“This shadowy desert, unfrequented woods,
I better brook than flourishing peopled towns.”
SHAKESPEARE.
Brotherly offices—We prepare for a campaign—Mohammed Dukhi comes to
court—A night robber—We start for Nejd—Tale of a penitent—The duty of
revenge—We are entertained by poor relations—The fair at Mezarib.
WE spent a week at Damascus, a week not altogether of pleasure, although
it was to be our last of civilised life. We had an immense number of
things to buy and arrange and think over, before starting on so serious a
journey as this, which we knew must be very unlike the pleasure trip of
last year. We could not afford to leave anything to chance with the
prospect of a three months’ wandering, and a thousand miles of desert,
where it was impossible to count upon fresh supplies even of the
commonest necessaries of life. Jôf, the first station on our road, was
four hundred miles off, and then we must cross the Nefûd, with its two
hundred miles of sand, before we could get to Nejd. The return journey,
too, to the Persian Gulf, would have to be made without coming to
anything so European as a Turkish town. Nobody could tell us what
supplies were to be had in Nejd, beyond dates and corn. Mr. Palgrave’s
account of Jebel Shammar was, in fact, the only guide we had to go on,
and its accuracy had been so much doubted that we felt obliged to take
into consideration the possibility of finding the Nejd towns mere oases,
and their cultivation only that of the date.
Mohammed, less “insouciant” than most of his countrymen are on such
matters, now made himself most useful, spending many hours in the bazaars
with Wilfrid, as I did with the cook and the camel-man; and being a town
Arab and a trader born, he saved us an infinity of trouble and time, and
no few mejidies.
They began by choosing a complete suit of Bedouin clothes for Wilfrid,
not exactly as a disguise, for we did not wish, even if we could have
done so, not to pass for Europeans, but in order to avoid attracting more
notice than was necessary on our way. The costume consisted of a striped
silk jibbeh or dressing-gown worn over a long shirt, a blue and white
abba of the kind made at Karieteyn, and for the head a black kefiyeh
embroidered with gold which was fastened on with the Bedouin aghal, a
black lamb’s-wool rope. Mohammed had brought with him a sword which had
belonged to his grandfather, a fine old Persian blade curved like a
sickle. He gave it to Wilfrid and received in return a handsome weapon
somewhat similar but silver-mounted, which they found in the bazaar.
Thus rigged out, for Mohammed too had been reclothed from head to foot
(and he much required it), they used to sally out in the town as two
Bedouin gentlemen. Wilfrid by holding his peace was able to pass with
the unwary as an unconcerned friend, while Mohammed did the bargaining
for cloaks, kefiyehs, and other articles suitable as presents to the
Sheykhs whose acquaintance we might make. Mohammed was an expert in
driving a hard bargain and knew the exact fashion in vogue in each
Bedouin tribe, so that although his taste did not always quite agree with
ours, we let him have his way. The only mistake he made, as it turned
out, was in underestimating the value of gifts necessary in Haïl. Not
one of us had the least idea of the luxury existing in Nejd, and
Mohammed, like most of the northern Arabs, had heard of Ibn Rashid only
as a Bedouin Sheykh, and fancied that a red cloth jibbeh would be the _ne
plus ultra_ of magnificence for him, as indeed it would have been for an
Ibn Shaalan or an Ibn Mershid. We had, however, some more serious
presents than these to produce, if necessary, in the rifles and revolvers
we carried with us, so that we felt there was no real danger of arriving
empty-handed.
The purchases which it fell to my share to make, with the assistance of
Abdallah and the cook, were entirely of a useful sort, and do not require
a detailed description here. As to dress, it was unnecessary for me to
make any change, save that of substituting a kefiyeh for a hat and
wearing a Bedouin cloak over my ordinary travelling ulster. Hanna and
Abdallah were both of them masters in the art of haggling, and vied with
each other in beating down the prices of provisions. Dates, flour,
burghul (a kind of crushed wheat, which in Syria takes the place of
rice), carrots, onions, coffee, and some dried fruit were to be the
mainstay of our cooking, and of these we bought a supply sufficient to
last us as far as Jôf. We had brought from England some beef tea,
vegetable soup squares, and a small quantity of tea in case of need. We
had agreed to do without bulky preserved provisions, which add greatly to
the weight of baggage, and that as to meat, we would take our chance of
an occasional hare or gazelle, or perhaps now and then a sheep.
