THE DESERT AND
THE SOWN
Bedouins of the Syrian Desert.
(JOHN SARGENT. R.A.)
SYRIA
THE DESERT & THE SOWN
BY
GERTRUDE LOWTHIAN BELL
WITH FRONTISPIECE BY JOHN SARGENT, R. A.
ALSO MANY ILLUSTRATIONS AND A MAP
NEW YORK
E.P. DUTTON AND COMPANY
1907
He deems the Wild the sweetest of friends, and travels on
where travels above him the Mother of all the clustered stars
TA'ABATA SHARRAN
To A. C. L.
WHO KNOWS THE HEART
OF THE EAST
[PREFACE]
Those who venture to add a new volume to the vast literature of travel, unless they be men of learning or politicians, must be prepared with an excuse. My excuse is ready, as specious and I hope as plausible as such things should be. I desired to write not so much a book of travel as an account of the people whom I met or who accompanied me on my way, and to show what the world is like in which they live and how it appears to them. And since it was better that they should, as far as possible, tell their own tale, I have strung their words upon the thread of the road, relating as I heard them the stories with which shepherd and man-at-arms beguiled the hours of the march, the talk that passed from lip to lip round the camp fire, in the black tent of the Arab and the guest-chamber of the Druze, as well as the more cautious utterances of Turkish and Syrian officials. Their statecraft consists of guesses, often shrewd enough, at the results that may spring from the clash of unknown forces, of which the strength and the aim are but dimly apprehended; their wisdom is that of men whose channels of information and standards for comparison are different from ours, and who bring a different set of preconceptions to bear upon the problems laid before them. The Oriental is like a very old child. He is unacquainted with many branches of knowledge which we have come to regard as of elementary necessity; frequently, but not always, his mind is little preoccupied with the need of acquiring them, and he concerns himself scarcely at all with what we call practical utility. He is not practical in our acceptation of the word, any more than a child is practical, and his utility is not ours. On the other hand, his action is guided by traditions of conduct and morality that go back to the beginnings of civilisation, traditions unmodified as yet by any important change in the manner of life to which they apply and out of which they arose. These things apart, he is as we are; human nature does not undergo a complete change east of Suez, nor is it impossible to be on terms of friendship and sympathy with the dwellers in those regions. In some respects it is even easier than in Europe. You will find in the East habits of intercourse less fettered by artificial chains, and a wider tolerance born of greater diversity. Society is divided by caste and sect and tribe into an infinite number of groups, each one of which is following a law of its own, and however fantastic, to our thinking, that law may be, to the Oriental it is an ample and a satisfactory explanation of all peculiarities. A man may go about in public veiled up to the eyes, or clad if he please only in a girdle: he will excite no remark. Why should he? Like every one else he is merely obeying his own law. So too the European may pass up and down the wildest places, encountering little curiosity and of criticism even less. The news he brings will be heard with interest, his opinions will be listened to with attention, but he will not be thought odd or mad, nor even mistaken, because his practices and the ways of his thought are at variance with those of the people among whom he finds himself. "'Ādat-hu:" it is his custom. And for this reason he will be the wiser if he does not seek to ingratiate himself with Orientals by trying to ape their habits, unless he is so skilful that he can pass as one of themselves. Let him treat the law of others respectfully, but he himself will meet with a far greater respect if he adheres strictly to his own. For a woman this rule is of the first importance, since a woman can never disguise herself effectually. That she should be known to come of a great and honoured stock, whose customs are inviolable, is her best claim to consideration.
None of the country through which I went is ground virgin to the traveller, though parts of it have been visited but seldom, and described only in works that are costly and often difficult to obtain. Of such places I have given a brief account, and as many photographs as seemed to be of value. I have also noted in the northern cities of Syria those vestiges of antiquity that catch the eye of a casual observer. There is still much exploration to be done in Syria and on the edge of the desert, and there are many difficult problems yet to be solved. The work has been well begun by de Vogüé, Wetzstein, Brünnow, Sachau, Dussaud, Puchstein and his colleagues, the members of the Princeton Expedition and others. To their books I refer those who would learn how immeasurably rich is the land in architectural monuments and in the epigraphic records of a far-reaching history.
My journey did not end at Alexandretta as this account ends. In Asia Minor I was, however, concerned mainly with archæology; the results of what work I did there have been published in a series of papers in the "Revue Archéologique," where, through the kindness of the editor, Monsieur Salomon Reinach, they have found a more suitable place than the pages of such a book as this could have offered them.
I do not know either the people or the language of Asia Minor well enough to come into anything like a close touch with the country, but I am prepared, even on a meagre acquaintance, to lay tokens of esteem at the feet of the Turkish peasant. He is gifted with many virtues, with the virtue of hospitality beyond all others.
I have been at some pains to relate the actual political conditions of unimportant persons. They do not appear so unimportant to one who is in their midst, and for my part I have always been grateful to those who have provided me with a clue to their relations with one another. But I am not concerned to justify or condemn the government of the Turk. I have lived long enough in Syria to realise that his rule is far from being the ideal of administration, and seen enough of the turbulent elements which he keeps more or less in order to know that his post is a difficult one. I do not believe that any government would give universal satisfaction; indeed, there are few which attain that desired end even in more united countries. Being English, I am persuaded that we are the people who could best have taken Syria in hand with the prospect of a success greater than that which might be attained by a moderately reasonable Sultan. We have long recognised that the task will not fall to us. We have unfortunately done more than this. Throughout the dominions of Turkey we have allowed a very great reputation to weaken and decline; reluctant to accept the responsibility of official interference, we have yet permitted the irresponsible protests, vehemently expressed, of a sentimentality that I make bold to qualify as ignorant, and our dealings with the Turk have thus presented an air of vacillation which he may be pardoned for considering perfidious and for regarding with animosity. These feelings, combined with the deep-seated dread of a great Asiatic Empire which is also mistress of Egypt and of the sea, have, I think, led the Porte to seize the first opportunity for open resistance to British demands, whether out of simple miscalculation of the spirit that would be aroused, or with the hope of foreign backing, it is immaterial to decide, The result is equally deplorable, and if I have gauged the matter at all correctly, the root of it lies in the disappearance of English influence at Constantinople. The position of authority that we occupied has been taken by another, yet it is and must be of far deeper importance to us than to any other that we should be able to guide when necessary the tortuous politics of Yildiz Kiosk. The greatest of all Mohammedan powers cannot afford to let her relations with the Khalif of Islām be regulated with so little consistency or firmness, and if the Sultan's obstinacy in the Tābah quarrel can prove to us how far the reins have slipped from our hands, it will have served its turn. Seated as we are upon the Mediterranean and having at our command, as I believe, a considerable amount of goodwill within the Turkish empire and the memories of an ancient friendship, it should not be impossible to recapture the place we have lost.
But these are matters outside the scope of the present book, and my apologia had best end where every Oriental writer would have begun: "In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate!"
MOUNT GRACE PRIORY.
CONTENTS
[PREFACE]
[CHAPTER I]
[CHAPTER II]
[CHAPTER III]
[CHAPTER IV]
[CHAPTER V]
[CHAPTER VI]
[CHAPTER VII]
[CHAPTER VIII]
[CHAPTER IX]
[CHAPTER X]
[CHAPTER XI]
[CHAPTER XII]
[CHAPTER XIII]
[CHAPTER XIV]
[INDEX]
ILLUSTRATIONS
[Bedouin of the Syrian Desert ]
[The Mosque of 'Umar, Jerusalem]
[The Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem]
[A Street in Jerusalem]
[St. Stephen's Gate, Jerusalem]
[A Mahommedan Procession passing the Garden of Olives]
[Russian Pilgrims]
[Pilgrims receiving Baptism in Jordan]
[Monastery of Kuruntul above Jericho]
[Crossing the Ghōr]
[The Bridge over Jordan]
[The Monastery of Mar Saba, Wilderness of Judæ]
[The Wall of Lamentation, Jerusalem]
[Jews of Bokhara ]
[Abyssinian Priests]
[An Arab of the 'Adwān Guarding Crops]
[An Encampment near the Dead Sea]
[The Theatre, 'Ammān]
[A Gateway, 'Ammān]
[The Temple, Khureibet es Sūḳ]
[Mausoleum, Khureibet es Sūḳ]
[Arabs of the Belḳa]
[A Ruined Church, Mādeba]
[The Ḳal'ah at Zīza]
[A Christian Encampment]
[Flocks of the Ṣukhūr]
[A Roman Milestone]
[Mshitta]
[Mshitta, the Façade]
[Mshitta, the Inner Halls]
[Arabs of the Belḳa]
[Fellāḥ ul 'Isa ad Da'ja]
[A Capital at Muwaġġar]
[A Capital at Muwaġġar]
[A Capital at Muwaġġar]
[Milking Sheep]
[G̣ablān ibn Ḥamūd ad Da'ja]
[On the Ḥājj Road]
[Arabs Riding Mardūf]
[A Travelling Encampment of the 'Ag̣ēl]
[A Desert Well]
[A Desert Water-course]
[Camels of the Ḥaseneh]
[Umm ej Jemāl]
[Watering Camels]
[Striking Camp]
[Muḥammad el Aṭrash]
[Desert Flora and Fauna]
[The Castle, Ṣalkhad]
[Nasīb el Aṭrash]
[A Group of Druzes]
[From Ṣalkhad Castle, looking South-East]
[Ḳreyeh]
[A Druze Ploughboy]
[Boṣrā Eski Shām]
[The Village Gateway, Ḥabrān]
[A Druze Maḳ'ad, Ḥabrān]
[Lintel, el Khurbeh]
[The Walls of Ḳanawāt]
[Ḳanawāt, The Basilica]
[Ḳanawāt, Doorway of the Basilica]
[Ḳanawāt A Temple]
[The Temple, Mashennef]
[Ḳal'at el Beiḍa]
[Ḳal'at el Beiḍa]
[Ḳal'at el Beiḍa, Door of Keep]
[Mouldings from Ḳal'at el Beiḍa and from Palmyra]
[A Gateway, Shakka]
[The Sheikh's House, Ḥayāt]
[In the Palmyrene Desert]
[The Great Mosque and the Roofs of the Bazaar from the Fort]
[A Corn Market ]
[The Ḳubbet el Khazneh]
[The Tekyah of Nakshibendi ]
[Gate of the Tekyah]
[Mushḳin Kalam]
[Sweetmeat Sellers]
[Court of the Great Mosque]
[Threshing-floor of Karyatein]
[The Tekyali of Nakshibendi]
[Outside Damascus Gates]
[A Water seller]
[Suḳ Wādi Barada]
[Ba'albek]
[The Great Court, Ba'albek]
[Columns of the Temple of the Sun, Ba'albek]
[Temple of Jupiter, Ba'albek]
[Capitals in the Temple of Jupiter, Ba'albek]
[Fountain in the Great Court, Ba'albek]
[Fragment of Entablature, Ba'albek]
[Basilica of Constantine, Ba'albek]
[A Stone in the Quarry, Ba'albek]
[Rās ul 'Ain, Ba'albek]
[Cedars of Lebanon ]
[The Ḳāmu'a Hurmul]
[An Eastern Holiday]
[A Street in Ḥomṣ ]
[Coffee by the Road-side]
[Ḳal'at el Ḥuṣn]
[Ḳal'at el Ḥuṣn, Interior of the Castle]
[Windows of the Banquet Hall]
[Ḳal'at el Ḥuṣn, Walls of the Inner Enceinte]
[Fellaḥīn Arabs]
[The Temple at Ḥuṣn es Suleimān]
[North Gate, Ḥuṣn es Suleimān]
[City Gate, Masyād]
[Capital at Masyād]
[Capital at Masyād]
[A Na'oura, Ḥamāh]
[The Ḳubbeh in the Mosque at Ḥamāh]
[The Tekyah Killāniyyeh, Ḥamāh]
[Capital in the Mosque, Ḥamāh]
[A Capital, Ḥamāh]
[Ḳal'at es Seijar]
[Ḳal'at es Seijar, The Cutting through the Ridge]
[A Capital, Ḥamāh]
[A House at el Bārah]
[Moulding at el Bārah and Lintel at Khirbet Hāss]
[Tomb, Serjilla]
[Sheikh Yūnis]
[House at Serjilla]
[Tomb of Bizzos]
[Church and Tomb, Ruweiḥā]
[Ḳaṣr el Ḃanāt]
[Tomb Dāna]
[A Beehive Village]
[The Castle, Aleppo]
[A Water-carrier]
[Ḳal'at Sim'ān]
[Ḳal'at Sim'ān]
[Ḳal'at Sim'ān West Door]
[Ḳal'at Sim'ān Circular Court]
[Ḳal'at Sim'ān Circular Court]
[Ḳal'at Sim'ān The Apse]
[Ḳal'at Sim'ān West Door]
[A Funeral Monument, Ḳāṭurā]
[Khirāb esh Shems]
[Khirāb esh Shems Carving in a Tomb]
[Capital, Upper Church at Kalōteh]
[Barād, Canopy Tomb]
[Barād, Tower to the West of the Town]
[Mūsa and his Family ]
[Bāsufān, a Kurdish Girl ]
[Tomb at Dānā]
[The Bāb el Hawa]
[The Temple Gate, Bāḳirḥa]
[Ḳalb Lōzeh]
[The Apse, Ḳalb Lōzeh]
[Ḥārim]
[Salḳīn]
[Travellers]
[Antioch]
[Antioch]
[On the Bank of the Orontes, Antioch]
[The Corn Market, Antioch]
[Roman Lamp in Rifa't Agha's Collection]
[Head of a Sphinx, Antioch]
[Daphne]
[The Garīz]
[The Statue in the Mulberry-Garden]
[Lower Course of the Garīz]
[Sarcophagus in the Seraya, Antioch]
THE MOSQUE OF 'UMAR, JERUSALEM
[CHAPTER I]
To those bred under an elaborate social order few such moments of exhilaration can come as that which stands at the threshold of wild travel. The gates of the enclosed garden are thrown open, the chain at the entrance of the sanctuary is lowered, with a wary glance to right and left you step forth, and, behold! the immeasurable world. The world of adventure and of enterprise, dark with hurrying storms, glittering in raw sunlight, an unanswered question and an unanswerable doubt hidden in the fold of every hill. Into it you must go alone, separated from the troops of friends that walk the rose alleys, stripped of the purple and fine linen that impede the fighting arm, roofless, defenceless, without possessions. The voice of the wind shall be heard instead of the persuasive voices of counsellors, the touch of the rain and the prick of the frost shall be spurs sharper than praise or blame, and necessity shall speak with an authority unknown to that borrowed wisdom which men obey or discard at will. So you leave the sheltered close, and, like the man in the fairy story, you feel the bands break that were riveted about your heart as you enter the path that stretches across the rounded shoulder of the earth.
