# The Tale the Drum Told

Extracted from Cosmopolitan, 1922 August, pp. 95–100, 114, 116. Accompanying illustrations by Lui Trugo may be omitted.
Achmed Abdullah's story of Love and Kismet on a Starlit Roof Top of Algiers
The Tale the Drum Told
Illustrations by Lui Trugo
OFTEN in after years, in a distant part of the world, Pitts Burton would remember the happening.
He would remember it vividly, at length, in detail, even now that he pain and futility of it had passed; too, he would remember it at incongruous moments, in the midst of a gay dinner party, or driving his ball from the first tee of the Sleepy Hollow links, or perhaps during a walk up Fifth Avenue, as though his spirit had winged back and crashed into an air pocket of memory. And with it would come to his ears the ghost of Mahdi Ibrahim's drum; its thud and drone, the tok-tak-tok, staccato, then a solid wall of sounds, suddenly receding in a way that seemed sinister, like a riddle of incomplete achievement—his life, and the woman's fate.
Of course he remembered his house in Tugurt, in the heart of the Arab town, with its flat roof a little higher than the sea of roofs which tossed about it, the Shafiyeh mosque, the rim of street barred by a screen of dark, lanky palms driven straight into the fox-brown earth like iron candlesticks, and beyond them the bazaar quarter, a snailshell containing all the windings of traffic and barter.
He had come to Tunis to stay a week; had remained to stay out the season.
For he liked the land, the people, the faith. It was all so uncomplex; that praying Arab whom he could see from the roof top where he spent the cool evening hours—what a close intimacy with his God! What a nonchalance of dreamy sensuousness in those delicate faced, delicate robed Tunisian dandies who strolled down the street! What a superb harmony and singleness of purpose in all this land!
It seemed as if the irking soul had gone from it and blended with the surge of the desert. It gave a sense of complete ease and disburdenment. It made a minimum demand on the intellect. It disregarded the mechanical chaos, the hysterical mental charnel house of the Occident, and wrote simple things—wrote them large and bold and clear upon a_background of vast spaces and vague distances.
Yes. He had liked it from the first; had remained, though he said to himself that sooner or later he would return to America, that this half year was going to be only an interlude, a sentence in brackets, not meant to influence the flowing tale of his life.
He never knew how Mahdi Ibrahim had happened to come up that evening. But there he was as he had often seen him in the market square, squatting on slippered heels, the flat, rush woven basket a few feet away.
“Snakes, yah Sidi?” he asked. “They dance when I order them. Want to see?”
“Sure they don't bite?”
“Not as long as I beat the drum, Sidi.”
“And if you stop——”
The Arab shrugged his shoulders. “Fi aman'illah,” he said—“we are all in the guardianship of God.”
“Small consolation!” smiled Pitts Burton.
But he settled himself comfortably in the shadow of the high marble parapet that circled the roof, preparing to watch. At his back, by standing on tiptoes and craning his neck, he could see the roof top of the next house and beyond it others, flat, white, stretching away into the lavender misted evening, gradually blending into the distance without a break.
The neighboring house had been empty until this morning when an Arab family had moved in with a great deal of hustle and confusion and laughter. A rich and orthodox Shareefian clan, evidently—for the women had driven up in a carriage with tightly closed wooden shutters, supervised by a gigantic Kisslar Agassi, or head eunuch; a band of Jewish musicians had blared a pæan of welcome; market porters had come, carrying baskets of roses and hyacinths and geranium leaves and digitalis, while other porters had balanced the household goods on turbaned heads—chairs and mattresses and French mirror wardrobes, gaily painted chests, kitchen utensils, brass pestles and mortars, huge zinc trunks and beds and ivory inlaid taborets, rugs, pillows, derboukas and rebabas, yellow faience plates and copper braziers. A dozen negresses, swinging pails and brooms, had invaded the front gate amidst triumphant shouts of “yoo-yoo-yoo”; and early in the afternoon, regarded with superstitious and admiring eyes by all the neighborhood, a white-haired, shriveled negro had squatted on the threshold to propitiate the scorpions that swarm in old Arab houses. He had been surrounded by the magic properties of his craft—a ragged end of carpet, three torn conjuring books, a small bag of sand, another filled with dried beans, and a square, battered, shiny box on which he seemed to put especial value and which on closer inspection, Burton, who had joined the throng, had discovered to be an ancient cocoa tin.
The negro had spent an hour over his incantations—“to make peace with the scorpions,” Nadj Omar, Burton's houseboy and dragoman, had explained, “so they won't bite. Also to bring luck to the house of Si Mohammed el-Busiri.”
“Is that my new neighbor's name?”
