Page:H. D. Traill - From Cairo to the Soudan Frontier.djvu/139

Rh mind than yours," observed Tama coldly, "that if my power of singing was created by an injury, nothing would be more likely to reduce me to silence than its repair. But who says I never had a note of music in me before 27?"

"Well, there is no mention of it whatever in any very early record, and no one, at any rate, seems to have paid much attention to it before the Roman period."

"Have you forgotten the beautiful legend of the Greeks?"

"By no means. But the Greeks were in the habit of inventing beautiful legends with very slight provocation from the facts."

"To them," said the Northern Colossus dreamily, "I was the statue of Memnon, the son of Tithonus and Aurora, the ill-fated young Ethiopian prince who was the first to be slain before the walls of Troy; and my song at sunrise was the voice of my lament to my mother, the Morning, even as the dews which she sprinkled upon me were her