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

We are now, since four o’clock, camped on the sand under some ghada bushes, and the wind has dropped for the moment. It seems always to blow here except for an hour about sunset and another at dawn. We are to dine on beef tea, burghul with curry sauce, and a water-melon, the last of our Hauran store.

December 30. – On the high level all the morning over ground like the Harra with volcanic stones, a fierce south-east wind in our faces, so that we could not talk or hardly think. Our course lay towards an inhospitable looking range of hills called El Mizmeh, and when we reached these, to the right of them, for we travel in anything but a straight line. Saw great numbers of red locusts which, as the sun warmed the ground, began to fly about and were pursued by the men and knocked down with sticks. Enough have been secured to make a dish for dinner. When flying, these insects look very like large May flies, as they have the same helpless heavy flight, drifting down the wind with hardly sufficient power of direction to keep them clear of obstacles. Sometimes they fly right against the camels, and at others drop heavily into the bushes where they are easily caught. When sitting on the ground, however, they are hard to see, and they keep a good look-out and jump up and drift away again as you come near them. They seem to have more sense, than power of moving.

At two we came to more wells, – Mahiyeh – most of them choked up with sand, but one containing a sufficient supply of brackish water. These wells lay among clumps of tamarisk, out of which we started several hares which the greyhounds could not catch, as they always dodged back to cover. Wilfrid and I waited behind for this fruitless hunting upon which our dinner depended, and did not join the rest of the party for more than a mile. Before we reached them we came upon Hanna, sitting on the ground on his hedûm (quilt and abba), and Ibrahim standing over him, both shouting, “Wah! wah! wah!” We could not conceive what had happened and could get no information from either of them, except that they were going to remain where they were. These two townspeople sitting on their beds all alone in the Wady Sirhán were so absurd a spectacle that, at the moment, we could not help laughing; but it was not an affair for laughter, and of course it was impossible to leave them there. We insisted on an explanation. There had been a quarrel between Hanna and Abdallah, because the latter had driven on Hanna’s delúl fast with the other camels, and refused to let it be made to kneel down and get up again. Abdallah and Awwab were in a great hurry to get as far from Mahiyeh as possible, because Hamdán the Sherâri says it is a dangerous spot. But Hanna was angry, and in his anger he dropped his cloak; upon which he jumped down, pulling his bed after him, and sat down on the ground. There the others left him, wailing and raving, and in this state we found him. He proposed that he and Ibrahim should be left behind to be eaten up by the hyena whose tracks we had seen. However, Ibrahim, who had only stayed to keep him company, was quite ready to go on, and, seeing this, Hanna was not long in getting up, and, making his brother carry his bedding, he followed us. It was no good inquiring who was right or who was wrong; we stopped the camels, and, driving back the delúl insisted on Hanna’s mounting, which after some faces he did, and the episode ended. Mohammed has been commissioned to insist with the Arabs on peace, and we have we think prevailed with Hanna to bear no malice. It is absolutely impossible for anybody to go back now without losing his life, and I trust they will all be reasonable; it is disagreeable to think that there has been discord in our small party, separated as it is from all the rest of the world. We are camped now in a side wady where the camel pasture is good. We saw the place from a great distance, for we are becoming skilful now at guessing likely spots. Wherever you see rocky ground in lines you may be sure pasture will be found. We have seen no sign of recent habitation in the country since leaving Itheri, neither footprint of camel nor of man.

The locusts fried are fairly good to eat.