“Yes,” Nadj Omar had replied; adding in the amazing mixture of English slang which he had picked up from tourists and during a journey as stoker to Liverpool and back, “No end bloody swanky family—descendant of the Prophet and all that sort of rot—eh what, old dear?”
Even now Burton still heard a commotion behind the parapet—a heavy dragging of furniture; a girl's high laugh; a faint shimmering and brushing of guttural voices; the Kisslar Agassi's peaked falsetto as he berated a female servant:
“What manners be these, yah oudj al-gahss—O countenance of misfortune! Allah ijjiblah rehba rama—may Allah send an earthquake to destroy thee!”
A woman's sniffling whine. Then:
“O almost entirely destitute of shame!”—the exclamation mark being supplied by the sound of a hand evidently coming into violent contact with bare flesh.
Burton laughed. He turned to the snake charmer.
“Proceed, Mahdi Ibrahim!”
“Fi aman'illah!” repeated the latter piously.
He altered the position of his head so that it jutted sharply into the rays of the dying sun, showing a dead-white face that rose from the pointed black beard like a sardonic Chinese vignette. His left hand disappeared in the burnouse, came out with the drum. He rose to a kneeling posture, sank back on his heels, swaying from side to side like a chained jungle beast. He raised the drum on its thin silver chain. It commenced swinging, right, left, right, left, like a pendulum.
It was small, the size of a child's head, of a dull mottled ivory with a tiny orifice covered by a tightly stretched skin. He beat it with gentle, dry taps, alternating thumb and palm of his right hand; and presently the drum spoke:
Tok-tak! Tok-tocketty-tak!—with a hiccoughy, syncopated rhythm. Tok-tocko-tok!—insistingly.
He stared at the basket with a fixed, dreamy immobility. His lips opened.
“Hayah—ho!” he said in a wiped-over, purring voice; then, a little more loudly: “Come! Dance for me! Come, yah bent—O daughter!” And with sudden ferocity: “Come, yah ikhs ya'l khammar—O thou drunkard! Jew! Christian! Uncouth wart!”
The top of the basket gave a convulsive tremor.
Tok! sobbed the drum as with far thunder—tok-tocko-tok-tocko-tok ... and again the top of the basket stirred, heaved; until all at once it was raised a few inches and a flat, wicked, triangular head appeared; a second; a third. They swayed from side to side, trying to locate the sound.
Tok-tok!
Three glistening lengths of rope plopped down. They coiled; uncoiled.
Never for a moment did Mahdi Ibrahim stop beating the swinging drum—left, right—tok-tak—rhythmically; and somehow Burton was not afraid. Somehow he felt soothed and happy as if a gentle hand had taken from his soul the weight of his body. His eyes opened; closed; opened. He saw a few feet away the snakes' eyes glimmering like mica discs with a filmy overglow; saw the tongues shoot out, reddish black, nervous quivering; saw the steely whips of bodies glide across the roof top with a wavy motion, a pitiless stretching of strength and cruelty, the black spots on the stripes of their sulphur-yellow, scaly skins glittering like cressets of evil desire.
The drum sobbed with a nasal cadence, with tiny, breathless pauses. The snake charmer stared.
“Come!” he said. 'My bride! My love! Come, my scented sprig of jessamine and myrrh!” And to a nine foot male snake: “Please deign to come, O great king! O my lord! O elephant!”
Still the drum kept swinging, zumming, calling, relentless resistless; and as if hypnotized the snakes came nearer, drawing their white bellies across the roof top with a noise of dry leaves rustling in the meeting of winds. They separated. They formed a half circle about Mahdi Ibrahim. Suddenly, as if in concerted attack, they lifted a foot of their bodies from the ground, swaying and jerking. Their jaws opened wide, exposing sneering, bluish black gums. They bloated the loose skin on their necks so that it was like curved golden shields with sable spots. They shot out their perverse flat heads, the eyes piercing in the direction of their old enemy, man, tonguing and hissing with the inherited hate and fear of a thousand generations of snakes. But calmly, dreamily, Mahdi Ibrahim stared at them. A silent battle it was, for mastery, for life and death, with the eyes the only weapon and the drum—the tok-tak-tok of the swinging ivory drum.
Then as Burton watched, first one, then another, then the third snake moved; right, left, right, following the pendulum of the drum, dancing, gyrating, circling; right, left, right; drunk with the thumping, droning rhythm, with Mahdi Ibrahim's blurred call: “Dance—hayah—dance!”
And they danced faster and faster until one, then another, then the third stretched exhausted on the ground, their flat eyes closed, their striped bodies shuddering as with the weakening aftermath of a great passion.
“Ho!” cried the Arab.
He slid the drum back in his burnouse, rose, pounced upon the snakes, picked them up, two in his right, the male reptile in his left hand, crammed them quickly into the basket, closed it, tied it with a stout rope and turned to Burton with a smile and an outstretched hand.