It was a stormy morning, the 5th of February. The west wind swept up from the Mediterranean, hurried across the plain where the Canaanites waged war with the stubborn hill dwellers of Judæa, and leapt the barrier of mountains to which the kings of Assyria and of Egypt had laid vain siege. It shouted the news of rain to Jerusalem and raced onwards down the barren eastern slopes, cleared the deep bed of Jordan with a bound, and vanished across the hills of Moab into the desert. And all the hounds of the storm followed behind, a yelping pack, coursing eastward and rejoicing as they went.
THE CHURCH OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE, JERUSALEM
No one with life in his body could stay in on such a day, but for me there was little question of choice. In the grey winter dawn the mules had gone forward carrying all my worldly goods—two tents, a canteen, and a month's provision of such slender luxuries as the austerest traveller can ill spare, two small mule trunks, filled mainly with photographic materials, a few books and a goodly sheaf of maps. The mules and the three muleteers I had brought with me from Beyrout, and liked well enough to take on into the further journey. The men were all from the Lebanon. A father and son, Christians both, came from a village above Beyrout: the father an old and toothless individual who mumbled, as he rode astride the mule trunks, blessings and pious ejaculations mingled with protestations of devotion to his most clement employer, but saw no need to make other contribution to the welfare of the party— Ibrahīm was the name of this ancient; the son, Ḥabīb, a young man of twenty-two or twenty-three, dark, upright and broad-shouldered, with a profile that a Greek might have envied and a bold glance under black brows. The third was a Druze, a big shambling man, incurably lazy, a rogue in his modest way, though he could always disarm my just indignation in the matter of stolen sugar or missing piastres with an appealing, lustrous eye that looked forth unblinking like the eye of a dog. He was greedy and rather stupid, defects that must be difficult to avoid on a diet of dry bread, rice and rancid butter; but when I took him into the midst of his blood enemies he slouched about his work and tramped after his mule and his donkey with the same air of passive detachment that he showed in the streets of Beyrout. His name was Muḥammad. The last member of the caravan was the cook. Mikhāil, a native of Jerusalem and a Christian whose religion did not sit heavy on his soul. He had travelled with Mr. Mark Sykes, and received from him the following character: "He doesn't know much about cooking, unless he has learnt since he was with me, but he never seems to care twopence whether he lives or whether he is killed." When I repeated these words to Mikhāil he relapsed into fits of suppressed laughter, and I engaged him on the spot. It was an insufficient reason, and as good as many another. He served me well according to his lights; but he was a touchy, fiery little man, always ready to meet a possible offence half way, with an imagination to the limits of which I never attained during three months' acquaintance, and unfortunately he had learned other things besides cooking during the years that had elapsed since he and Mr. Sykes had been shipwrecked together on Lake Van. It was typical of him that he never troubled to tell me the story of that adventure, though once when I alluded to it he nodded his head and remarked: "We were as near death as a beggar to poverty, but your Excellency knows a man can die but once," whereas he bombarded my ears with tales of tourists who had declared they could not and would not travel in Syria unsustained by his culinary arts. The 'arak bottle was his fatal drawback; and after trying all prophylactic methods, from blandishment to the hunting-crop, I parted with him abruptly on the Cilician coast, not without regrets other than a natural longing for his tough ragôuts and cold pancakes.
A STREET IN JERUSALEM
ST. STEPHEN'S GATE, JERUSALEM
I had a great desire to ride alone down the desolate road to Jericho, as I had done before when my face was turned towards the desert, but Mikhāil was of opinion that it would be inconsistent with my dignity, and I knew that even his chattering companionship could not rob that road of solitude. At nine we were in the saddle, riding soberly round the walls of Jerusalem, down into the valley of Gethsemane, past the garden of the Agony and up on to the Mount of Olives. Here I paused to recapture the impression, which no familiarity can blunt, of the walled city on the hill, grey in a grey and stony landscape under the heavy sky, but illumined by the hope and the unquenchable longing of generations of pilgrims. Human aspiration, the blind reaching out of the fettered spirit towards a goal where all desire shall be satisfied and the soul find peace, these things surround the city like a halo, half glorious, half pitiful, shining with tears and blurred by many a disillusion. The west wind turned my horse and set him galloping over the brow of the hill and down the road that winds through the Wilderness of Judæa.
A MAHOMMADAN PROCESSION PASSING THE GARDEN OF OLIVES
RUSSIAN PILGRIMS
At the foot of the first descent there is a spring, 'Ain esh Shems, the Arabs call it, the Fountain of the Sun, but the Christian pilgrims have named it the Apostles' Well. In the winter you will seldom pass there without seeing some Russian peasants resting on their laborious way up from Jordan. Ten thousand of them pour yearly into the Holy Land, old men and women, for the most part, who have pinched and saved all their life long to lay together the £30 or so which will carry them to Jerusalem. From the furthest ends of the Russian empire they come on foot to the Black Sea, where they take ship as deck passengers on board a dirty little Russian boat. I have travelled with 300 of them from Smyrna to Jaffa, myself the only passenger lodged in a cabin. It was mid-winter, stormy and cold for those who sleep on deck, even if they be clothed in sheepskin coats and wadded top-boots. My shipmates had brought their own provisions with them for economy's sake—a hunch of bread, a few olives, a raw onion, of such was their daily meal. Morning and evening they gathered in prayer before an icon hanging on the cook's galley, and the sound of their litanies went to Heaven mingled with the throb of the screw and the splash of the spray. The pilgrims reach Jerusalem before Christmas and stay till after Easter that they may light their tapers at the sacred fire that breaks out from the Sepulchre on the morning of the Resurrection. They wander on foot through all the holy places, lodging in big hostels built for them by the Russian Government. Many die from exposure and fatigue and the unaccustomed climate; but to die in Palestine is the best of favours that the Divine hand can bestow, for their bones rest softly in the Promised Land and their souls fly straight to Paradise. You will meet these most unsophisticated travellers on every high road, trudging patiently under the hot sun or through the winter rains, clothed always in the furs of their own country, and bearing in their hands a staff cut from the reed beds of Jordan. They add a sharp note of pathos to a landscape that touches so many of the themes of mournful poetry. I heard in Jerusalem a story which is a better illustration of their temper than pages of description. It was of a man who had been a housebreaker and had been caught in the act and sent to Siberia, where he did many years of penal servitude. But when his time was up he came home to his old mother with a changed heart, and they two set out together for the Holy Land that he might make expiation for his sins. Now at the season when the pilgrims are in Jerusalem, the riff-raff of Syria congregates there to cheat their simplicity and pester them for alms, and one of these vagabonds came and begged of the Russian penitent at a time when he had nothing to give. The Syrian, enraged at his refusal, struck the other to the earth and injured him so severely that he was in hospital for three months.
PILGRIMS RECEIVING BAPTISM IN JORDAN
When he recovered his consul came to him and said, "We have got the man who nearly killed you; before you leave you must give evidence against him." But the pilgrim answered, "No, let him go. I too am a criminal."
Beyond the fountain the road was empty, and though I knew it well I was struck again by the incredible desolation of it. No life, no flowers, the bare stalks of last year's thistles, the bare hills and the stony road. And yet the Wilderness of Judæa has been nurse to the fiery spirit of man. Out of it strode grim prophets, menacing with doom a world of which they had neither part nor understanding; the valleys are full of the caves that held them, nay, some are peopled to this day by a race of starved and gaunt ascetics, clinging to a tradition of piety that common sense has found it hard to discredit. Before noon we reached the khān half way to Jericho, the place where legend has it that the Good Samaritan met the man fallen by the roadside, and I went in to lunch beyond reach of the boisterous wind. Three Germans of the commercial traveller class were writing on picture-postcards in the room of the inn, and bargaining with the khānji for imitation Bedouin knives. I sat and listened to their vulgar futile talk—it was the last I was to hear of European tongues for several weeks, but I found no cause to regret the civilisation I was leaving. The road dips east of the khān, and crosses a dry water-course which has been the scene of many tragedies. Under the banks the Bedouin used to lie in wait to rob and murder the pilgrims as they passed. Fifteen years ago the Jericho road was as lawless a track as is the country now that lies beyond Jordan: security has travelled a few miles eastward during the past decade. At length we came to the top of the last hill and saw the Jordan valley and the Dead Sea, backed by the misty steeps of Moab, the frontier of the desert. Jericho lay at our feet, an unromantic village of ramshackle hotels and huts wherein live the only Arabs the tourist ever comes to know, a base-born stock, half bred with negro slaves. I left my horse with the muleteers whom we had caught up on the slope—"Please God you prosper!" "Praise be to God! If your Excellency is well we are content"—and ran down the hill into the village. But Jericho was not enough for that first splendid day of the road. I desired eagerly to leave the tourists behind, and the hotels and the picture-postcards. Two hours more and we should reach Jordan bank, and at the head of the wooden bridge that leads from Occident to Orient we might camp in a sheltered place under mud hillocks and among thickets of reed and tamarisk. A halt to buy corn for the horses and the mules and we were off again across the narrow belt of cultivated land that lies round Jericho, and out on to the Ghōr, the Jordan valley.
MONASTERY OF KURUNTUL ABOVE JERICHO
The Jericho road is bare enough, but the valley of Jordan has an aspect of inhumanity that is almost evil. If the prophets of the Old Testament had fulminated their anathemas against it as they did against Babylon or Tyre, no better proof of their prescience would exist; but they were silent, and the imagination must travel back to flaming visions of Gomorrah and of Sodom, dim legends of iniquity that haunted our own childhood as they haunted the childhood of the Semitic races. A heavy stifling atmosphere weighed upon this lowest level of the earth's surface; the wind was racing across the hill tops above us in the regions where men breathed the natural air, but the valley was stagnant and lifeless like a deep sea bottom. We brushed through low thickets of prickly sidr trees, the Spina Christi of which the branches are said to have been twisted into the Crown of Thorns. They are of two kinds these sidr bushes, the Arabs call them zaḳūm and dōm. From the zaḳūm they extract a medicinal oil, the dōm bears a small fruit like a crab apple that ripens to a reddish brown not uninviting in appearance. It is a very Dead Sea Fruit, pleasant to look upon and leaving on the lips a taste of sandy bitterness. The sidrs dwindled and vanished, and before us lay a sheet of hard mud on which no green thing grows. It is of a yellow colour, blotched with a venomous grey white salt: almost unconsciously the eye appreciates its enmity to life. As we rode here a swirl of heavy rain swooped down upon us from the upper world. The muleteers looked grave, and even Mikhāil's face began to lengthen, for in front of us were the Slime Pits of Genesis, and no horse or mule can pass over them except they be dry. The rain lasted a very few minutes, but it was enough. The hard mud of the plain had assumed the consistency of butter, the horses' feet were shod in it up to the fetlocks, and my dog Kurt whined as he dragged his paws out of the yellow glue. So we came to the Slime Pits, the strangest feature of all that uncanny land. A quarter of a mile to the west of Jordan—the belt is much narrower to the east of the stream—the smooth plain resolves itself suddenly into a series of steep mud banks intersected by narrow gullies. The banks are not high, thirty or forty feet at the most, but the crests of them are so sharp and the sides so precipitous that the traveller must find his way across and round them with the utmost care. The shower had made these slopes as slippery as glass, even on foot it was almost impossible to keep upright. My horse fell as I was leading him; fortunately it was on a little ridge between mound and mound, and by the most astonishing gymnastics he managed to recover himself. I breathed a short thanksgiving when I saw my caravan emerge from the Slime Pits: we might, if the rain had lasted, have been imprisoned there for several hours, since if a horseman falls to the bottom of one of the sticky hollows he must wait there till it dries.
CROSSING THE GHŌR
Along the river bank there was life. The ground was carpeted with young grass and yellow daisies, the rusty liveries of the tamarisk bushes showed some faint signs of Spring. I cantered on to the great bridge with its trellised sides and roof of beams—the most inspiring piece of architecture in the world, since it is the Gate of the Desert. There was the open place as I remembered it, covered with short turf, sheltered by the high mud banks, and, Heaven be praised! empty. We had had cause for anxiety on this head. The Turkish Government was at that time sending all the troops that could be levied to quell the insurrection in Yemen. The regiments of southern Syria were marched down to the bridge, and so on to 'Ammān, where they were entrained and sent along the Mecca railway to what was then the terminus, Ma'ān near Petra. From Mā'an they had a horrible march across a sandy waste to the head of the Gulf of 'Aḳabah. Many hundreds of men and many thousands of camels perished before they reached the gulf, for the wells upon that road are three only (so said the Arabs), and one lies about two miles off the track, undiscoverable to those who are not familiar with the country.
