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Updated: May 27, 2025
Two, squatting on the deck, played tom-tom on upturned tin pans; another jingled two pieces of rusty iron as accompaniment; and all who in that crowded space could find foot room, danced shuff-shuff-shuffle with absurd and aimless gestures.
They burnt incense before his shrine, and the captain devoutly said his evening prayer, whilst he of the tom-tom, Ahmet Faraj, stood behind and mimicked him, to the great amusement of his fellows a piece of irreverence I have never seen before in any Mohammedan country.
The two crews with their ceaseless tom-tom on the shore of the creek, were upward of half a mile away. Natalie was made comfortable in her tent; and Garth and Charley, collecting a pile of firewood, covered it with a tarpaulin, against the coming rain.
They were coming from up the river piled high with fruit and bark, with the women and children lying huddled in the high bow and stern, while amidships the twelve men at the oars strained and struggled until we saw every muscle rise under the black skin. As their stroke slackened, the man in the bow with the tom-tom beat more savagely upon it, and shouted to them in shrill sharp cries.
I heard the sound of the tom-tom above the wail of the wind. "Yes," I said. Why did I wish it? I hardly know. I had no fear for, no desire to protect myself. But I remembered the smile I had seen, the Spahi's saying, "There will be death in Sidi-Massarli to-night," and I was resolved that the three men who had heard the desert drum together should not be parted till the morning.
The idol stirred into life, the music of the orchestra died away. Then a tom-tom began to beat its nervous pulse-stirring throb, the strident notes of a reed-pipe joined in and the dancer, raised on her toes on the dais, began to sway languorously to and fro.
The impression produced on the spectators by the laconic harangue of the stranger was like that of a tom-tom in the midst of tender music. But the word "harangue" is insufficient to reproduce the hatred, the desires of vengeance expressed by the haughty gesture of the hand, the brevity of the speech, and the look of sullen and cool-blooded energy on the countenance of the speaker.
As he spoke, it seemed to Felix that these strange mystic words about each god springing fresh from his own ashes must contain the solution of that dread problem they were trying in vain to read. That, perhaps, was the secret of Korong. If only they could ever manage to understand it! Tu-Kila-Kila beat his tom-tom twice. In a second all the people fell flat on their faces again.
So they passed in streets of the thronging people, where yards of new dyed cotton, purple and yellow, stretched drying in the sun, where a busy tom-tom called the pious to leave coppers before a blood-red, goldened-tongued Kali, half visible through the door of a mud hut where all the dealers in brass dishes and glass armlets, nine-yard turban cloths, blue and gold, and silver gilt stands for the comfortable hubble-bubble, squatted in line upon their thresholds and accepted them with indifference.
"He is leading the national war-dance of our people. There is the tom-tom," he added triumphantly, pointing at the bass-drum, which was fortunately presented in full relief. Carlos was taken aback, and he made a guttural exclamation of surprise. "Do you dress like that when you are at home?" he asked of Colonel James. "I do," replied the colonel majestically.
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