My objective that day was the village of Umm Ruweik on the eastern edge
of the Druze hills. Remembering the vagaries of the map, I took with me
one of Muḥammad en Naṣṣār's nephews as a guide, Fāiz was his
name, and he was brother to Ghishghāsh, the Sheikh of Umm Ruweik. I had
singled him out the night before as being the pleasantest member of the
pleasant circle in the maḳ'ad, and in a four days' acquaintance there
was never an incident that caused me to regret my choice. He was a man
with features all out of drawing, his nose was crooked, his mouth was
crooked, you would not have staked anything upon the straight setting of
his eyes; his manner was particularly gentle and obliging, his
conversation intelligent, and he was full of good counsel and resource.
We had not ridden very far along the lip of the hills, I gazing at the
eastern plain as at a Promised Land that my feet would never tread,
before Fāiz began to develop a plan for leaving the mules and tents
behind at Umm Ruweik and making a dash across the Ṣafa to the
Ruḥbeh, where lay the great ruin of which the accounts had fired my
imagination. In a moment the world changed colour, and Success shone
from the blue sky and hung in golden mists on that plain which had
suddenly become accessible.
[Illustration 58: THE WALLS OF ḲANAWĀT]
Our path fell rapidly from Ṣāleh, and in half an hour we were out of
the snow and ice that had plagued us for the last day and night; half an
hour later when we reached the Wādi Buṣān, where the swift waters
turned a mill wheel, we had left the winter country behind. Ṣāneh,
the village on the north side of the Wādi Buṣān, looked a
flourishing place and contained some good specimens of Ḥaurān
architecture--I remember in particular a fine architrave carved with a
double scroll of grapes and vine leaves that fell on either side of a
vase occupying the centre of the stone. It was at Ṣāneh that we came
onto the very edge of the plateau and saw the great plain of the Ṣafa
spread out like a sea beneath us. The strange feature of it was that its
surface was as black as a black tent roof, owing to the sheets of lava
and volcanic stone that were spread over it. At places there were
patches of yellow, which I afterwards discovered to be the earth on
which the lumps of tufa lay revealed by their occasional absence, and
these the Arabs call the Beiḍa, the White Land, in contradistinction
to the Ḥarra, the Burnt Land of lava and tufa. In the Ṣafa the White
Land is almost as arid as the Burnt, though generally the word Beiḍa
means arable, for I heard Fāiz shout to the muleteers: "Come off the
Beiḍa!" when the mules had strayed into a field of winter wheat. The
literary word for desert bears a puzzling resemblance to this other, as
for instance in Mutanabbi's verse.
"Al tail w'al khail w'al beida ta'rafuni:
Night and my steed and the desert know me--
And the lance thrust and battle, and parchment and the pen."
[Illustration 59: ḲANAWĀT, THE BASILICA]
The Ṣafa ran out to a dark mass of volcanoes, lying almost due north
and south, but we were so high above them that their elevation was not
perceptible. Beyond them again we could see a wide stretch of Beiḍa
which was the Ruḥbeh plain. To the east and south on the immensely
distant horizon a few little volcanic cones marked the end of the
Ḥaurān outcrop of lava and the beginning of the Ḥamād, the
waterless desert that reaches to Baghdad. To the north were the hills
round Dmer, and still further north the other range bounding the valley
ten miles wide that leads to Palmyra, and these ran back to the slopes
of Anti-Libanus, snowcapped, standing above the desert road to Ḥomṣ.