December 31. – Another long day’s march, and here we are at the end of the year in one of the most desolate places in the world. It was so cold last night, that all the locusts are dead. They are lying about everywhere, and being eaten up by the little desert birds, larks, and wheatears. We have got down again into the main bed of the Wady Sirhán, which is still at the same level as before; it is here nearly flat, and covered with great bunches of guttub and other shrubs, all very salt to the taste; the soil crumbly and unsound, in places white with saltpetre. Awwad and the Sherâri declare that there are quicksands, hadôda (literally, an abyss), somewhere in the neighbourhood, in which everything that passes over sinks and disappears, leaving no trace – men, camels, and gazelles; but of such we saw nothing. Coasting the edge of the Wady, we came suddenly on some gazelles, which led us to higher ground, where we found a stony wilderness of the Harra type; and amongst the stones we saw a hyena trotting leisurely. We got nothing, however; neither him nor the gazelles, and are still without meat. No other incident occurred till we came to a palm tree standing by itself in an open place; near it, a charming little spring, quite in among the roots of a thick clump of palm bushes. The hole is about three feet across, and two deep, with about a foot of water in it; the water rises again as fast as it is taken out, but never overflows. There were traces of hyenas and gazelles about, and this, I suppose, is where the desert animals come to drink, for it is the only water above ground we have yet seen. This spring is called Maasreh (little by little) – a pleasant spot where we should have liked to camp; but it is always dangerous to stop near water, lest people should come. Awwad says there is some tradition of a town or village having formerly existed here; but no ruins are to be seen. The water is sweet and good, as might be perceived by the insects which were swimming about in it. The Arabs always judge of the wholesomeness of water in this way. There is nothing more suspicious in the desert than perfectly clear water, free from animal life.

We are now camped under a low cliff hollowed out into caves as if by water, capital dens for hyænas. There is a beautiful view looking back at the Mizmeh hills. The evening is still and cold, but we do not like to make much fire for fear of enemies. Hamdán, our Sherári guide, an uncouth, savage creature to look at, has been reciting a very pretty ballad, which he tells us he made himself. It is in stanzas of four lines with alternate rhymes, and relates to an episode in his own family. As he recited it the rest of the Arabs chimed in, repeating always the last word of the line with the rhyming syllable; it had a good effect. The story was simple, and told how Hamdán’s mother and sister had a quarrel, and how they brought their grievances before Obeyd ibn Rashid at Haïl, and how the old Sheykh settled it by putting a rope round the daughter’s neck, and bidding the mother hold the end of it, and do so for the rest of their days. Whereupon the daughter had kissed her mother, and Obeyd had sent them away with presents, a delúl, a cloak each, and a hundred measures of wheat, a present he had continued giving them every year till he died, and which is given still by his nephew, Mohammed, the present ruler of Jebel Shammar. Hamdán has also given us an interesting account of the Haïl politics, which agrees very closely with what we remember of Mr. Palgrave’s, carrying them on to a later date. The present Ibn Rashid is not by any means so amiable a character as his brother Tellál; and Hamdán’s account of his career is rather startling. It appears that he has put to death something like a dozen of his relations, and is more feared than loved by the Shammar. This is very tiresome, as it may be a reason for our not going on to Nejd after all. But we shall hear more when we get to Jôf.

Hamdán’s recitative was, as nearly as I could write the musical part of it, like this: —

January 1, 1879. – A black frost, but still. We have changed our course, and have been going all day nearly due south – twenty-five miles, as near as we can calculate it – and down the middle of the Wady Sirhán, a level plain of sand and grit, with here and there mounds of pure white sand covered with ghada. Our plan is to get up and strike the tents at the first glimpse of dawn, drink a cup of coffee, and eat a biscuit or a bit of rusk (kâk), and then march on till three or four in the afternoon without stopping for an instant, eating half-a-dozen dates and some more rusk as we go. Then immediately on stopping, and before the tents are pitched, we light a fire and make coffee, which carries us on till dinner is ready, about sunset. It is wonderful how little food one can do with while travelling. We have had no meat now for the last four days till to-day, only beef tea, and burghul, and dates, with sometimes fried onions, or flour mixed with curry powder and butter, and baked into a cake. This last is very good, and easily made. To-day, however, we are in clover, as the dogs coursed a hare, and we dug her out. The desert hare is very little bigger than a large rabbit, and is literally too much for one, and not enough for two; but Mohammed magnanimously foregoes his portion, and says he can wait.

