acrossasiaminoro00chiluoft

SINGING AND DRUM-BEATING 75
the edge of the precipice. It looked exactly like an
inquisitive face peeping over a wall. I could almost
see it move. It came up round and brilliant, and
shone on the city with a flood of light that made
mosques and domes and minarets and gardens visible
as by day. In a little while distant singing began,
a voice here, a voice there, wailing melancholy
Turkish songs to the twanging of an instrument
like a mandoline. And then a little drum began
to beat—the saz, I think they call it—with skin
stretched hard as a board, and a barbaric defiant
note which surely responds to some instinct of the
race whose music it is. You could never think of
these drums as instruments of Armenians or Greeks.
Just such drums, one imagines, must have sounded
along' the Jihon river in Central Asia when the first
Turkish nomads began moving west. The same
drums, too, and many more of them, were doubtless
beaten here when this was a favourite city of the
Seljuk sultans who beautified it with so many buildings.
Of this sort also, one thinks, must have been
the drums of Timur when he came here on conquest.