We turned east to Shibbekeh, a curious place built above a valley the
northern bank of which is honeycombed with caves, and north to Sheikhly
and Rāmeh on the southern brink of a very deep gully, the Wādi esh
Shām, down which are the most easterly of the inhabited villages,
Fedhāmeh and Ej Jeita. The settlements on this side of the Mountain
have an air of great antiquity. The cave villages may have existed long
before Nabatæan times; possibly they go back to the prehistoric
uncertainties of King Og, or the people whom his name covered, when
whole towns were quarried out underground, the most famous example being
Dera'a in the Ḥaurān plain south of Mezērib. We left Mushennef to
the west, not without regrets on my part that I had not time to revisit
it, for mirrored in its great tank is one of the most charming of all
the temples of the Jebel Druze, not excepting the magnificent monuments
of Ḳanawāt. El Ajlāt, north of the Wādi esh Shām, is perched on
top of a tell high enough to touch the February snow line, and another
valley leads down from it to the Ṣafa--I heard of a ruin and an
inscription in its lower course but did not visit them. We got to Umm
Ruweik about four o'clock, and pitched tents on the edge of the mountain
shelf, where I could see through my open tent door the whole extent of
the Ṣafa.
Sheikh Ghishghāsh was all smiles. Certainly I could ride out to the
Ruḥbeh if I would take him and his son Aḥmed and Fāiz with me. He
scoffed at the idea of a larger escort. By the Face of the Truth, the
Ghiāth were his servants and his bondmen, they would entertain us as
the noble should be entertained and provide us with luxurious lodgings.
I dined with Ghishghāsh (he would take no refusal), and concluded that
he was an easy tempered, boastful, and foolish man, extremely talkative,
though all that he said was not worth one of Fāiz's sentences. Fāiz
fell into comparative silence in his company, and Aḥmed too said
little, but that little was sensible and worth hearing. Ghishghāsh told
great tales of the Ṣafa and of what it contained, the upshot of which
was that beyond the ruins already known there was nothing till you
travelled a day's journey east of the Ruḥbeh; but that there you came
to a quarry and a ruined castle like the famous White Ruin of the
Ruḥbeh which we were going to see, but smaller and less well
preserved. And beyond that stretched the Ḥamād, with no dwellings in
it and no rujm--even the bravest of the Arabs were forced to desert it
in the summer owing to the total lack of water. My heart went out to the
mysterious castle east of the Ruḥbeh, unvisited, I believe, by any
traveller; but it was too distant a journey to be accomplished on the
spur of the moment without preparation. "When you next return, oh
lady----." Yes, when I return. But I shall not on a future, occasion
rely on the luxurious entertainment of the Ghiāth.
[Illustration 60: ḲANAWĀT, DOORWAY OF THE BASILICA]
[Illustration 61: ḲANAWĀT, A TEMPLE]
After consultation I decided that Mikhāil and Ḥabīb should accompany
us, the latter at his special request. He would ride his best mule, he
said, and she could keep pace with any mare and carry besides the rugs
and the five chickens which we took with us to supplement the
hospitality of the Ghiāth. I had a fur coat strapped behind my saddle
and, as usual, a camera and a note-book in my saddle-bags. We rode down
the steep slopes of the hills for an hour, three other Druze horsemen
joining us as we went. I presently discovered that the sheikhs had added
them to the stipulated escort, but I made no comment. One of the three
was a relative of Ghishghāsh, his name Khittāb; he had travelled with
Oppenheim and proved to be an agreeable companion. We passed through the
ploughland of Ghishghāsh's village and then down slopes almost barren,
though they yielded enough pasturage for his flocks of sheep shepherded
by Arabs, and at the foot of the hill we entered a shallow stony valley
wherein was a tiny encampment surrounded by more herds that quarried
their dinner among the boulders. After an hour of the valley, which
wound between volcanic rocks, we came out onto the wide desolation of
the Ṣafa. It is almost, but not quite, flat. The surface breaks into
low gentle billowings, just deep enough to shut out the landscape from
the horseman in the depression, so that he may journey for an hour or
more and see nothing but a sky-line of black stones a few feet above him
on either side. The billowings have an ordered plan; they form
continuous waterless valleys, each one of which the Arabs know by a
name. Valley and ridge alike are covered with blocks of tufa, varying
from six inches across to two feet or more, and where there is any space
between them you can perceive the hard yellow soil, the colour of sea
sand, on which they lie. An extremely scanty scrub pushes its way
between the stones, ḥamād and shīḥ and ḥajeineh, and here and
there a tiny geranium, the starry garlic and the leaves of the tulip,
but generally there is no room even for the slenderest plants, so
closely do the stones lie together. They are black, smooth and edgeless,
as though they had been waterworn; when the sun shines the air dazzles
above them as it dazzles above a sheet of molten metal, and in the
summer the comparison must hold good in other respects, for the pitiless
heat is said to be almost unendurable. It would be difficult to cross
the Ṣafa if it were not for the innumerable minute paths that
intersect it. At first the rider is not aware of them, so small and
faint they are, but presently as he begins to wonder why there is always
just enough space before him for his horse to step in, he realises that
he is following a road. Hundreds of generations of passing feet have
pushed aside the tufa blocks ever so little and made it possible to
travel through that wilderness of stones.
