Salcah, the city of King Og in Bashan, must have been a fortified place
from the beginning of history. The modern village clusters round the
base of a small volcano, on the top of which, built in the very crater,
is the ruined fortress. This fortress and its predecessors in the crater
formed the outpost of the Ḥaurān Mountains against the desert, the
outpost of the earliest civilisation against the earliest marauders. The
ground drops suddenly to the south and east, and, broken only by one or
two volcanic mounds in the immediate neighbourhood, settles itself down
into the long levels that reach Euphrates stream; straight as an arrow
from a bow the Roman road runs out from Ṣalkhad into the desert in a
line that no modern traveller has followed beyond the first two or three
stages. The caravan track to Nejd begins here and passes by Kāf and
Ethreh along the Wādi Sirḥan to Jōf and Ḥāil, a perilous way,
though the Blunts pursued it successfully and Euting after them.
Euting's description of it, done with all the learning and the minute
observation of the German, is the best we have. Due south of Ṣalkhad
there is an interesting ruined fort, Ḳal'at el Azrak, in an oasis
where there are thickets full of wild boar: Dussaud visited it and has
given an excellent account of his journey. No doubt there is more to be
found still; the desert knows many a story that has not yet been told,
and at Ṣalkhad it is difficult to keep your feet from turning south,
so invitingly mysterious are those great plains.
[Illustration 48: THE CASTLE, ṢALKHAD]
I went at once to the house of Nasīb el Atrāsh and presented Fellāḥ
ul 'Isa's letter. Nasīb is a man of twenty-seven, though he looks ten
years older, short in stature and sleek, with shrewd features of a type
essentially Druze and an expression that is more cunning than pleasant.
He received me in his maḳ'ad, where he was sitting with his brother
Jada'llah, a tall young man with a handsome but rather stupid face, who
greeted me with "Bon jour," and then relapsed into silence, having come
to the end of all the French he knew. Just as he had borrowed one phrase
from a European tongue, so he had borrowed one article of dress from
European wardrobes: a high stick-up collar was what he had selected, and
it went strangely with his Arab clothes. There were a few Druzes
drinking coffee in the maḳ'ad, and one other whom I instantly
diagnosed as an alien. He turned out to be the Mudīr el Māl of the
Turkish government--I do not know what his exact functions are, but his
title implies him to be an agent of the Treasury. Ṣalkhad is one of
three villages in Jebel Druze (the others being Sweida and 'Areh) where
the Sultan has a Kāimaḳām and a telegraph station. Yūsef Effendi,
Kāimaḳām, and Milḥēm Iliān, Mudīr el Māl, were considerably
surprised when I turned up from the desert without warning or
permission; they despatched three telegrams daily to the Vāli of
Damascus, recounting all that I did and said, and though I was on the
best of terms with both of them, finding indeed Milḥēm to be by far
the most intelligent and agreeable man in the village, I fear I caused
them much perturbation of mind. And here let me say that my experience
of Turkish officials leads me to count them among the most polite and
obliging of men. If you come to them with the proper certificates there
is nothing they will not do to help you; when they stop you it is
because they are obliged to obey orders from higher authorities; and
even when you set aside, as from time to time you must, refusals that
are always couched in language conciliatory to a fault, they conceal
their just annoyance and bear you no ill will for the trouble you have
caused them. The government agents at Ṣalkhad occupy an uneasy
position. It is true that there has been peace in the Mountain for the
past five years, but the Druzes are a slippery race and one quick to
take offence. Milḥēm understood them well, and his appointment to the
new post of Ṣalkhad is a proof of the Vāli's genuine desire to avoid
trouble in the future. He had been at Sweida for many years before he
came to Ṣalkhad; he was a Christian, and therefore not divided from
the Druzes by the unbridged gulf of hatred that lies between them and
Islām, and he was fully aware that Turkish rule in the Jebel Ḥaurān
depends on how little demand is made on a people nominally subject and
practically independent. Yūsef Effendi was not far behind him in the
strength of his conviction on this head, and he had the best of reasons
for realising how shadowy his authority was. There are not more than two
hundred Turkish soldiers in all the Mountain; the rest of the Ottoman
forces are Druze zaptiehs, well pleased to wear a government uniform and
draw government pay, on the rare occasions when it reaches them, though
they can hardly be considered a trustworthy guard if serious differences
arise between their own people and the Sultan. To all outward appearance
Nasīb and his brother were linked by the closest bonds of friendship
with the Kāimaḳām; they were for ever sitting in his maḳ'ad and
drinking his coffee, but once when we happened to be alone together,
Yūsef Effendi said pathetically in his stilted Turkish Arabic: "I never
know what they are doing: they look on me as an enemy. And if they wish
to disobey orders from Damascus, they cut the telegraph wire and go
their own way. What power have I to prevent them?"
