"Always during Ramadan."
"Does it rise with a bang too? I hate to be roused up early in the morning!"
"No, there is no gun at sunrise; but there is a very loud one at about three in the morning, or sometimes half-past, or four, or later."
"Shocking nuisance!" remarked J. "My bedroom window's just over that abominable battery."
The early morning gun was a great trial, certainly. I would not have minded being reveille en sursaut, as a Frenchman would say, and then turning comfortably over on the other side, and going to sleep again.
But somehow or other I always found myself awake half an hour or an hour before the time, and then I could not get to sleep again, but lay tossing about and fidgettily listening for the well-known din. At length I would hear a sound like the hum of an enormous fiendish nightmarish mosquito, caused by a hideous long tin trumpet, the shrill whistle of a fife or two, and the occasional tom-tomming of a Moorish drum. "Ha, the soldiers coming along the ramparts; they will soon fire now."
But the sound of the discordant instruments with which the soldiery solaced themselves in the night for their enforced abstinence from such "sweet sounds" in the day would continue for a long time before the red flash through my wide-open door would momentarily illumine my little chamber on the white flat roof, and then the horrid bang would rend the air, followed by a dense cloud of foul-smelling smoke; and then would my big dog Cæsar for several minutes rush frantically to and fro upon the roof in hot indignation, and utter deep-mouthed barks of defiance at the white figures of the "Maghaseni," as they flitted ghost-like along the ramparts below, and snort and pant and chafe and refuse to be pacified for a long time.
At the firing of the sunset gun the Moors were allowed to take a slight refection, which generally consisted of a kind of gruel. I have seen a Moorish soldier squatting in the street with a brass porringer in his lap, eagerly awaiting the boom of the cannon to dip his well-washed fingers in the mess.
At about 9 p.m. another slight meal was allowed to the true believers, and they might eat again at morning gun-fire, after which their mouths were closed against all "fixings, solid and liquid," even against the smallest draught of water or the lightest puff at the darling little pipe of dream-inducing kief.
On the twenty-seventh day of Ramadan we were informed that twenty-seven guns would be fired that night, and that we had better leave all our windows open, or they would certainly be broken by the violence of the discharge. This was pleasant; still more delightful was the glorious uncertainty which prevailed in the minds of our informants as to the time at which we might expect the infliction.