A low growl like that of a wild beast broke the silence.  Domini did not know at first whence it came.  She stared at the four men, but they were all gazing vacantly into the brazier, their naked arms dropping to the floor.  She glanced at Hadj.  He was delicately taking a cigarette paper from a little case.  The child—­no, it was absurd even to think of a child emitting such a sound.

Someone growled again more fiercely, and this time Domini saw that it was the palest of the ascetic-looking youths.  He shook back his long hair, rose to his feet with a bound, and moving into the centre of the court gazed ferociously at his companions.  As if in obedience to the glance, two of them stretched their arms backwards, found two tomtoms, and began to beat them loudly and monotonously.  The young ascetic bowed to the tomtoms, dropping his lower jaw and jumping on his bare feet.  He bowed again as if saluting a fetish, and again and again.  Ceaselessly he bowed to the tomtoms, always jumping softly from the pavement.  His long hair fell over his face and back upon his shoulders with a monotonous regularity that imitated the tomtoms, as if he strove to mould his life in accord with the fetish to which he offered adoration.  Flecks of foam appeared upon his lips, and the asceticism in his eyes changed to a bestial glare.  His whole body was involved in a long and snake-like undulation, above which his hair flew to and fro.  Presently the second youth, moving reverently like a priest about the altar, stole to a corner and returned with a large and curved sheet of glass.  Without looking at Domini he came to her and placed it in her hands.  When the dancer saw the glass he stood still, growled again long and furiously, threw himself on his knees before Domini, licked his lips, then, abruptly thrusting forward his face, set his teeth in the sheet of glass, bit a large piece off, crunched it up with a loud noise, swallowed it with a gulp, and growled for more.  She fed him again, while the tomtoms went on roaring, and the child in its red pillow watched with its weary eyes.  And when he was full fed, only a fragment of glass remained between her fingers, he fell upon the ground and lay like one in a trance.

Then the second youth bowed to the tomtoms, leaping gently on the pavement, foamed at the mouth, growled, snuffed up the incense fumes, shook his long mane, and placed his naked feet in the red-hot coals of the brazier.  He plucked out a coal and rolled his tongue round it.  He placed red coals under his bare armpits and kept them there, pressing his arms against his sides.  He held a coal, like a monocle, in his eye socket against his eye.  And all the time he leaped and bowed and foamed, undulating his body like a snake.  The child looked on with a still gravity, and the tomtoms never ceased.  From the gallery above painted faces peered down, but Domini did not see them.  Her attention was taken captive by the young priests of the Sahara.