[Illustration 49: NASĪB EL AṬRASH]
[Illustration 50: A GROUP OF DRUZES]
Nevertheless there are signs that the turbulent people of the Mountain
have turned their minds to other matters than war with the Osmanli, and
among the chief of these are the steam mills that grind the corn of
Ṣalkhad and a few villages besides. A man who owns a steam mill is
pledged to maintain the existing order. He has built it at considerable
expense, he does not wish to see it wrecked by an invading Turkish army
and his capital wasted; on the contrary, he hopes to make money from it,
and his restless energies find a new and profitable outlet in that
direction. My impression is that peace rests on a much firmer basis than
it did five years ago, and that the Ottoman government has not been slow
to learn the lessons of the last war--if only the Vāli of Damascus
could have known how favourable an opinion his recent measures would
force on the mind of the intriguing Englishwoman, he might have spared
his telegraph clerks several hours' work.
There could scarcely have been a better example of the freedom with
which the Druzes control their own affairs than was offered by an
incident that took place on the very evening of my arrival. It has
already been intimated on the authority of Fendi that the relations
between the Mountain and the Desert were fraught with the usual
possibilities of martial incident, and we had not spent an afternoon in
Ṣalkhad without discovering that the great raid that had occurred some
months previously was the topic that chiefly interested Nasīb and his
brother. Not that they spoke of it in their conversations with me, but
they listened eagerly when we told of the raid on the Ḥassan yyeh and
the part the Ṣukhūr had played in it, and they drew from us all we
knew or conjectured as to the present camping grounds of the latter
tribe, how far the raiders had come, and in which direction retreated.
The muleteers overheard men whispering at the street corners, and their
whispers were of warlike preparations; the groups round Mikhāil's fire,
ever a centre of social activity, spoke of injuries that could not be
allowed to pass unnoticed, and one of the many sons of Muḥammad's
uncle had provided that famished Beyrouti with a lunch flavoured with
dark hints of a league between the Wādi Sirḥan and the Beni Ṣakhr
which must be nipped in the bud ere it had assumed alarming proportions.
The wave of the ghazu can hardly reach as far as Ṣalkhad itself, but
the harm is done long before it touches that point, especially in the
winter when every four-footed creature, except the mare necessary for
riding, is far away in the southern plain.
My camp was pitched in a field outside the town at the eastern foot of
the castle hill. The slopes to the north were deep in snow up to the
ruined walls of the fortress, and even where we lay there were a few
detached snowdrifts glittering under the full moon. I had just finished
dinner, and was debating whether it were too cold to write my diary,
when a sound of savage singing broke upon the night, and from the
topmost walls of the castle a great flame leapt up into the sky. It was
a beacon kindled to tell the news of the coming raid to the many Druze
villages scattered over the plain below, and the song was a call to
arms. There was a Druze zaptieh sitting by my camp fire; he jumped up
and gazed first at me and then at the red blaze above us. I said:
[Illustration 51: FROM ṢALKHAD CASTLE, LOOKING SOUTH-EAST]
"Is there permission to my going up?"
He answered: "There is no refusal. Honour us."
We climbed together over the half frozen mud, and by the snowy northern
side of the volcano, edged our way in the darkness round the castle
walls where the lava ashes gave beneath our feet, and came out into the
full moonlight upon the wildest scene that eyes could see. A crowd of
Druzes, young men and boys, stood at the edge of the moat on a narrow
shoulder of the hill. They were all armed with swords and knives and
they were shouting phrase by phrase a terrible song. Each line of it was
repeated twenty times or more until it seemed to the listener that it
had been bitten, as an acid bites the brass, onto the intimate recesses
of the mind.
"Upon them, upon them! oh Lord our God! that the foe may fall
in swathes before our swords!
Upon them, upon them! that our spears may drink at their hearts!
