A Pilgrimage to Nejd, the Cradle of the Arab Race. Vol. 1 [of 2]

In the afternoon the weather cleared, and we made a little expedition to the top of the low tell just outside Nassr’s farm. The tell is of sandstone rock, orange coloured below, but weathered black on the upper surface. It is not more than a hundred feet high, but standing alone, it commands a very extensive view, curious as all views in the Jôf district are, and very pretty besides. In the fore-ground just below lay the farm, a square walled enclosure of three or four acres, with its palms and ithel trees, and its two low mud houses, and its wells, looking snug and trim and well to do. Beyond, looking westwards, three other farms were visible, spots of dark green in the broken wilderness of sand and sandstone rock, and then behind them Meskakeh, only its palm-tops in sight, and the dark mass of its citadel rising over them in fantastic outline. The long line of the palm grove stretched far away to the south, disappearing at last in a confused mass of sand-hills. These specially attracted our notice, for they marked the commencement of the Nefûd, not indeed the great Nefûd, but an outlying group of dunes tufted with ghada, and not at all unlike those passed through by the Calais and Boulogne railway. Our route, we know, lies across them, and we are to start to-morrow.

While I sat sketching this curious view, Wilfrid, who had climbed to the top of a tall stone, crowning the hill, came back with the news that he had discovered an inscription. We have been looking out, ever since our arrival in the sandstone district, for traces of ancient writing, but have hitherto found nothing except some doubtful scratches, and a few of those simple designs one finds everywhere on the sandstone, representing camels and gazelles. Here however, were three distinctly formed letters,

two of them belonging to the Greek alphabet.

It was evident, too, by the colour of the incisions, that they had been there for very many years. On these we have built a number of historical conjectures relating to Meskakeh, and its condition in classical times.

When we came home again, we found that Mohammed had been to make the last arrangements with Jóhar for our journey. The great man had raised objections at one point of the negotiations, but these had been settled by a dahab or gold piece, and he has now agreed to send a man with us, a professional guide for crossing the Nefûd. It seems that there are two lines by which Haïl may be reached, one of thirteen and the other of ten days’ journey. The first is better suited, they say, for heavy laden camels, as the sand is less deep, but we shall probably choose the shorter route, if only for the sake of seeing the Nefûd at its worst. For the Nefûd has been the object of our dreams all through this journey, as the ne plus ultra of desert in the world. We hear wonderful accounts of it here, and of the people who have been lost in it. This ten days’ journey represents something like two hundred miles, and there are only two wells on the way, one on the second, and another on the eighth day. The guide will bring his own camel, and carry a couple of waterskins, and we have bought four more, making up the whole number to eight. This will have to suffice for our mares as well as for ourselves, and we shall have to be very careful. We have laid in a sufficient stock of dates and bread, and have still got one of the kids left to start with in the way of meat, the other has just been devoured as I have said, and cannot be replaced. Provisions of every kind are difficult to procure at Meskakeh; it was only by the exercise of a little almost Turkish bullying that Jóhar has been able to get us a camel load of corn.

The rain is over and the moon shining. All our preparations are made for crossing the Nefûd, and in a few hours we shall be on our way. We shall want all our strength for the next ten days.

CHAPTER VIII

“We were now traversing an immense ocean of loose reddish sand, unlimited to the eye, and heaped up in enormous ridges running parallel to each other from north to south, undulation after undulation, each swell two or three hundred feet in average height, with slant sides and rounded crests furrowed in every direction by the capricious gales of the desert. In the depths between the traveller finds himself as it were imprisoned in a suffocating sand pit, hemmed in by burning walls on every side; while at other times, while labouring up the slope, he overlooks what seems a vast sea of fire, swelling under a heavy monsoon wind, and ruffled by a cross blast into little red hot waves.” – Palgrave.

