Therefore, upon the beating of the gong which had not been struck for many weary moons, he hastened to the court and salaamed to the ground before his master, who sat upon a pile of cushions, guarded by the two shaggy dogs of Billi, with the amber mouthpiece of the jewel-encrusted nargileh between his lips and the falcon upon a padded perch beside him.

“Bring me a woman—­to dance,” he curtly ordered, and the slave sped to do his bidding, with visions of a big increase in the banking-account hidden in a secret place.

And when the dancer drifted in like a flower-petal upon a breeze, Hugh Carden Ali looked up slowly, letting escape a wisp of smoke from between his lips.

The dancer wore one single garment of transparent black, hung from the shoulders by diamond bands and through which her perfectly nude body shone like an ivory pillar; her slender feet with crimsoned toes and heels were bare; the tiny hands ablaze with jewels; a huge bunch of orange-tinted diamond-sprinkled osprey was fastened in her jet-black hair; across her face there hung a short, almost transparent veil, one corner of which she held between her teeth, leaving to view the wonderful eyes, a heaven or hell of invitation—­as you will.

She danced as had danced her Biblical sister to the pleasing of a king for the attainment of her desire; and she danced humming a little tune behind the veil until the movement of her beautiful body and the knowledge of a man’s eyes upon her went to her head like wine, so that in the end, by force of habit maybe, she danced to conquer where she had only intended to interest.

As already mentioned, she had the morals of a jackal.

She drifted down the court towards Hugh Carden Ali and, standing before him, bowed her beautiful head to the level of her dimpled knees, laughed gently, and was gone like a bird to a far corner of the court.

She seemed to swing in the air like a lime flower caught on the end of a spider’s thread, as she came slowly down once more; to be blown hither and thither like a leaf before the gale as she ran here, sprang there, to the rhythm of the little tune she hummed behind the wisp of veil; to undulate, like a field of ripe wheat beneath the summer sun as she stood quite near the man who watched her with a fraction of the interest he would have shown in the purchase of a dog or falcon in the open mart.

Her henna’d toes pressed firmly on the centre of a Persian rug of such antiquity as to render the pattern indecipherable; she moved her body from the slender waist downward not at all; the muscles of her arms and shoulders rippled, and her head moved, slightly but unceasingly from side to side.