What is "tom-toms"

Usage examples of "tom-toms".

Before the great throne room, a dozen tom-toms tunked out the grief and despair of the stricken people.

Above the unearthly din could be heard the noise of the drums and tom-toms, while, as the adventurers drew up in front of their airship, there came a sort of chant, and a line of natives, dressed fantastically in the skins of beasts, came filing out of the large hut.

They could hear the natives beating on their big hollow tree drums, and on tom-toms, while the witch-doctors and medicine men were chanting weird songs to drive the elephants away.

Several times the barbaric noise of the tom-toms and war drums, with which the shouts of the natives mingled, broke out deafeningly.

It was the first thing I thought of when I realized these tom-toms might be passing a message across the island, so we dashed up the hill and looked.

It was as though the measured beats of the tom-toms inflicted muscular convulsions upon their bodies.

He could explain why Yig, the half-human father of serpents, is a shunned and feared object in central Oklahoma, and why old settlers shiver at the secret Indian orgies which make the autumn days and nights hideous with the ceaseless beating of tom-toms in lonely places.

That was why the tom-toms in the Pawnee, Wichita, and Caddo country pounded ceaselessly week in and week out in August, September, and October.

And from far away, the rhythmic pounding of those hellish tom-toms still pulsed on the chill night-wind.

And beyond it all, waking a hideous thought, the monotonous beating of the distant tom-toms came incessantly across the black plains on which a cloudy half-moon had set.

They performed a song on the second day, each of them using a percussion instrument: tambourine, chimes, triangles, tom-toms, cymbals and the hand-bells.