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their own satisfaction; a double row of grave, black- hooded figures at either bulwark merely surveyed the scene with solemn enthusiasm.

But all the rest gave forth grunts, and groans, and wails, and screeches fit to wake the dead and kill the living. It had time, as I say, and a kind of tune, and its quality of sound is best described as the voice of a camel crossed on a bagpipe. That was the outer ring; inside was a double row of musicians and the dancers. There were only two instruments at first-the waterjar, which is slung on the performer and slapped on the bottom like a tom-tom; and a pair of tiny, tiny wooden drums, one the shape and size of a breakfast-cup, the other of a tea cup. An old man played them: he was not smiling like the others, but very grave; he did not even look at the dancers, he just tap - tapped away at his baby drums. Nobody could possibly hear their little patter in that ear - achy jangle; but what was that to him? He just tapped

on.

THE FANTASIA OF THE SEASON.

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The breakfast - cup rolled over hausted; he carefully helped it up, and tapped it some more. A dancer galumphing down the line kicked over the tea-cup; he crawled after it, methodically put it in place, and tapped it again.

Fiercest Bacchanals of all were the dancers. From two to six swayed up and down the line intermittently-now moving slowly, now prancing with emphasis, now banging their feet down on deck in a fury of enjoyment. One especially I had noticed as a singularly languid and incompetent oar in the day; how different now! Now his turban, with a bit of sugar - cane stuck through it, was down over his left eye; from the left corner of his mouth there shot up to meet it a dead cigarette-stump in a holder. His eyes now lit with delight, now quenched with drunkenness. Every limb and every gesture spelt a mixture of insane fury and imbecile good - fellowship. Now he seized a waterbottle and slung it on, tom-tommed up and down, reeled as he kicked his legs abroad

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and brought them down slap, slap on the deck. Now he was a mixture between a mad bull and a marionette. Then suddenly there appeared in the ring -whence and how he got there nobody knew or cared—a white haired, jet black old man, a feather dust - brush stuck through his turban, playing a lyre. Of course you couldn't hear it, but plainly he was playing. A shriek of ecstasy greeted him. He moved his stiff limbs in a desperate dithyramb, and beamed all over with dirt and delirium.

There were one hundred and twenty guests, and they consumed between them only four bottles of brandy and eighteen pennyworth of hasheesh. Yet it was universally agreed to be the fantasia of the season. The noise ceased before midnight, but hours after we went to bed we could hear a crunch, crunch overhead as they chewed at sugar - cane. The crew were eating the decorations.

XXII.

THE ANCIENT EGYPTIANS.

ANCIENT EGYPTIAN ART-RAMESES THE GREAT-CHARACTER OF THE PEOPLE-A NATION OF MONUMENTAL MASONS.

February 14.-If a modern child were to draw on its slate the masterpieces of ancient Egyptian art, it would be smacked. The form of the buildings, its careful parent would point out, is uncouth and clumsy, and the figures quite hopelessly out of drawing. The men look like wooden dolls, and the women like those india-rubber things that you punch because they have a whistle at the back.

When you point out these fairly obvious facts to the Nile pilgrim, he- it is more usually she—at first catches her breath. Ancient Egyptian art not beautiful! Oh, Mr Steevens!

But when you gently lead her up to Rameses or Cleopatra, and compel her to look at them as she would look at any other carving on any other wall, then she is compelled to allow that the thing is a grotesque abortion. "Oh, but you forget," she says then, "how very old it is: you can't expect much from that age."

When you urge that plea you give Egyptian art away at once: you are beginning to excuse it as the work, not of people whose civilisation might set us blushing for our own, but as primitive barbarians who knew no better. But the queer thing is that a great many of the most admired masterpieces are not so very old after all. The temples of Denderah, Esneh, and Edfu were none of them completed much before the Christian era; some considerably later. That means that they are more than four hundred years younger than the Parthenon-which was itself the youngest of the great Greek temples. And the rude caricature of Cleopatra on the back of Denderah was scratched there many generations after

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