Angry, humiliated, feeling lost eternally, Barakah scrambled out to face a row of grinning, dancing hags. They and the shameless girls, the fiendish music, the sweating walls, the fumes of incense hiding the high roof, combined to make her fancy she was underneath the earth assisting at an orgy of malignant jinn.

Someone smote her from behind. She turned round angrily. A fair-haired girl was running. She ran after her. Another struck her lightly as she ran. She turned again. A third sprang on her, pinioned both her arms and kissed her on the mouth, amid applause. Then first she realized that it was all a game; the girls were friendly. In the magnitude of her relief, her shyness vanished. She soon led the romp. It was one long dancing game of follow-my-leader, varied with moods of hide-and-seek and leapfrog. All the while the singers kept up their wild din, the hired dancers never ceased their weird contortions.