All began well. Our servants seemed likely to turn out treasures, and we
had no difficulty in getting a couple of Agheyls to start with us as
camel drivers. We thought it prudent to keep our own counsel as to the
direction we intended to take, and it was generally supposed that Bagdad
was to be our first object. Only Mohammed and Hanna were informed of the
real design, and them we could trust. Not but what Hanna had occasional
fits of despondency about the risk he ran. He did not pretend to be a
hero, he had a wife and children to whom he was sincerely attached, and
he felt, not quite wrongly, that Central Arabia was hardly the place for
one of his nation and creed. He came to us, indeed, one morning, to
announce his intention of returning home to Aleppo, and he required a
good deal of humouring before he recovered his spirits; but I do not
think that he ever seriously intended to desert us. He had come all the
way from Aleppo to join us, and, besides, the companionship of the young
giant he called his “brother,” who was to share his tent, reassured him.
Once started, we knew that he would bear patiently all that fortune might
inflict.
By the 11th the necessary preparations had been made, and we were ready
to start. As a preliminary, we moved into a garden outside the town with
our camels and our mares, so as to be at liberty to go off any morning
without attracting notice and in the direction we might choose. It was
generally believed in Damascus that we intended going to Bagdad, and we
had made up our minds to start in that direction, partly to avoid
questions, and partly because at Jerúd, the first village on the road to
Palmyra, we should find Mohammed Dukhi with the Welled Ali. He seemed
the most likely person to put us on our way, and in expeditions of this
sort the first few marches are generally the most difficult, if not the
most dangerous. The edges of the desert are always unsafe, whereas, once
clear of the shore, so to speak, there is comparatively little risk of
meeting anybody, friend or foe. We thought then that we should be able
to get a man from Mohammed Dukhi to take us in a straight line from Jerúd
to some point in the Wady Sirhán, keeping well outside the Hauran, a
district of the worst reputation, and following perhaps a line of pools
or wells which the Bedouins might know. But just as we had settled this,
Mohammed Dukhi himself appeared unexpectedly at Damascus, and our plan
was changed.
Mohammed Dukhi ibn Smeyr is the greatest personage in the north-western
desert next to Ibn Shaalan, and as I have said before was at that time
hotly engaged in a war with the Roala chief. His object in visiting
Damascus was as follows: in the course of the autumn a detachment of
fifteen Turkish soldiers attacked his camp without provocation and,
firing into it, killed a woman and a child. This camp numbered only a
few tents, the tribe being at the time scattered on account of pasturage,
and the Sheykh himself was absent with most of the men. Those, however,
who had remained at home managed to cut off and surround the soldiers,
one of whom was killed in the fray. The Welled Ali would have killed the
rest but for Mohammed Dukhi’s wife, Herba, {26} who rushed in among the
combatants, and remonstrated with her people on the folly of involving
themselves in a quarrel with the Government. Her pluck saved the
soldiers’ lives. She took them under her protection, and the next
morning sent them under escort to a place of safety.
Now Mohammed Dukhi, having the Roala war on his hands and being obliged
to shelter himself from Ibn Shaalan under the walls of Jerúd, was
naturally anxious to clear up this matter of the soldier’s death; and,
directly he heard of Midhat’s arrival at Damascus, he shrewdly determined
to make his count with the new Pasha by an early call at the Serai. Ibn
Shaalan was out of the way, and the first comer would doubtless be the
one most readily listened to. Ibn Smeyr had besides a little intrigue on
foot respecting the escort of the Damascus pilgrims, which he in part
provided or hoped to provide. Abd el-Kader was his friend, and it was at
the Emir’s house that he alighted and that we found him. Mohammed Dukhi,
noble though he is in point of blood, is not a fine specimen of a great
Bedouin Sheykh. His politeness is overstrained and unnatural, reminding
one rather of city than of desert manners; there are also ugly stories of
his want of faith, which one finds no difficulty in believing when one
sees him. He affected, however, great pleasure at seeing us again, and
professed an entire devotion to our welfare and our plans. He would
himself accompany us on the first stages of our road, or at least send
his sons or some of his men; offers which dwindled, till at last they
resulted in his merely writing some letters of recommendation for us, and
giving us a large amount of good advice. As regards the latter, he
informed us that a journey such as we proposed outside the Hauran would
not at the present moment be practicable. No rain had fallen during the
autumn, and the Hamád was without water; indeed, except in the Wady
Sirhán, where the wells were never dry, there was no watering place
southwards at any distance from the hills. He advised us, therefore, to
leave Damascus by the pilgrim road, which keeps inside the Hauran, and
follow it till we came across the Beni Sokkhr, whom we should find
encamped not far to the east of it. There was besides a capital
opportunity for us of doing this in company with the _Jerdeh_, now on the
point of starting for Mezárib, a station on the Haj road. The Jerdeh, he
explained, for the name was new to us, are a kind of relief party sent
every year from Damascus, to meet the pilgrims on their homeward route,
carrying with them supplies of all the necessaries of life, provisions,
and extra camels to replace those broken down. The party is escorted by
Mohammed Dukhi, or rather by his men, and the idea of joining them seemed
exactly suited to our purpose; though when we came to put it in practice,
it turned out to be of as little value as the rest of the smooth-spoken
Sheykh’s offers. It was something, however, to have a plan, good or bad,
and letters from so great a man as Ibn Smeyr were of value, even though
addressed to the wrong people.