[Illustration 62: THE TEMPLE, MASHENNEF]
We rode by the depression called the Ghadir el Gharz, and at the end of
two hours we met one in rags, whose name was Heart of God. He was
extremely glad to see us, was Heart of God, having been a friend of the
family for years (at least eighty years I should judge), and extremely
surprised when he discovered me in the cavalcade. There his surprise
ceased, for when he heard I was English it conveyed nothing further to
him, his mind being unburdened with the names and genealogies of the
foreigner. He told us there was water close at hand and that Arab tents
were not more than two hours away, and bade Ghishghāsh go in peace, and
might there be peace also upon the stranger with him. In the matter of
the tents he lied, did Heart of God, or we misunderstood him; but we
found the water, a muddy pool, and lunched by it, sharing it with a herd
of camels. Water in the Ṣafa there is none fit to drink according to
European canons, and for that matter there is none in the Jebel Druze.
There are no springs in the hills; the water supply is contained in open
tanks, and the traveller may consider himself fortunate if he be not
asked to drink a liquid in which he has seen the mules and camels
wallowing. Under the most favourable conditions it is sure to be heavily
laden with foreign ingredients which boiling will not remove, though it
renders them comparatively innocuous. The tea made with this fluid has a
body and a flavour of its own; it is the colour of muddy coffee and
leaves a sediment at the bottom of the cup. Mikhāil carried an
earthenware jar of boiled water for me from camp to camp, and having
brought him to use this precaution by refusing to drink of the pools and
tanks we might meet by the way, I had no difficulty in continuing the
system in the Ṣafa. He and the Druzes and the muleteers drank what
they found, whether in the Mountain or in the Ṣafa, and they did not
appear to suffer from any ill effect. Probably the germs contained in
their careless draughts were so numerous and so active that they had
enough to do in destroying one another.
We rode on and on over all the stones in the world, and even Ghishghāsh
fell silent or spoke only to wonder where the tents of the Ghiāth might
be. Khittāb opined that when we reached the Ḳantarah, the Arch, we
should catch sight of them, and I pricked up my ears at a name that
seemed to imply some sort of construction. But the Ḳantarah was
nothing more than a rise in the ground, a little higher than the rest
and no less stony. There are many such; leading up to the crest of most
of them is a track by which the Arabs creep on their stomachs to look
out for foes, hidden themselves behind the small black pile that has
been erected as a permanent bastion on the summit. In summer the Ṣafa
is swept with raiders. Big tribes like the 'Anazeh ride through to deal
a sudden blow at some enemy to the south or north, harrying the Ghiāth
as they pass, and since there are exceedingly few places where water is
to be found in the unparalleled heat of the stony waste, the raiders and
such men of the Ghiāth as are still in the plain have no choice but to
frequent at dusk the same muddy holes, and the days and nights of the
Ghiāth are dogged in consequence by constant terror till the great
tribes go east again to the Ḥamād. There was no sign of tents to be
seen from the Ḳantarah, and it began to seem probable that we should
spend a waterless night among the stones under the clear frosty sky,
when about an hour before sunset Khittāb exclaimed that he could see
the smoke of camp fires to the north-west. We rode a good way back,
making a semicircle of our course, and got to the tents at nightfall
after a journey of nine hours. With the goats and camels who were
returning home after a laborious day's feeding we stumbled in over the
stones, and very miserable the little encampment looked, though it had
been so eagerly desired. A couple of hundred pounds would be a handsome
price for all the worldly goods of all the Ghiāth; they have nothing
but the black tents and a few camels and the coffee-pots, and if they
had more it would be taken from them in a midsummer ghazu. They live by
bread alone--shirāk, the thin flaps that are like brown paper--and for
the whole length of their days they wander among the stones in fear of
their lives, save for the month or two when they come up to the Jebel
Druze for the pasturage.