Mohammed in love – We enter the red sand desert – Geology of the Nefûd – Radi – The great well of Shakik – Old acquaintance – Tales of the Nefûd – The soldiers who perished of thirst – The lovers – We nearly remain in the sand – Land at last

January 12. – We left the farm this morning in a thick fog, among the benedictions of the Ibn Arûks. They have treated us kindly, and we were sorry to say good-bye to them, especially to Turki and Areybi, although we are a little disappointed in our expectations of the family in general. In spite of their noble birth and their Nejdean traditions, they have the failings of town Arabs in regard to money, and it was a shock to our feelings that Nassr, our host, expected a small present in money at parting, nominally for the women, but in reality, no doubt, for himself. No desert sheykh, however poor, would have pocketed the mejidies. The boys too asked for gifts, the elder wanted a cloak, because one had been given to his brother, the younger, a jíbbeh, because he already had a cloak; and other members of the household came with little skins full of dates or semneh in their hands, in the guise of farewell offerings, and lingered behind for something in return. All this of course was perfectly fair, and we were pleased to make them happy with our money; but it hardly tallied with the fine sentiments they had been in the habit of expressing, in season and out of season, about the duties of hospitality. Such small disappointments, however, must be borne, and borne cheerfully, for people are not perfect anywhere, and a traveller has no right to expect more abroad than he would find at home. In England we might perhaps not have been received at all, while here our welcome had been perfectly honest at starting, whatever the afterthought may have been. So Wilfrid solemnly kissed the relations all round, and exchanged promises of mutual good-will and hopes of meeting; I went in to the harim to say good-bye to the rest of the family, and fortunately was not expected to kiss them all round; and then we set out on our way.

Our course lay due south over the sand hills we saw yesterday, and presently these shut out Meskakeh and its palm groves from our view, and we were once more reduced to our own travelling party of eight souls, with Radi our new guide, and fairly on the road to Haïl. These sand dunes are not really the Nefûd, and are much like what may be seen elsewhere in the desert, in the Sahara for instance, or in certain parts of the peninsula of Sinai. They are very picturesque, being of pure white sand, from fifty to a hundred feet high, with intervening spaces of harder ground, and are covered with vegetation. The ghada here grows quite into a tree, with fine gnarled trunks, nearly white, and feathery grey foliage. We met several shepherds with their flocks, sent here to graze from the town, and parties of women gathering firewood. Mohammed amused us very much all the morning, talking with these wood gatherers. He had managed to get a glimpse of his bride elect and her sister before starting, and fancies himself desperately in love, though he cannot make up his mind which of the two he prefers. Sometimes it is Muttra, as it ought to be, and sometimes the other, for no better reason, as far as we can learn, than that she is taller and older, for he did not see their faces. His conversations to-day with the wood gatherers shewed a naïveté of mind neither of us suspected. He would ride on whenever he saw a party of these women, and when we came up was generally to be found in earnest discussion with the oldest and ugliest of them on the subject of his heart. He would begin by asking them whether they were from Meskakeh, and lead round the conversation to the Ibn Arûk family, and if he found that the women knew them, he would vaguely ask how many daughters there were in Jazi’s house, and whether married or unmarried. Then he would hint that he had heard that the eldest one was very beautiful, and ask cautiously after the youngest, ending always by the disclosure that he himself was an Ibn Arûk from Tudmur, and that he was engaged to whichever of the two unmarried ones the old women had seemed to favour in their descriptions. By this process he had quite lost his head about both sisters, sometimes fancying that he was the happiest of men, and sometimes that Jazi had passed off the less valuable of his daughters upon him. On such occasions he would turn to me and beg me to repeat for the hundredth time my description of Muttra’s merits, which consoled him until he met somebody else to raise new doubts in his mind.

After about eight miles of travelling through the sand dunes, we came out rather suddenly on the village of Kara, the last that we shall see for many a day. It is commanded by a rocky mound, with a ruin on it, and contains seventy or eighty houses; the palm grove surrounding it is remarkable for the palms and ithel trees. The fog had cleared off, and the sun was hot enough to make us glad to sit down for a few minutes under the mud wall which encloses the oasis. Some villagers came out, and we had a little chat about Kara and its sheykh, while our mares were being watered from a well close by. They told us we should find a Roala camp not far upon our way, for the camels from it were watered from this very well. Formerly Kara, like Jôf and Meskakeh, was a fief of the Ibn Shaalans, and they still pay a small tribute to Sotamm, but in return they make the Bedouins pay for the water they use. There is no danger of being attacked by the Roala or anyone else, for we are in Ibn Rashid’s country now, where highway robbery is not allowed. The villagers were very hospitable in their offers of entertainment if we would remain at Kara, but there was nothing in the place sufficiently interesting to detain us, so we went on. It contains, like Jôf and Meskakeh, a ruined castle on a low tell, but the ruins are now not much more than the foundations of old stone walls made without cement.

