brought. ‘We shall not look upon her like again.’ But gradually the raucous night around us was swelling with the deeper rumour of the approaching procession. One saw the rosy light of the cressets among the roofs. The streets, already congested, were now black with people. They buzzed like a great hive with the contagion of the knowledge. You could hear the distant bumping of drums and the hissing splash of cymbals, keeping time with the strange archaic peristaltic rhythms of the dance — its relatively slow walking pace broken by queer halts, to enable the dancers, as the ecstasy seized them, to twirl in and out of their syncopated measures and return once more to their places in the line of march. It pushed its way through the narrow funnel of the main street like a torrent whose force makes it overleap its bed; for all the little side streets were full of sightseers running along, keeping pace with it.
First came the grotesque acrobats and tumblers with masks and painted faces, rolling and contorting, leaping in the air and walking on their hands. They were followed by a line of carts full of candidates for circumcision dressed in brilliant silks and embroidered caps, and surrounded by their sponsors, the ladies of the harem. They rode proudly, singing in juvenile voices and greeting the crowd: like the bleating of sacrificial lambs. Balthazar croaked: ‘Foreskins will fall like snow tonight, by the look of it.
It is amazing that there are no infections. You know, they use black gunpowder and lime-juice as a styptic for the wound!’ Now came the various orders with their tilting and careening gonfalons with the names of the holy ones crudely written on them. They trembled like foliage in the wind. Magnificently robed sheiks held them aloft walking with difficulty because of their weight, yet keeping the line of the procession straight. The street-preachers were gabbling the hundred holy names. A cluster of bright braziers outlined the stern bearded faces of a cluster of dignitaries carrying huge paper lanterns, like balloons, ahead of them. Now as they overran us and flowed down the length of Tatwig Street in a long ripple of colour we saw the various orders of Dervishes climb out of the nether darkness and emerge into the light, each order distinguished by its colour. They were led by the black-capped Rifiya — the scorpion-eaters of legendary powers. Their short barking cries indicated that the religious ecstasy was already on them. They gazed around with dazed eyes.
Some had run skewers through their cheeks, others licked red-hot knives. At last came the courtly figure of Abu Zeid with his little group of retainers on magnificently caparisoned ponies, their cloaks swelling out behind them, their arms raised in salutation like knights embarking on a tournament. Before them ran a helter skelter collection of male prostitutes with powdered faces and long flowing hair, chuckling and ejaculating like chickens in a farmyard. And to all this queer discontinuous and yet somehow congruent mass of humanity the music lent a sort of homogeneity; it bound it and confined it within the heartbeats of the drums, the piercing skirl of the flutes, the gnashing of the cymbals.
Circling, proceeding, halting: circling, proceeding, halting, the long dancing lines moved on towards the tomb, bursting through the great portals of Scobie’s lodgings like a tide at full, and deploying across the brilliant square in clouds of dust.
And as the chanters moved forward to recite the holy texts six Mevlevi dervishes suddenly took the centre of the stage, expanding in a slow fan of movement until they had formed a semicircle.
They wore brilliant white robes reaching to their green slippered feet and tall brown hats shaped like huge bombes glacees. Calmly, beautifully, they began to whirl, these ‘tops spun by God’, while the music of the flutes haunted them with their piercing quibbles.
As they gathered momentum their arms, which at first they hugged fast to their shoulders, unfolded as if by centrifugal force and stretched out to full reach, the right palm turned upward to heaven, the left downward to the ground. So, with heads and tall rounded hats tilted slightly, like the axis of the earth, they stayed there miraculously spinning, their feet hardly seeming to touch the floor, in this wonderful parody of the heavenly bodies in their perpetual motion. On and on they went, faster and faster, until the mind wearied of trying to keep pace with them. I thought of the verses of Jalaluddin which Pursewarden used sometimes to recite. On the outer circles the Rifiya had begun their display of self-mutilation, so horrible to behold and yet so apparently harmless. The touch of a sheik’s finger would heal all these wounds pierced in the cheeks and breasts. Here a dervish drove a skewer through his nostrils, there another fell upon the point of a dirk, driving it up through his throat into his skull. But still the central knot of dancers continued its unswerving course, spinning in the sky of the mind.
‘My goodness’ said Balthazar at my elbow, with a chuckle, ‘I thought he was familiar. There’s the Magzub himself. The one at the further end. He used to be an absolute terror, more than half mad. The one who was supposed to have stolen the child and sold it to a brothel. Look at him.’ I saw a face of immense world-weary serenity, the eyes closed, the lips curved in a half-smile; as the dancer spun slowly to a halt this slender personage, with an air of half-playful modesty, took up a bundle of thorns and lighting it at a brazier thrust the blazing mass into his bosom against the flesh, and started to whirl once more like a tree in flames. Then as the circle came to a swaying halt he plucked it out once more and gave the dervish next to him a playful slap upon the face with it.
But now a dozen dancing circles intervened and took up the measure and the little courtyard overflowed with twisting turning figures. From the little shrine came the steady drone of the holy word, punctuated by the shrill tongue trills of the votaries.
‘Scobie’s going to have a heavy night’ said Balthazar with irreverence. ‘Counting foreskins up there in the Moslem heaven.’ Somewhere far away I heard the siren of a ship boom in the harbour, recalling me to my senses. It was time to be going. ‘I’ll come down with you’ said Balthazar, and together we started to push and wriggle our way down the crowded street towards the Corniche.
We found a gharry and sat silent in it, hearing the music and drumming gradually receding as we traversed the long rolling line of the marine parade. The moon was up, shining on the calm sea, freckled by the light breeze. The palms nodded. We clipclopped down the narrow twisted streets and into the commercial harbour at last with its silent ghostly watercraft. A few lights winked here and there. A liner moved out of its berth and slid softly down the channel — a long glittering crescent of light.
The little launch which was to carry me was still being loaded with provisions and luggage.
‘Well’ I said, ‘Balthazar. Keep out of mischief.’
‘We’ll be meeting again quite soon’ he said quietly. ‘You can’t shake me off. The Wandering Jew, you know. But I’ll keep you posted about Clea. I’d say something like “Come back to us soon”, if I didn’t have the feeling that you weren’t going to. I’m damned if I know why. But that we’ll meet again I’m sure.’
‘So am I’ I said.
We embraced warmly, and with an abrupt gesture he climbed back into the gharry and settled himself once more.
‘Mark my words’ he said as the horse started up to the flick of a whip.
I stood, listening to the noise of its hooves until the night swallowed them up. Then I turned back to the work in hand.
*******