MYSTERY OF A DANCER.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXX, Issue 3416, 6 January 1912, Page 10

MYSTERY OF A DANCER.

STORY OF HER CHILDHOOD

Sahary Djeli, mysterious as ever, has returned to London and will reappear in a new Eastern dance-tragedy at the Hippodrome, at which house, it will be remembered, the dancer scored an unusual success not long ago in an elaborate Salome sketch.

Sahary Djeli, resting on a divan from the fatigue of a rehearsal, was as secret and obscure as of old on the subject of her parentage, absolutely refusing to enlighten him as to her real name or real nationality, and talking only of incidents of her babyhood—and of "those more as if they had been of dreams than of actualities.

Speaking in French, which she has entirely adopted with the view of forgetting her own native language—or at all events with the view of not giving tongue to it before strangers—Sahary Djeii told the following remarkable story of what she called the birth of her passion for dancing:— “It was in the Fast, long, long ago, when I was a little girl—a baby, almost. "We were crossing the desert, going far into the interior. The sun —ah! yon do not know what the sun is in this grey land!—the sun was liquid lire. At noon we could bear it no longer. They had left me to play in the shadow of a few palms, and ax the foot of one I was digging deeply for the root of a flower, when the elephants trumpeted loudly, and I looked round to ine, to dance. I was entranced. So lightly the sand whirled round and round-—came closer and waltzed away.

“Then the sand would sink lower and lower, tall columns of it falling until they settled on the ground like this.” Rising to her utmost height, she slowly sank down upon her dressingroom floor, and lay there for a while, a tangle of shimmering transparency. Then she assumed a sitting posture, common to the Eastern people with whose life she is obviously more closely aequainted than she will admit, and went on with her story: “And then the desert danced again, a furious dance this time, great whirling clouds of sand darkening the sky, the palms above me shivering, some falling, and the elephants trumpeting more wildly than befort. Some buried their trunks in the sand and lay flat; and I lay flat also, covering my face with mv "hands, and working my body as deeply into the sand as I could, for protection. “The darkness and the storm passed slowly away, and when they had gone I rose and looked round. Two of the elephants lay dead by the palms; further along lay the bodies of my father and two of his attendants. “Yes,” said Sahary Djeli, after a slight shiver, “I remember only too well that first dance, the dance of death, which gave birth to my ‘Dance of the Desert’!”