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Updated: June 4, 2025
In common politeness he could scarcely refuse my company, since he had asked me as a favour to let him come with me to Beni-Kouidar. I waited, watching the moon rise, till my cigar was smoked out. Then I lit another. Still he did not come. I heard the distant throb of tomtoms beyond the Bureau Arabe in the quarter of the freed negroes. They were having a fantasia.
All the time, in light and dark, the Indians filled the air with dismal chant and doleful incantations to the Great Spirit, and the tum! tum! tum! tum! of tomtoms, a specific feature of their wild prayer for food. But the white monotony of the rolling land and level lake remained unbroken. The reindeer did not come. The days became shorter, dimmer, darker. The mercury kept on the slide.
The young ascetic bowed to the tomtoms, dropping his lower jaw and jumping on his bare feet. He bowed again as if saluting a fetish, and again and again. Ceaselessly he bowed to the tomtoms, always jumping softly from the pavement.
The hautboy players prolonged a wailing note, and the tomtoms gave forth a fierce and dull murmur almost like a death, roll. "She wants him to give her money," Batouch whispered to Domini. "Why does not he give her money?" Evidently the stranger did not understand what was expected of him.
At one moment they were birds, at another animals, at the next they were demons. The noise of the tomtoms and the harsh shouts of the Indians grew wilder and wilder. It was weird and terrifying.
An over-bold device, perhaps, but it certainly caught the eye; there was a barbaric suggestion in those strings of glittering beads that made one think of the Congo and of tomtoms beating brazenly in the moonlight. A hat that WAS a hat, as I have previously remarked, and Indiman and I gazed upon it with undisguised interest.
And, on the other hand, the distracted Chinese reads that: "Protestantism is not only a veritable Babel, but a horrible theory, and an immoral practice which blasphemes God, degrades man, and endangers society." When I entered Tongchuan the town was in commotion; kettledrums and tomtoms were beating, and crackers and guns firing; the din and clatter was continuous and deafening.
What was going on in the bride's half of her father's great tent Max did not know, but he fancied that, above the beating of Tahar's tomtoms and the wild singing of an imported Arab tenor, he could hear soft, distant wailings of the ghesbah and the shrill "You you you!" of excited women.
He was a Sicilian; but came to North Africa each winter. I have always heard the tomtoms and the pipes, and I know nearly all the desert songs of the nomads." "This is a love-song, isn't it?" "Yes. Larbi is always in love, they tell me. Each new dancer catches him in her net. Happy Larbi!" "Because he can love so easily?" "Or unlove so easily. Look at him, Madame."
She fed him again, while the tomtoms went on roaring, and the child in its red pillow watched with its weary eyes. And when he was full fed, only a fragment of glass remained between her fingers, he fell upon the ground and lay like one in a trance.
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