The Desert Drum

The Desert Drum, by Robert
Hichens

The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Desert Drum, by Robert Hichens
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
Title: The Desert Drum 1905
Author: Robert Hichens
Release Date: November 8, 2007 [EBook #23417]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE
DESERT DRUM ***

Produced by David Widger

THE DESERT DRUM
By Robert Hichens
Frederick A. Stokes Company Publishers

Copyright, 1905

I
I am not naturally superstitious. The Saharaman is. He has many
strange beliefs. When one is at close quarters with him, sees him day
by day in his home, the great desert, listens to his dramatic tales of
desert lights, visions, sounds, one's common-sense is apt to be shaken
on its throne. Perhaps it is the influence of the solitude and the wide
spaces, of those far horizons of the Sahara where the blue deepens
along the edge of the world, that turns even a European mind to an
Eastern credulity. Who can tell? The truth is that in the Sahara one can
believe what one cannot believe in London. And sometimes
circumstances--chance if you like to call it so--steps in, and seems to
say, "Your belief is well founded."
Of all the desert superstitions the one which appealed most to my
imagination was the superstition of the desert drum. The Sahara-man
declares that far away from the abodes of men and desert cities, among
the everlasting sand dunes, the sharp beating, or dull, distant rolling of
a drum sometimes breaks upon the ears of travellers voyaging through
the desolation. They look around, they stare across the flats, they see
nothing. But the mysterious music continues. Then, if they be
Sahara-bred, they commend themselves to Allah, for they know that
some terrible disaster is at hand, that one of them at least is doomed to
die.
Often had I heard stories of the catastrophes which were immediately
preceded by the beating of the desert drum. One night in the Sahara I
was a witness to one which I have never been able to forget.
On an evening of spring, accompanied by a young Arab and a negro, I
rode slowly down a low hill of the Sahara, and saw in the sandy cup at
my feet the tiny collection of hovels called Sidi-Massarli. I had been in
the saddle since dawn, riding over desolate tracks in the heart of the
desert. I was hungry, tired, and felt almost like a man hypnotised. The

strong air, the clear sky, the everlasting flats devoid of vegetation,
empty of humanity, the monotonous motion of my slowly cantering
horse--all these things combined to dull my brain and to throw me into
a peculiar condition akin to the condition of a man in a trance. At
Sidi-Massarli I was to pass the night. I drew rein and looked down on it
with lack-lustre eyes.
I saw a small group of palm-trees, guarded by a low wall of baked
brown earth, in which were embedded many white bones of dead
camels. Bleached, grinning heads of camels hung from more than one
of the trees, with strings of red pepper and round stones. Beyond the
wall of this palm garden, at whose foot was a furrow full of stagnant
brownish-yellow water, lay a handful of wretched earthen hovels, with
flat roofs of palmwood and low wooden doors. To be exact, I think
there were five of them. The Bordj, or Travellers' House, at which I
was to be accommodated for the night, stood alone near a tiny source at
the edge of a large sand dune, and was a small, earth-coloured building
with a pink tiled roof, minute arched windows, and an open stable for
the horses and mules. All round the desert rose in humps of sand,
melting into stony ground where the saltpetre lay like snow on a wintry
world. There were but few signs of life in this place; some stockings
drying on the wall of a ruined Arab café, some kids frisking by a heap
of sacks, a few pigeons circling about a low square watch-tower, a
black donkey brooding on a dust heap. There were some signs of death;
carcasses of camels stretched here and there in frantic and fantastic
postures, some bleached and smooth, others red and horribly odorous.
The wind blew round this hospitable township of the Sahara, and the
yellow light of evening began to glow above it. It seemed to me at that
moment the dreariest place in the dreariest dream man had ever had.