THE BRIDGE OVER JORDAN
We pitched tents, picketed the horses, and lighted a huge bonfire of tamarisk and willow. The night was grey and still; there was rain on the hills, but none with us—a few inches represents the annual fall in the valley of Jordan. We were not quite alone. The Turkish Government levies a small toll on all who pass backwards and forwards across the bridge, and keeps an agent there for that purpose. He lives in a wattle hut by the gate of the bridge, and one or two ragged Arabs of the Ghōr share his solitude. Among these was a grey-haired negro, who gathered wood for our fire, and on the strength of his services spent the night with us. He was a cheery soul, was Mabūḳ. He danced with pleasure, round the camp fire, untroubled by the consideration that he was one of the most preposterously misshapen of human beings. He told us tales of the soldiery, how they came down in rags, their boots dropping from their feet though it was but the first day's march, half starved too, poor wretches. A Ṭābūr (900 men) had passed through that morning, another was expected to-morrow—we had just missed them. "Māsha-'llah!" said Mikhāil, "your Excellency is fortunate. First you escape from the mud hills and then from the Redīfs." "Praise be to God!" murmured Mabūḳ, and from that day my star was recognised as a lucky one. From Mabūḳ we heard the first gossip of the desert. His talk was for ever of Ibn er Rashīd, the young chief of the Shammār, whose powerful uncle Muḥammad left him so uneasy a legacy of dominion in central Arabia. For two years I had heard no news of Nejd—what of Ibn Sā'oud, the ruler of Riāḍ and Ibn er Rashīd's rival? How went the war between them? Mabūḳ had heard many rumours; men did say that Ibn er Rashīd was in great straits, perhaps the Redīfs were bound for Nejd and not for Yemen, who knew? and had we heard that a sheikh of the Ṣukhūr had been murdered by the 'Ajārmeh, and as soon as the tribe came back from the eastern pasturages. . . . So the tale ran on through the familiar stages of blood feud and camel lifting, the gossip of the desert—I could have wept for joy at listening to it again. There was a Babel of Arabic tongues round my camp fire that evening, for Mikhāil spoke the vulgar cockney of Jerusalem, a language bereft of dignity, and Ḥabīb a dialect of the Lebanon at immense speed, and Muḥammad had the Beyrouti drawl with its slow expressionless swing, while from the negro's lips fell something approaching to the virile and splendid speech of the Bedouin. The men themselves were struck by the variations of accent, and once they turned to me and asked which was right. I could only reply, "God knows! for He is omniscient," and the answer received a laughing acceptance, though I confess I proffered it with some misgiving.
THE MONASTERY OF MAR SABA, WILDERNESS OF JUDÆA
The dawn broke windless and grey. An hour and a half from the moment I was awakened till the mules were ready to start was the appointed rule, but sometimes we were off ten minutes earlier, and sometimes, alas! later. I spent the time in conversing with the guardian of the bridge, a native of Jerusalem. To my sympathetic ears did he confide his sorrows, the mean tricks that the Ottoman government was accustomed to play on him, and the hideous burden of existence during the summer heats. And then the remuneration! a mere nothing! His gains were larger, however, than he thought fit to name, for I subsequently discovered that he had charged me three piastres instead of two for each of my seven animals. It is easy to be on excellent terms with Orientals, and if their friendship has a price it is usually a small one. We crossed the Rubicon at three piastres a head and took the northern road which leads to Salt. The middle road goes to Ḥeshbān, where lives the great Sheikh of all the Arabs of the Belḳa, Sulṭān ibn 'Ali iḍ Ḍiāb ul 'Adwān, a proper rogue, and the southern to Mādeba in Moab. The eastern side of the Ghōr is much more fertile than the western. Enough water flows from the beautiful hills of Ajlūn to turn the plain into a garden, but the supply is not stored, and the Arabs of the 'Adwān tribes content themselves with the sowing of a little corn. The time of flowers was not yet. At the end of March the eastern Ghōr is a carpet of varied and lovely bloom, which lasts but a month in the fierce heat of the valley, indeed a month sees the plants through bud and bloom and ripened seed. A ragged Arab showed us the path. He had gone down to join the Redīfs, having been bought as a substitute at the price of fifty napoleons by a well-to-do inhabitant of Salt. When he reached the bridge he found he was too late, his regiment having passed through two days before. He was sorry, he would have liked to march forth to the war (moreover, I imagine the fifty liras would have to be refunded), but his daughter would be glad, for she had wept to see him go. He stopped to extricate one of his leather slippers from the mud.
THE WALL OF LAMENTATION, JERUSALEM
"Next year," quoth he, catching me up again, "please God I shall go to America."
I stared in amazement at the half-naked figure, the shoes dropping from the bare feet, the torn cloak slipping from the shoulders, the desert head-dress of kerchief and camel's hair rope.
"Can you speak any English?" I asked.
"No," he replied calmly, "but I shall have saved the price of the journey, and, by God! here there is no advancement."
I inquired what he would do when he reached the States.
"Buy and sell," he replied; "and when I have saved 200 liras I shall return."
JEWS OF BOKHARA
The same story can be heard all over Syria. Hundreds go out every year, finding wherever they land some of their compatriots to give them a helping hand. They hawk the streets with cheap wares, sleep under bridges, live on fare that no freeborn citizen would look at, and when they have saved 200 liras, more or less, they return, rich men in the estimation of their village. East of Jordan the exodus is not so great, yet once in the mountains of the Haurān I stopped to ask my way of a Druze, and he answered me in the purest Yankee. I drew rein while he told me his tale, and at the end of it I asked him if he were going back. He looked round at the stone hovels of the village, knee deep in mud and melting snow: "You bet!" he replied, and as I turned away he threw a cheerful "So long!" after me.
When we had ridden two hours we entered the hills by a winding valley which my friend called Wād el Ḥassanīyyeh, after the tribe of that name. It was full of anemones and white broom (rattam the Arabs call it), cyclamen, starch hyacinths, and wild almond trees. For plants without a use, however lovely they may be, there is no name in Arabic; they are all hashīsh, grass; whereas the smallest vegetable that can be of service is known and distinguished in their speech. The path—it was a mere bridle track—rose gradually. Just before we entered the mist that covered the top of the hill we saw the Dead Sea below us to the south, lying under the grey sky like a great sheet of clouded glass. We reached Salt at four o'clock in real mountain weather, a wet and driving mist. Moreover, the ground near the village was a swamp, owing to the rain that, passing over us the night before, had fallen here. I hesitated to camp unless I could find no drier lodging. The first thing was to seek out the house of Ḥabīb Effendi Fāris, whom I had come to Salt to see, though I did not know him. My claim upon him (for I relied entirely upon his help for the prosecution of my journey) was in this wise: he was married to the daughter of a native preacher in Haifa, a worthy old man and a close friend of mine. Urfa on the Euphrates was the Stammplatz of the family, but Abu Namrūd had lived long at Salt and he knew the desert. The greater part of the hours during which he was supposed to teach me grammar were spent in listening to tales of the Arabs and of his son, Namrūd, who worked with Ḥabīb Fāris, and whose name was known to every Arab of the Belḳa.
"If ever you wish to enter there," said Abu Namrūd, "go to Namrūd." And to Namrūd accordingly I had come.
A very short inquiry revealed the dwelling of Ḥabīb Fāris. I was received warmly, Ḥabīb was out, Namrūd away (was my luck forsaking me?), but would I not come in and rest? The house was small and the children many: while I debated whether the soaked ground outside would not prove a better bed, there appeared a magnificent old man in full Arab dress, who took my horse by the bridle, declared that he and no other should lodge me, and so led me away. I left my horse at the khān, climbed a long and muddy stair, and entered a stone paved courtyard. Yūsef Effendi hurried forward and threw open the door of his guest-chamber. The floor and the divan were covered with thick carpets, the windows glazed (though many of the panes were broken), a European cheffonier stood against the wall: this was more than good enough. In a moment I was established, drinking Yūsef's coffee, and eating my own cake.
ABYSSINIAN PRIESTS
Yūsef Effendi Sukkar (upon him be peace!) is a Christian and one of the richest of the inhabitants of Salt. He is a laconic man, but as a host he has not his equal. He prepared me an excellent supper, and when I had eaten, the remains were set before Mikhāil. Having satisfied my physical needs he could not or would not do anything to allay my mental anxieties as to the further course. Fortunately at this moment Ḥabīb Fāris arrived, and his sister-in-law, Paulina, an old acquaintance, and several other worthies, all hastening to "honour themselves" at the prospect of an evening's talk. ("God forbid! the honour is mine!") We settled down to coffee, the bitter black coffee of the Arabs, which is better than any nectar. The cup is handed with a "Deign to accept," you pass it back empty, murmuring "May you live!" As you sip some one ejaculates, "A double health," and you reply, "Upon your heart!" When the cups had gone round once or twice and all necessary phrases of politeness had been exchanged I entered upon the business of the evening. How was I to reach the Druze mountains? the Government would probably refuse me permission, at 'Ammān there was a military post on the entrance of the desert road; at Boṣrā they knew me, I had slipped through their fingers five years before, a trick that would be difficult to play a second time from the same place. Ḥabīb Fāris considered, and finally we hammered out a plan between us. He would send me to-morrow to Ṭneib, his corn land on the edge of the desert; there I should find Namrūd who would despatch word to one of the big tribes, and with an escort from them I could ride up in safety to the hills. Yūsef's two small sons sat listening open-eyed, and at the end of the talk one of them brought me a scrap of an advertisement with the map of America upon it. Thereat I showed them my maps, and told them how big the world was and how fine a place, till at ten the party broke up and Yūsef began spreading quilts for my bed. Then and not till then did I see my hostess. She was a woman of exceptional beauty, tall and pale, her face a full oval, her great eyes like stars. She wore Arab dress, a narrow dark blue robe that caught round her bare ankles as she walked, a dark blue cotton veil bound about her forehead with a red handkerchief and falling down her back almost to the ground. Her chin and neck were tattooed in delicate patterns with indigo, after the manner of the Bedouin women. She brought me water, which she poured over my hands, moved about the room silently, a dark and stately figure, and having finished her ministrations she disappeared as silently as she had come, and I saw her no more. "She came in and saluted me," said the poet, he who lay in durance at Mecca, "then she rose and took her leave, and when she departed my soul went out after her." No one sees Yūsef's wife. Christian though he be, he keeps her more strictly cloistered than any Moslem woman; and perhaps after all he is right.
The rain beat against the windows, and I lay down on the quilts with Mikhāil's exclamation in my ears: "Māsha-'llah! your Excellency is fortunate."
[CHAPTER II]
The village of Salt is a prosperous community of over 10,000 souls, the half of them Christian. It lies in a rich country famous for grapes and apricots, its gardens are mentioned with praise as far back as the fourteenth century by the Arab geographer Abu'l Fīda. There is a ruined castle, of what date I know not, on the hill above the clustered house roofs. The tradition among the inhabitants is that the town is very ancient; indeed, the Christians declare that in Salt was one of the first of the congregations of their faith, and there is even a legend that Christ was His own evangelist here. Although the apricot trees showed nothing as yet but bare boughs the valley had an air of smiling wealth as I rode through it with Ḥabīb Fāris, who had mounted his mare to set me on my way. He had his share in the apricot orchards and the vineyards, and smiled agreeably, honest man, as I commended them. Who would not have smiled on such a morning? The sun shone, the earth glittered with frost, and the air had a sparkling transparency which comes only on a bright winter day after rain. But it was not merely a general sense of goodwill that had inspired my words; the Christians of Salt and of Mādeba are an intelligent and an industrious race, worthy to be praised. During the five years since I had visited this district they had pushed forward the limit of cultivation two hours' ride to the east, and proved the value of the land so conclusively that when the Ḥājj railway was opened through it the Sultan laid hands on a great tract stretching as far south as Ma'ān, intending to convert it into a chiflik, a royal farm. It will yield riches to him and to his tenants, for if he be an indifferent ruler, he is a good landlord.
AN ARAB OF THE 'ADWĀN
GUARDING CROPS
Half an hour from Salt, Ḥabīb left me, committing me to the care of his hind, Yūsef, a stalwart man, who strode by my side with his wooden club (G̣unwā, the Arabs call it) over his shoulder. We journeyed through wide valleys, treeless, uninhabited, and almost uncultivated, round the head of the Belḳa plain, and past the opening of the Wādy Sīr, down which a man may ride through oak woods all the way to the Ghōr. There would be trees on the hills too if the charcoal burners would let them grow—we passed by many dwarf thickets of oak and thorn—but I would have nothing changed in the delicious land east of Jordan. A generation or two hence it will be deep in corn and scattered over with villages, the waters of the Wādy Sīr will turn mill-wheels, and perhaps there will even be roads: praise be to God! I shall not be there to see. In my time the uplands will still continue to be that delectable region of which Omar Khayyām sings: "The strip of herbage strown that just divides the desert from the sown"; they will still be empty save for a stray shepherd standing over his flock with a long-barrelled rifle; and when I meet the rare horseman who rides over those bills and ask him whence he comes, he will still answer: "May the world be wide to you! from the Arabs."
AN ENCAMPMENT NEAR THE DEAD SEA
That was where we were going, to the Arabs. In the desert there are no Bedouin, the tent dwellers are all 'Arab (with a fine roll of the initial guttural), just as there are no tents but houses—"houses of hair" they say sometimes if a qualification be needed, but usually just "houses" with a supreme disregard for any other significance to the word save that of a black goat's hair roof. You may be 'Arab after a fashion even if you live between walls. The men of Salt are classed among the tribes of the Belḳa, with the Abādeh and the Da'ja and the Hassaniyyeh and several more that form the great troup of the 'Adwān. Two powerful rulers dispute the mastership here of the Syrian desert, the Beni Ṣakhr and the 'Anazeh. There is a traditional friendship, barred by regrettable incidents, between the Ṣukhūr and the Belḳa, perhaps that was why I heard in these parts that the 'Anazeh were the more numerous but the less distinguished for courage of the two factions. I have a bowing acquaintance with one of the sons of Talāl ul Fāiz, the head of all the Beni Ṣakhr. I had met him five years before in these very plains, a month later in the season, by which time his tribe moves Jordan-wards out of the warm eastern pasturages. I was riding, escorted by a Circassian zaptieh, from Mādeba to Mshitta—it was before the Germans had sliced the carved façade from that wonderful building. The plain was covered with the flocks and the black tents of the Ṣukhūr, and as we rode through them three horsemen paced out to intercept us, black-browed, armed to the teeth, menacing of aspect. They threw us the salute from afar, but when they saw the soldier they turned and rode slowly back. The Circassian laughed. "That was Sheikh Fāiz," he said, "the son of Talāl. Like sheep, wāllah! like sheep are they when they meet one of us." I do not know the 'Anazeh, for their usual seat in winter is nearer the Euphrates, but with all deference to the Ṣukhūr I fancy that their rivals are the true aristocracy of the desert. Their ruling house, the Beni Sha'alān, bear the proudest name, and their mares are the best in all Arabia, so that even the Shammār, Ibn er Rashīd's people, seek after them to improve their own breed.