Accordingly, on the 12th we bade good-bye to our Damascus friends, wrote
our last letters to our friends in England, and said a long farewell to
the pleasures and pains of European life. On the 13th we started.
_December_ 13.—We have started at last, and on a Friday, the 13th of the
month. I have no personal objection to any particular day of the week,
or of the month. But, as a matter of fact, the only seriously
unfortunate journey we ever made was begun on a Friday, and Wilfrid
professes himself to be superstitious and full of dark foreboding. He,
however, insisted on starting this Friday, and with some inconsistency
argues that forebodings are lucky, or that at any rate the absence of
them is unlucky, and that it would not be safe to begin a journey in a
cheerful frame of mind.
We were roused in the middle of the night by a cry of thieves in the
garden, and running out of our tent found a scuffle going on, which, when
lights were brought, proved to have been caused by two men, one the
keeper of the garden and the other a soldier, whom he was taking
prisoner. Our servants were standing round them, and Hanna, seeing the
man to be securely bound, was belabouring him with a stick, ejaculating
at intervals, “O robber, O dog, O pig! O pig, O dog, O robber!” The
story told us was that the gardener had found this man prowling about,
and had, after a terrible engagement, succeeded in his capture. There
were, however, no blood or wounds to show; and, the evidence of the
prisoner’s wicked designs not being very overwhelming, Wilfrid gave
orders that he should be let go as soon as it should be daylight. In the
first place, any handing over of the man to justice would have delayed
our start, and secondly, it was more than probable that the whole thing
had been got up by the gardener with the accused person for the sake of
the present the two would receive. Such little comedies are quite common
in the East; and when we declined to take it seriously, the two men very
good-humouredly let the matter drop.
At the first streak of dawn we struck our tents, loaded our camels, and a
little after sunrise were on our mares and well away from the town in
marching order for Nejd! At first we skirted the city, passing the gate
where St. Paul is said to have entered, and the place where he got over
the wall, and then along the suburb of Maidan, which is the quarter
occupied by Bedouins when they come to town, and where we had found the
Tudmuri and our camels. Here we were to have met the Jerdeh, and we
waited some time outside the Bawábat Allah, or “Gates of God,” while
Mohammed went in to make inquiries, and take leave of his Tudmuri
friends. It is in front of this gate that the pilgrims assemble on the
day of their start for Mecca, and from it the Haj road leads away in a
nearly straight line southwards. The Haj road is to be our route as far
as Mezárib, and is a broad, well worn track, though of course not a road
at all according to English ideas. It has, nevertheless, a sort of
romantic interest, one cannot help feeling, going as it does so far and
through such desolate lands, a track so many thousand travellers have
followed never to return. I suppose in its long history a grave may have
been dug for every yard of its course from Damascus to Medina, for,
especially on the return journey, there are constantly deaths among the
pilgrims from weariness and insufficient food.