Mohammed has been improving the occasion of a dispute which arose this evening on a choice of camp, to tell us some stories of his own adventures in the desert; and we have been telling him ours. He had a younger brother, whom his mother was very fond of, a regular town boy with “a white face like a girl,” who knew how to read and write and knew nothing of the desert (Mohammed himself like his great namesake, has always been a camel driver). Now at Tudmur they have constantly had fights and quarrels for the Sheykhat, and on one such occasion his brother was sent away by his parents to Sokhne, the neighbouring village, about thirty miles from Tudmur; and there he stayed for some time with a relation. At last, however, he got tired of being away from home, and wanted to see his mother. He started off with another boy of his own age (about fifteen) to walk back to Tudmur. It was in the middle of summer, and they lost their way and wandered far down into the Hamád where they died of thirst. Mohammed had gone out to look for them, and found them both dead close together.

On another occasion Mohammed himself was nearly meeting his death. He had gone alone with his camels on the road to Karieteyn, and had fallen in with a ghazú of robbers from the hills. These stripped him of everything except his shirt and a tarbush. His gun he had contrived to hide under a bush, but they left him nothing else, neither food nor water, and it was in the middle of summer. Karieteyn, the nearest place, was about forty miles off, and he was lame with a blow he had received. However, when the robbers were gone, he set out in that direction, and managed to walk on till night and the next day, till he got to a ruin called Kasr el Hayr where he fell down senseless under the shade, and lay for twenty-four hours unable to move, and suffering agonies from thirst. At last, when he had said to himself, “now I shall have to die,” a party of camel men from Sokhne came by and found him lying there. At first they took him for a slave, for the sun had burnt him black, and his tongue was dried so that he could not speak. Fortunately one of the party recognised him, and then they gave him water. He still could give no account of himself, but they put him on a donkey and brought him with them to Tudmur.

Our own story was the one of our quarrel with Abunjad and our rush from Akaba to Gaza, when we so nearly perished of thirst.

The year would have begun prosperously, but for a severe cold Wilfrid has caught. He has lost his voice.

January 2. – A hard frost – water frozen in the pail. Reached the wells of Shaybeh at half-past eight and watered the camels – water very brackish – level by aneroid 1950, depth to surface of water twelve feet. Got into a sort of track, part of the morning, but one evidently not frequented. At one o’clock came to another well, near a curious rock which at first we took for a castle. We have now crossed the wady and are on its western bank. Passed a ruined house of no great antiquity called Abu Kasr and another well near it, and at half-past four have encamped under some sand hills, crowned with ghada, a delightful spot not far from a fourth well called Bir el-Jerawi – level by barometer 1840. Wilfrid has recovered his voice but still has a bad cold. I am as lame as ever, though in less pain. I sometimes think I shall never be able to walk again.

Friday, January 3. – We have had an adventure at last and a disagreeable one; a severe lesson as to the danger of encamping near wells. We started early, but were delayed a whole hour at Jerawi taking water, and did not leave the wells till nearly eight o’clock. Then we turned back nearly due east across the wady. The soil of pure white sand was heavy going, and we went slowly, crossing low undulations without other landmark than the tells we had left behind us. Here and there rose little mounds tufted with ghada. To one of these Wilfrid and I cantered on, leaving the camels behind us, and dismounting, tied our mares to the bushes that we might enjoy a few minutes’ rest, and eat our midday mouthful – the greyhounds meanwhile played about and chased each other in the sand. We had finished, and were talking of I know not what, when the camels passed us. They were hardly a couple of hundred yards in front when suddenly we heard a thud, thud, thud on the sand, a sound of galloping. Wilfrid jumped to his feet, looked round and called out, “Get on your mare. This is a ghazú.” As I scrambled round the bush to my mare I saw a troop of horsemen charging down at full gallop with their lances, not two hundred yards off. Wilfrid was up as he spoke, and so should I have been, but for my sprained knee and the deep sand, both of which gave way as I was rising. I fell back. There was no time to think and I had hardly struggled to my feet, when the enemy was upon us, and I was knocked down by a spear. Then they all turned on Wilfrid, who had waited for me, some of them jumping down on foot to get hold of his mare’s halter. He had my gun with him, which I had just before handed to him, but unloaded; his own gun and his sword being on his delúl. He fortunately had on very thick clothes, two abbas one over the other, and English clothes underneath, so the lances did him no harm. At last his assailants managed to get his gun from him and broke it over his head, hitting him three times and smashing the stock. Resistance seemed to me useless, and I shouted to the nearest horseman, “ana dahílak” (I am under your protection), the usual form of surrender. Wilfrid hearing this, and thinking he had had enough of this unequal contest, one against twelve, threw himself off his mare. The khayal (horsemen) having seized both the mares, paused, and as soon as they had gathered breath, began to ask us who we were and where we came from. “English, and we have come from Damascus,” we replied, “and our camels are close by. Come with us, and you shall hear about it.” Our caravan, while all this had happened, and it only lasted about five minutes, had formed itself into a square and the camels were kneeling down, as we could plainly see from where we were. I hardly expected the horsemen to do as we asked, but the man who seemed to be their leader at once let us walk on (a process causing me acute pain), and followed with the others to the caravan. We found Mohammed and the rest of our party entrenched behind the camels with their guns pointed, and as we approached, Mohammed stepped out and came forward. “Min entum?” (who are you?) was the first question. “Roala min Ibn Debaa.” “Wallah? will you swear by God?” “Wallah! we swear.” “And you?” “Mohammed ibn Arûk of Tudmur.” “Wallah?” “Wallah!” “And these are Franjis travelling with you?” “Wallah! Franjis, friends of Ibn Shaalan.”

