Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
go-round over quite a large area. Some of these tiny boys were rolling on the ground and pommelling
each other in their baulked eagerness. It was all that the proprietor could do to persuade them to stop now
and then to allow for a change of riders. All was mud, shadow and darkness outside the ring of riders, but
within that cavalcade of galloping silhouettes, crouching like jockeys and cowboys and curvetting round
and round at breakneck speed, lay an enchanted circle of noise and light.
A sheaf of serbies sent wild shafts of light and darkness through the galloping but motionless legs of
the horses. I fought my way on to the back of a zebra, and was at once carried clattering through space.
Joan, with her fair hair streaming, was mounted on a sea-horse in front of me, with the commandant cara-
coling gallantly beside her on a dragon. Some places behind, a unicorn carried Costa. Immediately below,
a Negro hammered like a madman on a tom-tom—a qua —that had been made by stretching goat-skins
over the two mouths of a bottomless rum-keg. One end he struck with his hand in an unbroken tattoo, the
other with a drumstick, now and then jumping astride it and pounding away with both hands at one end,
only, after a few seconds, to leap back into his first position. Another wielded a shack-shack, a cylinder
of bamboo about a foot long, filled with pebbles or heavy seeds. He grasped it at both ends and jerked
it from side to side over his head like a bar-tender with a huge cocktail shaker, producing that rattling,
clanking, fluctuating, swinging noise that is the background of all rhumbas and sambas; only, in this case,
ten times louder. A third, with his head flung back and pointing it into the air, blew through a clarinet
and defined the course of the tune that his comrades underlined with their clattering rhythm. But these
three instruments were dominated by a fourth: a section from the trunk of a bamboo tree, about a foot in
thickness and over eight feet long, lashed to two of the uprights of the merry-go-round. Three Negroes,
naked to the waist and armed in both hands with two heavy bamboo clubs apiece, hammered away at
it. Deafening reverberations at an unbelievable speed pierced the air. The rhythm was faster and more
concentrated than anything I had ever heard. CRASH! bang - bang - bang! CRASH - CRASH! bang -
bang - bang! CRASH! … The momentum of the six simultaneous blows all fell at the same fraction of
a second that the accent of the shack-shack and tom-tom struck the ear. This instrument is the bamboula,
and against this mass of percussion the clarinet tore and screamed and zigzagged its path through biguine
after biguine. Every now and then one of the clubs, striking the bamboula, would break or split, and, with
no hiatus in the rhythm, another would be handed to the striker from a reserve pile at the side. The three
players were soon surrounded by broken sticks, and the ferocious bastinado seemed to grow more intense
each time they swung below and past us. There was something disturbing about these three men. Their
activity had none of the jauntiness of musicians in a jazz band. Taut and intent, with their teeth bared and
the sweat streaming down their black torsos, they stooped forward flogging and bashing their wooden
victim like Ethiopian executioners. One of them would fall out exhausted from time to time, throwing his
two clubs to one of the waiting substitutes. There was a moment of decrescendo as he caught them, and
moved into the other's place; then as he brought them down with a fresh access of violence, the noise
almost split the eardrums.
We raced round and round this extraordinary disc of light, unable, as though petrified by the din, to
tear ourselves from the backs of our steeds. We managed to wrench ourselves away at last, and as we
drove out of the little town, the truculent sounds died down. The thin scream of the clarinet was audible
for a long time above the impact and boom and rattle of the other three. Then that too fell silent as the
darkness and the sugarcane swallowed us up.
Half asleep in the back of the car, I could just hear the voice of the Créole gentleman talking to Costa
about the funeral practices of the villagers. Some of them sounded similar, in their milder forms, to the
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