The Desert Drum

The Desert Drum is a Fiction Short Story Book. The book sasy that I am not naturally superstitious. The Saharaman is. He has many strange beliefs. When one is at close quarters with him, sees him day by day in his home, the great desert, listens to his dramatic tales of desert lights, visions, sounds, one's common sense is apt to be shaken on its throne. Perhaps it is the influence of the solitude and the wide spaces, of those far horizons of the Sahara where the blue deepens along the edge of the world, that turns even a European mind to an Eastern credulity. Who can tell? The truth is that in the Sahara one can believe what one cannot believe in London. And sometimes circumstances chance if you like to call it so steps in, and seems to say, "Your belief is well founded". Of all the desert superstitions the one which appealed most to my imagination was the superstition of the desert drum. The Sahara man declares that far away from the abodes of men and desert cities, among the everlasting sand dunes, the sharp beating, or dull, distant rolling of a drum sometimes breaks upon the ears of travellers voyaging through the desolation. They look around, they stare across the flats, they see nothing. But the mysterious music continues. Then, if they be Sahara bred, they commend themselves to Allah, for they know that some terrible disaster is at hand, that one of them at least is doomed to die.