Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 2, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 4 January 1917 — SIGHT TO BE REMEMBERS [ARTICLE]

SIGHT TO BE REMEMBERS

Dances of the Turning and Howling Dervishes Hypnotize Spectator * From the West. The dervishes of Constantinople are one of those sights of the Orient which the western visitor sees, as a rule, with the all-embracing and apathetic tourist curiosity that will regard any- . thing from an execution in China to famine in India in the light of a curious entertainment. There is no more horribly fascinating spectacle in the East than these dervishes, and he must be thick-skinned indeed who can come away without feeling that he has brushed the edge of mystery—crude and savage mystery, perhaps, but mystery none the less. There are two kinds of. dervishes. 3 the dancing or turning dervish, and the howling dervish. Both are religious orders, and their orgies are mystic tention, but they have about them more of the character of black magic. The turning dervishes dance on a raised, waxed platform, Incongruously reminiscent of a dance floor at Coney ' island. A little gallery is provided where tact and backsheesh may procure a seat for the European visitor. A primitive orchestra of drums and flutes provides music whose quality is almost solely rhythmic, embroidered by the ghost of a thin tune from the

eerie flutes. With elaborate ceremonial the dervishes step one by one upon the floor, bowing deeply each to his companions and to the master of ceremonies. Slowly, one by one, they begin to turn, around and around, with lithe, snakelike movements. The drums beat or,t a muffled tempo, the floor is a maze of sinuous circling forms that turn, each on his own heel, while circling in smooth patterns singly and in groups about each other —a maze, a tangle, of blending that draws and tires and hypnotizes the eye as it lifts the performers into a mechanical ecstasy. The howling dervishes are of another and more violent order. Their dance is one of mad, convulsive contortions that seem to rack their tortured bodies in time to the beat of the drums. Low groans tear from their throats in the same inexorable teinpo. It is a physical pain to watch them. Before the ceremony is half over they are in a semicataleptic state, dead to the world, but still jerking and twisting in rhythm, The spectacle is not pretty, but it leaves an impression that cannot be lightly tossed off.