Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. II, No. X., March 1851

by Various

The melancholy monotony of this singing in unison, harmonized with the vague feelings of that first Nile night. The simplicity of the words became the perpetual childishness of the men, so that it was not ludicrous. It was clearly the music and words of a race just better than the brutes. If a poet could translate into sound the expression of a fine dog's face, or that of a meditative cow, the Howadji would fancy that he heard Nile music. For, after all, that placid and perfect animal expression would be melancholy humanity. And with the crew only, the sound was sad; they smiled, and grinned, and shook their heads with intense satisfaction. The evening and the scene were like a chapter of Mungo Park. I heard the African mother sing to him as he lay sick upon her mats, and the world and history forgotten, those strange, sad sounds drew me deep into the dumb mystery of Africa.

But the musical Howadji will find a fearful void in his Eastern life. The Asiatic has no ear, and no soul for music. Like other savages and children, he loves a noise, and he plays on shrill pipes—on the tarabuka, on the tár, or tambourine, and a sharp, one-stringed fiddle, or rabáb. Of course, in your first Oriental days, you will decline no invitation, but you will grow gradually deaf to all entreaties of friends, or dragomen, to sally forth and hear music. You will remind him that you did not come to the East to go to Bedlam.

This want of music is not strange, for silence is natural to the East and the tropics. When, sitting quietly at home, in midsummer, sweeping ever sunward in the growing heats, we at length reach the tropics in the fixed fervor of a July noon, the day is rapt, the birds are still, the wind swoons, and the burning sun glares silence on the world.

The Orient is that primeval and perpetual noon. That very heat explains to you the voluptuous elaboration of its architecture, the brilliance of its costume, the picturesqueness of its life. But no Mozart was needed to sow Persian gardens with roses breathing love and beauty, no Beethoven to build mighty Himmalayas, no Rossini to sparkle and sing with the birds and streams. Those realities are there, of which the composers are the poets to Western imaginations. In the East, you feel and see music, but hear it never.

Yet, in Cairo and Damascus the poets sit at the cafés, surrounded by the forms and colors of their songs, and recite the romances of the Arabian Nights, or of Aboo Zeyd, or of Antar, with no other accompaniment than the tár, or the rabáb, then called the "Poet's Viol," and in the same monotonous strain. Sometimes the single strain is touching, as when on our way to Jerusalem, the too-enamored camel-driver, leading the litter of the fair Armenian, saddened the silence of the desert noon with a Syrian song. The high, shrill notes trembled and rang on the air. The words said little, but the sound was a lyric of sorrow. The fair Armenian listened silently as the caravan wound slowly along, her eyes musingly fixed upon the East, where the flower-fringed Euphrates flows through Bagdad to the sea. The fair Armenian had her thoughts, and the camel-driver his; also the accompanying Howadji listened and had theirs.

The Syrian songs of the desert are very sad. They harmonize with the burning monotony of the landscape in their long recitative and shrill wail. The camel steps more willingly to that music, but the Howadji, swaying upon his back, is tranced in the sound, so naturally born of silence.

Meanwhile our crew are singing, although we have slid upon their music, and the moonlight, far forward into the desert. But these are the forms and feelings that their singing suggested. While they sang I wandered over Sahara, and was lost in the lonely Libyan hills—a thousand simple stories, a thousand ballads of love and woe trooped like drooping birds through the sky-like vagueness of my mind. Rosamond Grey, and the child of Elle passed phantom-like with vailed faces—for love, and sorrow, and delight, are cosmopolitan, building bowers indiscriminately of palm-trees or of pines.

The voices died away like the Muezzins', whose cry is the sweetest and most striking of all Eastern sounds. It trembles in long-rising and falling cadences from the balcony of the minaret, more humanly alluring than bells, and more respectful of the warm stillness of Syrian and Egyptian days. Heard in Jerusalem it has especial power. You sit upon your house-top reading the history whose profoundest significance is simple and natural in that inspiring clime; and as your eye wanders from the aerial dome of Omar, beautiful enough to have been a dome of Solomon's Temple, and over the olives of Gethsemane climbs the Mount of Olives—the balmy air is suddenly filled with a murmurous cry, like a cheek suddenly rose-suffused—a sound near, and far, and every where, but soft and vibrating, and alluring, until you would fain don turban, kaftan, and slippers, and kneeling in the shadow of a cypress on the sun-flooded marble court of Omar, would be the mediator of those faiths, nor feel yourself a recreant Christian.

Once I heard the Muezzin cry from a little village on the edge of the desert, in the starlight before the dawn: it was only a wailing voice in the air. The spirits of the desert were addressed in their own language—or was it themselves lamenting, like water-spirits to the green boughs overhanging them, that they could never know the gladness of the green world, but were forever demons and denizens of the desert? But the tones trembled away, without echo or response, into the starry solitude. Al-lá-hu Ak-bar, Al-lá-hu Ak-bar!