most suitable as a setting for a fantasy. While we were considering the merit of ochre-gingerbread men versus bluespotted gazelles, a muezzin called us to the mosque in this case an open court where all the men of the village squatted at prayer. A minaret rising to the sky, the figure of the sheik at the top of a winding staircase, silhouetted against the blue, added a more serious note to the modernist scene. The women of the village gathered around, offering their armlet cases for baksheesh, but we galloped on, our Professor luring us away with the hint of a howlingdervish service in the offing.

By the time we reached the next village due to the Professor's extraordinary educational methods - we were prepared for an examination in the manners and customs of the Nubians and, having added this new race to our museum of nationalist problems, we felt qualified to mix socially with the elect of the tribe. We left our gallant little donkeys at the doorstep of the Bodagdi ménage and were welcomed by Madame Bodagdi into the Nubian household. In striking contrast to other Egyptian domiciles, this courtyard and interior were clean and orderly. The women unveiled, revealed their dusky charms enhanced by the tattoo and the gold nose-ring. The sleeping-quarters showed a built-in bed of the same earth that formed the floor, the rugs and mats rolled up in Japanese fashion. The family wardrobe, gayly displayed, furnished the 'sky borders' of the room. The walls were decorated with everything from Sudanese baskets to lurid colored-supplement ‘ads.'

Cocoa and Nubian dates, a European table, Vienna chairs, were presided over with charm and savoir faire by Madame. We were almost shocked by this radical defiance of 'woman's place,' but were assured by the Professor that in this, as in other cus

toms, the Nubians have their independent views. However, Allah does not recognize this laxity, for as we approached the mosque of this village only the masculine elect dared doff their shoes and enter. For two reasons we were admitted: first, because of our nationality, and secondly, because the Professor felt in need of midday prayers. His preparations were elaborate, his libations almost a complete bath, while we in our religious fervor stood in stockinged feet on uncovered dust and dirt, and would have preferred our libations after prayer. We were glad, however, to see this simple, devout service, for we, as women, had been proscribed in Cairo from treading the holy ground during the ritual service.

After a hurried lunch we exchanged our 'subway donkeys' for the 'elevated camels' and were admitted to a new experience the Bisharin. Here we touched nearest to Nature. Huts of matted grass provide shelter for this amazing tribe of Bedouin camelbreeders, who wander all through the Arabian desert. They are absolutely unique in type, and we felt we had been whisked away to the South Seas. Almost naked black bodies and limbs, heads well set and formed, but dwarfed under mats of bushy hair, set a new standard for workshop wigs and an idea to be achieved by the flapper of 1944. An unbleached cotton cloth was wound in curious drapery round the loins and over one shoulder, on men and women alike; but the latter were more heavily clad with silver amulets and bracelets. The oldest and most shrunken graybearded Bisharin squatted on a small mat surrounded by a row of miniature cobblestones. This isolation proclaimed the 'holy ground,' a sacred place of prayer or mosque.

At our Professor's suggestion the performance began. Out of the mud hovels dashed the men of the tribe,

brandishing long swords and round leather-and-metal shields. They leaped at one another in so fearsome a way that it seemed more than a game, when they had to be separated by the sedate umpires. Meanwhile the pacifists on the box-seats of cameldom became so thrilled and excited that they dismounted and cheered the combatants on to greater frenzy. The repertoire of simple leaping-games and war dances is short but violent, and so primitively picturesque that it would satisfy the ultra-æsthete who cries, 'Back to nature.' The Bisharin orchestra seemed to our ears less crude or at least less

strident - than other Arab music. Vocal in part, it was accompanied by a lyre-shaped instrument with five strings, mellow in tone.

Back through the bazaars we cantered, the narrow streets forming roofed vistas and lined with the usual open shops gayly decorated with everything from Sudanese armor to American wheat.

Stars, donkeys, and a kufiehed guard fore and aft, long twisting alleys, shadowed hovels, the silent and stark Nubian desert, an oasis of mud huts, soundless and motionless in the night, and we passing as silently, expectant, tense, confident that our Nubian escort and our donkeys were leading us to the magic and mystery of the theatre of the race of Ham. Or were we already caught in its hoodoo spell?

Our caravan stopped before a mud wall.

Dusky shadows began to move; a penetrating voice broke the silence. There was a fumbling of wooden latches and the glow of a charcoal brazier as a door opened and we were ushered through a mud courtyard into the Little Theatre of Sudan.

A low square chamber where one tiny wall-wick, combined with the glow of the brazier on the floor, immediately

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cast a spell of theatre magic round us. In one corner, huddled on a wooden bench, lay what seemed to be a heap of old rags, but which later proved to be a child. On the floor a great hulking form crouched, warming a large tambura over the burning coals. This we have observed is the tuning ritual of the orchestras of Egypt. Cold and lack of food there may be, but always glow enough to warm rhythm and melody into life.

