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Updated: May 7, 2025
The musical instruments were, the tomtom, or drum, and the Malayan gong; which were beat either slow or fast, according to the measure of the dance. The dances are highly interesting, more especially from their close resemblance, if not identity, with those of the South Sea Islanders.
Last night, as we reposed under the Japanese roof of Diou-djen-dji the thin old wooden roof scorched by a hundred years of sunshine, vibrating at the least sound, like the stretched-out parchment of a tomtom in the silence which prevails at two o'clock in the morning, we heard overhead a sound like a regular wild huntsman's chase passing at full gallop. "Nidzoumi!"
Suppose the king and priests had said: "That tomtom is the finest instrument of music in the world that is the kind of music found in heaven.
She was an honest, virtuous woman, and is to be buried with honor beside the grave of her husband, Ibrahim. The mourners slowly assemble. The tomtom is still vainly summoning the only son. The body has been laid on two boards covered with woollen cloths, and is borne out on the shoulders of four men.
And I saw at the same time a row of men's skulls skulls from the Bushmen of Australia, skulls from the center of Africa, skulls from the farthest islands of the Pacific, skulls from this country from the aborigines of America, skulls of the Aztecs, up to the best skulls, or many of the best of the last generation; and I noticed there was the same difference between the skulls as between the products of the skulls, the same between that skull and that, as between the dugout and the man-of-war, as between the dugout and the steamship, as between the tomtom and an opera of Verdi, as between those ancient agricultural implements and ours, as between that yellow daub and that landscape, as between that stone god and a statue of today; and I said to myself, "This is a question of intellectual development; this is a question of brain."
One of the belles of the tribe leads a man into the dancing apartment, which consists of one of two tepees thrown together. In one are the tomtom beaters, in the other the dancers. In this room the couple begin to dance, making signs to each other, the meaning of which may be: "Well, what do you think of me? Do you like me? Do you think me pretty?
We knew then that his medicine was bad medicine, otherwise the white baas without the pictures could not have killed him. So we were wroth and made to slay the other baas, but he shot us down with a fire stick and returned to his own country in haste. Then did I take the skin from the dead baas, for I loved him for his pictures, and I made them into a tomtom. I have spoken."
The variegated crowd and that huckster was too enticing, and forgetting I had not seen one of my own kind since leaving the ship, and that my face among those black and brown masks was as loud as the tomtom, I mingled my outrageous tourist tweeds with the graceful folds of the robes.
They were playing the bendir, the tomtom, the Arab flute, as well as the räita; but the räita laughed the other music down. They were waiting, eager-eyed. If Max had not known beforehand that something was expected, he would have guessed it. At last she came, the great desert dancer said to be the most beautiful Ouled Nail of her generation.
The far-sounding clang of a brass gong roused the poet from his ecstasy. It was the tomtom calling him to duty, to the lecture on rhetoric which at this hour he had to deliver to the young priests.
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