THE THEATRE, 'AMMĀN
From the broken uplands that stand over the Ghōr, we entered ground with a shallow roll in it and many small ruined sites dotted over it. There was one at the head of the Wādy Sīr, and a quarter of an hour before we reached it we had seen a considerable mass of foundations and a big tank, which the Arabs call Birket Umm el 'Amūd (the tank of the Mother of the Pillar). Yūsef said its name was due to a column which used to stand in the middle of it, surrounded by the water; an Arab shot at it and broke it, and its fragments lie at the bottom of the tank. The mound or tell, to give it its native name, of Amēreh is covered with ruins, and further on at Yadūdeh there are rock-hewn tombs and sarcophagi lying at the edge of the tank. All the frontier of the desert is strewn with similar vestiges of a populous past, villages of the fifth and sixth centuries when Mādeba was a rich and flourishing Christian city, though some are certainly earlier still, perhaps pre-Roman. Yadūdeh of the tombs was inhabited by a Christian from Salt, the greatest corn-grower in these parts, who lived in a roughly built farm-house on the top of the tell; he too is one of the energetic new comers who are engaged in spreading the skirts of cultivation. Here we left the rolling country and passed out into the edges of a limitless plain, green with scanty herbage, broken by a rounded tell or the back of a low ridge—and then the plain once more, restful to the eye yet never monotonous, steeped in the magic of the winter sunset, softly curving hollows to hold the mist, softly swelling slopes to hold the light, and over it all the dome of the sky which vaults the desert as it vaults the sea. The first hillock was that of Ṭneib. We got in, after a nine hours' march, at 5.30, just as the sun sank, and pitched tents on the southern slope. The mound was thick with ruins, low walls of rough-hewn stones laid without mortar, rock-cut cisterns, some no doubt originally intended not for water but for corn, for which purpose they are used at present, and an open tank filled up with earth. Namrūd had ridden over to visit a neighbouring cultivator, but one of his men set forth to tell him of my arrival and he returned at ten o'clock under the frosty starlight, with many protestations of pleasure and assurances that my wishes were easy of execution. So I went to sleep wrapped in the cold silence of the desert, and woke next day to a glittering world of sunshine and fair prospects.
A GATEWAY, 'AMMĀN
The first thing to be done was to send out to the Arabs. After consultation, the Da'ja, a tribe of the Belḳa, were decided to be the nearest at hand and the most likely to prove of use, and a messenger was despatched to their tents. We spent the morning examining the mound and looking through a mass of copper coins that had turned up under Namrūd's ploughshare—Roman all of them, one showing dimly the features of Constantine, some earlier, but none of the later Byzantine period, nor any of the time of the Crusaders; as far as the evidence of coinage goes, Ṭneib has been deserted since the date of the Arab invasion. Namrūd had discovered the necropolis, but there was nothing to be found in the tombs, which had probably been rifled centuries before. They were rock-cut and of a cistern-like character. A double arch of the solid rock with space between for a narrow entrance on the surface of the ground, a few jutting excrescences on the side walls, footholds to those who must descend, loculi running like shelves round the chambers, one row on top of another, such was their appearance. Towards the bottom of the mound on the south side there were foundations of a building which looked as though it might have been a church. But these were poor results for a day's exploration, and in the golden afternoon we rode out two hours to the north into a wide valley set between low banks. There were ruins strewn at intervals round the edge of it, and to the east some broken walls standing up in the middle of the valley—Namrūd called the spot, Ḳuṣeir es Saḥl, the Little Castle of the Plain. Our objective was a group of buildings at the western end, Khureibet es Sūḳ. First we came to a small edifice (41 feet by 39 feet 8 inches, the greatest length being from east to west) half buried in the ground. Two sarcophagi outside pointed to its having been a mausoleum. The western wall was pierced by an arched doorway, the arch being decorated with a flat moulding. Above the level of the arch the walls narrowed by the extent of a small set-back, and two courses higher a moulded cornice ran round the building. A couple of hundred yards west of the Ḳaṣr or castle (the Arabs christen most ruins either castle or convent) there is a ruined temple. It had evidently been turned at some period to other uses than those for which it was intended, for there were ruined walls round the two rows of seven columns and inexplicable cross walls towards the western end of the colonnades. There appeared to have been a double court beyond, and still further west lay a complex of ruined foundations. The gateway was to the east, the jambs of it decorated with delicate carving, a fillet, a palmetto, another plain fillet, a torus worked with a vine scroll, a bead and reel, an egg and dart and a second palmetto on the cyma. The whole resembled very closely the work at Palmyra—it could scarcely rival the stone lacework of Mshitta, and besides it had a soberer feeling, more closely akin to classical models, than is to be found there. To the north of the temple on top of a bit of rising ground, there was another ruin which proved to be a second mausoleum. It was an oblong rectangle of masonry, built of large stones carefully laid without mortar. At the south-east corner a stair led into a kind of ante-chamber, level with the surface of the ground at the east side owing to the slope of the hill. There were column bases on the outer side of this ante-chamber, the vestiges probably of a small colonnade which had adorned the east façade. Six sarcophagi were placed lengthways, two along each of the remaining walls, north, south and west. Below the base of the columns on either side of the stair ran a moulding, consisting of a bold torus between two fillets, and the same appeared on the inner side of the sarcophagi. The face of the buttress wall on the south side rose in two in-sets, otherwise the whole building was quite plain, though some of the fragments scattered round upon the grass were carved with a flowing vine pattern. This mausoleum recalls the pyramid tomb which is common in northern Syria; I do not remember any other example of it so far south. It may have resembled the beautiful monument with a colonnaded front which is one of the glories of the southern Dāna, and the fragments of vine scroll were perhaps part of the entablature.
THE TEMPLE, KHUREIBET ES SŪḲ
MAUSOLEUM, KHUREIBET ES SŪḲ
When I returned to my tents a little before sunset, I learnt that the boy we had despatched in the morning had lingered by the way and, alarmed by the lateness of the hour, had returned without fulfilling his mission. This was sufficiently annoying, but it was nothing compared with the behaviour of the weather next day. I woke to find the great plain blotted out by mist and rain. All day the south wind drove against us, and the storm beat upon our canvas walls. In the evening Namrūd brought news that his cave had been invaded by guests. There were a few tents of the Ṣukhūr a mile or two away from us (the main body of the tribe was still far to the east, where the winter climate is less rigorous), and the day's rain had been too much for the male inhabitants. They had mounted their mares and ridden in to Ṭneib, leaving their women and children to shift for themselves during the night. An hour's society presented attractions after the long wet day, and I joined the company.
ARABS OF THE BELḲA
Namrūd's cave runs far into the ground, so far that it must penetrate to the very centre of the hill of Ṭneib. The first large chamber is obviously natural, except for the low sleeping places and mangers for cattle that have been quarried out round the walls. A narrow passage carved in the rock leads into a smaller room, and there are yet others behind which I took on trust, the hot stuffy air and the innumerable swarms of flies discouraging me from further exploration. That evening the cave presented a scene primitive and wild enough to satisfy the most adventurous spirit. The Arabs, some ten or a dozen men clothed in red leather boots and striped cloaks soaked with rain, were sitting in the centre round a fire of scrub, in the ashes of which stood the three coffee-pots essential to desert sociability. Behind them a woman cooked rice over a brighter fire that cast a flickering light into the recesses of the cave, and showed Namrūd's cattle munching chopped straw from the rock-hewn mangers. A place comparatively free from mud was cleared for me in the circle, a cup of coffee prepared, and the talk went forward while a man might smoke an Arab pipe five times. It was chiefly of the iniquities of the government. The arm of the law, or rather the mailed fist of misrule, is a constant menace upon the edges of the desert. This year it had been quickened to baleful activity by the necessities of war. Camels and mares had been commandeered wholesale along the borders without hope of compensation in money or in kind. The Arabs had gathered together such live stock as was left to them and sent them away five or six days to the east, where the soldiery dared not penetrate, and Namrūd had followed their example, keeping only such cattle as he needed for the plough. One after another of my fellow guests took up the tale: the guttural strong speech rumbled round the cave. By God and Muḥammad the Prophet of God we called down such curses upon the Circassian cavalry as should make those powerful horsemen reel in their saddles. From time to time a draped head, with black elf locks matted round the cheeks under the striped kerchief, bent forward towards the glow of the ashes to pick up a hot ember for the pipe bowl, a hand was stretched out to the coffee cups, or the cooking fire flashed up under a pile of thorn, the sudden light making the flies buzz and the cows move uneasily. Namrūd was not best pleased to see his hardly gathered store of fire-wood melt away and his coffee beans disappear by handfuls into the mortar. ("Wāllah! they eat little when they feed themselves, but when they are guests much, they and their horses; and the corn is low at this late season.") But the word "guest" is sacred from Jordan to Euphrates and Namrūd knew well that he owed a great part of his position and of his security to a hospitality which was extended to all comers, no matter how inopportune. I added my quota to the conviviality of the party by distributing a box of cigarettes, and before I left a friendly feeling had been established between me and the men of the Beni Ṣakhr.
The following day was little more promising than that which had preceded it. The muleteers were most unwilling to leave the shelter of the caves and expose their animals to such rain in the open desert, and reluctantly I agreed to postpone the journey, and sent them into Mādeba, three hours away, to buy oats for the horses, cautioning them not to mention from whom they came. It cleared a little in the afternoon, and I rode across the plain southwards to Ḳasṭal, a fortified Roman camp standing on a mound.
This type of camp was not uncommon on the eastern frontiers of the Empire, and was imitated by the Ghassānids when they established themselves in the Syrian desert, if indeed Mshitta was, as has been surmised, but a more exquisite example of the same kind of building. Ḳasṭal has a strong enclosing wall broken by a single gate to the east and by round bastions at the angles and along the sides. Within, there is a series of parallel vaulted chambers leaving an open court in the centre—the plan with slight variations of Ḳal'at el Beiḍa in the Safa and of the modern caravanserai.[1] To the north there is a separate building, probably the Prætorium, the house of the commander of the fortress. It consists of an immense vaulted chamber, with a walled court in front of it, and a round tower at the south-west corner. The tower has a winding stair inside it and a band of decoration about the exterior, rinceaux above and fluted triglyphs below, with narrow blank metopes between them. The masonry is unusually good, the walls of great thickness; with such defences stretching to his furthest borders, the citizen of Rome might sleep secure o' nights.
A RUINED CHURCH, MĀDEBA
When I passed by Ḳasṭal, five years before, it was uninhabited and the land round it uncultivated, but a few families of fellaḥīn had established themselves now under the broken vaults and the young corn was springing in the levels below the walls, circumstances which should no doubt warm the heart of the lover of humanity, but which will send a cold chill through the breast of the archæologist. There is no obliterator like the ploughshare, and no destroyer like the peasant who seeks cut stones to build his hovel. I noted another sign of encroaching civilisation in the shape of two half starved soldiers, the guard of the nearest halting place on the Ḥājj railroad, which is called Zīza after the ruins a few miles to the west of it. The object of their visit was the lean hen which one of them held in his hand. He had reft it from its leaner companions in the fortress court—on what terms it were better not to inquire, for hungry men know no law. I was not particularly eager to have my presence on these frontiers notified to the authorities in 'Ammān, and I left rather hastily and rode eastward to Zīza.
THE ḲAL'AH AT ZĪZA
The rains had filled the desert watercourses, they do not often flow so deep or so swiftly as the one we had to cross that afternoon. It had filled, too, to the brim the great Roman tank of Zīza, so that the Ṣukhūr would find water there all through the ensuing summer. The ruins are far more extensive than those at Ḳasṭal; there must have been a great city here, for the foundations of houses cover a wide area. Probably Ḳasṭal was the fortified camp guarding this city, and the two together shared the name of Zīza, which is mentioned in the Notitia: "Equites Dalmatici Illyriciana Zīza." There is a Saracenic Ḳal'ah, a fort, which was repaired by Sheikh Ṣoktan of the Ṣukhūr, and had been furnished by him, said Namrūd, with a splendour unknown to the desert; but it has now fallen to the Sultan, since it stands in the territory selected by him for his chiflik, and fallen also into ruin. The mounds behind are strewn with foundations, among them those of a mosque, the mihrab of which was still visible to the south. Zīza was occupied by a garrison of Egyptians in Ibrahīm Pasha's time, and it was his soldiers who completed the destruction of the ancient buildings. Before they came many edifices, including several Christian churches, were still standing in an almost perfect state of preservation, so the Arabs reported. We made our way homewards along the edge of the railway embankment, and as we went we talked of the possible advantages that the land might reap from that same line. Namrūd was doubtful on this subject. He looked askance at the officials and the soldiery, indeed he had more cause to fear official raiders, whose rapacity could not be disarmed by hospitality, than the Arabs, who were under too many obligations to him to do him much harm. He had sent up a few truck-loads of corn to Damascus the year before; yes, it was an easier form of transport than his camels, and quicker, if the goods arrived at all; but generally the corn sacks were so much lighter when they reached the city than when Namrūd packed them into the trucks that the profit vanished. This would improve perhaps in time—at the time when lamps and cushions and all the fittings of the desert railway except the bare seats were allowed to remain in the place for which they were made and bought. We spoke, too, of superstition and of fears that clutch the heart at night. There are certain places, said he, where the Arabs would never venture after dark—haunted wells to which thirsty men dared not approach, ruins where the weary would not seek shelter, hollows that were bad camping grounds for the solitary. What did they fear? Jinn; who could tell what men feared? He himself had startled an Arab almost out of his wits by jumping naked at him from a lonely pool in the half light of the dawn. The man ran back to his tents, and swore that he had seen a jinni, and that the flocks should not go down to water where it abode, till Namrūd came in and laughed at him and told his own tale.