Not long after leaving the village, we came upon a party of Roala, with several hundred camels coming in to Kara for water. They were unarmed, and travelling as peaceably as peasants would in Italy. They told us their camp was out of our way, and too far off for us to reach to-night, but that we should find Beneyeh ibn Shaalan, a cousin of Sotamm’s, near the well of Shakik our watering place for to-morrow. It argued well for the security of the country, to find parties of villagers, as we presently did, out in the sand dunes many miles beyond Kara, with all these Bedouins about. But really there seem to be law and order in Ibn Rashid’s government. After travelling on for another two hours and a half in broken ground, we came at last to a steep acclivity which proved, when we had mounted it, to be the further edge of the Meskakeh depression, and above it we found ourselves on a gravelly plain. The view from this edge, looking back, was very interesting, and gave us at once an idea of the geography of the whole country, the great basin of Meskakeh with its tells and sand hills, the long ridge of hill under which the oasis stands, the range of Jebel Hammamiyeh too, all mere islands in the basin, which seems moreover to include Jôf as well as the eastern villages in its main circuit. Wilfrid has little doubt now that Meskakeh and Jôf are really only the tail as it were of the Wady Sirhán or rather its head, for the whole must be in shape something like a tadpole, and this point its nose.

The Hamád or plain where we now were, is three hundred and fifty feet higher than Kara and Meskakeh, or 2220 feet above the sea. It is absolutely level and bare of vegetation, a flat black expanse of gravelly soil covered with small round pebbles, extending southwards to the horizon, and quite unlike anything in the basin below. We were much surprised to find such an open plain in front of us, for we had expected nothing now but sand, but the sand, though we could not see it, was not far off, and this was only as it were the shore of the great Nefûd.

At half past three o’clock we saw a red streak on the horizon before us, which rose and gathered as we approached it, stretching out east and west in an unbroken line. It might at first have been taken for an effect of mirage, but on coming nearer we found it broken into billows, and but for its red colour not unlike a stormy sea seen from the shore, for it rose up, as the sea seems to rise, when the waves are high, above the level of the land. Somebody called out “the Nefûd,” and though for a while we were incredulous, we were soon convinced. What surprised us was its colour, that of rhubarb and magnesia, nothing at all like the sand we had hitherto seen, and nothing at all like what we had expected. Yet the Nefûd it was, the great red desert of central Arabia. In a few minutes we had cantered up to it, and our mares were standing with their feet in its first waves.

