In the handsome Ezbekeëh park or garden, where there are shady walks and some fine sycamores and banyans to be seen, a military band plays every afternoon, while the foreigners of both sexes, and Egyptian men promenade. Of course no Egyptian lady or woman of respectability is ever seen in so public a place. In another part of the garden, more retired, a native band is always playing at nightfall. In this sheltered spot, under the lee of some gigantic rock and grotto-work are tables and chairs, and a divan for the band. This rock has water pleasantly running through it, but it must have been struck by somebody besides Moses, for beer is brought out of its cool recesses, as well. Rows of men of all colors and costumes may be seen there, with pipe and mug and coffee cup; and on settees more elevated and next the grotto, are always sitting veiled women, in outer wrappers of black silk, sometimes open enough to show an underskirt of bright color and feet in white slippers. These women call for beer or something stronger, and smoke like the men; they run no risk in being in this publicity, for they have nothing to lose here or elsewhere. Opposite them on a raised divan, not unlike a roomy bedstead, sits the band.
It is the most disreputable of bands. Nothing in the whole East so expressed to me its fagged-out dissoluteness as this band and its performances. It is a sleepy, nonchalant band, as if it had been awake all the previous night; some of its members are blear-eyed, some have one eye, some have two; they are in turbans, in tarbooshes, in gowns of soiled silk, of blue cotton, of white drilling. It is the feeblest band; and yet it is subject to spurts of bacchantic fervor. Sometimes all the instruments are striving together, and then only one or two dribble the monotonous refrain; but somehow, with all the stoppings to light cigarettes and sip coffee, the tune is kept groaning on, in a minor that is as wild as the desert and suggestive of sin.
The instruments are as African as the music. There is the darabooka, a drum made of an earthen or wooden cylinder with a flaring head, over which is stretched a parchment; the tar, a kind of tambourine; kemengeh, a viol of two strings, with a cocoa-nut sounding-body; the kanoon, an instrument of strings held on the knees, and played with the fingers; the '.od, a sort of guitar with seven double strings; played with a plectrum, a slip of vultures' feather held between the thumb and finger; and the nay, a reed-flute blown at the end.
In the midst of the thumbing and scraping, a rakish youth at the end, is liable, at any moment, to throw back his head and break out in a soft womanish voice, which may go no farther than a nasal yah, ah, m-a-r-r, that appears to satisfy his yearnings; or it may expand into a droning song, “Ya benat Iskendereeyeh,” like that which Mr. Lane renders:—
“O ye damsels of Alexandria!
Your walk over the furniture is alluring:
Ye wear the Kashmeer shawl with embroidered work,
And your lips are sweet as sugar.”
Below the divan sit some idlers or supernumeraries, who, as inclination moves them, mark the rhythm by striking the palms of the hands together, or cry out a prolonged ah-yah, but always in a forgetful, uninterested manner, and then subside into silence, while the picking and throbbing of the demoralized tune goes on. It is the “devilish iteration” of it, I think, that steals away the senses; this, and some occult immorality in the debased tune, that blots virtue out of the world. Yet there is something comic in these blinking owls of the night, giving sentimental tongue to the poetic imagery of the Eastern love-song—“for a solitary gazelle has taken away my soul”:—
“The beloved came to me with a vacillating gait;