We scattered, being a large party, and Ghishghāsh, my servants and I
went to the house of the sheikh, whose name was Understanding. His two
sons, Muḥammad and Ḥamdān, lighted a fire of thorn and camel dung
that smoked abominably, and we sat round and watched the coffee making.
Muḥammad, being the eldest, officiated. He was skilful in the song of
the pestle, and beat out a cheerful tattoo upon the mortar. His face was
dark and thin and his white teeth shone when he smiled; he was dressed
airily in dirty white cotton garments, a cotton kerchief fell from the
camel's hair rope on his head down on to his bare breast, and he spoke
in a guttural speech which was hard to follow. Our dinner was of shirāk
and dibs; the Ghiāth are too poor to kill a sheep for their guest, even
when he is a personage so important as Ghishghāsh. He, foolish man, was
in his element. He preened himself and swelled with pride, combed out
his long moustache before the admiring gaze of his hosts and talked
without ceasing until far into the night, silly talk, thought I, who
longed to be allowed to sleep. I had a rug to cover me and my saddle for
a pillow, and I lay in a corner by the sāḥah, the division against
the women's quarter, and at times I listened to a conversation which was
not particularly edifying, and at times I cursed the acrid, pungent
smoke. Towards the middle of the night I was awakened by the moon that
shone with a frosty brilliance into the tent. The fire had burnt down
and the smoke had blown out; the Arabs and the Druzes were lying asleep
round the cold hearth; a couple of mares stood peacefully by the tent
pole and gazed with wise eyes upon their masters within, and beyond them
a camel lay chumping among the black stones. The strange and silent
beauty of a scene as old as the world caught at the heart and spurred
the fancy even after sleep had fallen upon it again.
Before dawn Mikhāil had succeeded in making me a cup of tea over the
fitful blaze of the thorns, and as the sun rose we got into the saddle,
for we had far to go. "God's bright and intricate device" had clothed
the black plain in exquisite loveliness. The level sun towards which we
were riding cast a halo of gold round every stone, the eastern ranges of
volcanoes stood in clear cut outline against the cloudless sky, and to
the north-west the snows of Anti-Libanus and Hermon gleamed incredibly
bright above the glittering blackness of the foreground. One of the
Arabs was added to our party as a guide; 'Awād was his name. He rode a
camel, and from that point of vantage conversed with us in a raucous
shout, as though to bridge the immense distance between rākib and
fāris, a camel rider and one who rides a mare. We were all shivering as
we set out in the chill dawn, but 'Awād turned the matter into a jest
by calling out from his camel: "Lady, lady! do you know why I am cold?
It is because I have four wives in the house!" And the others laughed,
for he had the reputation of being a bit of a Don Juan, and such funds
as he possessed went to replenishing his harem rather than his wardrobe.
I think we must speedily have re-entered the Ghadīr el Gharz. After two
hours' riding we crossed some rising ground to the south-west of the
Tulūl es Ṣafa, the line of volcanoes, and cantered across a
considerable stretch of stoneless yellow ground, Beiḍa, till we came
to the southern end of the lava bed. The lava lay on our left hand like
a horrible black nightmare sea, not so much frozen as curdled, as though
some hideous terror had arrested the flow of it and petrified the lines
of shrinking fear upon its surface. But it was long long ago that a
mighty hand had lifted the Gorgon's head before the waves of the Tulūl
es Ṣafa. Sun and frost and æons of time had splintered the original
forms of the volcanoes, rent the lava beds, shattered the precipices and
obliterated the features of the hills. One or two terebinths had found a
foothold in the crevices, but when I passed they were still bare and
grey and did nothing to destroy the general sense of lifelessness.