“Is the Sidi satisfied?” he asked in the fluent English which he had learned years earlier in an American circus.
“Bully! Here you are.” There was the clink of money “But——”
“Yes, Sidi?”
“I've seen you do your little parlor trick before. You usually get the brutes up again—force them to do a second dance.”
“I could not today.”
“Oh?”
“The other music, Sidi! It interfered with my drum—made the snakes nervous.”
“What other music?”
“Can't you hear?” Mahdi Ibrahim pointed to the parapet in back of the American.
The latter listened.
“You're right!” he said suddenly as, with a thin, tremulous distinctness, the pizzicato twanging of a one stringed guitar drifted up, sobbing softly through the gathering night that dropped with the thick, lazy dew of the tropics, jeweling a thousand spider webs, painting the palms a silvery pastel shade clothing the spiky cactus clumps in the garden with a robe of lemon and elfin green.
“Hush!” he whispered as the guitar coiled into a maze of baroque dissonances, an embroidery of fantastic, chromatic arabesques, as a woman's voice picked up the lilting melody and tossed it high with an abandon of eerie, wailing, minor harmonies.
“Yah benti, yah benti,
Akh idjibleq erradjel ...”
The accompaniment lilted and quivered. It wafted as with the scent of roses. It swished like a naked wind across the sweep of the desert: “Yah benti, yah benti...”
[Illustration: “Yah amri!” said Janina in her low, throaty voice. “O my life! Yah aini—O my soul!”]
The voice sobbed, rose higher and higher to a clear, bell-like note, rested there trembling, like a butterfly on a leaf, dropped octave: “Akh idjibleq... ”
It rose again with the rush and surge of a wave, with an infinite, throbbing joy of the senses, then stopped, cut off suddenly in mid-air as clean as with a knife, leaving a stark void of silence; and Pitts Burton gave a little shudder. Somehow the song had seemed to him pregnant with a vast, symbolic appeal, had seemed to hold the very soul of this Arab land, the red days, the black-winged nights and the gold-dusted sands that crept to the south.
He pulled himself together, feeling rather like a fool. Never had he suspected in himself such an overwhelming emotional reaction to music, and so he was a little ashamed and smiled sheepishly at the snake charmer.
“Pretty, eh?” he asked, knowing that the word was ludicrously inadequate. “What was it?”
“A love song, Sidi. A love song of the Black Tents, the Bedouin——” And then suddenly, as Burton turned to the parapet, about to raise himself and look down: 'No, no! You mustn't!”
“Why not?”
“The woman who sang—she is on the roof top—the roof top next door!”
“Sure enough. That's just why I want to——”
“No! She may be unveiled!”
“Let's hope so.”
“But”—the other was shocked to the depths of his narrow Moslem soul—“this is an Arab town—there are the customs——”
“All right!” laughed Burton. “You are deliciously Mid-victorian, quite like my uncle, the Bishop.” And when Mahdi Ibrahim looked surprised, catching the words without their meaning, he slapped him on the shoulder and cried: “Don't you worry. I'll behave.”
Mahdi Ibrahim picked up his basket. “Shall I come back,” he asked, “and make the snakes dance again?”
“Drop in any time.”
“The salute, yah Sidi!”
“So long, old boy!”
But as soon as the other had left Burton turned once more to the parapet. He drew himself up carefully, inch by inch. He looked down.
The roof top of the house of Si Mohammed el-Busiri was directly beneath his, only a few feet away, the outer walls touching. It lay sharp and clear in the sun's crimson afterglow, heaped with a profusion of silken rugs and pillows in rich blendings of purple and maroon and peacock-green. There were a number of taborets with sweetmeats and bottles of perfume, a silver hubble-bubble pipe and a dwarf peach tree in full bloom set in a square pot of turquoise-blue Persian porcelain. In the center stood a mazah, a sort of pergola, closed on three sides with screens of fretted marble, while the fourth was covered by a curtain of brown wool embroidered with silver.
As he looked the curtain moved and a woman stepped out, a guitar in her hand.
She was dressed in a long kaftan of mauve silk with a mansouryiah, an overdress, of spidery lace. Her tiny feet were in orange velvet slippers stitched with golden crescents. Her black hair was twisted up in an orange silk handkerchief bordered with seed pearls.
He saw her face very clearly as she raised her chin to look at the sky where Orion, slanting and immense, was tilting across the crest of dropping night, while here and there the minor constellations were brushing out of the ether like points of silver pricked in a purple canopy. She seemed very young; perhaps seventeen, he said to himself, or eighteen—no more. She was of a light golden complexion, the even texture of her skin enhanced by the blue tattoo mark on her forehead and by the great diamond nose stud fastened to her left nostril. Her keen, large eyes seemed even larger through the curved frame of her immense black brows.