A CHRISTIAN ENCAMPMENT
We did not go straight back to my tents. I had been invited out to dine that evening by Sheikh Nahār of the Beni Ṣakhr, he who had spent the previous night in Namrūd's cave; and after consultation it had been decided that the invitation was one which a person of my exalted dignity would not be compromised by accepting.
"But in general," added Namrūd, "you should go nowhere but to a great sheikh's tent, or you will fall into the hands of those who invite you only for the sake of the present you will give. Nahār—well, he is an honest man, though he be Meskīn,"—a word that covers all forms of mild contempt, from that which is extended to honest poverty, through imbecility to the first stages of feeble vice.
The Meskīn received me with the dignity of a prince, and motioned me to the place of honour on the ragged carpet between the square hole in the ground that serves as hearth and the partition that separates the women's quarters from the men's. We had tethered our horses to the long tent ropes that give such wonderful solidity to the frail dwelling, and our eyes wandered out from where we sat over the eastward sweep of the landscape—swell and fall, fall and swell, as though the desert breathed quietly under the gathering night. The lee side of an Arab tent is always open to the air; if the wind shifts the women take down the tent wall and set it up against another quarter, and in a moment your house has changed its outlook and faces gaily to the most favourable prospect. It is so small and so light, and yet so strongly anchored that the storms can do little to it; the coarse meshes of the goat's hair cloth swell and close together in the wet so that it needs continuous rain carried on a high wind before a cold stream leaks into the dwelling-place.
The coffee beans were roasted and crushed, the coffee-pots were simmering in the ashes, when there came three out of the East and halted at the open tent. They were thick-set, broad-shouldered men, with features of marked irregularity and projecting teeth, and they were cold and wet with rain. Room was made for them in the circle round the hearth, and they stretched out their fingers to the blaze, while the talk went on uninterrupted, for they were only three men of the Sherarāt, come down to buy corn in Moab, and the Sherarāt, though they are one of the largest and the most powerful of the tribes and the most famous breeders of camels, are of bad blood, and no Arab of the Belḳa would intermarry with them. They have no fixed haunts, not even in the time of the summer drought, but roam the inner desert scarcely caring if they go without water for days together. The conversation round Nahār's fire was of my journey. A negro of the Ṣukhūr, a powerful man with an intelligent face, was very anxious to come with me as guide to the Druze mountains, but he admitted that as soon as he reached the territory of those valiant hillmen he would have to turn and flee—there is always feud between the Druzes and the Beni Ṣakhr. The negro slaves of the Ṣukhūr are well used by their masters, who know their worth, and they have a position of their own in the desert, a glory reflected from the great tribe they serve. I was half inclined to accept the present offer in spite of the possible drawback of having the negro dead upon my hands at the first Druze village, when the current of my thoughts was interrupted by the arrival of yet another guest. He was a tall young man, with a handsome delicate face, a complexion that was almost fair, and long curls that were almost brown. As he approached, Nahār and the other sheikhs of the Ṣukhūr rose to meet him, and before he entered the tent, each in turn kissed him upon both cheeks. Namrūd rose also, and cried to him as he drew near:
FLOCKS OF THE ṢUKHŪR
"Good? please God! Who is with you?"
The young man raised his hand and replied:
"God!"
He was alone.
Without seeming to notice the rest of the company, his eye embraced the three sheikhs of the Sherarāt eating mutton and curds in the entrance, and the strange woman by the fire, as with murmured salutations he passed into the back of the tent, refusing Nahār's offer of food. He was G̣ablān, of the ruling house of the Da'ja, cousin to the reigning sheikh, and, as I subsequently found, he had heard that Namrūd needed a guide for a foreigner—news travels apace in the desert—and had come to take me to his uncle's tents. We had not sat for more than five minutes after his arrival when Nahār whispered something to Namrūd, who turned to me and suggested that since we had dined we might go and take G̣ablān with us. I was surprised that the evening's gossip should be cut so short, but I knew better than to make any objection, and as we cantered home across Namrūd's ploughland and up the hill of Ṭneib, I heard the reason. There was blood between the Da'ja and the Sherarāt. At the first glance G̣ablān had recognised the lineage of his fellow guests, and had therefore retired silently into the depths of the tent. He would not dip his hand in the same mutton dish with them. Nahār knew, as who did not? the difficulty of the situation, but he could not tell how the men of the Sherarāt would take it, and, for fear of accidents, he had hurried us away. But by next morning the atmosphere had cleared (metaphorically, not literally), and a day of streaming rain kept the blood enemies sitting amicably round Namrūd's coffee-pots in the cave.
The third day's rain was as much as human patience could endure. I had forgotten by this time what it was like not to feel damp, to have warm feet and dry bed clothes. G̣ablān spent an hour with me in the morning, finding out what I wished of him. I explained that if he could take me through the desert where I should see no military post and leave me at the foot of the hills, I should desire no more. G̣ablān considered a moment.
"Oh lady," said he, "do you think you will be brought into conflict with the soldiery? for if so, I will take my rifle."
I replied that I did not contemplate declaring open war with all the Sultan's chivalry, and that with a little care I fancied that such a contingency might be avoided; but G̣ablān was of opinion that strategy went further when winged with a bullet, and decided that he would take his rifle with him all the same.
In the afternoon, having nothing better to do, I watched the Sherarāt buying corn from Namrūd. But for my incongruous presence and the lapse of a few thousand years, they might have been the sons of Jacob come down into Egypt to bicker over the weight of the sacks with their brother Joseph. The corn was kept in a deep dry hole cut in the rock, and was drawn out like so much water in golden bucketsful. It had been stored with chaff for its better protection, and the first business was to sift it at the well-head, a labour that could not be executed without much and angry discussion. Not even the camels were silent, but joined in the argument with groans and bubblings, as the Arabs loaded them with the full sacks. The Sheikhs of the Ṣukhūr and the Sherarāt sat round on stones in the drizzling mist, and sometimes they muttered, "God! God!" and sometimes they exclaimed, "He is, merciful and compassionate!" Not infrequently the sifted corn was poured back among the unsifted, and a dialogue of this sort ensued:
A ROMAN MILESTONE
Namrūd; "Upon thee! upon thee! oh boy! may thy dwelling be destroyed! may thy days come to harm!"
Beni Ṣakhr: "By the face of the Prophet of God! may He be exalted!"
Sherarāt (in suppressed chorus): "God! and Muḥammad the Prophet of God, upon Him be peace!"
A party in bare legs and a sheepskin:
"Cold, cold! Wāllah! rain and cold!"
Namrūd: "Silence, oh brother! descend into the well and draw corn. It is warm there."
Beni Ṣakhr: "Praise be to God the Almighty!"
Chorus of Camels: "B-b-b-b-b-dd-G-r-r-o-o-a-a."
Camel Drivers; "Be still, accursed ones! may you slip in the mud! may the wrath of God fall on you!"
Ṣukhūr (in unison): "God! God! by the light of His Face!"
At dusk I went into the servants' tent and found Namrūd whispering tales of murder over the fire on which my dinner was a-cooking.
"In the days when I was a boy," said he (and they were not far behind us), "you could not cross the Ghōr in peace. But I had a mare who walked—wāllah! how she walked! Between sunrise and sunset she walked me from Mezerīb to Salt, and never broke her pace. And besides I was well known to all the Ghawārny (natives of the Ghōr). And one night in summer I had to go to Jerusalem—force upon me! I must ride. The waters of Jordan were low, and I crossed at the ford, for there was no bridge then. And as I reached the further bank I heard shouts and the snap of bullets. And I hid in the tamarisk bushes more than an hour till the moon was low, and then I rode forth softly. And at the entrance of the mud hills the mare started from the path, and I looked down and saw the body of a man, naked and covered with knife wounds. And he was quite dead. And as I gazed they sprang out on me from the mud hills, ten horsemen and I was but one. And I backed against the thicket and fired twice with my pistol, but they surrounded me and threw me from the mare and bound me, and setting me again upon the mare they led me away. And when they came to the halting place they fell to discussing whether they should kill me, and one said: 'Wāllah! let us make an end.' And he came near and looked into my face, and it was dawn. And he said: 'It is Namrūd!' for he knew me, and I had succoured him. And they unbound me and let me go, and I rode up to Jerusalem."
The muleteers and I listened with breathless interest as one story succeeded another.
"There are good customs and bad among the Arabs," said Namrūd, "but the good are many. Now when they wish to bring a blood feud to an end, the two enemies come together in the tent of him who was offended. And the lord of the tent bares his sword and turns to the south and draws a circle on the floor, calling upon God. Then he takes a shred of the cloth of the tent and a handful of ashes from the hearth and throws them in the circle, and seven times he strikes the line with his naked sword. And the offender leaps into the circle, and one of the relatives of his enemy cries aloud: 'I take the murder that he did upon me!' Then there is peace. Oh lady! the women have much power in the tribe, and the maidens are well looked on. For if a maiden says: 'I would have such an one for my husband,' he must marry her lest she should be put to shame. And if he has already four wives let him divorce one, and marry in her place the maiden who has chosen him. Such is the custom among the Arabs."
He turned to my Druze muleteer and continued:
"Oh Muḥammad! have a care. The tents of the Ṣukhūr are near, and there is never any peace between the Beni Ṣakhr and the Druzes. And if they knew you, they would certainly kill you—not only would they kill you, but they would bum you alive, and the lady could not shield you, nor could I."
This was a grim light upon the character of my friend Nahār, who had exchanged with me hospitality against a kerchief, and the little group round the fire was somewhat taken back. But Mikhāil was equal to the occasion.
"Let not your Excellency think it," said he, deftly dishing up some stewed vegetables; "he shall be a Christian till we reach the Jebel Druze, and his name is not Muḥammad but Ṭarīf, for that is a name the Christians use."
So we converted and baptized the astonished Muḥammad before the cutlets could be taken out of the frying-pan.
[1]Admirable plans and photographs of the fort have been published by Brünnow and Domaszewski in vol. II. of their great work, "Die Provincia Arabia." This volume was not out at the time I visited Ḳasṭal.
[CHAPTER III]
The morning of Sunday, the 12th of February, was still stormy, but I resolved to go. The days spent at Ṭneib had not been wasted. An opportunity of watching hour by hour the life of one of these outlying farms comes seldom, but my thoughts had travelled forward, and I longed to follow the path they had taken. I caught them up, so it seemed to me, when G̣ablān, Namrūd and I heard the hoofs of our mares ring on the metals of the Ḥājj railway and set our faces towards the Open desert. We rode east by north, leaving Mshitta a little to the south, and though no one who knew it in its loveliness could have borne to revisit those ravished walls, it must be not forgotten that there is something to be said for the act of vandalism that stripped them. If there had been good prospect that the ruin should stand as it had stood for over a thousand years, uninjured save by the winter rains, it ought to have! been allowed to remain intact in the rolling country to which it gave so strange an impress of delicate and fantastic beauty; but the railway has come near, the plains will fill up, and neither Syrian fellah nor Turkish soldier can be induced to spare walls that can be turned to practical uses. Therefore let those who saw it when it yet stood unimpaired, cherish its memory with gratitude, and without too deep a regret.
MSHITTA
Namrūd and G̣ablān chatted without a pause. Late in the previous night two soldiers had presented themselves at the door of the cave, and having gained admittance they had told a strange tale. They had formed part, so they affirmed, of the troops that the Sultan had despatched from Baghdad to help Ibn er Rashīd against Ibn Sa'oud. They related how the latter had driven them back step by step to the very gates of Ḥāil, Ibn er Rashīd's capital, and how as the two armies lay facing one another Ibn Sa'oud with a few followers had ridden up to his enemy's tent and laid his hand upon the tent pole so that the prince of the Shāmmaṝ had no choice but to let him enter. And then and there they had come to an agreement, Ibn er Rashīd relinquishing all his territory to within a mile or two of Ḥāil, but retaining that city and the lands to the north of it, including Jōf, and recognising Ibn Sa'oud's sovereignty over Riāḍ and its extended fief. The two soldiers had made the best of their way westward across the desert, for they said most of their companions in arms were slain and the rest had fled. This was by far the most authentic news that I was to receive from Nejd, and I have reason to believe that it was substantially correct.[2] I questioned many of the Arabs as to Ibn er Rashīd's character: the answer was almost invariably the same. "Shātir jiddan," they would say; "he is very shrewd," but after a moment they would add, "majnūn" ("but mad"). A reckless man and a hot-headed, so I read him, with a restless intelligence and little judgment, not strong enough, and perhaps not cruel enough, to enforce his authority over the unruly tribes whom his uncle, Muḥammad, held in a leash of fear (the history of the war has been one long series of betrayals on the part of his own allies), and too proud, if the desert judges him rightly, to accept the terms of the existing peace. He is persuaded that the English government armed Ibn Sa'oud against him, his reason being that it was the Sheikh of Kweit, believed to be our ally, who furnished that homeless exile with the means of re-establishing himself in the country his ancestors had ruled, hoping thereby to weaken the influence of the Sultan on the borders of Kweit. The beginning of the trouble was possibly the friendship with the Sultan into which Ibn er Rashīd saw fit to enter, a friendship blazoned to the world by the appearance of Shammaṝi mares in Constantinople and Circassian girls in Ḥāil; but as for the end, there is no end to war in the desert, and any grievance will serve the turn of an impetuous young sheikh.
MSHITTA, THE FAÇADE
MSHITTA, THE INNER HALLS
Though we were riding through plains which were quite deserted and to the casual observer almost featureless, we seldom travelled for more than a mile without reaching a spot that had a name. In listening to Arab talk you are struck by this abundant nomenclature. If you ask where a certain sheikh has pitched his tents you will at once be given an exact answer. The map is blank, and when you reach the encampment the landscape is blank also. A rise in the ground, a big stone, a vestige of ruin, not to speak of every possible hollow in which there may be water either in winter or in summer, these are marks sufficiently distinguishing to the nomad eye. Ride with an Arab and you shall realise why the pre-Mohammadan poems are so full of names, and also how vain a labour it would be to attempt to assign a definite spot to the greater number of them, for the same name recurs hundreds of times. We presently came to a little mound which G̣ablān called Thelelet el Ḥirsheh and then to another rather smaller called Theleleh, and here G̣ablān drew rein and pointed to a couple of fire-blackened stones upon the ground.
