The story of the Damascus Drum

The Damascus Drum

Chapter 1

'Goats Do Roam'

This is the story of a drum. Not any old drum, although you might be forgiven for thinking, on just a casual glance or with such easy mention, that this was so. But, no. This is an extraordinary drum, because it has a story to tell. The drum with which we are about to make an acquaintance began its life in the hills above the ancient and venerable city of Damascus.
‘Ha!’ you think, ‘a drum cannot have a life.’ You insist, perhaps, that it is inanimate. That it cannot move of its own volition. That it does not breath, nor speak. That it does not resound with the ‘I am’ of being and self-identity. So, you persist, it can hardly be predicated of something that is barely half a step evolved beyond the state of a stone, motionless upon the face of Mt Kassioun which looks down in protective benevolence upon the once-green city of Dimasq-i-Sham (as the locals call Damascus), that such an object as a drum can have a life. And therefore, you postulate, how on earth can such be the subject of a biographical narrative, and thereby possess the being of a thing in script.
Well then, so be it. If that is the extent of your imagination, stop listening immediately. Go! Go on! Get yourself away and be useful somewhere. Earn a living for your family by the sweat of your brow or brain, but leave us alone. This story cannot be anything but a burden to you, and afterwards you will complain that you have been led astray, and your intentions to worldly success have been subverted.

