United States or Mali ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
When the great tune had been played right through once, and a passionate roll of tomtoms announced its repetition, Irena suddenly shot out her tiny arms, brought her hands down on the knives, seized them and sprang to her feet. She had passed from lassitude to vivid energy with an abruptness that was almost demoniacal, and to an energy with which both mind and body seemed to blaze.
"That sound? But it is always the same and there is no music in it." "Perhaps there is more in it than music. The jacket?" Suzanne went gingerly to fetch it. The faint cry of the African hautboy rose up above the tomtoms. The evening fete was beginning.
Can anyone doubt this who witnesses the stoicism with which a Chinaman can endure physical pain when sustaining surgical operation without chloroform, the comfort with which he can thrive amid foul and penetrating smells, the calmness with which he can sleep amid the noise of gunfire and crackers, drums and tomtoms, and the indifference with which he contemplates the sufferings of lower animals, and the infliction of tortures on higher?
It was built on the left side of the river on two small hills, but we heard no gongs or tomtoms sounding, the usual alarm of all the Malay settlements on the approach of strangers. When we arrived off it, we found that the town was deserted.
At the same moment with the uproar of the tomtoms there mingled a loud knocking on the door. Hadj's lips curled back from his pointed teeth and he looked dangerous. "It is Batouch!" he snarled. Domini got up. Without a word, turning her back upon the court, she made her way out, still hearing the howl of the scorpion-eater, the roar of the tomtoms, and the knocking on the door.
But immediately an extraordinary effect was produced amongst the innumerable population. Beatings of the tomtoms and sounds of other formidable instruments of the Chinese orchestra, gun reports by the thousand, mortars fired in hundreds, all were brought into play to scare away the aeronef.
"The tomtoms were roaring, the pipe was yelling, blown by the frantic demon with his hood full of latch keys, the impassible, bearded faces were watching the painted women who, in their red garments and their golden crowns, promenaded down the earthen floor, between the divans, fluttering their dyed fingers, smiling grotesquely like idols, bending forward their greasy foreheads to receive the tribute of their admirers.
These Britishers had been through the mill; they knew. None of the glory stuff for them! Leave that for the newspaper scribblers, the bloody rascals who stayed at home and beat on tomtoms, driving other men to march in and die. You went and got yourself battered up, ruined for life and then what would they do for you? It was a hard world to a man who was crippled and helpless.
She began to feel a sort of terror mingled with the most extraordinary attraction she had ever known. Hadj crouched right back against the wall. The voice of the Jewess ceased in a shout. The hautboys stopped playing. Only the tomtoms roared. "Hadj can be happy now," observed Batouch in a voice of almost satisfaction, "for Irena is going to dance. Look!
As she went she was acutely aware of the many distant noises that rose up in the night to the pale crescent of the young moon, the pulsing of the tomtoms in the city, the faint screaming of the pipes that sounded almost like human beings in distress, the passionate barking of the guard dogs tied up to the tents on the sand-slopes where the multitudes of fires gleamed.
Word Of The Day