ARABS OF THE BELḲA
"That," said he, "was my hearth. Here I camped five years ago. Yonder was my father's tent, and the son of my uncle pitched his below the slope."
I might have been riding with Imr ul Ḳais, or with any of the great singers of the Age of Ignorance, whose odes take swinging flight lifted on just such a theme, the changeless theme of the evanescence of desert existence.
The clouds broke in rain upon us, and we left Theleleh and paced on east—an Arab when he travels seldom goes quicker than a walk—while Namrūd, according to his habit, beguiled the way with story telling.
"Oh lady," said he,—"I will tell you a tale well known among the Arabs, without doubt G̣ablān has heard it. There was a man—he is dead now, but his sons still live—who had a blood feud, and in the night his enemy fell upon him with many horsemen, and they drove away his flocks and his camels and his mares and seized his tents and all that he had. And he who had been a rich man and much honoured was reduced to the extreme of necessity. So he wandered forth till he came to the tents of a tribe that was neither the friend nor the foe of his people, and he went to the sheikh's tent and laid his hand on the tent pole and said: 'Oh sheikh! I am your guest' "('Ana dakhīlak,' the phrase of one who seeks for hospitality and protection)." And the sheikh rose and led him in and seated him by the hearth, and treated him with kindness. And he gave him sheep and a few camels and cloth for a tent, and the man went away and prospered so that in ten years he was again as rich as before. Now after ten years it happened that misfortune fell upon the sheikh who had been his host, and he in turn lost all that he possessed. And the sheikh said: 'I will go to the tents of so-and-so, who is now rich, and he will treat me as I treated him.' Now when he reached the tents the man was away, but his son was within. And the sheikh laid his hand on the tent pole, and said, 'Ana dakhīlak,' and the man's son answered: 'I do not know you, but since you claim our protection come in and my mother will make you coffee.' So the sheikh came in, and the woman called him to her hearth and made him coffee, and it is an indignity among the Arabs that the coffee should be made by the women. And while he was sitting by the women's hearth, the lord of the tent returned, and his son went out and told him that the sheikh had come. And he said: 'We will keep him for the night since he is bur guest, and at dawn we will send him away lest we should draw his feud upon ourselves.' And they put the sheikh in a corner of the tent and gave him only bread and coffee, and next day they bade him go. And they sent an escort of two horsemen with him for a day's journey, as is the usage among the Arabs with one who has sought their protection and goes in fear of his life, and then they left him to starve or to fall among his enemies. But such ingratitude is rare, praise be to God! and therefore the tale is not forgotten."
FELLĀH UL 'ISA AD DA'JA
We were now nearing some slopes that might almost be dignified with the name of hills. They formed a great semicircle that stretched away to the south and in the hollow of their arm Fellāḥ ul 'Isa had pitched his tents. The Da'ja, when I was with them, occupied all the plain below the amphitheatre of the Jebel el 'Alya and also the country to the north-west between the hills and the river Zerka Mujēmir, the young sheikh, was camped to the north, his two uncles, Fellāḥ ul 'Isa and Ḥamūd, the father of G̣ablān, together in the plain to the south. I did not happen to see Ḥamūd; he had ridden away to visit some of his herds. G̣ablān put his horse to a canter and went on ahead to announce our arrival. As we rode up to the big sheikh's tent a white-haired man came out to welcome us. This was my host, Fellāḥ ul 'Isa, a sheikh renowned throughout the Belḳa for his wisdom and possessed of an authority beyond that which an old man of a ruling house exercises over his own tribe. Six months before he had been an honoured guest among the Druzes, who are not used to receiving Arab sheikhs on terms of friendship, and for this reason Namrūd had selected him as the best of counsellors in the matter of my journey. We were obliged to sit in his tent till coffee had been made, which ceremony occupied a full hour. It was conducted in a dignified silence, broken only by the sound of the pestle crushing the beans in the mortar, a music dear to desert ears and not easy of accomplished execution. By the time coffee drinking was over the sun had come out and with G̣ablān and Namrūd I rode up the hills north of the camp to inspect some ruins reported by the Arabs.
A CAPITAL AT MUWAG̣G̣AR
The Jebel el 'Alya proved to be a rolling upland that extended for many miles, sloping gradually away to the north and north-east. The general trend of the range is from west to south-east; it rises abruptly out of the plains and carries upon its crest a series of ruins out of which I saw two. They seem to have been a line of forts guarding a frontier that, in the absence of inscriptions, may be conjectured to have been Ghassānid. The first of the ruined sites lay immediately above Fellāḥ ul 'Isa's camp—I surmise it to have been the Ḳaṣr el Ahla (a name unknown to the Da'ja) marked on the Palestine Exploration map close to the Ḥājj road. If this be so, it lies four or five miles further east than the map makers have placed it, and its name should be written Ḳaṣr el 'Alya. It was a small tell, ringed round with the foundations of walls that enclosed an indistinguishable mass of ruins. We rode forward some three or four miles to the east, and at the head of a shallow valley on the northern side of the Jebel el 'Alya we found a large tank, about 120 feet by 150 feet, carefully built of dressed stones and half full of earth. Above it, nearer the top of the hill, there was a group of ruins called by the Arabs El Muwag̣g̣ar.[3] It must have been a military post, for there seemed to be few remains of small dwellings such as would point to the existence of a town. To the east lay a building that the Arabs maintain to have been a stable. It was planned like a church, in three parallel chambers, the nave being divided from the aisles by arcades of which six arches on either side were standing, round arches resting on piers of masonry. On the inner sides of these piers were holes through which to fasten tethering ropes, and possibly horses may at some period have been stabled between the arches. The three chambers were roofed with barrel vaults, and wall and vault alike were built of small stones set in brittle, crumbling mortar. A few hundred yards to the north-west there was a big open cistern, empty of water, with plastered sides and a flight of steps at one corner. The largest ruin was still further to the north-west, almost at the summit of the hill; it is called by the Arabs the Ḳaṣr, and was probably a fortress or barracks. The main entrance was to the east, and since the ground sloped away here, the façade was supported on a substructure of eight vaults, above which were traces of three, or perhaps four, doorways that could only have been approached by flights of steps. Moulded piers had stood on either side of the doorways—a few were still in their places—and the façade had been enriched with columns and a cornice, of which the fragments were strewn over the ground below together with capitals of various designs, all of them drawn from a Corinthian prototype, though many were widely dissimilar from the parent pattern. Some of the mouldings showed very simple rinceaux, a trefoil set in the alternate curves of a flowing stalk, others were torus-shaped and covered with the scales of the palm trunk pattern. The width of the façade was forty paces; behind it was an ante-chamber separated by a cross wall from a square enclosure. Whether there had been rooms round the inside of this enclosure I could not determine; it was heaped up with ruins and overgrown with turf. On either side of the eight parallel vaults there was another vaulted chamber forming ten in all; but the two supplementary vaults did not appear to have supported a superstructure of any kind, the massive side walls of the ante-chamber resting on the outer walls of the eight central vaults. The masonry was of squared stones with rubble between, set in mortar.
A CAPITAL AT MUWAG̣G̣AR
We rode back straight down the hill and so along the plain at its foot, passing another ruined site as we went, Najēreh was its name. Such heaped up mounds of cut stones the Arabs call "rujm"; it would be curious to know how far east they are to be found, how far the desert was inhabited by a permanent population. A day's journey from 'Alya, said G̣ablān, there is another fort called Kharaneh, and a third not far from it, Umm er Resas, and more besides, some of them with pictures, and all easy to visit in the winter when the western pasturages are comparatively empty.[4] As we rode he taught me to read the desert, to mark the hollow squares of big stones laid for the beds of Arab boys, and the semi-circular nests in the earth that the mother camels scoop out for their young. He taught me also the names of the plants that dotted the ground, and I found that though the flora of the desert is scanty in quantity, it is of many varieties, and that almost every kind has been put to some useful end by the Arabs. With the leaf of the utrufān they scent their butter, from the prickly kursa'aneh they make an excellent salad, on the dry sticks of the billān the camels feed, and the sheep on those of the shīḥ, the ashes of the g̣āli are used in soap boiling. The rôle of teacher amused G̣ablān, and as we passed from one prickly blue-grey tuft to another equally blue-grey and prickly, he would say: "Oh lady, what is this?" and smile cheerfully if the answer came right.
A CAPITAL AT MUWAG̣G̣AR
I was to dine that night in Fellāḥ ul 'Isa's tent, and when the last bar of red light still lay across the west G̣ablān came to fetch me. The little encampment was already alive with all the combination of noises that animates the desert after dark, the grunting and groaning of camels, the bleating of sheep and goats and the uninterrupted barking of dogs. There was no light in the sheikh's tent save that of the fire; my host sitting opposite me was sometimes hidden in a column of pungent smoke and sometimes illumined by a leaping flame. When a person of consideration comes as guest, a sheep must be killed in honour of the occasion, and accordingly we eat with our fingers a bountiful meal of mutton and curds and flaps of bread. But even on feast nights the Arab eats astonishingly little, much less than a European woman with a good appetite, and when there is no guest in camp, bread and a bowl of camel's milk is all they need. It is true they spend most of the day asleep or gossiping in the sun, yet I have seen the 'Ag̣ēl making a four months' march on no more generous fare. Though they can go on such short commons, the Bedouin must seldom be without the sensation of hunger; they are always lean and thin, and any sickness that falls upon the tribe carries off a large proportion of its numbers. My servants feasted too, and since we had left Muḥammad, or rather Ṭarīf the Christian, to guard the tents in our absence, a wooden bowl was piled with food and sent out into the night "for the guest who has remained behind."
Fellāḥ ul 'Isa and Namrūd fell into an interesting discussion over the coffee, one that threw much light on the position of the tribes of the Belḳa. They are hard pressed by encroaching civilisation. Their summer quarters are gradually being filled up with fellāḥin, and still worse, their summer watering places are now occupied by Circassian colonists settled by the Sultan in eastern Syria when the Russians turned them out of house and home in the Caucasus. The Circassians are a disagreeable people, morose and quarrelsome, but industrious and enterprising beyond measure, and in their daily contests with the Arabs they invariably come off victors. Recently they have made the drawing of water from the Zerka, on which the Bedouin are dependent during the summer, a casus belli, and it is becoming more and more impossible to go down to 'Ammān, the Circassian headquarters, for the few necessities of Arab life, such as coffee and sugar and tobacco. Namrūd was of opinion that the Belḳa tribes should have asked the Government to appoint a Ḳāimaḳām over their district to protect their interests; but Fellāḥ ul Tsa hesitated to call in King Stork, fearing the military service he might impose, the enforced registration of cattle and other hateful practices. The truth is that the days of the Belḳa Arabs are numbered. To judge by the ruins, it will be possible, as it was possible in past centuries, to establish a fixed population all over their territory, and they will have to choose between themselves building villages and cultivating the ground or retreating to the east where water is almost unobtainable in the summer, and the heat far greater than they care to face.
Namrūd turned from these vexed questions to extol the English rule in Egypt. He had never been there, but he had heard tales from one of his cousins who was a clerk in Alexandria; he knew that the fellahin had grown rich and that the desert was as peaceful as were the cities.
MILKING SHEEP
"Blood feud has ceased," said he, "and raiding; for when a man steals another's camels, look you what happens. The owner of the camels comes to the nearest konak and lays his complaint, and a zaptieh rides out alone through the desert till he reaches the robber's tent. Then he throws the salaam and enters. What does the lord of the tent do? he makes coffee and tries to treat the zaptieh as a guest. But when the soldier has drunk the coffee he places money by the hearth, saying, 'Take this piastre,' and so he pays for all he eats and drinks and accepts nothing. And in the morning he departs, leaving orders that in so many days the camels must be at the konak. Then the robber, being afraid, gathers together the camels and sends them in, and one, may be, is missing, so that the number is short. And the judge says to the lord of the camels, 'Are all the beasts here?' and he replies, 'There is one missing.' And he says, 'What is its value?' and he answers, 'Eight liras.' Then the judge says to the other, 'Pay him eight liras.' Wāllah! he pays."
Fellāḥ ul 'Isa expressed no direct approval of the advantages of this system, but he listened with interest while I explained the principles of the Fellaḥīn Bank, as far as I understood them, and at the end he asked whether Lord Cromer could not be induced to extend his rule to Syria, an invitation that I would not undertake to accept in his name. Five years before, in the Ḥaurān mountains, a similar question had been put to me, and the answering of it had taxed my diplomacy. The Druze sheikhs of Ḳanawāt had assembled in my tent under shadow of night, and after much cautious beating about the bush and many assurances from me that no one was listening, they had asked whether if the Turks again broke their treaties with the Mountain, the Druzes might take refuge with Lord Cromer in Egypt, and whether I would not charge myself with a message to him. I replied with the air of one weighing the proposition in all its aspects that the Druzes were people of the hill country, and that Egypt was a plain, and would therefore scarcely suit them. The Sheikh el Balad looked at the Sheikh ed Dīn, and the horrible vision of a land without mountain fastnesses in which to take refuge, or mountain paths easy to defend, must have opened before their eyes, for they replied that the matter required much thought, and I heard no more of it. Nevertheless the moral is obvious: all over Syria and even in the desert; whenever a man is ground down by injustice or mastered by his own incompetence, he wishes that he were under the rule that has given wealth to Egypt, and our occupation of that country, which did so much at first to alienate from us the sympathies of Mohammedans, has proved the finest advertisement of English methods of government.[5]
As I sat listening to the talk round me and looking out into the starlit night, my mind went back to the train of thought that had been the groundwork of the whole day, the theme that G̣ablān had started when he stopped and pointed out the traces of his former encampment, and I said:
G̣ABLĀN IBN ḤAMŪD AD DA'JA
"In the ages before the Prophet your fathers spoke as you do and in the same language, but we who do not know your ways have lost the meaning of the words they used. Now tell me what is so-and-so, and so-and-so?"