She crossed the roof top with the swinging gait of the desert bred, and at every step the elastic cords and smooth long muscles of her bare throat moved rhythmically. Different he thought her, from the women he had known in America. The magic of tropical stars had ripened her. The motley pageantry of tropical skies had shaped her young body.
He held himself perfectly quiet, so quiet and silent that he could hear the flutter of a moth's wings that sped past him. The woman was now directly beneath him, and a scent drifted up as a strand of her hair escaping from under the handkerchief, she caught up the loose lock with a gesture of her rounded arm. It was not the scent of perfume or flowers but the scent of the woman herself, the aroma of her warm young body; and again, as before when he had listened to her song, a shudder ran through him of fear—too, of longing, unformed yet overwhelming. He felt the blood in his veins singing with a puissant rhythm.
The next second, before he could drop from sight, her glance met his. She stared up at him from beneath half closed lids. He felt the look physically. It touched his heart and body together. It stirred him, unreasonably, like some great awakening, like the facing of a riddle which he must read to the end.
She stood very still, yet poised on her toes, ready to dart away should he move. Her eyes opened to their full width. Her nostrils quivered nervously, like those of a mare, causing the diamond nose stud to twinkle with a million rainbow facets. Her kaftan, caught by the tail end of the desert breeze, slid to one side, exposing a soft shoulder.
Burton heard his own breath come rapidly, staccato. He felt his imaginings drive along like a sheet of flame, rippling through his body in a huge red wave. A strange tumult as of some ecstasy of long forgotten, again remembered primitive savagery invaded him, honeycombing his wire-drawn, respectable soul, melting down the walls of his civilizational resistance. He could not turn his eyes away. He wanted to speak; to say—anything. Could not utter a sound.
Then he heard a voice at his elbow:
“Sidi Burton!”
With a jerk of his whole body he turned, grasping the parapet in back of him with both his hands, and blinked stupidly. Nadj Omar, his houseboy and dragoman, bowed before him.
“She's rather jolly well corking, eh what?” he asked with impudent familiarity.
“You——” Burton was angry; less at having been found out than because he heard on the roof behind him a rushing of slippered feet and thought that the dragoman had frightened the woman away. His rage choked him. He clenched his fists.
“Si Mohammed knows how to pick out his wives,” continued the other imperturbably; and seeing the expression of anger in his master's eyes changing to curiosity, he added: “Janina is his youngest wife. How do I know? I am a yaouled, a bazaar boy. The tongue is my weapon and the ear my shield—right-o. Throw me in the river—and I rise with a fish in my mouth!” He looked over the parapet. “She's gone. Too jolly damn bad. Still—rehbi ma ighleg bab hatta iheul bab—God does not close one door without first opening another. You want to meet her, Sidi? How much you pay? Two hundred francs? I am not Jew or an Armenian that I should bargain! One hundred and ninety——”
“Go to the devil!”
Pitts Burton left the roof top, while Nadj Omar smiled. He put his head on one side, considering. Then he stepped close to the parapet and whistled—two high notes, followed by fluttering tremolo and ending in a throaty gurgle, exactly like a crane calling to its mate. He waited, listening tensely; repeated the call; and presently the answer came in a soft warble from Mohammed's house.
[Illustration: Every day Pitts Burton rode into the vaulted silences of the Sahara]
He stared down. It was now quite dark. But he caught the blurred impression of a white robed, enormous figure waddling flat footedly across the roof top, heard a voice drift up in a falesetto whisper:
“Meunhoo—who is it?”
“Nadj Omar. Is that you—Fayruzabadi, the Kisslar Agassi?”
“The same,” replied the head eunuch.
He struck a wax match. It flared like a yellow wedge, bringing his face into sharp relief, heavy jowled, thick lipped, the face of a perverted, latter day Roman emperor blended with the inhuman, crushing calm of a Buddhist sage and with a suspicion of negro coarseness in flattened nose and rolling, bloodshot eyeballs.
He held up the match, recognized Nadj Omar's vulpine features, dropped the match. There was once more darkness, steadily increasing.
“You remember me?” asked the dragoman. “A small business matter we had in Algiers—last year——”
“I remember when I wish. At times memory is a hangman's noose. Why should I remember—tonight?”
“Money!” was the laconic answer.
“Money is on the lips of the liar!”
“Money honeys the gall!”
“Money is an infidel sect!”
“Money”—the dragoman continued the exchange of oriental metaphors—“is the key which opens the lock of desire!”
[Illustration: “Look out, Sidi,” came the snake charmer's warning cry, changing into a bitter laugh of triumph.]