Let the babe leave his mother's breast!
Let the young man arise and be gone!
Upon them, upon them! oh Lord our God! that our swords may
drink at their hearts. . . ."
So they sang, and it was as though the fury of their anger would never
end, as though the castle walls would never cease from echoing their
interminable rage and the night never again know silence, when suddenly
the chant stopped and the singers drew apart and formed themselves into
a circle, every man holding his neighbours by the hand. Into the circle
stepped three young Druzes with bare swords, and strode round the ring
of eager boys that enclosed them. Before each in turn they stopped and
shook their swords and cried:
"Are you a good man? Are you a true man?"
And each one answered with a shout:
"Ha! ha!"
The moonlight fell on the dark faces and glittered on the quivering
blades, the thrill of martial ardour passed from hand to clasped hand,
and earth cried to heaven: War! red war!
And then one of the three saw me standing in the circle, and strode up
and raised his sword above his head, as though nation saluted nation.
"Lady!" he said, "the English and the Druze are one."
I said: "Thank God! we, too, are a fighting race."
Indeed, at that moment there seemed no finer thing than to go out and
kill your enemy.
And when this swearing in of warriors was over, we ran down the hill
under the moon, still holding hands, and I, seeing that some were only
children not yet full grown, said to the companion whose hand chance had
put in mine:
"Do all these go out with you?"
He answered: "By God! not all. The ungrown boys must stay at home and
pray to God that their day may soon come."
When they reached the entrance of the town, the Druzes leapt on to a
flat house roof, and took up their devilish song. The fire had burnt out
on the castle walls, the night struck suddenly cold, and I began to
doubt whether if Milḥēm and the Vāli of Damascus could see me taking
part in a demonstration against the Ṣukhūr they would believe in the
innocence of my journey; so I turned away into the shadow and ran down
to my tents and became a European again, bent on peaceful pursuits and
unacquainted with the naked primitive passions of mankind.
We had certain inquiries to make concerning our journey, and stores to
lay in before we set out for the eastern side of the Mountain, where
there are no big villages, and therefore we spent two days at Ṣalkhad.
The great difficulty of the commissariat is barley for the animals.
There had been enough for our needs at Umm er Rummān, but there was
none at Ṣalkhad; it is always to be got at Sweida, which is the chief
post of the Turkish government, but that was far away across the hills,
and we decided to send down to Imtein, the path thither being bare of
snow. It is worth recording that in the winter, when all the flocks are
several hours away in the plain, it is impossible to buy a sheep in the
Mountain, and the traveller has to make shift with such scraggy chickens
as he may find. The want of foresight which had left our larder so
ill-furnished affected Mikhāil considerably, for he prided himself on
the roasting of a leg of mutton, and he asked me how it was that all the
books I had with me had not hinted at the absence of the animal that
could supply that delicacy. I answered that the writers of these works
seemed to have been more concerned with Roman remains than with such
weighty matters as roasts and stews, whereat he said firmly:
[Illustration 52: ḲREYEH]
"When your Excellency writes a book, you will not say: 'Here there is a
beautiful church and a great castle.' The gentry can see that for
themselves. But you shall say: 'In this village there are no hens.' Then
they will know from the beginning what sort of country it is."
The first day of my visit I spent with Nasīb, watching him give orders
for the grinding of the corn needed for the coming military expedition
(to which we sedulously avoided any allusion), photographing him and the
notables of his village, and lunching with him in his maḳ'ad on gritty
brown-paper-like bread and dibs, a kind of treacle made from boiled
grape juice, and a particularly nasty sort of soup of sour milk with
scraps of fat mixed in it--_kirk_ the Druzes call it and hold it in an
unwarrantable esteem. In the afternoon Nasīb was riding some ten miles
to the south, to settle a dispute that had arisen between two of his
villages, and he invited me to accompany him; but I thought that there
were probably other matters on hand, in which it might be awkward if a
stranger were to assist, and I compromised by agreeing to go with him
for an hour and turn aside to visit a shrine on top of a tell, the Weli
of El Khuḍr, who is no other than our St. George. Nasīb rode out in
style with twenty armed men by his side, himself arrayed in a long
mantle of dark blue cloth embroidered in black, with a pale blue
handkerchief tucked into the folds of the white turban that encircled
his tarbūsh. The cavalcade looked very gallant, each man wrapped in a
cloak and carrying his rifle across his knees. These rifles were handed
to me one by one that I might read the lettering on them. They were of
many different dates and origins, some antiquated pieces stolen from
Turkish soldiers, the most French and fairly modern, while a few came
from Egypt and were marked with V.R. and the broad arrow. Nasīb rode
with me for a time and catechised me on my social status, whether I
would ride at home with the King of England, and what was the extent of
my father's wealth. His curiosity was not entirely without a motive; the
Druzes are always hoping to find some very rich European whose
sympathies they could engage, and who would finance and arm them if
another war were to break out with the Sultan; but so contemptuous was
he of the modest competence which my replies revealed, that I was roused
to ask subsequently, by methods more tactful than those of Nasīb, what
was wealth in the Mountain. The answer was that the richest of the
Ṭurshān, Ḥamūd of Sweida, had an income of about 5000 napoleons.
