The people of Jauf, in Northern Arabia, are most famous for music at the present day, according to Burckhardt. They are especially adept at playing the _Rebaba_. This may well be considered the national instrument of music. It is all but universal in every part of the peninsula, and as well-known to all Arabs as the bag pipe is to the Scotch. I have heard the highland shepherd boys of Yemen play on a set of reed-pipes rudely fastened together with bits of leather thong. The drum _tabl_, is common among the town Arabs, and is used at their marriage and circumcision feasts; but all over the desert one only hears the rebaba. It is simplicity itself in its construction, when made by the Bedouins; the finer ornamental ones are from the cities. A box frame is made ready, a stick is thrust through, and in this they pierce an eye-hole for a single peg; a kidskin is then stretched upon the hollow box; the string is plucked from a mare’s tail, and setting under it a bent twig for the bridge, their music is ready. Time and measure are often very peculiar and hard to catch, but they are kept most accurately, and Ali Bey gives an example which he says, “exhibits the singularity of a bar divided into five equal portions, a thing which J.J. Rousseau conceived to be practicable, but was never able to accomplish.” Here it is as he gives it; it strikingly resembles the boatmen’s song at Bahrein: [Illustration: Music score] The singing one commonly hears, however, is much more monotonous than this, and the tune nearly always depends on the whim of the performer or singer, sometimes, alas, on his inability to give more than a certain number of variations! Antar, one of their own poets, has said that the song of the Arabs is like the hum of flies. A not inapt comparison to those who have seen the “fly bazaar” in Hodeidah or Menamah during the date season, and heard their myriad-mouthed buzzing. Antar, however, lived in the “times of ignorance,” and most probably referred to the chanting of the camel drivers, which is bad enough. Imagine the following sung in a high monotonous key with endless repetition. “Ya Rub sallimhum min el tahdeed Wa ija’ad kawaihum ’amd hadeed.” That is to say, being freely interpreted: “Oh Lord, keep them from all dangers that pass And make their long legs pillars of brass.”