January 13. – We have been all day in the Nefûd, which is interesting beyond our hopes, and charming into the bargain. It is, moreover, quite unlike the description I remember to have read of it by Mr. Palgrave, which affects one as a nightmare of impossible horror. It is true he passed it in summer, and we are now in mid-winter, but the physical features cannot be much changed by the change of seasons, and I cannot understand how he overlooked its main characteristics. The thing that strikes one first about the Nefûd is its colour. It is not white like the sand dunes we passed yesterday, nor yellow as the sand is in parts of the Egyptian desert, but a really bright red, almost crimson in the morning when it is wet with the dew. The sand is rather coarse, but absolutely pure, without admixture of any foreign substance, pebble, grit, or earth, and exactly the same in tint and texture everywhere. It is, however, a great mistake to suppose it barren. The Nefûd, on the contrary, is better wooded and richer in pasture than any part of the desert we have passed since leaving Damascus. It is tufted all over with ghada bushes, and bushes of another kind called yerta, which at this time of the year when there are no leaves, is exactly like a thickly matted vine. Its long knotted stems and fibrous trunk give it so much that appearance, that there is a story about its having originally been a vine. The rasúl Allah (God’s prophet), Radi says, came one day to a place where there was a vineyard, and found some peasants pruning. He asked them what they were doing, and what the trees were, and they, fearing his displeasure or to make fun of him, answered, these are “yerta” trees, yerta being the first name that came into their heads. “Yerta inshallah, yerta let them be then,” rejoined the prophet, and from that day forth they ceased to be vines and bore no fruit. There are, besides, several kinds of camel pasture, especially one new to us called adr, on which they say sheep can feed for a month without wanting water, and more than one kind of grass. Both camels and mares are therefore pleased with the place, and we are delighted with the abundance of firewood for our camps. Wilfrid says that the Nefûd has solved for him at last the mystery of horse-breeding in Central Arabia. In the hard desert there is nothing a horse can eat, but here there is plenty. The Nefûd accounts for everything. Instead of being the terrible place it has been described by the few travellers who have seen it, it is in reality the home of the Bedouins during a great part of the year. Its only want is water, for it contains but few wells; all along the edge, it is thickly inhabited, and Radi tells us that in the spring, when the grass is green after rain, the Bedouins care nothing for water, as their camels are in milk, and they go for weeks without it, wandering far into the interior of the sand desert.

We have been travelling through the Nefûd slowly all day, and have occupied ourselves in studying its natural features. At first sight it seemed to us an absolute chaos, and heaped up here and hollowed out there, ridges and cross ridges, and knots of hillocks all in utter confusion, but after some hours’ marching we began to detect a uniformity in the disorder, which we are occupied in trying to account for. The most striking features of the Nefûd are the great horse-hoof hollows which are scattered all over it (Radi calls them fulj). These, though varying in size from an acre to a couple of hundred acres, are all precisely alike in shape and direction. They resemble very exactly the track of an unshod horse, that is to say, the toe is sharply cut and perpendicular, while the rim of the hoof tapers gradually to nothing at the heel, the frog even being roughly but fairly represented by broken ground in the centre, made up of converging water-courses. The diameter of some of these fuljes must be at least a quarter of a mile, and the depth of the deepest of them, which we measured to-day, proved to be 230 feet, bringing it down very nearly exactly to the level of the gravelly plain which we crossed yesterday, and which, there can be little doubt, is continued underneath the sand. This is all the more probable, as we found at the bottom of this deepest fulj, and nowhere else, a bit of hard ground. The next deepest fulj we measured was only a hundred and forty feet, and was still sandy at the lowest point, that is to say, just below the point of the frog. Though the soil composing the sides and every part of the fuljes is of pure sand, and the immediate surface must be constantly shifting, it is quite evident that the general outline of each has remained unchanged for years, possibly for centuries. The vegetation proves this; for it is not a growth of yesterday, and it clothes the fuljes like all the rest. Moreover, our guide, who has travelled backwards and forwards over the Nefûd for forty years, asserts that it never changes. No sandstorm ever fills up the hollows, or carries away the ridges. He knows them all, and has known them ever since he was a boy. “They were made so by God.” Wilfrid has been casting about, however, for some natural theory to account for their formation, but has not yet been able to decide whether they are owing to the action of wind or water, or to inequalities of the solid ground below. But at present he inclines to the theory of water. We shall be able perhaps to say more of them hereafter, when we have seen more of them, and I therefore reserve my remarks. We have had a long day’s journey, plodding up to the camel’s fetlocks in sand, and now it is time to look after Hanna, who is busy cooking. Height of our camp 2440 feet; but the highest level crossed during the day was 2560 feet. Nobody seen all day but one Roala on a delúl, who told us there was a camp to our left. We looked for it, but only made out camels at a great distance.

January 14. – Another bright clear morning, but with a cold wind from the south-east. Nothing can be more bright and sparkling than the winter’s sun reflected from these red sands. The fuljes have again been the object of our attention. We find that they all point in the same direction, or nearly so, that is to say, with the toe of the horse-hoof towards the west, though the steepest part of the declivity varies a little, sometimes the southerly and sometimes the northerly aspect being more abrupt than that facing east. This would seem to point rather to wind than water as being the original cause of the depressions.