Nasīb himself was not so well off. He had some 1000 napoleons yearly.
Probably it comes to him mainly in kind; all revenues are derived from
land, and vary considerably with the fortunes of the agricultural year.
The figures given me were, I should think, liberal, and depended on a
reckoning according with the best harvest rather than with the mean.
[Illustration 53: A DRUZE PLOUGHBOY]
Presently Nasīb fell behind and engaged in a whispered conversation
with an old man who was his chief adviser, while the others crowded
round me and told me tales of the desert and of great ruins to the
south, which they were prepared to show me if I would stay with them. At
the foot of the tell we met a group of horsemen waiting to impart to
Nasīb some important news about the Arabs. Mikhāil and I stood aside,
having seen our host look doubtfully at us out of the comers of his
eyes. That the tidings were not good was all we heard, and no one could
have learnt even that from Nasīb's crafty unmoved face and eyes
concealed beneath the lids as if he wished to make sure that they should
not reveal a single flash of his thoughts. Here we left him, to his
evident relief, and rode up the tell. Now there is never a prominent
hill in the Jebel Druze but it bears a sanctuary on its summit, and the
building is always one of those early monuments of the land that date
back to the times before Druze or Turk came into it. What is their
history? Were they erected to Nabatæan gods of rock and hill, to
Drusāra and Allāt and the pantheon of the Semitic inscriptions whom
the desert worshipped with sacrifice at the Ka'abah and on many a
solitary mound? If this be so the old divinities still bear sway under
changed names, still smell the blood of goats and sheep sprinkled on the
black doorposts of their dwellings, still hear the prayers of pilgrims
carrying green boughs and swathes of flowers. As at the Well of El
Khuḍr, there is always in the interior of the sanctuary an erection
like a sarcophagus, covered with shreds of coloured rags, and when you
lift the rags and peer beneath you find some queer block of tufa, worn
smooth with libations and own brother to the Black Stone at Mecca. Near
at hand there is a stone basin for water--the water was iced over that
day, and the snow had drifted in through the stone doors and was melting
through the roof, so that it lay in muddy pools on the floor.
The next day was exceedingly cold, with a leaden sky and a bitter wind,
the forerunner of snow. Milḥēm Iliān came down to invite me to lodge
with him, but I refused, fearing that I should feel the temperature of
my tent too icy after his heated room. He stayed some time and I took
the opportunity of discussing with him my plan of riding out into the
Ṣafa, the volcanic waste east of the Jebel Druze. He was not at all
encouraging, indeed he thought the project impossible under existing
conditions, for it seemed that the Ghiāth, the tribe that inhabits the
Ṣāfa, were up in arms against the Government. They had waylaid and
robbed the desert post that goes between Damascus and Baghdad, and were
expecting retribution at the hands of the Vāli. I f therefore a small
escort of zaptiehs were to be sent in with me they would assuredly be
cut to pieces. Milḥēm agreed, however, that it might be possible to
go in alone with the Druzes though anything short of an army of soldiers
would be useless, and he promised to give me a letter to Muḥammad en
Naṣṣār, Sheikh of Ṣāleh, whom he described as a good friend of
his and a man of influence and judgment. The Ghiāth are in the same
position with regard to the Druzes as are the Jebeliyyeh; they cannot
afford not to be on good terms with the Mountain, since they are
dependent on the high pasturages during the summer.