The men round the fire bent forward, and when a flame jumped up I saw their dark faces as they listened, and answered:
"By God! did they say that before the Prophet?"
"Māsha'llah! we use that word still. It is the mark on the ground where the tent was pitched."
Thus encouraged I quoted the couplet of Imr ul Ḳais which G̣ablān's utterance had suggested.
"Stay! let us weep the memory of the Beloved and her resting place in the cleft of the shifting sands 'twixt ēd Dujēl and Haumal."
G̣ablān, by the tent pole, lifted his head and exclaimed: "Māsha'llah! that is 'Antara."
All poetry is ascribed to 'Antara by the unlettered Arab; he knows no other name in literature.
I answered: "No; 'Antara spoke otherwise. He said: 'Have the poets aforetime left ought to be added by me? or dost thou remember her house when thou lookest on the place?' And Lebīd spoke best of all when he said: 'And what is man but a tent and the folk thereof? one day they depart and the place is left desolate.'"
G̣ablān made a gesture of assent.
"By God!" said he, "the plain is covered with places wherein I rested."
He had struck the note. I looked out beyond him into the night and saw the desert with his eyes, no longer empty but set thicker with human associations than any city. Every line of it took on significance, every stone was like the ghost of a hearth in which the warmth of Arab life was hardly cold, though the fire might have been extinguished this hundred years. It was a city of shadowy outlines visible one under the other, fleeting and changing, combining into new shapes elements that are as old as Time, the new indistinguishable from the old and the old from the new.
There is no name for it. The Arabs do not speak of desert or wilderness as we do. Why should they? To them it is neither desert nor wilderness, but a land of which they know every feature, a mother country whose smallest product has a use sufficient for their needs. They know, or at least they knew in the days when their thoughts shaped themselves in deathless verse, how to rejoice in the great spaces and how to honour the rush of the storm. In many a couplet they extolled the beauty of the watered spots; they sang of the fly that hummed there, as a man made glad with wine croons melodies for his sole ears to hear, and of the pools of rain that shone like silver pieces, or gleamed dark as the warrior's mail when the wind ruffled them. They had watched, as they crossed the barren watercourses, the laggard wonders of the night, when the stars seemed chained to the sky as though the dawn would never come. Imr ul Ḳais had seen the Pleiades caught like jewels in the net of a girdle, and with the wolf that howled in the dark he had claimed fellowship: "Thou and I are of one kindred, and, lo, the furrow that thou ploughest and that I plough shall yield one harvest." But by night or by day there was no overmastering terror, no meaningless fear and no enemy that could not be vanquished. They did not cry for help, those poets of the Ignorance, either to man or God; but when danger fell upon them they remembered the maker of their sword, the lineage of their horse and the prowess of their tribe, and their own right hand was enough to carry them through. And then they gloried as men should glory whose blood flows hot in their veins, and gave no thanks where none were due.
ON THE ḤĀJJ ROAD
This is the temper of verse as splendid of its kind as any that has fallen from the lips of men. Every string of Arab experience is touched in turn, and the deepest chords of feeling are resonant. There are no finer lines than those in which Lebīd sums up his appreciation of existence, a poem where each one of the fourteen couplets is instinct with a grave and tragic dignity beyond all praise. He looks sorrow in the face, old age and death, and ends with a solemn admission of the limitations of human wisdom: "By thy life! the casters of pebbles and the watchers of the flight of birds, how know they what God is doing?" The voice of warning is never the voice of dismay. It recurs often enough, but it does not check the wild daring of the singer. "Death is no chooser!" cries Tārafa, "the miser or the free-handed, Death has his rope round the swift flying heel of him!" But he adds: "What dost thou fear? To-day is thy life." And as fearlessly Zuhair sets forth his experience: "To-day I know and yesterday and the days that were, but for to-morrow mine eyes are sightless. For I have seen Doom let out in the dark like a blind camel; those it struck died and those it missed lived to grow old." The breath of inspiration touched all alike, old and young, men and women, and among the most exquisite remnants of the desert heritage is a dirge sung by a sister for her dead brother, which is no less valuable as a historical document than it is admirable in sentiment. An Naḍr Ibn el Hārith was taken prisoner by Muḥammad at Uthail, after the battle of Bedr, and by his order put to death, and through the verses of Ḳutaila you catch the revolt of feeling with which the Prophet's pretensions were greeted by those of his contemporaries who would not submit to them, coupled with the necessary respect due to a man whose race was as good as their own. "Oh camel rider!" she cries,
"Oh camel rider! Uthail, methinks, if thou speedest well,
shall lie before thee when breaks the fifth Dawn o'er thy road.
Take thou a word to a dead man there—and a greeting, sure,
but meet it is that the riders bring from friends afar—
From me to him, yea and tears unstanched, in a flood they flow
when he plies the well rope, and others choke me that stay
behind.
Raise clear thy voice that an Naḍr may hear if thou call on him—
can a dead man hear? Can he answer any that shouts his name?
Day long the swords of his father's sons on his body played—
Ah God! the bonds of a brother's blood that were severed there!
Helpless, a-weary, to death they led him, with fight foredone;
short steps he takes with his fettered feet and his arms are bound.
Oh Muḥammad! sprung from a mother thou of a noble house,
and thy father too was of goodly stock when the kin is told.
Had it cost thee dear to have granted grace that day to him?
yea, a man may pardon though anger burn in his bosom sore.
And the nearest he in the ties of kinship of all to thee,
and the fittest he, if thou loosedst any to be set free.
Ah, hadst thou taken a ransom, sure with the best of all
that my hand possessed I had paid thee, spending my utmost
store."
And on yet stronger wing the wild free spirit of the desert rose in his breast who lay in ward at Mecca, and he sang of love and death with a voice that will not be silenced:
"My longing climbs up the steep with the riders of El Yemen,
by their side, while my body lies in Mecca a prisoner.
I marvelled as she came darkling to me and entered free,
while the prison door before me was bolted and surely barred.
She drew near and greeted me, then she rose and bade farewell,
and when she turned my life well-nigh went forth with her.
Nay, think not that I am bowed with fear away from you,
or that I tremble before death that stands so nigh.
Or that my soul quakes at all before your threatening,
or that my spirit is broken by walking in these chains.
But a longing has smitten my heart born of love for thee,
as it was in the days aforetime when that I was free."[6]
The agony of the captive, the imagined vision of the heart's desire which no prison bars could exclude, then the fine protest lest his foes should dream that his spirit faltered, and the strong man's fearless memory of the passion that had shaken his life and left his soul still ready to vanquish death—there are few such epitomes of noble emotion. Born and bred on the soil of the desert, the singers of the Age of Ignorance have left behind them a record of their race that richer and wiser nations will find hard to equal.
[2]Since the events above recorded, Ibn Sa'oud has, I believe, come to terms with the Sultan after a vain appeal to a stronger ally, and Ibn er Rashīd is reported to be struggling to turn out the Turkish garrisons which were appointed nominally to aid him. Quite recently there has been a rumour that Ibn er Rashīd is dead.
[3]El Muwaḳḳar it is written, but the Bedouin change the hard k into a hard g. The site has been described in "Die Provincia Arabia," vol II.
[4]Several of these ruins were visited by Musil, but his took is not yet published.
[5]The present unrest in Egypt may seem to throw a doubt upon the truth of these observations, but I do not believe this to be the case. The Egyptians have forgotten the miseries from which our administration rescued them, the Syrians and the people of the desert are still labouring under them, and in their eyes the position of their neighbours is one of unalloyed and enviable ease. But when once the wolf is driven from the door, the restraints imposed by an immutable law eat into the temper of a restless, unstable population accustomed to reckon with misrule and to profit by the frequent laxity and the occasional opportunities of undeserved advancement which characterise it. Justice is a capital thing when it guards your legal rights, but most damnable when you wish to usurp the rights of others. Fellāḥ ul 'Isa and his kind would not be slow to discover its defects.
[6]I have borrowed Sir Charles Lyall's beautiful and most scholarly translation of this and the preceding poem.
[CHAPTER IV]
There is an Arabic proverb which says: "Ḥayyeh rubda wa la ḍaif muḍḥa"—neither ash-grey snake nor midday guest. We were careful not to make a breach in our manners by outstaying our welcome, and our camp was up before the sun. To wake in that desert dawn was like waking in the heart of an opal. The mists lifting their heads out of the hollows, the dews floating in ghostly wreaths from the black tents, were shot through first with the faint glories of the eastern sky and then with the strong yellow rays of the risen sun. I sent a silver and purple kerchief to Fellāḥ ul 'Isa, "for the little son" who had played solemnly about the hearth, took grateful leave of Namrūd, drank a parting cup of coffee, and, the old sheikh holding my stirrup, mounted and rode away with G̣ablān. We climbed the Jebel el 'Alya and crossed the wide summit of the range; the landscape was akin to that of our own English border country but bigger, the sweeping curves more generous, the distances further away. The glorious cold air intoxicated every sense and set the blood throbbing—to my mind the saying about the Bay of Naples should run differently. See the desert on a fine morning and die—if you can. Even the stolid mules felt the breath of it and raced across the spongy ground ("Mad! the accursed ones!") till their packs swung round and brought them down, and twice we stopped to head them off and reload. The Little Heart, the highest peak of the Jebel Druze, surveyed us cheerfully the while, glittering in its snow mantle far away to the north.
ARABS RIDING MARDŪF
At the foot of the northern slopes of the 'Alya hills we entered a great rolling plain like that which we had left to the south. We passed many of those mysterious rujm which start the fancy speculating on the past history of the land, and presently we caught sight of the scattered encampments of the Ḥassaniyyeh, who are good friends to the Da'ja and belong to the same group of tribes. And here we spied two riders coming across the plain and G̣ablān went out to greet them and remained some time in talk, and then returned with a grave face. The day before, the very day before, while we had been journeying peacefully from Ṭneib, four hundred horsemen of the Ṣukhūr and the Ḥoweiṭāṭ, leagued in evil, had swept these plains, surprised an outlying group of the Beni Ḥassan and carried off the tents, together with two thousand head of cattle. It was almost a pity, I thought, that we had come a day too late, but G̣ablān looked graver still at the suggestion, and said that he would have been forced to join in the fray, yes, he would even have left me, though I had been committed to his charge, for the Da'ja were bound to help the Beni Ḥassan against the Ṣukhūr. And perhaps yesterday's work would be enough to break the new-born truce between that powerful tribe and the allies of the 'Anazeh and set the whole desert at war again. There was sorrow in the tents of the Children of Ḥassan. We saw a man weeping by the tent pole, with his head bowed in his hands, everything he possessed having been swept from him. As we rode we talked much of ghazu (raid) and the rules that govern it. The fortunes of the Arab are as varied as those of a gambler on the Stock Exchange. One day he is the richest man in the desert, and next morning he may not have a single camel foal to his name. He lives in a state of war, and even if the surest pledges have been exchanged with the neighbouring tribes there is no certainty that a band of raiders from hundreds of miles away will not descend on his camp in the night, as a tribe unknown to Syria, the Beni Awājeh, fell, two years ago, on the lands south-east of Aleppo, crossing three hundred miles of desert, Mardūf (two on a camel) from their seat above Baghdad, carrying off all the cattle and killing scores of people. How many thousand years this state of things has lasted, those who shall read the earliest records of the inner desert will tell us, for it goes back to the first of them, but in all the centuries the Arab has bought no wisdom from experience. He is never safe, and yet he behaves as though security were his daily bread. He pitches his feeble little camps, ten or fifteen tents together, over a wide stretch of undefended and indefensible country. He is too far from his fellows to call in their aid, too far as a rule to gather the horsemen together and follow after the raiders whose retreat must be sufficiently slow, burdened with the captured flocks, to guarantee success to a swift pursuit. Having lost all his worldly goods, he goes about the desert and makes his plaint, and one man gives him a strip or two of goats' hair cloth, and another a coffee-pot, a third presents him with a camel, and a fourth with a few sheep, till he has a roof to cover him and enough animals to keep his family from hunger. There are good customs among the Arabs, as Namrūd said. So he bides his time for months, perhaps for years, till at length opportunity ripens, and the horsemen of his tribe with their allies ride forth and recapture all the flocks that had been carried off and more besides, and the feud enters on another phase. The truth is that the ghazu is the only industry the desert knows and the only game. As an industry it seems to the commercial mind to be based on a false conception of the laws of supply and demand, but as a game there is much to be said for it. The spirit of adventure finds full scope in it—you can picture the excitement of the night ride across the plain, the rush of the mares in the attack, the glorious (and comparatively innocuous) popping of rifles and the exhilaration of knowing yourself a fine fellow as you turn homewards with the spoil. It is the best sort of fantasia, as they say in the desert, with a spice of danger behind it. Not that the danger is alarmingly great: a considerable amount of amusement can be got without much bloodshed, and the raiding Arab is seldom bent on killing. He never lifts his hand against women and children, and if here and there a man falls it is almost by accident, since who can be sure of the ultimate destination of a rifle bullet once it is embarked on its lawless course? This is the Arab view of the ghazu; the Druzes look at it otherwise. For them it is red war. They do not play the game as it should be played, they go out to slay, and they spare no one. While they have a grain of powder in their flasks and strength to pull the trigger, they kill every man, woman and child that they encounter.
A TRAVELLING ENCAMPMENT OF THE 'AG̣ĒL
Knowing the independence of Arab women and the freedom with which marriages are contracted between different tribes of equal birth, I saw many romantic possibilities of mingled love and hatred between the Montagues and the Capulets. "Lo, on a sudden I loved her," says Antara, "though I had slain her kin." G̣ablān replied that these difficult situations did indeed occur, and ended sometimes in a tragedy, but if the lovers would be content to wait, some compromise could be arrived at, or they might be able to marry during one of the brief but oft-recurring intervals of truce. The real danger begins when blood feud is started within the tribe itself and a man having murdered one of his own people is cast out a homeless, kinless exile to shelter with strangers or with foes. Such was Imr ul Ḳais, the lonely outlaw, crying to the night: "Oh long night, wilt thou not bring the dawn? yet the day is no better than thou."
