This might have been that dirge that the crew sang in a mournful minor. Suddenly, one rose and led the song, in sharp, jagged sounds, formless as lightning. "He fills me the glass full, and gives me to drink," sang the leader, and the low-measured chorus throbbed after him, "Hummeleager malooshee." The sounds were not a tune, but a kind of measured recitative. It went on constantly faster and faster, exciting them, as the Shakers excite themselves, until a tall, gaunt Nubian rose in the moonlight and danced in the centre of the circle, like a gay ghoul among his fellows. The dancing was monotonous, like the singing, a simple jerking of the muscles. He shook his arms from the elbows, like a Shaker, and raised himself alternately upon both feet. Often the leader repeated the song as a solo, then the voices died away, the ghoul crouched again, and the hollow throb of the tarabuka continued as an accompaniment to the distant singing of Nero's crew, that came in fitful gusts through the little grove of sharp, slim masts: "If you meet my sweetheart, Give her my respects." The melancholy monotony of this singing in unison, harmonized with the vague feelings of that first Nile night. The simplicity of the words became the perpetual childishness of the men, so that it was not ludicrous. It was clearly the music and words of a race just better than the brutes. If a poet could translate into sound the expression of a fine dog's face, or that of a meditative cow, the Howadji would fancy that he heard Nile music. For, after all, that placid and perfect animal expression would be melancholy humanity. And with the crew only, the sound was sad; they smiled, and grinned, and shook their heads with intense satisfaction. The evening and the scene were like a chapter of Mungo Park. I heard the African mother sing to him as he lay sick upon her mats, and the world and history forgotten, those strange, sad sounds drew me deep into the dumb mystery of Africa. But the musical Howadji will find a fearful void in his Eastern life. The Asiatic has no ear, and no soul for music. Like other savages and children, he loves a noise, and he plays on shrill pipes--on the tarabuka, on the tár, or tambourine, and a sharp, one-stringed fiddle, or rabáb. Of course, in your first Oriental days, you will decline no invitation, but you will grow gradually deaf to all entreaties of friends, or dragomen, to sally forth and hear music. You will remind him that you did not come to the East to go to Bedlam. This want of music is not strange, for silence is natural to the East and the tropics. When, sitting quietly at home, in midsummer, sweeping ever sunward in the growing heats, we at length reach the tropics in the fixed fervor of a July noon, the day is rapt, the birds are still, the wind swoons, and the burning sun glares silence on the world.