Towards sunset I returned Milḥēm's visit. His room was full of
people, including Nasīb newly returned from his expedition. They made
me tell them of my recent experiences in the desert, and I found that
all my friends were counted as foes by the Druzes and that they have no
allies save the Ghiāth and the Jebeliyyeh--the Sherarāt, the Da'ja,
the Beni Ḥassan, there was a score of blood against them all. In the
desert the word _gōm_, foe, is second to none save only that of _daif_,
guest, but in the Mountain it comes easily first. I said:
[Illustration 54: BOṢRA ESKI SHĀM]
"Oh Nasīb, the Druzes are like those of whom Kureyt ibn Uneif sang when
he said: 'A people who when evil bares its teeth against them, fly out
to meet it in companies or alone.'"
The sheikh's subtle countenance relaxed for a second, but the talk was
drifting too near dangerous subjects, and he rose shortly afterwards and
took his leave. His place was filled by new comers (Milḥēm's
coffee-pots must be kept boiling from dawn till late at night), and
presently one entered whom they all rose to salute. He was a Kurdish
Agha, a fine old man with a white moustache and a clean-shaven chin, who
comes down from Damascus from time to time on some business of his own.
Milḥēm is a native of Damascus, and had much to ask and hear; the
talk left desert topics and swung round to town dwellers and their ways
and views.
"Look you, your Excellencies," said a man who was making coffee over the
brazier, "there is no religion in the towns as there is in country
places."
"Yes," pursued Milḥēm--
"May God make it Yes upon you!" ejaculated the Kurd.
"May God requite you, oh Agha! You may find men in the Great Mosque at
Damascus at the Friday prayers and a few perhaps at Jerusalem, but in
Beyrout and in Smyrna the mosques are empty and the churches are empty.
There is no religion any more."
"My friends," said the Agha, "I will tell you the reason. In the country
men are poor and they want much. Of whom should they ask it but of God?
There is none other that is compassionate to the poor save He alone. But
in the towns they are rich, they have got all they desire, and why
should they pray to God if they want nothing? The lady laughs--is it not
so among her own people?"
I confessed that there was very little difference in this matter between
Europe and Asia and presently left the party to pursue their coffee
drinking and their conversation without me.
Late at night some one came knocking at my tent and a woman's voice
cried to me:
"Lady, lady! a mother's heart (are not the English merciful?) listen to
the sorrow of a mother's heart and take this letter to my son!"
I asked the unseen suppliant where her son was to be found.
"In Tripoli, in Tripoli of the West. He is a soldier and an exile, who
came not back with the others after the war. Take this letter, and send
it by a sure hand from Damascus, for there is no certainty in the posts
of Ṣalkhad."
I unfastened the tent and took the letter, she crying the while:
"The wife of Nasīb told me that you were generous. A mother's heart,
you understand, a mother's heart that mourns!"
So she departed weeping, and I sent the mysterious letter by the English
post from Beyrout, but whether it ever reached Tripoli of the West and
the Druze exile we shall not know.
The Ḳāimaḳām came out to see us off next morning and provided us
with a Druze zaptieh to show us the way to Ṣāleh. The wind was
searchingly cold, and the snow was reported to lie very deep on the
hills, for which reason we took the lower road by Ormān, a village
memorable as the scene of the outbreak of the last war. Milḥēm had
entrusted my guide, Yūsef, with the mail that had just come in to
Ṣalkhad; it consisted of one letter only, and that was for a
Christian, an inhabitant of Ormān, whom we met outside the village. It
was from Massachusetts, from one of his three sons who had emigrated to
America and were all doing well, praise be to God! They had sent him
thirty liras between them the year before: he bubbled over with joyful
pride as we handed him the letter containing fresh news of them. At
Ormān the road turned upwards--I continue to call it a road for want of
a name bad enough for it. It is part of the Druze system of defence that
there shall be no track in the Mountain wide enough for two to go
abreast or smooth enough to admit of any pace beyond a stumbling walk,
and it is the part that is the most successfully carried out. We were
soon in snow, half melted, half frozen, concealing the holes in the path
but not firm enough to prevent the animals from breaking through into
them. Occasionally there were deep drifts on which the mules embarked
with the utmost confidence only to fall midway and scatter their packs,
while the horses plunged and reared till they almost unseated us.