As we rode round these frontiers of death I became aware that we were
following a track almost as old as the hills themselves, a little thread
of human history leading us straight through that forbidding land.
'Awāḍ kept talking of a stone which he called El 'Ablā, a word that
denotes a white rock visible from afar, but I was so much used to names
signifying nothing that I paid no attention until he stopped his camel
and shouted:
"Oh lady! here it is. By the Face of God, this is El 'Ablā."
It was no more nor less than a well stone. It bore the groove of the
rope worn a couple of inches deep into it, and must have served a
respectable time, since this black rock is extremely hard, but there was
no modern well within miles of it. Close at hand was a big heap of
stones and then another and another, two or three in every quarter of a
mile, and when I looked closely I perceived that they were built, not
thrown together. Some of them had been opened by Arabs seeking for
treasure, and where the topmost layers had been thus removed a square
shallow space lay revealed in the centre of the mound, carefully
constructed of half-dressed blocks. 'Awāḍ said that as far as he knew
nothing had ever been found in these places, whatever they might have
contained formerly. Clearly the mounds were made to mark the line of
that ancient road through the wilderness. 'Awāḍ stopped again a few
hundred yards further at some black rocks almost flush with the ground,
and they were like the open pages of a book in which all the races that
had passed that way had written their names, in the queer script that
the learned call Safaitic, in Greek, in Cufic, and in Arabic. Last of
all the unlettered Bedouin had scrawled their tribe marks there.
"By Shuraik son of Naghafat son of Na'fis (?) son of Nu'mān," so ran
one of them; and another: "By Būkhālih son of Ṭhann son of An'am son
of Rawāḳ son of Būkhālih. He found the inscription of his uncle and
he longed after him and . . . ." And there was another in a label which
I did not copy sufficiently well to admit of its being deciphered with
certainty. Probably it contains two names connected by "ibn," "son of."
Above the names are seven straight lines which, according to Dussaud's
ingenious suggestion, may represent the seven planets.[7] The Greek
letters spelt the word Hanelos, which is John, a Semitic name written
possibly by its owner in the foreign script that he had learnt while he
served under the Roman eagles; the Cufic sentences were pious
ejaculations calling down a blessing on the traveller who had paused to
inscribe them. So each man according to his kind had left his record and
departed into the mists of time, and beyond these scratches on the black
rocks we know nothing of his race, nor of his history, nor of the errand
that brought him into the inhospitable Ghadīr el Gharz. As I copied the
phrases they seemed like the murmur of faint voices from out the limbo
of the forgotten past, and Orpheus with his lute could not have charmed
the rocks to speak more clearly of the generations of the dead. All the
Ṣafa is full of these whisperings; shadows that are nothing but a name
quiver in the quivering air above the stones, and call upon their God in
divers tongues.
[Illustration 63: ḲAL'AT EL BEIḌA]
I copied in haste, for there was no time to lose that day. The Druzes
stood round me impatiently, and 'Awāḍ shouted, "Yallah, yallah! ya
sitt," which being interpreted means, "Hurry up!" We rode on to the
eastern limit of the Ṣafa, turned the corner of the lava bed, and saw
the yellow plain of the Ruḥbeh before us. I know, because I have
observed it from the Jebel Druze, that it stretches for a great distance
to the east; but, when we reached it, it seemed no wider than half a
mile, and beyond it lay a wonderful lake of bluish misty water. The
little volcanoes far away to the east rose like islands out of the sea,
and were mirrored in the water at their feet; yet as we rode towards
that inland flood, its shores retreated before us, for it was but a
phantom sea whereat the phantom hosts of the Ṣafa may fitly assuage
their thirst. Then on the brink of the lava hills we caught sight of a
grey tower, and in the plain below it we saw a domed and whitewashed
shrine, and these were the Khirbet el Beiḍa and the Mazār of Sheikh
Serāk. Sheikh Serāk inherits his position as guardian of the Ruḥbeh
from Zeus Saphathenos, who is in turn the direct heir to the god El, the
earliest divinity of the Ṣafa. His business is to watch over the
crops, which in good years the Arabs sow round his soul's dwelling
place; he is respected by Moslem and by Druze alike, and he holds a
well-attended yearly festival which had fallen about a fortnight before
I came. The shrine itself is a building of the Ḥaurān type, with a
stone roof supported on transverse arches. Over the doors there is a
carved lintel taken from the ruins of the White Castle.