“How much money?” demanded the practical Kisslar Agassi. “And what key, O brother of the horse leech?”
“This!” Nadj Omar whispered at length, winding up with: “The lady Janina looked long at the Sidi. I am not the one to roll scandal over my tongue. But she came seeking him with a lighted candle in her eye.”
“Oh?”
“Indeed. What is she like?”
“A young woman—very young! With warm intestines—very warm!”
“Ah!” sighed the dragoman. “El chem fassghar qi klurda fel ghzenn—during youth pain is like a rose on a bush!”
“Just so.”
“But what about the thorn on the rosebush? What is Si Mohammed like?”
“Old, Nadj Omar. Once he was the hammer. Now he is the anvil.”
“So—it can be arranged?”
“It can be tried. If you cannot take things by the head, take them by the tail.”
“Meaning——”
“That there is a back door,” said the Kisslar Agassi. “There is also myself.”
“Who guards the back door?”
“Yes.”
“Allah's peace on you, Fayruzabadi!”
“And on your own head!”
Feet brushed across the roof tops, right and left, and vanished into the memory of sound. There was the stillness of the night. High in the west gleamed a sickle moon of delicate ivory. A jackal crossed the far desert, swiftly, grayly, like an evil thought. From the hectic maze of the bazaar quarter came a very faint rubbing of drums and wailing of reed pipes.
Pitts Burton heard. He could not find sleep for a long time; tossed nervously on his bed. The thought of the woman would not leave him.
Love? Perhaps. Desire? Doubtless.
But too, negatively, the fear of middle age. He dreaded it. It meant patent lotions for the hair and patent medicines for the liver. It meant dowagers in purple velvet at dinner, and a rise both in his weight and his handicap at golf. It spelled flannel underwear and hot springs and stodginess and respectability—not by preference but by force majeure.
And youth meant romance.
Romance—why!—he had missed it all through life; had sneered at it; had buried it beneath the stony drag and smother of business, ambition, self-consciousness, fear of his own and his friends' ridicule. His had been the common school logic in which all the truths stand behind one another, neatly marshaled and labeled. Flotsam—that's what he had been—flotsam on the tide of other people's opinions and prejudices.
Romance! He needed. it; wanted it. Why not, he said to himself, why not? There had been the woman's eyes, with the suggestion in them of infinite dreams, infinite sweetness, infinite thrills.
Why not—why not? He-had been a fool to jump down Nadj Omar's throat. The dragoman was all right; a little too familiar perhaps with his mixture of English slang and Arab proverbs, but loyal and shrewd. He would know away. Why—he had even suggested that for a few hundred francs he might...
So Burton fell asleep, to be wakened by Nadj Omar who came with the breakfast tray and smiling words:
“Ripping day, Sidi! You dream of Janina, eh?”
Burton sat up. Morning lay through the room with a brocaded mantle of rose and silver.
“Oh!”—he yawned. “Janina——” He rubbed his eyes.
“Damn pretty, Sidi!”
“I'll say she is.” The American sipped his coffee,
“Her husband is old,” continued the other. “Also weak. Also trusting. Also a fool.”
And, master psychologist, he let the matter drop until that evening when, the snake charmer having come, performed and left, Burton once more watched the neighboring roof top. Janina was sitting cross-legged on a pillow. She did not look up. She twanged her guitar, and again the flame of desire burned through Burton's soul and set his heart to beating fearfully hammering against his ribs, leaving him breathless, without volition, without resistance.
The dragoman stepped to his side.
“The lady Janina likes your face—right-o!” he said with calm directness.
“How do you know?”
“The Kisslar Agassi told me—the head eunuch. No end clever chap—my word! Once he lost a she-camel and four years later knew her colt by its foot.”
Burton laughed.
“It is now nine o'clock,” the other went on.
“Well?”
“Si Mohammed's other two wives are very old and very fat. They are asleep. They hide their leaky tongues in their snores.” He lighted a cigarette. “The Kisslar Agassi is at the back door—waiting——”
“But—how——”
For answer the dragoman hummed a current Tugurt bazaar song:
“Noosig yah alli man andeq khoog achqiq,
Khoog achqig hooah ed-douro—”
which he translated into:
“I tell thee, O thou who hast real brother,
Thy real brother is the dollar!
“How much?” asked Burton.
“Two hundred francs—perhaps a little more afterwards, Sidi.”
Burton felt slightly disgusted. He felt tempted to draw back. But he shook his head. Romance—it was waiting for him; and after all, he thought, it was no better or worse than tipping the headwaiter in a New York restaurant and sending him across the waxed floor to a woman dining alone, with a word scribbled on a visiting card.
“All right,” he said.