At the edge, moreover, of the large fuljes there is generally a tallish mound of sand with a ridge, such as one sees on the top of a snow peak, and evidently caused by the wind, the lee side being steep and the weather side rounded. These seem to change with a change of wind and are generally bare of vegetation, and what is singular, of a lighter coloured sand than the rest. One can guess the existence of a deep fulj from a long way off, by the presence of one of these snowy looking mounds on the horizon. It is seldom that one can see very far in the Nefûd, as one is always toiling up or down sandslopes, or creeping like a fly round the edges of these great basins. The ground is generally pretty even, just round the edges, and one goes from one fulj to another so as to take this advantage of level. We rode up to the top of one or two of the highest sand peaks, and from one of them made out a line of hills about fifteen miles off to the west-south-west, with an isolated headland beyond, which we recognized as the Ras el Tawil pointed out to us the day we arrived at Jôf. From these heights too we could observe the lay of the fuljes, and make out that they followed each other in strings, not always in a straight line, but as a wady would go, winding gently about. This made us speculate on the water theory again. Wilfrid thinks that there may be a very gradual slope in the plain beneath the sand, and that whenever rain falls, as of course it must do here sometimes, it sinks through to the hard ground and flows under the sand along shallow winding wadys, and that the sand in this way is constantly slipping very gradually down the incline, and wherever there is a slope in the plain below, there the fulj occurs above it.13

This notion is favoured by what we have observed of the bare places, where such occur, for they always slope down towards the west. Radi assures us that no water ever collects in the fuljes even after rain. It runs into them and disappears. While we were discussing these points of natural history, we suddenly perceived camels grazing at the edge of a fulj not half a mile below us, and jumped on to our mares in a great hurry. I have contrived a bandage which enables me to mount quickly, and ever since the ghazú in the Wady Sirhán, we keep a good look-out for enemies. We then rode down to see what was to be seen, and presently found half a dozen people, men and women, in a fulj, and several more camels grazing near a tent. The tent was a mere awning with a back to it, and as soon as they saw us the women ran and pulled it down, while the men rushed off to the nearest camels, and made them kneel. They were evidently in a fright, and so quickly was it all done that by the time we had ridden up, the tent and tent furniture, such as there was, were loaded and ready to go. The Arabs take pride in being able to strike camp and march at almost a moment’s notice, and in this case I think it hardly took three minutes. They seemed much surprised and puzzled at our appearance when we rode up, and at first said they were Roala, but when our people joined us they confessed that they were of the Howeysin, a very poor tribe despised by the rest of the Bedouins and holding much the same position as the Sleb. They were, however, to our eyes undistinguishable from other Bedouins.

I asked Mohammed after this, how it was that in the desert each tribe seemed so readily recognized by their fellows, and he told me that each has certain peculiarities of dress or features well known to all. Thus the Shammar are in general tall, and the Sebaa very short but with long spears. The Roala spears are shorter, and their horses smaller. The Shammar of Nejd wear brown abbas, the Harb are black in face, almost like slaves, and Mohammed told me many more details as to other tribes which I do not remember. He said that Radi had recognised these people as Howeysin directly, by their wretched tent. He then reminded us of how we had been deceived last year by the ghazú we had met in the Hamád the day we found Jedaan. It was very lucky, he declared, that nothing disagreeable had happened then, for he had found out since that the nine people Wilfrid had ridden up to talk to, were in reality a ghazú of Amarrat, headed by Reja himself, Sheykh of the Erfuddi section of that tribe. Reja had come in not many weeks later to Palmyra to buy corn, and had stayed two days in Abdallah’s house, and had recognized him as the man who was with the Beg that day. These Amarrat had been in the act of discussing how they should attack our caravan when Wilfrid rode up, and the fact of his doing so alone made them imagine that our caravan was a very strong one, so they had decided on leaving us alone. Mohammed and Reja were now friends, Reja having given Mohammed a falcon on going away, and Mohammed the strange present of a winding-sheet. Winding-sheets he explains are much esteemed by the Bedouins, and this one had been made by Mohammed’s mother.