IV. THE IBIS SINGS. WHILE the Hadji Hamed fluttered about the deck, and the commander served his kara kooseh, the crew gathered around the bow and sang. The stillness of early evening had spelled the river, nor was the strangeness dissolved by that singing. The men crouched in a circle upon the deck, and the reis, or captain, thrummed the tarabuka, or Arab drum, made of a fish-skin stretched upon a gourd. Raising their hands, the crew clapped them above their heads, in perfect time, not ringingly, but with a dead dull thump of the palms-moving the whole arm to bring them together. They swung their heads from side to side, and one clanked a chain in unison. So did these people long before the Ibis nestled to this bank, long before there were Americans to listen. For when Diana was divine, and thousands of men and women came floating down the Nile in barges to celebrate her festival, they sang and clapped, played the castanets and flute, stifling the voices of Arabian and Lybian echoes with a wild roar of revelry. They, too, sang a song that came to them from an unknown antiquity, Linus, their first and only song, the dirge of the son of the first king of Egypt. This might have been that dirge that the crew sang in a mournful minor. Suddenly one rose and led the song, in sharp jagged sounds, formless as lightning. "He fills me the glass full and gives me to drink," sang the leader, and the low measured chorus throbbed after him, "Hummeleager malooshee." The sounds were not a tune, but a kind of measured recitative. It went on constantly faster and faster, exciting them, as the Shakers excite themselves, until a tall gaunt Nubian rose in the moonlight and danced in the centre of the cir cle, like a gay ghoul among his fellows. The dancing was monotonous, like the singing, a simple jerking of the muscles. He shook his arms. from the elbows like a Shaker, and raised himself alternately upon both feet. Often the leader repeated the song as a solo, then the voices died away, the ghoul crouched again, and the hollow throb of the tarabuka continued as an accompaniment to the distant singing of Nero's crew, which came in fitful gusts through the little grove of sharp slim masts— "If you meet my sweetheart, The melancholy monotony of this singing in unison harmonized with the vague feelings of that first Nile night. The simplicity of the words became the perpetual childishness of the men, so that it was not ludicrous. It was clearly the music and words of a race just better than the brutes. If a poet could translate into sound the expression of a fine dog's face, or that of a meditative cow, the Howadji would fancy that he heard Nile music. For, after all, that placid and perfect animal expression would be melancholy humanity. And with the crew only the sound was sad; they smiled and grinned and shook their heads with intense satisfaction. The evening and the scene were like a chapter of Mungo Park. I heard the African mother sing to him as he lay sick upon her mats, and the world and history forgotten, those strange sad sounds drew me deep into the dumb mystery of Africa. But the musical Howadji will find a fearful void in his Eastern life. The Asiatic has no ear and no soul for music. Like other savages and children. he loves a noise and he plays on shrill pipes—on the tarabuka, on the tár or tambourine, and a sharp one-stringed fiddle, or rabáb. Of course, in your first oriental days, you will decline no invitation, but you will grow gradually deaf to all entreaties of friends or dragomen to sally forth and hear music. You will remind him that you did not come to the East to go to Bedlam. This want of music is not strange, for silence is natural to the East and the tropics. When, sitting quietly at home, in midsummer, sweeping ever sunward in the growing heats, we at length reach the tropics in the fixed fervor of a July noon, the day is rapt, the birds are still, the wind swoons, and the burning sun glares silence on the world. The Orient is that primeval and perpetual noon. That very heat explains to you the voluptuous elaboration of its architecture, the brilliance of its costume, the picturesqueness of its life. But no Mozart was needed to sow Persian gardens with roses breathing love and beauty, no Beethoven to build mighty Himalayas, no Rossini to sparkle and sing with the birds and streams. Those realities are there, of which the composers are the poets to western imaginations. In the East, you feel and see music, but hear it never. Yet in Cairo and Damascus the poets sit at the cafés, surrounded by the forms and colors of their songs, and recite the romances of the Arabian Nights, or of Aboo Zeyd, or of Antar, with no other accompaniment than the tár or the rabáb, then called the "poet's viol," and in the same. monotonous strain. Sometimes the single strain is touching, as when on our way to Jerusalem, the too enamored camel-driver; leading the litter of the fair Armenian, saddened the silence of the desert noon with a Syrian song. The high shrill notes trembled and rang in the air. The words said little, but the sound was a lyric of sorrow. fair Armenian listened silently as the caravan wound slowly along, her eyes musily fixed upon the east, where the flower-fringed Euphrates flows through Bagdad to the sea. The fair Armenian had her thoughts and the camel-driver his; also the accompanying Howadji listened and had theirs. The The Syrian songs of the desert are very sad. They harmonize with the burning monotony of the landscape in their long recitative and shrill wail. The camel steps more willingly to that music, but the Howadji, swaying upon his back is tranced in the sound, so naturally born of si lence. Meanwhile our crew are singing, although we |