"I told you: India awakes! But watch." It was growing dark.

Two women came and drew the curtains closer.

Other women brought lamps and set them on stools along one wall; others again brought tapers and lit the candles in the hydra-headed candelabra.
"It is really too light yet," Yasmini grumbled, as if the gods who marshal in the night had not kept 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.