Mikhāil, who was no rider, bit the slush several times. The makers of
the Palestine Exploration map have allowed their fancy to play freely
over the eastern slopes of the Jebel Druze. Hills have hopped along for
miles, and villages have crossed ravines and settled themselves on the
opposite banks, as, for instance, Abu Zreik, which stands on the left
bank of the Wādi Rājil, though the map places it on the right. At the
time it all seemed to fit in with the general malevolence of that day's
journey, and our misery culminated when we entered on an interminable
snow field swept by a blizzard of cutting sleet. At the dim end of it,
quite unapproachably far away, we could just see through the sleet the
slopes on which Ṣāleh stands, but as we plodded on mile after mile
(it was useless to attempt to ride on our stumbling animals and far too
cold besides) we gradually came nearer, and having travelled seven hours
to accomplish a four hours' march, we splashed and waded late in the
afternoon though the mounds of slush and pools of water that did duty as
streets. There was not a dry place in all the village, and the snow was
falling heavily; clearly there was nothing to be done but to beat at the
door of Muḥammad en Naṣṣār, who has an honoured reputation for
hospitality, and I made the best of my way up steps sheeted with ice to
his maḳ'ad.
[Illustration 55: THE VILLAGE GATEWAY, ḤABRĀN]
If Providence owed us any compensation for the discomforts of the day,
it paid us, or at least it paid me, full measure and running over, by
the enchanting evening that I spent in the sheikh's house. Muḥammad en
Naṣṣār is a man full of years and wisdom who has lived to see a
large family of sons and nephews grow up round him, and to train their
quick wits by his own courteous and gracious example. All the Druzes are
essentially gentlefolk; but the house of the sheikhs of Ṣāleh could
not be outdone in good breeding, natural and acquired, by the noblest of
the aristocratic races, Persian or Rajputs, or any others distinguished
beyond their fellows. Milḥēm's letter was quite unnecessary to ensure
me a welcome; it was enough that I was cold and hungry and an
Englishwoman. The fire in the iron stove was kindled, my wet outer
garments taken from me, cushions and carpets spread on the divans under
the sheikh's directions, and all the band of his male relations, direct
and collateral, dropped in to enliven the evening. We began well. I knew
that Oppenheim had taken his escort from Ṣāleh when he went into the
Ṣafa, and I happened to have his book with me--how often had I
regretted that a wise instinct had not directed my choice towards
Dussaud's two admirable volumes, rather than to Oppenheim's ponderous
work, packed with information that was of little use on the present
journey! The great merit of the book lies in the illustrations, and
fortunately there was among them a portrait of Muḥammad en Naṣṣār
with his two youngest children. Having abstracted Kiepert's maps, I was
so generous as to present the tome to one of the family who had
accompanied the learned German upon his expedition. It has remained at
Ṣāleh to be a joy and a glory to the sheikhs, who will look at the
pictures and make no attempt to grapple with the text, and the hole in
my bookshelves is well filled by the memory of their pleasure.
[Illustration 56: A DRUZE MAḲ'AD, ḤABRĀN]
We talked without ceasing during the whole evening, with a brief
interval when an excellent dinner was brought in. The old sheikh, Yūsef
the zaptieh, and I partook of it together, and the eldest of the nephews
and cousins finished up the ample remains. The topic that interested
them most at Ṣāleh was the Japanese War--indeed it was in that
direction that conversation invariably turned in the Mountain, the
reason being that the Druzes believe the Japanese to belong to their own
race. The line of argument which has led them to this astonishing
conclusion is simple. The secret doctrines of their faith hold out hopes
that some day an army of Druzes will burst out of the furthest limits of
Asia and conquer the world. The Japanese had shown indomitable courage,
the Druzes also are brave; the Japanese had been victorious, the Druzes
of prophecy will be unconquerable: therefore the two are one and the
same. The sympathy of every one, whether in Syria or in Asia Minor, is
on the side of the Japanese, with the single exception of the members of
the Orthodox Church, who look on Russia as their protector. It seems
natural that the Ottoman government should rejoice to witness the
discomfiture of their secular foes, but it is more difficult to account
for the pleasure of Arab, Druze (apart from the secret hope of the
Druzes above mentioned), and Kurd, between whom and the Turk there is no
love lost. These races are not wont to be gratified by the overthrow of
the Sultan's enemies, a class to which they themselves generally belong.