Our caravan, waiting at the gate, presented a very picturesque
appearance. Each of the delúls carries a gay pair of saddle-bags in
carpet-work, with long worsted tassels hanging down on each side half way
to the ground; and they have ornamented _reshmehs_ or headstalls to
match. The camels, too, though less decorated, have a gay look; and
Wilfrid on the chestnut mare ridden in a halter wants nothing but a long
lance to make him a complete Bedouin. The rest of our party consists,
besides Mohammed and Hanna, who have each of them a delúl to ride, of
Mohammed’s “cousin” Abdallah, whom we call Sheykh of the camels, with his
two Agheyl assistants, Awwad, a negro, and a nice-looking boy named Abd
er-Rahman. These, with Mohammed, occupy one of the servants’ tents,
while Hanna and his “brother” Ibrahim have another, for even in the
desert distinctions of religious caste will have to be preserved. It is
a great advantage in travelling that the servants should be as much as
possible strangers to each other, and of different race or creed, as this
prevents any combination among them for mutiny or disobedience. The
Agheyls will be one clique, the Tudmuri another, and the Christians a
third, so that though they may quarrel with one another, they are never
likely to unite against us. Not that there is any prospect of difficulty
from such a cause; but three months is a long period for a journey, and
everything must be thought of beforehand.
Mohammed was not long in the Maidan, and came back with the news that the
Jerdeh has not been seen there, but might be at a khan some miles on the
road called Khan Denún. It was useless to wait for them there, and so,
wishing our friend, Mr. Siouffi, good-bye (for he had accompanied us thus
far) we rode on. Nothing remarkable has marked our first day’s journey;
a gazelle crossing the track, and a rather curious squabble between a
kite, a buzzard, and a raven, in which the raven got all the profit,
being the only events. From the crest of a low ridge we looked back and
saw our last of Damascus, with its minarets and houses imbedded in green.
We shall see no more buildings, I suppose, for many a day. Mount Hermon
to the left of it rose, an imposing mass, hazy in the hot sun, for,
December though it is, the summer is far from over. Indeed, we have
suffered from the heat today more than we did during the whole of our
last journey.
At Denún no sign or knowledge of the Jerdeh, so we have decided to do
without them. On a road like this we cannot want an escort. There are
plenty of people passing all day long, most of them, like ourselves,
going to Mezárib for the annual fair which takes place there on the
occasion of the Jerdeh visit. Among them, too, are zaptiehs and even
soldiers; and there are to be several villages on the way. We filled our
goat-skins at Denún and camped for this our first night on some rising
ground looking towards Hermon. It is a still, delightful evening, but
there is no moon. The sun is setting at five o’clock.
_December_ 14.—Still on the Haj road and through cultivated land, very
rich for wheat or barley, Mohammed says, though it has a fine covering of
stones. These are black and volcanic, very shiny and smooth, just as
they were shot up from the Hauran when the Hauran was a volcano. The
soil looks as if it ought to grow splendid grapes, and some say the
bunches the spies brought to Joshua came from near here. The villages,
of which we have passed through several, are black and shiny too, dreary
looking places even in the sunshine, without trees or anything pleasant
to look at round them. The fields at this time of year are of course
bare of crops, and it is so long since there was any rain that even the
weeds are gone. This is part of what is called the Leja, a district
entirely of black boulders, and interesting to archæologists as being the
land of Og, king of Basan, whose cities some have supposed to exist in
ruins to the present day.
In the middle of the day we passed a small ruin, about which Mohammed,
who has been this road before, as his father was at one time
camel-contractor for the Haj, told us a curious story. Once upon a time
there were two children, left orphans at a very early age. The elder, a
boy, went out into the world to seek his fortune, while the other, a
girl, was brought up by a charitable family in Damascus. In course of
time the brother and sister came together by accident, and, without
knowing their relationship, married, for according to eastern usage the
marriage had been arranged for them by others. Then, on comparing notes,
they discovered the mistake which had been made; and the young man,
anxious to atone for the guilt they had inadvertently incurred, consulted
a wise man as to what he should do in penance. He was told to make the
pilgrimage to Mecca seven times, and then to live seven years more in
some desert place on the Haj road offering water to the pilgrims. This
he did, and chose the place we passed for the latter part of his penance.
When the seven years were over, however, he returned to Damascus, and the
little house he had built and the fig-trees he had planted remain as a
record of his story. Mohammed could not tell me what became of the girl,
and seemed to think it did not matter.
