explosion as you entered the room. There was no distinguishable tune. It
was simply an enormous noise. But there was a kind of savage rhythm about
it which made one think immediately of Indians and fierce men and the
native camps one used to visit at the Earl's Court Exhibition. And this was
not surprising. For the musicians included one genuine negro and three men
with their faces blacked; and the noise and the rhythm were the authentic
music of a negro village in South America, and the words which some genius
had once set to the noise were an exhortation to go to the place where the
negroes dwelt.

To judge by their movements, many of the dancers had in fact been there,
and had carefully studied the best indigenous models. They were doing some
quite extraordinary things. No two couples were doing quite the same thing
for more than a few seconds, so that there was an endless variety of
extraordinary postures. Some of them shuffled secretly along the edge of
the room, their faces tense, their shoulders swaying like reeds in a light
wind, their progress almost imperceptible; they did not rotate, they did
not speak, but sometimes the tremor of a skirt or the slight stirring of a
patent-leather shoe showed that they were indeed alive and in motion,
though that motion was as the motion of a glacier, not to be measured in
minutes or yards.

And some in a kind of fever rushed hither and thither among the thick
crowd, avoiding disaster with marvellous dexterity; and sometimes they
revolved slowly and sometimes quickly and sometimes spun giddily round for
a moment like gyroscopic tops. Then they too would be seized with a kind of
trance, or it may be with sheer shortness of breath, and hung motionless
for a little in the centre of the room, while the mad throng jostled and
flowed about them like the leaves in Autumn round a dead bird.