[Illustration 64: ḲAL'AT EL BEIḌA]
But I could scarcely stay while my men assembled here, so eager was I to
see the Ḳal'at el Beiḍa--Khirbeh or Ḳal'ah, ruin or castle, the
Arabs call it either indifferently. I left the Druzes to pay such
respects as were due to Zeus Saphathenos or whoever he might be, and
cantered off to the edge of the lava plateau. A deep ditch lay before
the lava, so full of water that I had to cross it by a little bridge of
planks; Ḥabīb was there watering his mule, that admirable mule which
walked as fast as the mares, and, entrusting my horse to him, I hastened
on over the broken lava and into the fortress court. There were one or
two Arabs sauntering through it, but they paid as little attention to me
as I did to them. This was it, the famous citadel that guards a dead
land from an unpeopled, the Ṣafa from the Ḥamād. Grey white on the
black platform rose the walls of smoothly dressed stones, the ghostly
stronghold of a world of ghosts. Whose hands reared it, whose art
fashioned the flowing scrolls on door-post and lintel, whose eyes kept
vigil from the tower, cannot yet be decided with any certainty. Hanelos
and Shuraik and Būkhālih may have looked for it as they rounded the
corner of the Wādi el Gharz, and perhaps the god El took it under his
protection, and perhaps the prayers of the watchman were turned to some
distant temple, and offered to the deities of Greece and Rome. A
thousand unanswered, unanswerable, questions spring to your mind as you
cross the threshold.
De Vogüé and Oppenheim and Dussaud have described the Khirbet el
Beiḍa, and any one who cares to read their words may know that it is a
square enclosure with a round tower at each corner, a round bastion
between the towers and a rectangular keep against the south wall; that
its doorways are carved with wonderful flowing patterns, scrolls and
leaves and flowers, with animals striding through them; and that it is
probably an outlying fortress of Rome, built between the second and
fourth centuries. The fact remains that we are not certain of its
origin, any more than we are certain of the origin of the ruins near it
at Jebel Sēs, or of Mshitta, or of any of the buildings in the western
desert. There are resemblances between them all, and there are marked
differences, just as there are resemblances between Ḳal'at el Beiḍa
and the architecture of the Ḥaurān, and yet what stonecutter of the
Mountain would have let his imagination so outstrip the classic rule as
did the man who set the images of the animals of the desert about the
doors of the White Castle? There is a breath of something that is
strange to neighbouring art, a wilder, freer fancy, not so skilled as
that which created the tracery of Mshitta, cruder, and probably older.
It is all guess work; the desert may give up its secrets, the history of
the Ṣafa and the Ruḥbeh may be pieced together from the lettered
rocks, but much travel must be accomplished first and much excavation on
the Syrian frontiers, in Hira perhaps, or in Yemen. I would only remark
that the buildings at Ḳal'at el Beiḍa cannot as they stand belong to
one and the same period. The keep is certainly a later work than the
curtain walls of the fort. While these are built with mortar, like the
Roman camp at Ḳasṭal and the fortress at Muwaḳḳar, the keep is
of dry masonry resembling that which is universal in the Ḥaurān, and
in its walls are set carved stones which were assuredly not executed for
the positions they occupy. Even the decoration about the main door of
the keep is of borrowed stones; the two superimposed carved blocks of
the lintel do not fit each other, and neither fits the doorway. But the
only conclusion I venture to draw is, that the two suggestions of origin
that have been made by archaeologists, the one that the place was a
Roman camp, the other that it was the Ghassānid fortress, may both be
true.