He has been talking a great deal to us on the duties of brotherhood,
which seemed a little like a suggestion. The rich brother, it would
seem, should make the poor one presents, not only of fine clothes, but of
a fine mare, a fine delúl, or a score of sheep,—while the poor brother
should be very careful to protect the life of his sworn ally, or, if need
be, to avenge his death. Wilfrid asked him how he should set about this
last, if the case occurred. “First of all,” said Mohammed, “I should
inquire who the shedder of blood was. I should hear, for instance, that
you had been travelling in the Hauran and had been killed, but I should
not know by whom. I should then leave Tudmur, and, taking a couple of
camels so as to seem to be on business, should go to the place where you
had died, under a feigned name, and should pretend to wish to buy corn of
the nearest villagers. I should make acquaintance with the old women,
who are always the greatest talkers, and should sooner or later hear all
about it. Then, when I had found out the real person, I should watch
carefully all his goings out and comings in, and should choose a good
opportunity of taking him unawares, and run my sword through him. Then I
should go back to Tudmur as fast as my delúl could carry me.” Wilfrid
objected that in England we thought it more honourable to give an enemy
the chance of defending himself; but Mohammed would not hear of this.
“It would not be right. My duty,” he said, “would be to avenge your
blood, not to fight with the man; and if I got the opportunity, I should
come upon him asleep or unarmed. If he was some poor wretch, of no
consequence, I should take one of his relations instead, if possible the
head of his family. I cannot approve of your way of doing these things.
Ours is the best.” Mohammed might have reasoned (only Arabs never
reason), that there were others besides himself concerned in the deed
being secretly and certainly done. An avenger of blood carries not only
his own life but the lives of his family in his hand; and if he bungles
over his vengeance, and himself gets killed, he entails on them a further
debt of blood. To Mohammed, however, on such a point, reasoning was
unnecessary. What he had described was the custom, and that was enough.
We are now a little to the south of the village of Gunayeh where we have
sent Abdallah with a delúl to buy straw. There is no camel pasture here
nor anything the horses can eat. To the east we can see the blue line of
the Hauran range, and to the west the Syrian hills from Hermon to Ajalon.
I told Mohammed the story of the sun standing still over Gibeon and the
moon over Ajalon, which he took quite as a matter of course, merely
mentioning that he had never heard it before.
I forgot to say that we crossed the old Roman road several times to-day.
It is in fair preservation, but the modern caravan track avoids it.
Perhaps in old days wheeled carriages were common and required a stone
road. Now there is no such necessity. At Ghabaghat, a village we passed
about eleven o’clock, we found a tank supplied with water from a spring,
and while we were waiting there watering the camels a fox ran by pursued
by two greyhounds, who soon came up with and killed him. One of the
dogs, a blue or silver grey, was very handsome and we tried to buy him of
his owner, a soldier, but he would not take the money. After that we had
a bit of a gallop in which we were pleased with our new mares. But we
are both tired with even this short gallop, being as yet not in training,
and we feel the heat of the sun.
_Sunday_, _December_ 15.—We have left the Leja country and are now in
bare open fields, a fine district for farmers, but as uninteresting as
the plains of Germany or northern France. These fields are better
watered than the Leja, and we crossed several streams to-day by old stone
bridges belonging to the Roman road. The streams run, I believe,
eventually into the Jordan, and in one place form a marsh to the right of
the road which Mohammed declared to be infested by robbers, men who lurk
about in the tall reeds and when they have made a capture run off with
their booty into it and cannot be followed. We saw nothing suspicious,
however, nor anything of interest but a huge flock of sand grouse, of
which we got four as they passed overhead. There were also immense
clouds of starlings, and we started a hare. We passed many villages, the
principal one being Shemskin, where there are the ruins of an old town.
Our road then bore away to the right, leaving the Roman road for good.
This goes on straight to Bozra, the chief town of the Hauran in former
days.
At Tafazz we stopped to pay a visit to some Tudmuri settled there,
relations of Mohammed’s but not on the Ibn Arûk side, very worthy people
though hardly respectable as relations. Tafazz from the outside looks
like a heap of ruins half smothered in dunghills. There has been a
murrain among the cattle this year, and dead cows lay about in every
stage of decomposition. We had some difficulty in groping our way
through them to the wretched little mud hovel where the Tudmuri lived.