But if you feel some irritation of the mind, a stirring perhaps, an unfamiliar vibration among the mysterious sea of little grey cells within the shore of your cranium such as you might feel when with eyes closed you turn and turn until you are no longer certain in which direction you are facing, then stay. Maybe you will find within this story some thread which will lead to... who knows?
To hear the story of the drum, we must first learn to hear the drum’s voice. For this we need to concentrate, and listen with the stillness of stone itself. That is, if we wish to hear what our drum is saying, beyond the mere telling of a tale.
Sa’id bin Adam, was a goatherd. He herded his flock of twenty seven goats on the steep slopes and summit of Mt Kassioun, in the days before the army took over this vantage point, planted barbed wire among the bushes and erected radar masts upon a peak best left to the surveillance of eagles and angels. Sa’id bin Adam loved his goats, just as he loved his wife Maryam. He loved the life they led together, away from the smoky city below. He loved the way the sun rose each morning on the desert’s distant edge, and the way it vanished each evening over the hills behind him. He loved the moon and the stars which appeared each night, and he recognised the different patterns they produced as they moved across the sky.
Sa’id bin Adam was not a simple man, even if the appearances of his life were reduced to the simple requirements of eating and sleeping, shelter and companionship, and a useful occupation which did not interfere with the natural cycles of existence. He found deep satisfaction in the intricate complexities of existence as they revealed themselves to him in the placid mirror of his uncluttered heart, and the joy which this evoked in him.
Somehow Sa’id bin Adam, whose inclination to introspection was as deeply rooted as his interest in the world about him, had never felt within the urge, so common among those apparently rootless beings of earth which are men and women, and the occasional goat, to discover whether or not in fact the grass really was greener over the hills beyond. He had simply relied on the reports from those who passed by from time to time, that yes, some of it was, and no, some of it wasn’t. His own grass took colour with the seasons, and waxed and waned according to the pattern of his grazing flock. From this he had concluded that any advantage or disadvantage to his roaming further afield than the generous providence which the good God in His Mercy had seen fit to bestow upon him would in all likelihood have been equal.
Sa’id bin Adam’s natural response to his situation was one of gratitude, which he expressed in his unwillingness to alter of his own accord the benevolent arrangement of his life, as it presented itself to him at each moment, a gratitude which showed in the joy with which he went about his daily business.
Sa’id bin Adam had a billy goat. He was the leader of the herd. A big-shouldered shaggy horned thing, with a straggly tuft of a beard. He was golden in colour and Sa’id bin Adam had named him Shams, the Sun, both because of the golden colour of his wool, and for the punctuality of his setting out and retiring with the dawn and closing of the day. The unerring regularity with which he led the procession of the herd’s grazing across the face of the mountain side, cyclic yet never quite repeating the previous day’s pasture, was as accurate a clock for Sa’id as the sun itself.
The steadfastness of Shams was equal to the placid wisdom of his master, and the goat looked after his flock with the same quality of faithfulness to duty and sense of service as Sa’id bin Adam himself. And all the she-goats, and the little baby goats followed this order with the same delight and ease of water in the stream bed, jumping over rocks, rummaging in the nooks and crannies, and proceeding calmly and unhurried as they spread over the untrammelled pasture of the mountain top.
But Shams the Goat was getting on in years, and the pride and thrill he had once felt as leader of the flock, when he too had jumped on the highest boulders and stood sentinel on the sharpest ridge, had settled into a calm and steady certainty. His youthful feelings, and the exploits that ensued from them were merely memories, and no longer attributes necessary for life. A case of distillation of energy, from the froth of youth, through the passions of manhood, to the essential spirit. He was getting old. His teeth felt it, worn in their sockets, as he pulled ever more slowly on the tough grass and wildflowers. He was aware too of the joints of his limbs taking up his weight more carefully as he rose each day, and complaining with an ever-so gentle stiffness as he stepped out, whereas for most of his earlier life they had obeyed as a murmurless reflex to his will.
Then one morning Shams the Goat woke up and things were different. It was not something he thought about at the time. It was not something he could have explained had he so wished. He just knew things were different. When he arose that morning he no longer felt stiff in his legs, although he still moved carefully out of respect for the aged carcass which had done him such good service over the years. And when he grazed, he no longer had to struggle to loosen the clumps of forage, as his teeth always alighted upon tender shoots which gave to the mildest tug and shake of his jaw. He felt a lightness as he led his flock out in the sunlight, and he enjoyed a quiet satisfaction of seeing them all munching away below him as he turned on the upward morning climb.
On the mountain top, at midday, Sa’id bin Adam sat down in one of his usual places in the shade of the trees, contemplating the distant desert while the heat of the day was suffused into sweet aromas of cypress and pine, and a balmy scent rose from sage and thyme crushed under foot and hoof. Not even Sa’id bin Adam, in his gifted and almost universal awareness of his little world, had noticed that the leather strap holding the bell around the neck of his lead goat had become torn some weeks earlier. The collar had worked its way round until the torn part was underneath Shams’ neck; a much narrower section of leather was now exposed to the friction of the brass ring connecting the bell to the strap, and the weight of the bell concentrated in the cut was hastening the strap’s deterioration. Shams the Goat, who was entertaining the possibility of nibbling the heads off a clump of saffron crocuses nestling in an earth-filled crevice between two rocks, shook his head to dislodge a fly that seemed intent on taking up lodgings in his left nostril. Not only did this action have the desired effect of sending the fly off on other aerial pursuits, but it also gave the necessary momentum to sever the tie of his bell, which now fell with a clink and a thud to the grass below.
Shams suddenly felt unaccustomedly light headed. The sense of bodily ease which he had been feeling all day now culminated in a real sense of rebirth. Then a hitherto unknown urge entered him, as if a guiding light now overtook his whole being. He no longer saw the tasty posy of crocuses, which at any other time would have been an irresistible treat, he no longer felt attached to his faithful harem of she-goats and the offspring of their combined loins. The sweet bodily memory of their fruitful couplings was erased in that instant, and all sense of need for the salient order of his days and nights upon Mt Kassioun dissolved. It was if some desert wind had blown away every trace of desire for family and for familiar ties; for the regularity of time and accustomed spaces. His vision had became so expanded, that the remnants of his former life, such as he was aware of them at all, barely impinged on his consciousness.
So, what remained in sight either as a replacement, or as a wide horizon now no longer obfuscated by the parochial vision of his previous history, was like a blank page, a blank white page; or a sky, but a page or a sky without edges. And he neither filled, nor was absent from this place of vision by any sense yet of identity other than the wonderful formless edgeless sense of being that this state evoked. Into this sense of wonder, for that was the only feeling he possessed which gave him any sense of identity at all, there entered something akin to an opening, like a door in a sky, or the turning of a page. It was the sense of the other side of the hill, and the beginning of an irresistible and compelling curiosity. This new motive force in him turned his attention from the crocuses and awoke in him an intense desire to move beyond his flock, which continued to graze contentedly among the rocks in the quiet time of the day. Unconscious too of Sa’id bin Adam, who was travelling in the restful meadows of his own meditation, the goat allowed these new feelings to lead him away to the borders of his usual pasture. Reaching the rambling dry stone wall at the very top of the mountain, invigorated and enlightened by the remarkable state in which he now found himself, he leapt. And in leaping, he parted from his homeland in a singular act of abandonment. Like some space voyager of old, he cast off the liens of his earth’s gravity and began a journey into the unknown.
***
Sa’id bin Adam paused in the stillness of his inward flight and let out a long breath, while his consciousness took seat again within the enveloping atmosphere of his body reclining in the shade of the old acacia tree. It was the sound of the bell which had pierced the skylimit of his quiet contemplation. Or rather, the unaccustomed reverberation of the old beaten copper clanger as it fell softly upon the hard earth. That single chime of freedom which released Shams from his erstwhile occupation as leader of Sa’id’s herd was no pure sounding timbre but a simple rustic rattle of metal. This was followed, only seconds later, by the distant soft hoof scuffle on rock and an insubstantial shimmer in the endless deep yet empty space above the wall into which Shams’ shaggy form had flown as light as the breeze he followed.