The edge of the lava plateau lies a few feet above the plain. Along this
natural redoubt are other buildings besides the White Castle, but none
of them are of the same architectural interest. Their walls are roughly
made of squared tufa blocks laid dry, whereas the castle is of a grey
stone, and part of it is constructed with mortar. The only building of
any importance that I visited lay a little to the north and had been
roofed after the Ḥaurān manner with stone slabs laid on transverse
arches. At intervals along the lava bed there were small towers like
sentry boxes guarding the approach to the castle, and these, too, were
of dry masonry.
[Illustration 65: ḲAL'AT EL BEIḌA, DOOR OF KEEP]
A couple of hours' halt was all that we could allow ourselves, for we
had to be in sight of our encampment before the dusk closed in at the
risk of passing the night in the open Ṣafa. So after devouring hastily
the remains of the five chickens we had brought from Umm Ruweik,
flavoured by stalks of wild onions that 'Awāḍ had found in the lava,
we set off homewards. We just accomplished the ride of 4 3/4 hours in
time, that is we saw the smoke of the camp fires before night fell, and
got our direction thereby. A series of spaces cleared of stones led us
to the camp. These open places are the marāḥ (tent marks) of the
'Anazeh, who used to camp in the Ṣafa before the Druzes established
themselves in the Mountain over a hundred years ago. The marāḥ,
therefore, have remained visible after at least a century, and will
remain, probably, for many centuries more. There was a strong cold wind
that evening, and the main wall of the tent had been shifted round to
shelter us the better; but for all that we passed a comfortless night,
and the cold woke me several times to an uneasy sense of having fallen
asleep on an ant hill. How the Arabs contrive to collect so many fleas
among so few possessions is an insoluble mystery. There was hardly a
suitable place for them to lodge in, except the tent walls themselves,
and when those walls are taken down they must show skill and agility
beyond the common wont of fleas in order to get themselves packed up and
carried off to the next camping ground, but that they are equal to the
task every one knows who has spent a night in a house of hair. After two
nights with the Ghiāth our own tents seemed a paradise of luxury when
we returned to them the next afternoon, and a bath the utmost height to
which a Sybaritic life could attain, even when taken in a temperature
some degrees below freezing point.
During our ride homewards an incident occurred which is worth recording,
as it bears on Druze customs. The sect, as has been remarked before, is
divided into initiated and uninitiated. To the stranger the main
difference between the two is that the initiated abstain from the use of
tobacco, and I had noticed in the evening I spent at Ṣāleh that none
of Muḥammad en Naṣṣār's family smoked. I was therefore surprised
when Fāiz, finding himself alone with Mikhāil and me, begged the
former for a cigarette, and I apologised for having omitted to offer him
one before, saying that I had understood smoking to be forbidden to him.
Fāiz blinked his crooked eyes, and replied that it was as I had said,
and that he would not have accepted a cigarette if another Druze had
been in sight, but that since none of his co-religionists were present
he felt himself at liberty to do as he pleased. He begged me, however,
not to mention to his brother this lapse from virtue. That night in the
maḳ'ad of Umm Ruweik the three sheikhs and I laid many plans for a
further exploration of the Ṣafa, settled the number of camels I was to
take with me, and even the presents which were to reward the escort at
the end of the journey. Fāiz and Aḥmed and Khittāb shall certainly
be of the expedition if the selecting of it lies in my hands.
