35

29
World, will prove it. These follwers of Mr. Mahomet are high-class riders and desert warriors, but more remarkable as athletes of singular and superb skill and agile strength. It should also be taken into consideration that they perform in the open, and on the rough ground, instead of having carpets and carfully leveled ground beneath their feet. They can even substitute mud for rosin and then make the circus look tame. Their holiday manual of arms includes the so rapid manipulate of long guns that they seem transformed into huge Fourth of July pin-wheels. Their head to head balancing is a prodigy of equilibristic art, strength and endurance. The nimbest pair of legs could scarce keep abreast of their handspring evolutions clear across the great arena. They walk on their hands as though brought up to thatg kind of locomotion exclusively. They launch themselves in high and hazardous spreads and side-long somersaults over bayonets and sword blades. They tumble as though tossed in the arms of an invisible tornado, and they climb atop of one another with the balance and agility of monkeys, until nine of them form a high pyramid, of which one herculean son of the Prophet is the sole base. Meanwhile, and in fact all the while, the sage Dervish of the tribe is making a human tectotum of his respected self, and rotating more rapidly that the double screws of an Atlantic liner. So rapidly and continuously does he whirl around with extended arms that, unless he is iron-hooped, it is a wonder that he does not burst all to pieces and strew the Oriental scene with sanctified fragments