He followed the dragoman down stairs, through the garden, to the back door of Si Mohammed's house. The Kisslar Agassi was waiting. There was talk in guttural, explosive Arabic, the clink of money, and the eunuch's pudgy hand grasping Burton's and drawing him across the threshold.
“Come, yah Sidi. Be careful.”
Then a rapid crossing of darkened rooms, a mounting of darkened stairs, a rustle of curtains, a heavy odor of musk and attar roses, somewhere the sound of a sleeper snoring rumblingly, sluggishly, a final word:
“I shall watch, Sidi.”
[Illustration: “At times,” said the head eunuch, “memory is a hangman's noose.”]
And Burton found himself on the roof top of Si Mohammed's house. Janina rose and came up him, the moonlight gleaming down her black tresses, gleaming with diamond points in the somber orbit of her eyes. He heard his own voice stammering, ludicrous:
“You—you speak English?”
“A little—and a little French——”
“And I know about two words of Arabic.”
She laughed.
“I shall teach you more,” she said. “Listen. Repeat after me: Agarbi h'ulana, anna sehauff Janina barka, maqueh fathma lashor!”
“What does it mean?”
“Repeat!” she insisted; and word for word, clumsily, haltingly, his lips echoed the strange sounds.
“Please tell me what it means.”
“It means: I swear by Allah that I shall see only Janina, and no other woman!”
Then he kissed her.
He never knew how and when he parted from her. There was just a vague memory of the Kisslar Agassi looming up with warning words to hurry because day was near, a quick descent and crossing of rooms where morning was beginning to shoot in with a ghostly wedge of white, a dash across the garden.
At noon he woke up. There was in his soul the knowledge of something sweet and strange that had taken possession of him, heart and body, and somehow a sense of immense sadness; there was in his mouth the sweetness of wild honey, with a bitter after taste to prick the tongue and set the nerves to longing; and again that night he saw her.
Earlier in the evening the snake charmer had come. He had dismissed him curtly.
The Kisslar Agassi took him to the roof top. She came up to him with the magic of her touch.
“Yah amri!” she said in her low, throaty voice. “'O my life!”
He saw her almost every night, except on those rare occasions when Nadj Omar brought word that Si Mohammed's other two wives were on the roof; and so the days passed into weeks. They had little to talk about. At times, of course, he tried to speak to her, to ask her questions about herself. But she seldom opened her lips except to kiss him or whisper words of love.
“Tell me of what you think, dear,” he would ask.
“Yah amri—O my life!” she would reply. “Yah aini—O my soul!”
Then a flood of passionate words, in Arabic, in quaint French, in the little English which she knew; and after a while he gave up asking her questions. She was right, he said to himself. There was no truth but that of the senses, God given. Such was now the single thought which dominated him.
Occasionally Mahdi Ibrahim came and squatted on the roof top and beat his drum—tok-tak-tok—forcing the snakes to dance drunkenly. But as a rule Pitts Burton dismissed him, impatiently, curtly. For he had begun—quite unreasonably, he owned up to himself—to dislike the snake charmer's hawkish, sardonic face. He wondered if the man knew. If he did, he did not let on. Only once he made a certain cryptic allusion.
“If Allah proposes the destruction of an ant, He allows wings to grow upon her,” he said one evening, apropos of nothing as from the neighboring house drifted up the wailing of Janina's guitar.
By this time the year had swooned into the sharp, glaring summer of North Africa with myriads of bundles of vegetation transformed in a day into fully expanded leaves and riotous, blazing flowers, and dead in another day; with the birds opening their beaks in a painful effort to gasp for air; with a splintering, jaundiced heat that veiled the levels; and the very desert a carpet of bloom. All day long Burton sat behind closed shutters, coming out only in the evening and sitting at Janina's feet, looking dreamily at the rainbow twinkle of her diamond nose stud, listening dreamily to her soft words:
“I love you, yah aini!”
“And I love you, small Janina!”
“Why do you love me, yah amri?”
“Oh—just because——”
“And I love you for the same reason O my life—my soul—O eyes of my soul!”
Another week passed and summer was over. The desert came into its own again, with chilly night breezes which swept the yellow sands into shifting, carved waves which clothed the rock waste with a fitful, scraggly, fantastic tangle of tamarack and drinn and dwarf acacia.
Every day Pitts Burton rode his little blue-mottled stallion out into the desert. He left Nadj Omar at home, preferring to be alone with the great peace and the enormous, vaulted silences of the Sahara, with no sign of human habitation except, occasionally, a camel rider looming on the horizon, a ragged Bedouin boy driving his goats toward brackish water and green food, or a similar bit of desert flotsam. The strength of the yellow lands came to him with a mighty sweep, a feeling of triumphant elation, a falling away of the useless burdens of life, the useless thoughts, the useless worries and ambitions. It seemed to him that he was being purged of his past—his too human, too complex past. This new life had come to him with a sort of effortless, elemental, cosmic power. His days, immensely simple, seemed charged to the brim with an overwhelming loveliness, a radiant, stainless happiness and cleanliness; and there were the nights. There was Janina. He loved her, and she loved him. Why did he love her? And did she love him? What did it matter? What did anything matter?
