t faith with her. But even so, the
shadows danced among India's gods on the wall facing the row of stools.

Then there began wood-wind music, made by musicians out of sight, low
and sweet, suggesting unimaginable mysteries, and one by one through the
curtains opposite there came in silently seven women on bare feet that
hardly touched the carpet; and all the stories about nautch girls, all
the travelers' tales of how Eastern women dance with their arms, not
feet, vanished that instant into the kingdom of lies. This was
dancing--art absolute. They no longer seemed to be flesh and blood women
possessed of weight and other limitations; their footfall was hardly
audible, and you could not hear them breathe at all. They were like
living shadows, and they danced the way the shadows of the branches do
on a jungle clearing when a light breeze makes the trees laugh.

It had some sort of mystic meaning no doubt, although I did not
understand it; but what I did understand was that the whole arrangement
was designed to produce a sort of mesmerism in the beholder.

However, school yourself to live alone and think alone for a quarter of
a century or so, meeting people only as man to man instead of like a
sheep among a flock of sheep, and you become immune to that sort of
thing.

The Princess Yasmini seemed to realize that neither King nor I were
being drawn into the net of dreaminess that those trained women of hers
were weaving.

"Watch!" said Yasmini suddenly. And then we saw what very few men have
been priviliged to see.

She joined the dance; and you knew then who had taught those women.
Theirs had been after all a mere interpretation: of her vision. Hers was
the vision itself.

She was _It_--the thing itself--no more an interpretation than anything
in nature is. Yasmini became India--India's heart; and I suppose that if
King and I had understood her we would have been swept into her vortex,
as it were, like drops of water into an ocean.

She was unrestrained by any need, or even willingness to explain
herself. She was talking the same language that the nodding blossoms and
the light and shadow talk that go chasing each other across the
hillsides. And while you watched you seemed to know all sorts of
things--secrets that disappeared from your mind a moment afterward.

She began singing presently, commencing on the middle F as every sound
in nature does and disregarding conventional limitations just as she did
when danc