"Alekoum selam, ya Seenou!" It was the name of boyhood, Seenou, the diminutive, that fell from Habib's lips. And he could not call it back.
"Come thou now." He felt the gentle push of Houseen's hands. He found himself moving toward the door that stood open into the street. The light of an outer conflagration was in his eyes. The thin music of lute and tabouka in the court behind him grew thinner; the boom of drums and voices in the street grew big. He had crossed the threshold. A hundred candles, carried in horizontal banks on laths by little boys, came around him on three sides, like footlights. And beyond the glare, in the flaming mist, he saw the street Dar-el-Bey massed with men. All their faces were toward him, hot yellow spots in which the black spots of their mouths gaped and vanished.
"That the marriage of Habib be blessed! Blessed be the marriage of
Habib!"
The riot of sound began to take form. It began to emerge in a measure, a boom-boom-boom of tambours and big goatskin drums. A bamboo fife struck into a high, quavering note. The singing club of Sidibou-Sa d joined voice.
The footlights were moving forward toward the street of the market. Habib moved with them a few slow paces without effort or will. Again they had all stopped. It could not be more than two hundred yards to the house of the notary and his waiting bride, but by the ancient tradition of Kairwan an hour must be consumed on the way.
An hour! An eternity! Panic came over Habib. He turned his hooded eyes for some path of escape. To the right, Houseen! To the left, close at his shoulder, Mohammed Sherif—Mohammed the laughing and the well-beloved—Mohammed, with whom in the long, white days he used to chase lizards by the pool of the Aglabides … in the long, white, happy days, while beyond the veil of palms the swaying camel palanquins of women, like huge bright blooms, went northward up the Tunis road….
What made him think of that?
"Boom-boom-boom-boom!" And around the drums beyond the candles he heard them singing:
On the day of the going away of my Love,
When the litters, carrying the women of the tribe,
Traversed the valley of Dad, like a sea, mirage,
They were like ships, great ships, the work of the children of
Adoul,
Or like the boats of Yamen's sons….
"Boom-boom!" The monotonous pulse, the slow minor slide of sixteenth tones, the stark rests—he felt the hypnotic pulse of the old music tampering with the pulse of his blood. It gave him a queer creeping fright. He shut his eyes, as if that would keep it out. And in the glow of his lids he saw the tents on the naked desert; he saw the forms of veiled women; he saw the horses of warriors coming like a breaker over the sand—the horses of the warriors of God!