We were ushered to the only seats, our Nubian escort sharing what later appeared to be the community bed, and we once more experienced the thrill of personal rapport between audience and performers. This is the Little Theatre rarefied to its ultimate purpose. First, the audience is sharing directly with the performers in the creation of the production; secondly, there is no physical convention of proscenium or setting to separate the audience from the stage; thirdly, and most important, there is the rare and personal sensation that the moment belongs to you alone - that for you alone the gate of illusion is momentarily opened.

One by one the ladies of the ballet, who had retired for the night but had been roused by a flying messenger, appeared and were presented with all the ceremony of hand-kissing. The costume: a printed cotton of Mother Hubbard cut, a probable survival of an early missionary period; a gold nosering as a chic and individual touch; make-up of charcoal number 3, relieved by decorative patterns of tattoowork; a coiffure beyond the skill of any wig-maker — a multitude of tight ringlets of wool in even rows, suspended from a smooth oiled surface, which we recognized at once as a survival of the ancient tomb-paintings. The fashions of their headgear, the pride of the Sudanese flapper, accounted for the fields of castor-oil plant through which

we passed earlier in the day. Bracelets, necklets, anklets of heavy silver set off the dusky features and massive limbs. The performance began with the customary salutation; then the first motive of the movement - the swaying of the body for the complicated flexibility of head, neck, shoulders, arms, torso, and so on, every muscle coming into play in anatomical succession. Romance, as with us, forms the plot of these dramas of the East, and the happy ending is also demanded. The heroine, a dusky ingénue who would have captivated Gauguin, impersonated the bride, and one of the dark-veiled matrons impersonated the mother of the tribe. The pantomime suggested the conferring of the powers of motherhood and the passing on of the tribal line.

The première danseuse arrived. Every muscle heaved in amazing gyrations and the syncopations of the bare feet continued as the body bent back in a Salome-like attitude. The abandon of the movement was in strange contrast to the missionary cut of the trailing Mother Hubbard. Not only was this accompanied by the rhythmic beating of the tabla and by hand-clapping, but, at intervals, the most arresting climaxes were induced by a sudden call, piercing and vibrant as the call of a wild creature to its mate in the jungle. So close to the primitive world was the unhuman cry that it would take centuries for a less savage race to acquire the technique of this coloratura of the jungle. The movement, meanwhile, grew more and more primitively sensuous, the danseuse directing her charms from one to another of the gentlemen present, until, at its most seductive moment, each in turn jumped up and passionately beat the air with his stick or fist, to acknowledge her conquest and incite her to further triumphs.

The next number explained itself:

"To make the dirt fly' — and it flew! Producing a psychological cough, we fled to the door and watched what probably was a relic of a spirit dance: a semicircle of black forms, more dusky than the night, gleaming eyes and whitened teeth half shrouded in a gauze of dust, shuffling, stamping, leaping, crying, that revealed to us an orgiastic ritual of black magic.

The stars and the cool fragrant night and the stretches of the desert sands seemed homey and familiar after the scene so remote from us in tradition, in development, so close to a savage life beyond our ken.

Even the most insatiable first-nighter might have paused for breath and retired to the realities of bed and the relaxing influence of a hot-water bottle after this seriesof the season's openings; but the Nubian constitution is no more enduring than that of Grand Street and we revived at the idea of another divertisement suggested by our resourceful Professor. On we cantered to a Nubian village where we were welcomed with customary grace. The setting for this performance was an exterior: an alley-way bounded by newly built mud-houses formed a background for two rows of dervishes, squatting cross-legged on the braided groundcloth used for the ceremony, lit by a hive-shaped light that shed its beams on the faces of the performers. The 'overheads' twinkled with brilliant star-effects.

It was an interlude in the prenuptial festivities of a young Nubian felláheen. Contrary to Western traditions, the hero of the occasion was not the bridegroom, but his mother's second husband, a gentleman of great dignity and repose, robed in handsome galabya and kufieh. No women, of course, were present, but on inquiry we learned that the bride was making the most

of the last moments of her childhood in a final fling with her pals.

Familiar trays of what we thought the inevitable brewed Nile were served to us, but it proved to be an exotic drink of distilled annis, that was a strain on our crude Occidental palates.

The howling dervish ceremony began. Two sheiks, leading the service in high-keyed voices of brilliant quality, intoned the praise of the Prophet, and the two lines swaying in opposition, pendulum-like in rhythm but moving in ever-enlarging spirals, chanted the responses. From the most subtle movement of the heads the relaxed bodies swayed in ever-increasing tempo until, with simultaneous impulse, all rose to their feet. Without a pause or loss of a beat, the movement and in

toned reiteration continued faster and yet faster, until both lines swayed themselves into an ecstasy of the infinite spiral rhythm of 'Allah Akbar.'