A DESERT WELL
A few miles further north the Ḥassaniyyeh encampments had not yet heard of yesterday's misfortune, and we had the pleasure of spreading the ill-news. G̣ablān rode up to every group we passed and delivered his mind of its burden; the men in buckram multiplied as we went, and perhaps I had been wrong in accepting the four hundred of the original statement, for they had had plenty of time to breed during the twenty-four hours that had elapsed between their departure and our arrival. All the tents were occupied with preparations not for war but for feasting. On the morrow fell the great festival of the Mohammedan year, the Feast of Sacrifice, when the pilgrims in Mecca slaughter their offerings and True Believers at home follow their example. By every tent there was a huge pile of thorns wherewith to roast the camel or sheep next day, and the shirts of the tribe were spread out to dry in the sun after a washing which, I have reason to believe, takes place but once a year. Towards sunset we reached a big encampment of the Beni Ḥassan, where G̣ablān decided to spend the night. There was water in a muddy pool near at hand and a good site for our tents above the hollow in which the Arabs lay. None of the great sheikhs were camped there and, mindful of Namrūd's warnings, I refused all invitations and spent the evening at home, watching the sunset and the kindling of the cooking fires and the blue smoke that floated away into the twilight. The sacrificial camel, in gorgeous trappings, grazed among my mules, and after dark the festival was heralded by a prolonged letting off of rifles. G̣ablān sat silent by the camp fire, his thoughts busy with the merrymakings that were on foot at home. It went sorely against the grain that he should be absent on such a day. "How many horsemen," said he, "will alight to-morrow at my father's tent! and I shall not be there to welcome them or to wish a good feast day to my little son!"
A DESERT WATER-COURSE
We were off before the rejoicings had begun. I had no desire to assist at the last moments of the camel, and moreover we had a long day before us through country that was not particularly safe. As far as my caravan was concerned, the risk was small. I had a letter in my pocket from Fellāḥ ul 'Isa to Nasīb el Aṭrash, the Sheikh of Ṣalkhad in the Jebel Druze. "To the renowned and honoured sheikh, Nasīb el Aṭrash," it ran (I had heard my host dictate it to Namrūd and seen him seal it with his seal), "the venerated, may God prolong his existence! We send you greetings, to you and to all the people of Ṣalkhad, and to your brother Jada'llah, and to the son of your uncle Muḥammad el Aṭrash in Umm er Rummān, and to our friends in Imtain. And further, there goes to you from us a lady of the most noble among the English. And we greet Muḥammada and our friends. . . . etc., (here followed another list of names), and this is all that is needful, and peace be with you." And beyond this letter I had the guarantee of my nationality, for the Druzes have not yet forgotten our interference on their behalf in 1860; moreover I was acquainted with several of the sheikhs of the Ṭurshān, to which powerful family Nasīb belonged. But G̣ablān was in a different case, and he was fully conscious of the ambiguity of his position. In spite of his uncle's visit to the Mountain, he was not at all certain how the Druzes would receive him; he was leaving the last outposts of his allies, and entering a border land by tradition hostile (he himself had no acquaintance with it but that which he had gathered on raiding expeditions), and if he did not find enemies among the Druzes he might well fall in with a scouring party of the bitter foes of the Da'ja, the Ḥaseneh or their like, who camp east of the hills.
CAMELS OF THE ḤASENEH
After an hour or two of travel, the character of the country changed completely: the soft soil of the desert came to an end, and the volcanic rocks of the Ḥaurān began. We rode for some time up a gulley of lava, left the last of the Ḥassaniyyeh tents in a little open space between some mounds, and found ourselves on the edge of a plain that, stretched to the foot of the Jebel Druze in an unbroken expanse, completely deserted, almost devoid of vegetation and strewn with black volcanic stones. It has been said that the borders of the desert are like a rocky shore on which the sailor who navigates deep waters with success may yet be wrecked when he attempts to bring his ship to port. This was the landing which we had to effect. Somewhere between us and the hills were the ruins of Umm ej Jemāl, where I hoped to get into touch with the Druzes, but for the life of us we could not tell where they lay, the plain having just sufficient rise and fall to hide them. Now Umm ej Jemāl has an evil name—I believe mine was the second European camp that had ever been pitched in it, the first having been that of a party of American archæologists who left a fortnight before I arrived—and G̣ablān's evident anxiety enhanced its sinister reputation. Twice he turned to me and asked whether it were necessary to camp there. I answered that he had undertaken to guide me to Umm ej Jemāl, and that there was no question but that I should go, and the second time I backed my obstinacy by pointing out that we must have water that night for the animals, and that there was little chance of finding it except in the cisterns of the ruined village. Thereupon I had out my map, and after trying to guess what point on the blank white paper we must have reached, I turned my caravan a little to the west towards a low rise from whence we should probably catch sight of our destination. G̣ablān took the decision in good part and expressed regret that he could not be of better service in directing us. He had been once in his life to Umm ej Jemāl, but it was at dead of night when he was out raiding. He and his party had stopped for half an hour to water their horses and had passed on eastward, returning, by another route. Yes, it had been a successful raid, praise be to God! and one of the first in which he had engaged. Mikhāil listened with indifference to our deliberations, the muleteers were not consulted, but as we set off again Ḥabīb tucked his revolver more handily into his belt.
UMM EJ JEMĀL
We rode on. I was engaged in looking for the rasīf, the paved Roman road that runs from Ḳal'at ez Zerka straight to Boṣrā, and also in wondering what I should do to protect if necessary the friend and guide whose pleasant companionship had enlivened our hours of travel and who should certainly come to no harm while he was with us. As we drew nearer to the rising ground we observed that it was crowned with sheepfolds, and presently we could see men gathering their flocks together and driving them behind the black walls, their hurried movements betraying their alarm. We noticed also some figures, whether mounted or on foot it was impossible to determine, advancing on us from a hollow to the left, and after a moment two puffs of smoke rose in front of them, and we heard the crack of rifles.
G̣ablān turned to me with a quick gesture.
"Ḍarabūna!" he said. "They have fired on us."
I said aloud: "They are afraid," but to myself, "We're in for it."
G̣ablān rose in his stirrups, dragged his fur-lined cloak from his shoulders, wound it round his left arm and waved it above his head, and very slowly he and I paced forward together. Another couple of shots were fired, and still we rode forward, G̣ablān waving his flag of truce. The firing ceased; it was nothing after all but the accepted greeting to strangers, conducted with the customary levity of the barbarian. Our assailants turned out to be two Arabs, grinning from ear to ear, quite ready to fraternise with us as soon as they had decided that we were not bent on sheep stealing, and most willing to direct us to Umm ej Jemāl. As soon as we had rounded the tell we saw it in front of us, its black towers and walls standing so boldly out of the desert that it was impossible to believe it had been ruined and deserted for thirteen hundred years. It was not till we came close that the rents and gashes in the tufa masonry and the breaches in the city wall were visible. I pushed forward and would have ridden straight into the heart of the town, but G̣ablān caught me up and laid his hand upon my bridle.
"I go first," he said. "Oh lady, you were committed to my charge."
And since he was the only person who incurred any risk and was well aware of the fact, his resolution did him credit.
WATERING CAMELS
We clattered over the ruined wall, passed round the square monastery tower which is the chief feature of the Mother of Camels (such is the meaning of the Arabic name), and rode into an open place between empty streets, and there was no one to fear and no sign of life save that offered by two small black tents, the inhabitants of which greeted us with enthusiasm, and proceeded to sell us milk and eggs in the most amicable fashion. The Arabs who live at the foot of Ḥaurān mountains are called the Jebeliyyeh, the Arabs of the Hills, and they are of no consideration, being but servants and shepherds to the Druzes. In the winter they herd the flocks that are sent down into the plain, and in the summer they are allowed to occupy the uncultivated slopes with their own cattle.
I spent the hour of daylight that remained in examining the wonderful Nabatæan necropolis outside the walls. Monsieur Dussaud began the work on it five years ago; Mr. Butler and Dr. Littmann, whose visit immediately preceded mine, will be found to have continued it when their next volumes are given to the world. Having seen what tombs they had uncovered and noted several mounds that must conceal others, I sent away my companions and wandered in the dusk through the ruined streets of the town, into great rooms and up broken stairs, till G̣ablān came and called me in, saying that if a man saw something in a fur coat exploring those uncanny places after dark, he might easily take the apparition for a ghoul and shoot at it. Moreover, he wished to ask me whether he might not return to Ṭneib. One of the Arabs would guide us next day to the first Druze village, and G̣ablān would as soon come no nearer to the Mountain. I agreed readily, indeed it was a relief not to have his safety on my conscience. He received three napoleons for his trouble and a warm letter of thanks to deliver to Fellāḥ ul 'Isa, and we parted with many assurances that if God willed we would travel together again.
STRIKING CAMP
The stony foot of the Jebel Ḥaurān is strewn with villages deserted since the Mohammedan invasion in the seventh century. I visited two that lay not far from my path, Shabḥa and Shabḥīyyeh, and found them to be both of the same character as Umm ej Jemāl. From afar they look like well-built towns with square towers rising above streets of three-storied houses. Where the walls have fallen they lie as they fell, and no hand has troubled to clear away the ruins. Monsieur de Vogüé was the first to describe the architecture of the Ḥaurān; his splendid volumes are still the principal source of information. The dwelling-houses are built round a court in which there is usually an outer stair leading to the upper story. There is no wood used in their construction, even the doors are of solid stone, turning on stone hinges, and the windows of stone slabs pierced with open-work patterns. Sometimes there are traces of a colonnaded portico, or the walls are broken by a double window, the arches of which are supported by a small column and a rough plain capital; frequently the lintels of the doors are adorned with a cross or a Christian monogram, but otherwise there is little decoration. The chambers are roofed with stone slabs resting on the back of transverse arches. So far as can be said with any certainty, Nabatæan inscriptions and tombs are the oldest monuments that have been discovered in the district; they are followed by many important remains of pagan Rome, but the really flourishing period seems to have been the Christian. After the Mohammadan invasion, which put an end to the prosperity of the Ḥaurān uplands, few of the villages were re-inhabited, and when the Druzes came about a hundred and fifty years ago, they found no settled population. They made the Mountain their own, rebuilt and thereby destroyed the ancient towns, and extended their lordship over the plains to the south, though they have not established themselves in the villages of that debatable land which remains a happy hunting ground for the archæologist. The American expedition will make good use of the immense amount of material that exists there, and knowing that the work had been done by better hands than mine, I rolled up the measuring tape and folded the foot-rule. But I could not so far overcome a natural instinct as to cease from copying inscriptions, and the one or two (they were extremely few) that had escaped Dr. Littmann's vigilant eye and come by chance to me were made over to him when we met in Damascus.
To our new guide, Fendi, fell the congenial task of posting me up in the gossip of the Mountain. Death had been busy among the great family of the Turshān during the past five years. Fāiz el Aṭrash, Sheikh of Kreyeh, was gone, poisoned said some, and a week or two before my arrival the most renowned of all the leaders of the Druzes, Shibly Beg el Aṭrash, had died of a mysterious and lingering illness—poison again, it was whispered. There was this war and that on hand, a terrible raid of the Arabs of the Wādy Sirḥān to be avenged, and a score with the Ṣukhūr to be settled, but on the whole there was prosperity, and as much peace as a Druze would wish to enjoy. The conversation was interrupted by a little shooting at rabbits lying asleep in the sun, not a gentlemanly sport perhaps, but one that helped to fill and to diversify the pot. After a time I left the mules and Fendi to go their own way, and taking Mikhāil with me, made a long circuit to visit the ruined towns. We were just finishing lunch under a broken wall, well separated from the rest of the party, when we saw two horsemen approaching us across the plain. We swept up the remains of the lunch and mounted hastily, feeling that any greeting they might accord us was better met in the saddle. They stopped in front of us and gave us the salute, following it with an abrupt question as to where we were going. I answered: "To Ṣalkhād, to Nasīb el Aṭrash," and they let us pass without further remark. They were not Druzes, for they did not wear the Druze turban, but Christians from Ḳreyeh, where there is a large Christian community, riding down to Umm ej Jemāl to visit the winter quarters of their flocks, so said Fendi, whom they had passed a mile ahead. Several hours before we reached the present limits of cultivation, we saw the signs of ancient agriculture in the shape of long parallel lines of stones heaped aside from earth that had once been fruitful. They looked like the ridge and furrow of a gigantic meadow, and like the ridge and furrow they are almost indelible, the mark of labour that must have ceased with the Arab invasion. At the foot of the first spur of the hills, Tell esh Shīḥ (it is called after the grey white Shīḥ plant which is the best pasturage for sheep), we left the unharvested desert and entered the region of ploughed fields—we left, too, the long clean levels of the open wilderness and were caught fetlock deep in the mud of a Syrian road. It led us up the hill to Umm er Rummān, the Mother of Pomegranates, on the edge of the lowest plateau of the Jebel Druze, as bleak a little muddy spot as you could hope to see. I stopped at the entrance of the village, and asked a group of Druzes where I should find a camping ground, and they directed me to an extremely dirty place below the cemetery, saying there was no other where I should not spoil the crops or the grass, though the crops. Heaven save the mark! were as yet below ground, and the grass consisted of a few brown spears half covered with melting snow. I could not entertain the idea of pitching tents so near the graveyard, and demanded to be directed to the house of Muḥammad el Aṭrash, Sheikh of Umm er Rummān. This prince of the Ṭurshān was seated upon his roof, engaged in directing certain agricultural operations that were being carried forward in the slough below. Long years had made him shapeless of figure and the effect was enhanced by the innumerable garments in which the winter cold had forced him to wrap his fat old body. I came as near as the mud would allow, and shouted: