Page:The Art of Nijinsky.djvu/89

 Rh who is the favourite of the queen herself."

This is Nijinsky, and from the moment of his entrance the drama takes on to itself a new and terrible meaning. The dark youth flickers here and there among the mazy crowd of slaves, hungry for the faithless wife of the sultan—she whose flesh also is parched and dry for the touch of his. He finds her soon, and his lecherous hands play over and over her body with a purpose too subtle, it seems, to take and hold her once and for all. And presently he leaves her, threading his way in and out of the passionate dancers, to lie at last on a soft cushion, like a flame of lust that smoulders and sinks but never dies. Now he has joined the orgy again. See him leap in the air, no man but a devil, the foul and heady essence that can spur these bodies of men and women to