This was merely one incident in the munificence of a pre-nuptial fête. We were next ushered through dark courtyards and corridors to still another scene of praise and prayer. The brazier was this time the central point, around which squatted another company chanting the words of the Koran. Sandalwood, incense, and burnt annis, mingling with the natural perfume of the Nubian, filled the windowless, airless chamber. The pale-faced audience was soon surfeited with atmosphere and religion, and cantering back to Assuan, welcomed the waning stars and the chilling approach of dawn.

AFTER various changes we finally transferred at the corner of the Pyramids and cameled across the desert sands, while the moonlight played in fantastic shadows on the distant hills, and our luggage followed in rope 'prop' bags on Sambo's humped back.

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When we reached the tent flap of the desert theatre, Machmud-producer, manager, impresario- greeted with desert courtesy. Instead of the drab canvas effect we anticipated, what was our amazement to find ourselves 'magicked' into the setting of the paladins! Luckily, we remembered that we had brought our dress clothes, -abayas, kufiehs, and burnous, — or we should have felt as painfully conspicuous as if we had been in overalls at the opera. The other guests arrived on gray Arab steeds, accompanied by a claque of Bedouin jackal dogs.

The curtain rose. The 'back drop'

twinkling with star-effects, was seen through a low proscenium. The orchestra for this important opening was conducted by the Barrère of Mena village, a sofara player of great distinction in the Bedouin tribe. As in other Little Theatres, percussion was the accompaniment, and Gamma, a young prodigy of twelve years, performed on the tabla, with fingers and wrists moving in rhythmic skill comparable only to the intricacies of Pavlowa's toes in her most technical ballet. Voices in strange minor intervals came in, in complicated rhythms. And then one figure after another rose spontaneously, and began to move in subtle rhythm-the feet first, then the movement of the body surged upward with the melody of the reed pipe, until the neck, and then the head itself, was moving in curious syncopations. The tempo increased as the mood grew

more and more excited, with the clapping of hands from the audience and performers who found themselves swept into the spell of the reiterated call of the desert. The stick of the camel-driver now came into play as the most important 'prop.' Such grace and subtlety of the wrist, such sinuous litheness of each muscle defies western imitation. Next the kufieh or headkerchief caught the night air with the delicacy of a chiffon scarf. A deliciously floating rhythm combined with a sudden pause told the story of the baking of the bread, and then came the final dramatic climax of capturing the kufieh in the teeth of the performer amid the wild acclaim of the syncopated orchestra drums, flute, voices, hand-clapping, that was at once discordant, yet harmonious. Our guests departed on their Arab steeds and we, already adopted by the Machmud tribe, had our first initiation into the mysteries of the Dervish. Ali, our irrepressible donkey-boy, was suddenly swayed by a religious impulse and began to move in a slow minor rhythm as he gradually hypnotized himself by the repetition of the Prophet's name. Faster and faster until, loosened by the spiral abandon, the kufieh unwound and floated in white waves about his head and body. He rose, still swirling, and was joined by the whole clan until there were two lines in orthodox dervish fashion. So hypnotized were they by their own impetus,-not, alas, by religious frenzy,

that finally their relaxed bodies collapsed utterly with exhaustion, and Ali in particular had so completely surrendered his senses to the abandon of rhythm that he had to be revived to a waking state.

So successful was this opening that the management rejoiced and the traveling audience's dreams became that night a fantastic mirage, in anticipation of the first day on the road.

The morning bath in a glassful of muddy Nile. Breakfast coffee of the same complexion, with bread and treacle from the fresh sugar-cane, were tempting hors d'oeuvres to caravan life. As we did not belong to the Arab Union, 'striking' gave us an opportunity to observe the cast of ten of the night before, who were now transformed into the crew. Each seemed to head his own department efficiently but never rose to the finished standard of Machmud with the all-seeing eye and helping hand! Sardi, the poet and slave of Sarifa, the dromedary; Hamid, the tribe's strong man, tossing the heavy water-tanks on to the groaning camel's back; Ali, the dervish, saddling 'Mary Anderson' and 'Gazelle,' who brayed their morning antiphon; Byume, caging the cackling fowls that formed part of our commissary. Even we, hardened to orchestral rehearsals, were slightly unnerved by the caravan method of harmonics. Only after each tent peg had been checked up and every prop was in its balanced position on the camel's back, did Machmud give word to start. It was interesting to find how like the technique of the static theatre our caravan methods were.

Thrilling to new experiences, the Caravan Road Company began its route across the yellow sands. The dignified pace and the solemn mien of Sambo and his followers could not dampen the gay spirits of the company. On they danced and on and on, the tabla and the sofara lightening the way of this barefooted ballet; there was standing room only for all but the audience and impresario in this traveling show. And how analogous the life, with its intricacies, its adventure, its camaraderie, its absorbing interest in the perfection of one vanishing moment, its demands on the vitality of the producer and his staff!

But, on the other hand, what a