When, with the sun below the horizon, and the sky a frosted magic of purple and silver, he returned from the desert, he spurred his stallion to a furious gallop the last few miles. He wanted to see Janina, to hold her in his arms, to look into her black eyes, to kiss her red lips.
He loved her. She loved him.
And then one evening, as he crossed the garden and gave the prearranged signal at the back door—two short knocks followed by a long, low drumming—the Kisslar Agassi appeared on the threshold and motioned him away.
“Oh—are Si Mohammed's other wives on the roof top?”
“No, Sidi.”
“Then—why? Is Janina sick?”
“She is dead, Sidi!” And the Kisslar Agassi closed the door in Burton's face.
In the next few seconds, that passed all scale of time, Burton lived through a series of emotions too vivid for remembrance of gesture, of action, of thought. He did feel. But it was as if he felt it in another man's body, a stranger's. This stranger gave a strangled cry; he passed through certain absurd physical details—a foot that was “asleep,” a hat that fell on the ground, a mosquito that bit savagely and was savagely crushed, shaky legs that crossed the garden with short, broken steps, a body that stumbled through the hall and dropped into a chair; and then out of the whirlwind and the tumult a figure came and looked down upon him, with words softly, pitifully spoken.
“I ran after you to tell you. You did not hear me, Sidi.”
“Is it—true—Nadj Omar?”
“Yes, Sidi.” -
“You—oh!” Burton sat up. “You lie—you lie! You are crazy——” Then he read the truth in the other's eyes. An ashen pallor spread to his very lips. His voice shook: “Oh God!”
“It came suddenly this afternoon,” said the dragoman, forgetting the English slang of which he was so proud, speaking gently as he might to a child. “A fever. Then death. Come, my master!” He forced Burton to rise. “A woman is a woman, and fate is fate. Who can escape what is written on the forehead? Bismillah irrahman errahmin!” he mumbled piously as he saw that Burton was tottering, about to fall. “Take my arm. Sit on the roof. It is cool and sweet there, and I will bring you a glass of fig wine—iced, as you like it.”
Burton hardly heard. Unresisting, he accompanied Nadj Omar to the roof top.
He sat down and stared into the west with stony eyes. A chill wind sobbed from the desert. It rattled dismally in the palms and blew the sand in conical whirls. A sad, sleepy night crept over the roofs of Tugurt with black fingers. From a puddle, where a camel had wallowed, rose an evil odor. He had the confused sensation of pain that wrapped about his soul as with the curling sting of a whiplash.
Dead. How? Why?
Perhaps—the suspicion came suddenly—Si Mohammed had found out, had...
No, no—came the second thought—it was on him, the man, that the husband's revenge would have fallen first.
Death. There was the fact.
“El ouad—destiny!” whispered Nadj Omar, who had come up with a glass of fig wine.
Dead. There was the fact. His life shook upon its foundations. Now that he had lost her, his heart was like a house without any light where his thoughts wandered about, lonely children afraid of the dark. So he sat there all that night until the mists of morning rose and coiled. The mists of the desert! The mists in his own heart! They echoed this day to the tolling of the death gongs that came from the house of Si Mohammed el-Busiri, to the sobbing of the tomtoms, the wailing of the negresses. The next day he sat there and the next, knitting his riven soul to hold the pain in his breast. He ate mechanically what the dragoman put before him. He saw the burial cortège leave the house of Si Mohammed, and his heart's remembrance followed the tiny body in the big coffin; followed it, followed it back to the evening when he had first heard her lilting song—“yah benti, yah benti!”
Darkness stalked over his soul. Grief was about him like an iron wall from which there was no escape. He spent evening after evening on the roof top, staring at the place where once had been his paradise.
Speech, action, thought, all seemed to him alike useless and vain, not worth the effort of hand or brain. Go back to America? And to what purpose? There was always in his heart the fact of Janina's death. Why had she died? How?
“Fever!” the dragoman told him, often, patiently: “Just a fever, Sidi.”
So the short winter passed, and December brought the beginning of the Saharan spring with soft winds and blue nights and golden days and the melody of the young year, like a slow sob of melting harmonies. And one evening Mahdi Ibrahim, whom he had not seen since before Janina's death, came on the roof top with his basket.
“Snakes, yah Sidi?” he asked. “Shall I make them dance for you?”
