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.
[Illustration 27: 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.
[Illustration 28: MSHITTA, THE FAÇADE]
[Illustration 29: 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.
[Illustration 30: 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."
[Illustration 31: 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.
[Illustration 32: 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.
[Illustration 33: 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.
[Illustration 34: 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.
[Illustration 35: 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:
[Illustration 36: 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.
[Illustration 37: 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.
[Footnote 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.]
[Footnote 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.]
[Footnote 4: Several of these ruins were visited by Musil, but his took
is not yet published.]
[Footnote 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.]
[Footnote 6: I have borrowed Sir Charles Lyall's beautiful and most
scholarly translation of this and the preceding poem.]