The family consisted of two middle-aged men, brothers, with their mother,
their wives, and a pretty daughter named Shemseh (sunshine), some
children, and an old man, uncle or grandfather of the others. These were
all presently clustering round us, and hugging and kissing Mohammed who,
I must say, showed a complete absence of false pride in spite of his fine
clothes and noble appearance. Their welcome to us, poor people, was very
hearty; and in a few minutes coffee was being pounded, and a breakfast of
unleavened loaves, thin and good, an omelette, buttermilk (lebben), and a
sweet kind of treacle (dibs), made of raisins, prepared. While we were
at breakfast a little starved colt looked in at the door from the yard;
and some chickens and a pretty fawn greyhound, all equally hungry I
thought, watched us eagerly. The people were very doleful about the want
of rain, and the loss of their yoke-oxen, which makes their next year’s
prospects gloomily uncertain. They told us, however, that they had a
good stock of wheat in their underground granaries, sufficient for a year
or even more, which shows a greater amount of forethought than I should
have expected of them. In these countries it is quite necessary to
provide against the famines which happen every few years, and in ancient
times I believe it was a universal practice to keep a year’s harvest in
store.
After many entreaties that we would stay the night under their roof they
at last suffered us to depart, promising that the men of the party would
rejoin us the following day at Mezárib, for Mezárib was close by. There
we arrived about three o’clock and are encamped on the piece of desert
ground where the fair is held. The view from our tents is extremely
pretty, a fine range of distant hills, the Ajlun to the south-west, and
about a mile off a little lake looking very blue and bright, with a
rather handsome ruined khan or castle in the foreground. To the left the
tents of the Suk, mostly white and of the Turkish pattern. There are
about a hundred and fifty of them in four rows, making a kind of street.
The village of Mezárib stands on an island in the lake, connected by a
stone causeway with the shore, but the Suk is on the mainland. There is
a great concourse of people with horses, and donkeys, and camels, and
more are constantly coming from each quarter of the compass. They have
not as yet paid much attention to us, so that we have been able to make
ourselves comfortable. There is a fresh wind blowing from the south, and
there is a look in the clouds of something like rain. I have never
before wished for rain on a journey, but I do so heartily now; these poor
people want it badly.
_December_ 16.—To-day we have done nothing but receive visits. First
there came a Haurani, who announced himself as a sheykh, and gave us the
information that Sotamm ibn Shaalan and the Roala are somewhere near
Ezrak. If this be true it will be a great piece of good luck for us, but
other accounts have made it doubtful. A more interesting visitor was a
young man, a native of Bereydeh in Nejd, who, hearing that we were on our
way to Jôf, came to make friends with us. Though a well-mannered youth,
he is evidently nothing particular in the way of position at home, and
admits having been somebody’s servant at Bagdad, but on the strength of a
supposed descent from the Beni Laam in Nejd, he has claimed kinship with
Mohammed and they have been sitting together affectionately all the
morning, holding each an end of Mohammed’s rosary. We have
cross-questioned him about Nejd; but though he knows Haïl and Kasim and
other places, he can give us little real information. He seems to have
left it as a boy. We are cheered, however, by the little he has had to
tell us, as he seems to take it for granted that everybody in Nejd will
be delighted to see us, and he has given us the name and address of his
relations there.
Mohammed went last night to find out whether any of the Beni Sokkhr
Sheykhs were at the Suk, for it is to them that we have letters from
Mohammed Dukhi, and in the middle of the day Sákhn, a son of Fendi
el-Faiz, the nominal head of the tribe, was introduced. He was a not
ill-looking youth, and when we had shewn him our letter to his father
informed us that the Sheykh had just arrived, so we sent him to fetch
him. While Hanna was preparing coffee, the old man came to our tent. In
person he is very different from any of the Ánazeh Sheykhs we have seen,
reminding one rather of the Jiburi, or other Euphrates Arabs. The Beni
Sokkhr are in fact of Shimali or Northern race, which is quite distinct
from the Nejdi, to which both Ánazeh and Shammar belong. He is a fine
picturesque old man, with rugged features and grey beard and an immense
nose, which put us in mind of the conventional Arab types of Scripture
picture books, and seemed to correspond with a suggestion I have heard
made, that the Beni Sokkhr {41} are really the Beni Issachar, a lost
tribe.