Pitts Burton shrugged his shoulders.
“All right——” It made no difference. Nothing made any difference.
Mahdi Ibrahim squatted down. His left hand disappeared in the burnouse, came out with the drum. It commenced swinging, left, right, left, like a pendulum, as he beat it with gentle, dry taps.
Tok-tak! spoke the drum. Tok-tocko-tak!—with a hiccoughy, syncopated rhythm. Tok-tak-tok!—insistingly, while the snake charmer stared at the basket with dreamy immobility. Tok-tak-tok!
And presently a flat, wicked head appeared from beneath the top of the basket; a second; a third. The snakes plopped down. They began to dance, swaying, circling, gyrating, following the pendulum of the drum.
Tok-tak-tok!
Desolate in an empty world of grief, Burton listened and stared, with eyes too hot for tears, yet with a coldness of ice upon his very heart.
Tok-tak-tok!
The memory came back to him, through the low roll of the drum, of Janina's love song:
“Yah benti, yah benti,
Akh idjibleq erradjel...”
He heard the embroidery of fantastic, chromatic arabesques, the abandon of eerie, minor harmonies:
“Yah benti, yah benti...”
He heard the voice rising higher and higher to a clear, bell-like note, with an infinite, throbbing joy of the senses, naked and unashamed: “Akh idjibleq...”
Tok!—said the drum. He heard its rhythm within the rhythm of Janina's voice; heard the vibrating tok-tak-tok within the edges of Janina's wailing cadences. The two sounds blended; they joined hands above the snakes' flat, glistening eyes, and a bleak terror invaded the hidden corners of Burton's heart as the beating of the drum seemed to cease, as from the drum itself came Janina's song, sobbing, unearthly:
“Yah benti, yah benti,
Akh idjibleq erradjel...”
He thought of her, her crimson lips, her black eyes, the twinkling diamond nose stud. He stared. Then, suddenly, he screamed. He rose to his feet, stumbling, tottering, his hands outstretched,
“The drum!” he cried. “Give it to me!”
“Hush—for the love of the All-Merciful!” came Mahdi Ibrahim's whisper, warning, yet in it a lilting accent of elation. “Death is on the roof top, yah Sidi!” as one of the snakes flopped down, nervous, frightened out of its drunken rhythm.
“The drum! Give it to me!” repeated Burton in a high, cracked voice.
He jerked forward. He saw the male snake move, glide, directly beneath his feet, heard the hiss distinctly; and even in that moment of stark, enormous horror, horror too great to be grasped, horror that swept over and beyond the barriers of fear, he still heard the song, come wailingly from the inside of the drum, calling him, luring him on:
“Yah benti, yah benti ...”
He tore it from the other's hand. He looked at it. It was of a dull, mottled yellow, no larger than a child's head. Then he began shivering all over as if in an ague. Cold sweat ran down his face as he saw that it was a human skull, the eye sockets and ear holes and nose openings closed with minutely fitted pieces of ivory, a skin stretched tightly across the place where the mouth had been, and, fastened by a silver wire to the left nasal bone, a diamond that twinkled evilly.
And in after years, when the memory of the thing came back to him, in the midst of a gay dinner party, or driving his ball from the first tee of the Sleepy Hollow links, or perhaps during a walk up Fifth Avenue, he could never explain, not even to himself, what happened during the next few seconds. It was like one of those incredible incidents which loom out of the dark without beginning or end.
There was just the snake charmer's warning cry, “Look out, Sidi!” changing rapidly into a bitter laugh of triumph, a sibilant, cutting: “Hayah! If Allah proposes the destruction of an ant, He allows wings to grow upon her!”—another voice, the dragoman's, “Quick!”—the sharp bark of a shot. Suddenly his knees seemed to give. The roof top heaved like the bow of a ship. The drum in his hand swung to and fro in a blazing yellow pendulum. He felt a dull jar as he fell to his knees and rolled over.
When he came to he found himself in his bed, in his own room. He lay still for a moment. Then he opened his eyes. Through the semi-darkness he saw a white robed figure standing above him. He recognized Nadj Omar's vulpine feature, heard the man's voice:
“No harm done, Sidi. I came—shot the snake just in time. No end jolly lucky for you—my word! I shall bring you a glass of fig wine.”
The dragoman left, and Burton stretched himself in utter lassitude. His hand came in contact with something cool and smooth. He lifted it up. It was the drum. Shudderingly his knuckles brushed across the place where the mouth had been, trembling over the tightly spanned skin.
“Yah aini!” he seemed to hear. “Yah aini—O my soul!”—as with the ebbing of a far, high spring tide.
Watch future issues of COSMOPOLITAN for more of the masterly tales of Achmed Abdullah
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1945, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 78 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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