It was all right, we had fallen into the hands of friends. Ibn Shaalan, our host of last year, was bound to protect us, even so far away in the desert, and none of his people dared meddle with us, knowing this. Besides, Mohammed was a Tudmuri, and as such could not be molested by Roala, for Tudmur pays tribute to Ibn Shaalan, and the Tudmuris have a right to his protection. So, as soon as the circumstances were made clear, orders were given by the chief of the party to his followers to bring back our mares, and the gun, and everything which had been dropped in the scuffle. Even to Wilfrid’s tobacco bag, all was restored. The young fellows who had taken the mares made rather wry faces, bitterly lamenting their bad fortune in finding us friends. “Ah the beautiful mares,” they said, “and the beautiful gun.” But Arabs are always good-humoured, whatever else their faults, and presently we were all on very good terms, sitting in a circle on the sand, eating dates and passing round the pipe of peace. They were now our guests.

What struck us as strange in all this was, the ready good faith with which they believed every word we said. We had spoken the truth, but why did they trust us? They knew neither us nor Mohammed; yet they had taken our word that we were friends, when they might so easily have ridden off without question with our property. Nobody would ever have heard of it, or known who they were.

It appears that Ibn Debaa (hyæna), the Sheykh, and his friends were a small party in advance of the main body of the Roala. They had come on to see what pasturage there might be in the wady, and had there camped only a few miles from the wells of El Jerawi near which we slept last night. They had come in the morning for water, and had seen our tracks in the sand, and so had followed, riding in hot haste to overtake us. It was a mere accident their finding us separated from the rest of the caravan, and they had charged down as soon as they saw us. Everything depends on rapidity in these attacks, and this had been quite successful The least hesitation on their part, and we should have been safe with our camels. There they could not have molested us, for though they were twelve to our eight, they had only lances, while we carried firearms. We liked the look of these young Roala. In spite of their rough behaviour, we could see that they were gentlemen. They were very much ashamed of having used their spears against me, and made profuse apologies; they only saw a person wearing a cloak, and never suspected but that it belonged to a man. Indeed their mistake is not a matter for surprise, for they were so out of breath and excited with their gallop, that they looked at nothing except the object of their desire – the mares. The loss of these, however, I fear, was to them a cause of greater sorrow than the rough handling to which we had been treated, when, after explanations given and regrets interchanged, they rode away. Mohammed was anxious not to detain them, prudently considering that our acquaintance with them had gone far enough, and it was plain that Awwad was in a terrible fidget. I fancy he has a good many debts of blood owing him, and is somewhat shy of strangers. The others, too, were rather subdued and silent; so we wished Ibn Debaa farewell and let him go.