The Sheykh was very much “en cérémonie,” and we found it difficult to
carry on conversation with him. Either he had not much to say, or did
not care to say it to us; and the talk went on principally between his
second son Tellál, a Christian merchant (here on business), and Mohammed.
We did not, ourselves, broach the subject of our journey; but after
coffee had been served, Mohammed had a private conversation with the
Sheykh, which resulted in an invitation from him to his tents, which he
described as being somewhere near Zerka on the Haj road, from which he
will send us on to Maan, and ultimately to Jôf. This plan, however, does
not at all suit Wilfrid, who is determined on exploring the Wady Sirhán,
which no European has ever done, and he insists that we must go first to
Ezrak. Fendi, it appears, cannot take us that way, as he is on bad terms
with the Kreysheh, a branch of his own tribe who are on the road.
Perhaps, too, he is afraid of the Roala. It is very perplexing, as some
sort of introduction we must have at starting, and yet we cannot afford
to go out of our way or even wait here indefinitely till Fendi is ready.
The Jerdeh people are after all not expected for another two days, and it
may be a week before they go on.
Later in the day Sottan, Fendi’s youngest son, came to us and offered to
accompany us himself to Jôf, but at a price which was altogether beyond
our ideas. He had travelled once with some English people on the Syrian
frontier, and had got foolish notions about money. Five pounds was the
sum we had thought of giving; and he talked about a hundred. So we sent
him away. Later still, came a Shammar from the Jebel, who said he was
willing to go for fifteen mejidies, and a Kreysheh who made similar
offers. We have engaged them both, but neither could do more than show
us the road. They would be no introduction. The difficulty, by all
accounts, of going down the Wady Sirhán, is from the Sherarát, who hang
about it, and who having no regular Sheykh, cannot easily be dealt with.
They are afraid, however, of the Beni Sokkhr Sheykhs, and of course of
Mohammed Dukhi and Ibn Shaalan; and if we could only get a proper
representative of one or other of these to go with us, all would be
right. But how to get such a one is the question.
It has been very hot and oppressive here to-day, and the appearance of
rain is gone. The thermometer about noon stood at 86°.
_December_ 17.—We have decided not to wait here any longer, but to go off
to-morrow in the direction of Ezrak, trusting to find some one on the
road. We shall have to pass through Bozra, and may have better luck
there. Our Shammar seems to think it will be all right; but the Kreysheh
came back this morning with a demand for thirty pounds, instead of the
two pounds ten shillings, which he informed Mohammed, Fendi had told him
to ask. He seems to be with Fendi, although his branch of the tribe are
not on terms with their principal chief. He still talks, however, of
coming on the original terms, but that will be without Fendi’s
permission. It is quite necessary to be, or appear to be stingy with
these people, as throwing money away is considered by them the act of a
simpleton.
Mohammed has been sent to the Suk to make some last purchases, and
inquire about two more camels. Now that it is decided we are to go by
the Wady Sirhán, we shall be obliged to buy two extra camels to carry
food for the rest. In ordinary seasons this would not be necessary, but
this year everybody tells us we shall find no pasture. _Altek_, which is
the camel food used at Damascus, is made of a sort of grain, like small
misshapen peas or lentils, the husk green and the seed red. It is mixed
up into dough with wheaten flour and water, and then kneaded into
egg-shaped balls five inches long. Six of these balls are a camel’s
daily ration, which, if he can pick up any rubbish by the way, will be
enough to keep him fat. We are carrying barley for the mares.
Aamar and Selim, our Tafazz relations, have come to pay us their promised
visit, and will perhaps accompany us to-morrow. They brought with them a
measure of _feríkeh_, wheat crushed very fine, a sort of burghul, some
bread, and a couple of fowls; also Mohammed’s sheepskin coat, which one
of the women has been lining for him; and lastly, the little greyhound we
saw at their house, all as a present, or very nearly so, after the
fashion of the country.
Mohammed has come back with two camels for our approval, one a very
handsome animal, but rather long-legged, the other short and
broad-chested like a prize-fighter. We have paid ten pounds and eleven
pounds for them. Nothing is absolutely settled about who is going and
who is not going with us. Nothing but this, that we leave Mezárib
to-morrow.
As I write, an immense hubbub and a cry of thieves from the Suk. They
are ducking a man in the lake.
[Picture: Salkhad]