acrossasiaminoro00chiluoft

212 ACROSS ASIA MINOR ON FOOT
an extra flourish to his music, and on stepping out
again beat a simple rhythmical beat. He had nothing
to do with the troops. He was a village functionary,
a sort of town crier, whose labour this gloomy morning
was neither more nor less than the announcement
of a wedding. He took his stand at last in the
open space before the shop, and there for half an
hour beat his drums with as much skill and satisfaction
in his calling as any drunmier may hope
to attain. On one drum he would beat a diflicult
rhythm, and then suddenly break in and complicate
it with another rhythm on the other drum. He
would go slowly with one drum and fast with the
other, and keep the tv/o always in time. He beat
softly and loudly, slowly and fast ; one might even
say that he got expression into his monotonous instruments,
and that listening to him was a pleasure.
The drum, I think, may be called the Turkish
national instrument. Certainly I brought away from
Asia Minor more memories of sounding drums than of
all other musical instruments j)ut together. I heard
drums by night and morning and evening, by fast and
feast and holy day ; heard them also sounding in the
villages on outbreak of war, calling up men for mobilisation—a
most impressive sound coming from many
distant unseen villages at once—and heard, too, the
sonorous earthenware drums of Smyrna, curious jarshaped
cylinders, open at one end, the parchment
over the other which is beaten with the flat hand.
Do you know how the drums go in that march called
" The Turkish Patrol," the far-away sound of them at
first, drawing nearer and nearer, passing, and then
receding into the distance ? Whoever composed that
drum music had caught, either of his own experience
or by most accurate report, the very spirit of
Ottoman drums.