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, it is inanimate, it cannot move of its own volition, it does not breath, it does not speak, it does not resound with the ‘I am’ of being and self-identity, and so it can hardly be predicated of such a thing that is barely half a step evolved beyond the state of a stone, a boulder or rock perhaps, 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 can have a life, let alone be the subject of a biographical narrative.’

Well then, so be it. If that is the extent of your imagination, stop listening immediately, go! Go on! Go 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 subverted. But if you feel some irritation of the mind, a stirring perhaps, an unfamiliar movement among the little grey cells, or a feeling such as when you close your eyes and turn and are not sure in which direction you are facing, then maybe we can talk.

To hear the story of the drum, we must first learn how to hear the drum’s voice, and that requires such a kind of concentration of listening that we may well turn to stone in the trying, for it is only in such stillness that what our drum wishes to tell us, beyond the mere telling of a tale, may be understood.

Said 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 and planted its barbed wire among the bushes, and erected its radar masts upon a peak best left to the surveillance of eagles and angels. Said bin Adam loved his goats, just as he loved his wife Maryam, and 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.

Said 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. Said bin Adam was not a simple man. He loved deeply 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 Said 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, 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. Seeing that his own grass took colour with the seasons, and waxed and waned according to the pattern of his grazing flock, he concluded that there was unlikely to be any advantage, just as equally there might not be any disadvantage, to his roaming further afield than the generous providence which the good God, in His Mercy, had seen fit to bestow upon him. Said 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, and which showed in the joy with which he went about his daily business.

Said 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, and the unerring regularity with which he led the procession of the herd’s grazing across the face of the mountain side, and yet never quite repeating the previous day’s pasture. Perhaps also his name reflected in some way the busy, boiling city below.

The steadfastness of Shams the Goat was equal to the placid wisdom of his master, and he looked after his flock with a quality of faithfulness to duty which accorded to Said bin Adam’s own response to the world he had been given. 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 on 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 now reduced in him to the point of being merely a memory of an action long past, and not of an attribute essential to his identity. He was getting old. His teeth felt it, worn in their sockets, as he pulled ever more slowly on the grass and wildflowers, and he was aware of the joints of his limbs taking up his weight carefully as he rose each day, and complaining with an ever-so gentle stiffness as he stepped out, when for most of his earlier life they had obeyed as a murmurless reflex to his will.

Shams the Goat woke up one morning 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. For instance, that morning he no longer felt stiff as he arose, although he still moved carefully from respect for the aged carcass which had done him such good service over the years. Somehow that day he no longer had to struggle to loosen the clumps of forage when he grazed, 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, Said 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 Said 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 having 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 now 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 lodging 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. Added to the sense of sublime regeneration he had been experiencing all day, he was now positively reborn. A new and hitherto unknown urge entered him, like a guiding light which 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. All 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 all traces of desire for family and for familiar ties, for the regularity of time and accustomed spaces. In its place... but no, the place in which all his life had been contained was now so expanded, so clearly perhaps without any known limits, that the remnants, such as they might have been, of his previous life, were in such relative diminution, that they would not have appeared there anyway. So, what remained 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, like a sky, but a page or a sky without edges, and he neither filled, nor was absent from it by any sense yet of identity other than the wonderful formless edgeless sense of being that this state evoked. And into this sense of wonder, for that was the only way in which he could have predicated identity in any way at all, there entered something akin to an opening, like a door in a sky, or the turning of a page,  the sense of the other side of the hill, like the beginning of an irresistible curiosity. And this opening, which appeared as a new kind of emotion in him, now turned his attention from the crocuses and set in him an intense and irresistible desire to move, beyond his flock, idly chewing among the rocks in the quiet time of the day. Unconscious now of his master, who was locked away in his own restful void of meditation, he allowed this new feeling 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 he found himself in, 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.

***

Said 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 oh so gentle 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 Said’s herd was no pure sounding timbre but a simple rustic rattle of metal. This was followed, surely only seconds later, but Said had no means of measuring the interval between as he reimmersed himself within the parameters of his corporeality, by the distant soft hoof scuffle on rock and - did he see it or did his imagination fill in the space? -  the endless deep yet empty space above the wall into which Shams’ shaggy form had flown as light as the breeze he followed.