Tepelenti, then, was really dead—totally dead.
Early next morning Gaskho Bey heard a very curious story.
In the artillery barracks, where the round guns stood, a drummer had laid down his drum close beside him, with the drumsticks leaning over it, when he suddenly perceived the two drumsticks begin to move of their own accord over the tightly drawn skin of the drums as if some invisible hand wished to beat a tattoo. The drummer cried out at this marvel, and fancied that a dzhin was in the drum.
Gaskho Bey would not believe it till he had himself gone to the barracks and seen with his own eyes how the two drumsticks vibrated with sufficient force to tap the drum pretty loudly, moving in a spiral line backward and forward across it, tap-tap-tapping as they went.
"It is very marvellous!" cried the bey; and he immediately summoned the imams to drive the dzhin out of the drum.
The imams set to work at once. They fetched their fumigators and their sacred books, and they fumigated the drum with nose-offending odors and recited over it drum-expelling exorcisms in a shrill voice. And certainly if the devil was in that drum, and had anything of a nose or ears, he would have been obliged to escape from that noise and stink. So long as the drum was in any one's hand the drumsticks did not move, but when it was put down on the ground the mysterious tap-tapping began again.
The imams went on howling, and horribly they howled.
The chief of the observatory was present during this scene. As a French renegade he was a man of some education, and therefore he did not accept the theory of the dzhins. When he perceived that the imams were not successful in expelling the evil spirits, he called Gaskho Bey aside and whispered in his ear:
"I know nothing about your dzhins, and don't understand what you are driving at with all this noise and stench, but I can tell you that this beating of the drum is a sign that invisible hands are at work here."
"What?"