The mares belonging to this ghazú were small, compact, and active, with especially good shoulders and fine heads, but they were of a more poneyish type than our own Ánazeh mares. Most of them were bay. One I saw was ridden in a bit.

When the Roala were gone we compared notes. In the first place, Wilfrid’s hurts were examined, but they are only contusions. The thick rope he wears round his head had received all the blows, and though the stock of the gun is clean broken, steel and all, his head is still sound. The lances could not get through his clothes. As regards myself the only injury I have received is the renewal of my sprain. But I could almost forget the pain of it in my anger at it, as being the cause of our being caught. But for this we might have galloped away to our camels and received the enemy in quite another fashion. I was asked if I was not frightened, but in fact there was at first no time, and afterwards rage swallowed up every other feeling. Wilfrid says, but I do not believe him, that he felt frightened, and was very near running away and leaving me, but on reflection stayed. The affair seems more alarming now it is over, which is perhaps natural.

As to the others, Mohammed is terribly crestfallen at the not very heroic part he took in the action. The purely defensive attitude of the caravan was no doubt prudent; but it seemed hardly up to the ideal of chivalry Mohammed has always professed. He keeps on reproaching himself, but we tell him that he did quite right. It was certainly our own fault that we were surprised in this way, and if the enemy, as they might have been, had really been robbers and outlaws, our safety depended on our having the caravan intact as a fortress to return to after being robbed. To have rushed forward in disorder to help us would have exposed the whole caravan to a defeat, which in so desolate a region as this would mean nothing less than dying of cold and starvation.

We may indeed be very thankful that matters were no worse. I shall never again dismount while I remain crippled, and never as long as I live, will I tie my horse to a bush.

Many vows of sheep, it appears, were made by all the party of spectators during the action, so we are to have a feast at Jôf – if ever we get there.

Now all is quiet, and Hamdán the Sherâri is singing the loves of a young man and maiden who were separated from one another by mischief-makers, and afterwards managed to carry on a correspondence by tying their letters to their goats when these went out to pasture

January 4. – There was no dawdling this morning, for everybody has become serious, and we were off by seven, and have marched steadily on for quite thirty miles without stopping, at the rate of three-and-a-half miles an hour. We have left the Wady Sirhán for good, and are making a straight cut across the Hamád for Jôf. There is no water this way, but less chance of ghazús. The soil has been a light hard gravel, with hardly a plant or an inequality to interfere with the camels’ pace. At one o’clock we came to some hills of sandstone faced with iron, the beginning of the broken ground in which, they say, Jôf stands. We had been gradually ascending all day, and as we reached that, the highest point of our route, the barometer marked 2660 feet. Here we found a number of little pits, used, so Hamdán explained, for collecting and winnowing semh, a little red grain which grows wild in this part of the desert, and is used by the Jôf people for food.

A little later we sighted two men on a delúl, the first people we have seen, except the ghazú, since leaving Kâf. Wilfrid and Mohammed galloped up to see what they were, and Mohammed, to atone I suppose for his inertness on a recent occasion, fired several shots, and succeeded in frightening them out of their wits. They were quite poor people, dressed only in old shirts, and they had a skin of dates on one side the camel and a skin of water on the other. They were out, they said, to look for a man who had been lost in the Wady Sirhán, one of the men sent by Ibn Rashid to Kâf for the tribute. He had been taken ill, and had stopped behind his companions, and nobody had seen him since. They had been sent out by the governor of Jôf to look for him. They said that we were only a few hours from the town.

Meanwhile, I had remained with our camels, listening to the remarks of Awwad and Hamdán, both dying with curiosity about the two zellems from Jôf. At last Awwad could wait no longer, and begged Hamdán to go with him. They both jumped down from the camels they were riding, and set off as hard as they could run to meet the Jôfi, who by this time had proceeded on their way, while Wilfrid and Mohammed were returning. Wilfrid on arriving held out to me a handful of the best dates I have ever eaten, which the men had given him. The Sherâri and Awwad presently came back with no dates, but a great deal of Jôf gossip.