Ghaouazi Dance.

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There are the dances of Syrian, Soudanese and other dancing-girls. Then there are the special dances, accompanied by choral singing and instrumental music, that celebrate the nuptial ceremony throughout the Orient.

IV

The variety of customs, of traditional observances and usages interwoven with exotic music is endless. Many religious chants, for instance, are fixed by tradition, and are undoubtedly of high antiquity. Such is the chanting of the sacred books in the Temple of the Sacred Tooth in Ceylon, where on each night of the full moon the whole text of the ‘Tripitakas,’ or ‘Three Baskets’ of wisdom, is recited by relays of yellow-robed priests, succeeding each other every two hours between the dark and the dawn. They are said to chant in deep resonant voices, as steady and continuous as the roar of the surf, without break, quaver, or pause. When we consider that Buddhist priests have repeated these sacred texts in this manner on every night of the full moon for twenty-eight centuries, the traditional cantillation of the Koran appears a thing of recent date. The following interesting ‘call to prayer’ of the muezzin has been traditionally handed down, and its chant is supposed to antedate the era of Mohammed:

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Al-la-ho ak-bar,
Al-la - - - - ho ak-bar,
ach ha-dou en-nâ la i-lah ell Al-lah.
Ach ha-dou en-nâ. Mo-ham-med
ra-soul Al-lah - - - - - Al-la-ho ak-
bar - - - - la i-lah ell Al-lah.

And the Hindoo ragas and mantranis offer further proof of the conserving examples of tradition.

A curious custom among the Chinese of immemorial antiquity is that of attaching whistles weighing only a few grams to the tails of pigeons soon after they emerge from the shell, by means of fine copper wire. The whistles are of two kinds; bamboo, with from two to five tubes, or gourds, with sometimes as many as twenty-five apertures. All the whistles in a flock are tuned to a different pitch. As they fly about Pekin and other cities they fill the air with a sort of wind-blown music. It is interesting as a commentary on the Chinese national love of sweet sounds.