[Illustration 66: MOULDINGS FROM ḲAL'AT EL BEIḌA AND FROM PALMYRA]
Next morning at 8.30 we started on our three days' ride to Damascus. Of
Umm Ruweik I need only add that it took exactly four days to scrape
together sufficient money among the inhabitants for the changing of a
gold piece. We had brought a bag of silver and copper coins with us from
Jerusalem, but when it was exhausted we had the utmost difficulty in
paying our debts--this is also one of the Hints to Travellers that
Mikhāil urged me to embody in the book I was to write. We rode by
enchanting slopes, covered where the snow had melted with the sky-blue
Iris Histrio, and spent an hour or two at Shakka, which was one of the
principal scenes of de Vogüé's archæological work. The basilica which
figures as almost perfect in his book is now fallen completely into
ruin, only the façade remaining, but the Ḳaisarīeh still stands, and
the monastery which he believes to be one of the oldest monastic
buildings in existence. We rode by Ḥīt, an interesting village
containing a fine pre-Arabic house in which the sheikh lives, and camped
at Bathaniyyeh in a frost that sent me shivering to bed. It was here
that a running stream was completely frozen. Next day I made a circuit
to visit Ḥayāt, where there is a lovely Kalybeh, published by de
Vogüé, and a castle, that I might fill up some gaps in my former
journey and see what sort of buildings are to be found on the northern
slopes of the mountain, if I could do no more. The old villages are
rapidly filling up, and in a few years little trace of their monuments
will remain. So we came down into the plain, joined the Lejā road from
Shaḥbah to Damascus at Lahiteh, and pursued our mules to Brāk, the
furthest village of the Ḥaurān. There is a military post at Brāk
held by a score of soldiers; just before we reached it we met a little
Druze girl who cowered by the roadside and wept with fear at the sight
of us. "I am a maid!" she cried, "I am a maid!" Her words threw an
ominous shadow upon the Turkish regime under which we were now to find
ourselves again. Almost opposite the fort we passed two Druzes returning
from Damascus. They gave me a friendly greeting, and I said:
[Illustration 67: A GATEWAY, SHAKKA]
"Are you facing to the Mountain?"
They said: "By God! may God keep you!"
I said: "I come from thence--salute it for me," and they answered:
"May God salute you! go in peace!"
It is never without a pang that the traveller leaves the Druze country
behind, and never without registering a vow to return to it as soon as
may be.
[Illustration 68: THE SHEIKH'S HOUSE, ḤAYĀT]
Having passed under the protection of the Sultan, I found that my road
next day lay across a really dangerous bit of country. The Circassians
and Turks of Brāk (the Turks were charming people from the northern
parts of Asia Minor) dissuaded me strongly from taking the short cut
across the hills to Damascus, so strongly that I had almost abandoned
the idea. They said the hills were infested by robbers and probably
empty of Arab encampments at this time of year, so that the robbers had
it all their own way. Fortunately next morning we heard of a company of
soldiers who were said to be riding to Damascus across the hills, and
the report encouraged us to take the same path. We never saw them, and I
do not believe that they had any real existence; on the other hand, we
did see some black tents which gave us confidence at the worst bit of
the road, and the robbers must have been otherwise engaged for they did
not appear. But I noted with interest, firstly, that desert life comes
to within an hour or two of Damascus, a fact I had not been able to
observe before when I went by the high road, and secondly that the
Sultan's peace, if peace it can be called, ceases almost at the walls of
the chief city of Syria. We crossed the Nahr el 'Awāj, which is the
Pharpar, and reached soon after midday the Circassian village of Nejhā,
where I stopped to lunch under a few poplars, the first grove of trees I
had seen since we left Salt. Whether you ride to Damascus by a short cut
or by a high road, from the Ḥaurān or from Palmyra, it is always
further away than any known place. Perhaps it is because the traveller
is so eager to reach it, the great and splendid Arab city set in a
girdle of fruit trees and filled with the murmur of running water. But
if he have only patience there is no road that will not end at last; and
we, too, at the last came to the edge of the apricot gardens and then to
the Bawābet Ullaḥ, the Gates of God, and so passed into the Meidān,
the long quarter of shops and khāns stretching out like the handle to a
great spoon, in the bowl of which lie the minarets and domes of the rich
quarters. By four o'clock I was lodged in the Hotel Victoria, and had a
month's post of letters and papers in my hands.
[Footnote 7: Dussaud, "Mission Scientific," p. 64. The translation of
the inscriptions I owe to the kindness of Dr. Littmann, who will include
the original copies in his "Semitic Inscriptions."]