Metal he sings: his song is sparse like shreds of grass on a sand hump. Five notes, naked, timbreless, make this intricate weave. They start like arrows, like catapulted stones, like horse-hoofs on the desert. This music is stripped like war; and like war single-willed. The blind bard’s face is gray beneath the sumptuous swathes of his turbash. His lips twist like cord; his face like an engine discharges the song of Islam--single of key, terrible in singleness. * * * * * The sun stands beside the minaret that forms part of the west wall of the town. The eastern mountain is gold and over it lies a pallid crescent moon. There will be moon tonight upon the desert! From the _fondoukhs_, camels are beaten forth. They are prodded to their knees which are then bound so that they cannot rise. And the fragile humps are heaped with the exchange of the mart. Great bags, here, oozed sugar of the date: now there is wheat and wool. Fifteen camels, lashed and hobbled, groan: then sway into the air like an armada moved by the wind of guttural call and staff-blow. Fifteen camels swerve through a narrow gate into the desert. The town stands behind, low mosqued: the minarets rise from the flat roofs like acrobats. Palms make a misty coronal to the east: thousands of palms, mazed like a camel’s hair: and over all the sterile mountain, a chart of ages, working to the sky. Now, from the minarets comes a voice. _Alláh acbar.... Echhed en la ila ella Alláh._ _Echhed en Mohammed Rasou Alláh._ _Haï ala Elsalat. Haë ala Elfaláh._ _Alláh Acbar.... La ila ella Alláh._ It is the call of the muedzin. Invariable his word, his key: invariable the five points of the day ... dawn, noon, mid-afternoon, sunset and dark ... when from all the minarets of town, in all the towns of the land, in all the lands of Islam, the muedzin calls to prayer. The voice is of iron. Myriad muedzin voices, like strokes of some intricate machine, weave together, and bind Islam holy. Allah is great.... I affirm there is no God save only Allah. I affirm Mohammed is the Prophet of Allah. Come ye to prayer. Come ye to adore him. Allah is great.... I affirm there is no God, save only Allah. Belal, first muedzin, crier for Mohammed, spoke these words. They are a redolent poem: ecstasy was in them, and resolve. They have not changed in syllable since Belal received them from his master, a year after the Hegira, the year of our era 623. But they have hardened. They are a terrible horizontal stroke upon a prostrate people. Harder than bells of Christendom they are; harder than the Jewish plaint which Mohammed hated, which Mohammed strove to wipe from the ears of the earth.