Meanwhile in the Etmeidan a much more free-and-easy sort of entertainment is taking place.  The women of the lower orders are there diverting themselves in gaily adorned tents, where they can buy as much mead as they can drink, and in the midst of the piazza on round, outspread carpets dance the bayaderes of the streets, whom Sultan Achmed had once collected together and locked up in a dungeon where they had remained till the popular rising set them free again.  In their hands they hold their nakaras (timbrels), clashing them together above their heads as they whirl around; on their feet are bronze bangles; and their long tresses and their light bulging garments flutter around them, whilst with wild gesticulations they dance the most audacious of dances, compared with whose voluptuous movements the passion of the fiercest Spanish bailarina is almost tame and spiritless.

Suddenly one of these street dancing-girls scream aloud to her companions in the midst of the mazy dance, bringing them suddenly to a standstill.

“Look, look!” she cried, “there comes Guel-Bejaze!  Guel-Bejaze, the wife of Halil Patrona.”

“Guel-Bejaze!  Guel-Bejaze!” resound suddenly on every side.  The bayaderes recognise the woman who had been shut up with them in the same dungeon, surround her, begin to kiss her feet and her garments, raise her up in their arms on to their shoulders, and so exhibit her to all the women assembled together on the piazza.

“Yonder is the wife of Halil Patrona!” they cry, and Rumour quickly flies with the news all through the city.  Everyone of the bayaderes dancing among the people has something to say in praise of her.  Some of them she had cared for in sickness, others she had comforted in their distress, to all of them she had been kind and gentle.  And then, too, it was she who had restored them their liberty, for was it not on her account that Halil Patrona had set them all free?

Everyone hastened up to her.  The poor thing could not escape from the clamorous enthusiasm of the sturdy muscular fish-wives and bathing women who, in their turn also, raised her upon their shoulders and carried her about, finally resolving to carry her all the way home for the honour of the thing.  So for Halil Patrona’s palace they set off with Guel-Bejaze on their shoulders, she all the time vainly imploring them to put her down that she might hide away among the crowd and disappear, for she feared, she trembled at, the honour they did her.  From street to street they carried her, whirling along with them in a torrent of drunken enthusiasm everyone they chanced to fall in with on the way; and before them went the cry that the woman whom the others were carrying on their shoulders was the wife of Halil Patrona, the feted leader of the people, and ever denser and more violent grew the crowd.  Any smaller groups they might happen to meet were swept along with them.  Now and then they encountered the harems of the greatest dignitaries, such as pashas and beglerbegs.  It was all one, the august and exalted ladies had also to follow in the suite of the wife of Halil Patrona, the most powerful man in the realm, whose wife was the gentlest lady under Heaven.