At bottom there is no doubt a certain _Schadenfreude_, and the natural
impulse to favour the little man against the big bully, and behind all
there is that curious link which is so difficult to classify except by
the name of a continent, and the war appeals to the Asiatic because it
is against the European. However eagerly you may protest that the
Russians cannot be considered as a type of European civilisation,
however profoundly you may be convinced that the Japanese show as few
common characteristics with Turk or Druze as they show with South Sea
Islander or Esquimaux, East calls to East, and the voice wakes echoes
from the China Seas to the Mediterranean.
We talked also of the Turk. Muḥammad had been one of the many sheikhs
who were sent into exile after the Druze war; he had visited
Constantinople, and his experiences embraced Asia Minor also, so that he
was competent to hold an opinion on Turkish characteristics. In a blind
fashion, the fashion in which the Turk conducts most of his affairs, the
wholesale carrying off of the Druze sheikhs and their enforced sojourn
for two or three years in distant cities of the Empire, has attained an
end for which far-sighted statesmanship might have laboured in vain. Men
who would otherwise never have travelled fifty miles from their own
village have been taught perforce some knowledge of the world; they have
returned to exercise a semi-independence almost as they did before, but
their minds have received, however reluctantly, the impression of the
wide extent of the Sultan's dominions, the infinite number of his
resources, and the comparative unimportance of Druze revolts in an
empire which yet survives though it is familiar with every form of civil
strife. Muḥammad had been so completely convinced that there was a
world beyond the limits of the Mountain that he had attempted to push
two of his six sons out into it by putting them into a Government office
in Damascus. He had failed because, even with his maxims in their ears,
the boys were too headstrong. Some youthful neglect of duty, followed by
a sharp rebuke from their superior, had sent them hurrying back to the
village where they could be independent sheikhs, idle and respected.
Muḥammad took in a weekly sheet published in Damascus, and the whole
family followed with the keenest interest such news of foreign politics,
of English politics in particular, as escaped the censor's pencil.
Important events sometimes eluded their notice--or that of the
editor--for my hosts asked after Lord Salisbury and were deeply grieved
to hear he had been dead some years. The other name they knew, besides
Lord Cromer's, which is known always and everywhere, was that of Mr.
Chamberlain, and thus there started in the maḳ'ad at Ṣāleh an
animated debate on the fiscal question, lavishly illustrated on my part
with examples drawn from the Turkish gumruk, the Custom House. It may be
that my arguments were less exposed to contradiction than those which
most free traders are in a position to use, for the whole of Ṣāleh
rejected the doctrines of protection and retaliation (there was no
half-way-house here) with unanimity.
There was only one point which was not settled with perfect satisfaction
to all, and that was my journey to the Ṣafa. I have a shrewd suspicion
that Milḥēm's letter, which had been handed to me sealed, so that I
had not been able to read it, was of the nature of that given by Prætus
to Bellerophon when he sent him to the King of Lycia, and that if
Muḥammad was not commanded to execute the bearer on arrival, he was
strongly recommended to discourage her project. At any rate, he was of
opinion that the expedition could not be accomplished unless I would
take at least twenty Druzes as escort, which would have involved so much
preparation and expense that I was obliged to abandon the idea.
At ten o'clock I was asked at what hour I wished to sleep, and, to the
evident chagrin of those members of the company who had not been riding
all day in the snow, I replied that the time had come. The sons and
nephews took their departure, wadded quilts were brought in and piled
into three beds, one on each of the three sides of the immense divan,
the sheikh, Yūsef and I tucked ourselves up, and I knew no more till I
woke in the sharp frost of the early dawn. I got up and went out into
the fresh air. Ṣāleh was fast asleep in the snow; even the little
stream that tumbled in and out of a Roman fountain in the middle of the
village was sleeping under a thick coat of ice. In the clear cold
silence I watched the eastern sky redden and fade and the sun send a
long shaft of light over the snow field through which we had toiled the
day before. I put up a short thanksgiving appropriate to fine weather,
roused the muleteers and the mules from their common resting place under
the dark vaults of the khān, ate the breakfast which Muḥammad en
Naṣṣār provided, and took a prolonged and most grateful farewell of
my host and his family. No better night's rest and no more agreeable
company can have fallen to the lot of any wanderer by plain and hill
than were accorded to me at Ṣāleh.
[Illustration 57: LINTEL, EL KHURBEH]