You do not see Ḥamāh until you are actually upon it--there is no
other preposition that describes the attitude of the new comer. The
Orontes at this point flows in a deep bed and the whole city lies hidden
between the banks. The monotonous plain of cornfields stretches before
you without a break until you reach a veritable entanglement of
graveyards--the weekly All Souls' Day had come round again when we
arrived, and the cemeteries were crowded with the living as well as with
the dead. Suddenly the plain ceased beneath our feet, and we stood on
the edge of an escarpment, with the whole town spread out before us, the
Orontes set with gigantic Persian wheels, and beyond it the conical
mound on which stood the fortresses of Hamath and Epiphaneia and who
knows what besides, for the site is one of the oldest in the world. Two
soldiers started from the earth and set about to direct me to a camping
ground, but I was tired and cross, a state of mind that does sometimes
occur on a journey, and the arid spots between houses to which they took
us seemed particularly distasteful. At length the excellent Turk, who
had not yet abandoned us, declared that he knew the very place that
would please me; he led us along the edge of the escarpment to the
extreme northern end of the city, and here showed us a grassy sward
which was as lovely a situation as could be desired. The Orontes issued
from the town below us amid gardens of flowering apricot trees, the
golden evening light lay behind the minarets, and a great Na'oura ground
out a delicious song of the river.
Ḥamāh is the present terminus of the French railway,[9] and the seat
of a Muteserrif. The railway furnished me with a guide and companion in
the shape of a Syrian station-master, a consequential half-baked little
man, who had been educated in a missionary school and scorned to speak
Arabic when he could stutter in French. He announced that his name was
Monsieur Kbēs and his passion archæology, and, that he might the
better prove himself to be in the van of modern thought, he attributed
every antiquity in Ḥamāh to the Hittites, whether it were Byzantine
capital or Arab enlaced decoration. With the Muteserrif I came
immediately into collision by reason of his insisting on providing me
with eight soldiers to guard my camp at night, a preposterous force,
considering that two had been ample in every country district. So
numerous a guard would have been an intolerable nuisance, for they would
have talked all night and left the camp no peace, and I sent six of them
away, in spite of their protestations that they must obey superior
orders. They reconciled the Muteserrif's commands with mine by spending
the night in a ruined mosque a quarter of a mile away, where they were
able to enjoy excellent repose unbroken by a sense of responsibility.
[Illustration 109: THE ḲUBBEH IN THE MOSQUE AT ḤAMĀH]
For picturesqueness Ḥamāh is not to be outdone by any town in Syria.
The broad river with its water wheels is a constant element of beauty,
the black and white striped towers of the mosques an exquisite
architectural feature, the narrow, partly vaulted streets are traps to
hold unrivalled effects of sun and shadow, and the bazaars are not as
yet disfigured by the iron roofs that have done so much to destroy the
character of those at Damascus and at Ḥomṣ. The big mosque in the
centre of the town was once a Byzantine church. The doors and windows of
the earlier building are easily traceable in the walls of the mosque;
the lower part of the western minaret was probably the foundation of an
older tower; the court is full of Byzantine shafts and capitals, and the
beautiful little Ḳubbeh is supported by eight Corinthian columns. On
one of these I noticed the Byzantine motive of the blown acanthus. When
they grew weary of setting the leaves in a stereotyped uprightness, the
stone-cutters laid them lightly round the capital, as though the fronds
had drifted in a swirl of wind, and the effect is wonderfully graceful
and fanciful. Kbēs and I climbed the citadel hill, and found the area
on the top to be enormous, but all the cut stones of the fortifications
have been removed and built into the town below. My impression is that
the isolation of the mound is not natural, but has been effected by
cutting through the headland that juts out into the valley, and so
separating a part of it from the main ridge. If this be so, it must have
been a great work of antiquity, for the cutting is both wide and deep.
The chief interest of the day at Ḥamāh was supplied by the
inhabitants. Four powerful Mohammadan families are reckoned as the
aristocracy of the town, that of 'Aẓam Zādeh, Teifūr, Killāni and
Barāzi, of which last I had seen a member in Damascus. The combined
income of each family is probably about £6000 a year, all derived from
land and villages, there being little trade in Ḥamāh. Before the
Ottoman government was established as firmly as it is now, these four
families were the lords of Ḥamāh and the surrounding districts; they
are still of considerable weight in the administration of the town, and
the officials of the Sultan let them go pretty much their own way, which
is often devious. An ancient evil tale of the 'Aẓam Zādeh is often
told, and not denied, so far as I could learn, by the family. There was
an 'Aẓam in past years who, like King Ahab, desired his neighbour's
vineyard, but the owner of it refused to sell. Thereupon the great man
laid a plot. He caused one of his slaves to be slaughtered and had him
cut into small pieces and buried, not too deep, in a corner of the
coveted property, and after waiting a suitable time he sent a message to
the landlord saying, "You have frequently invited me to drink coffee
with you in your garden; I will come. Make ready." The man was gratified
by this condescension and prepared a feast. The day came and with it the
'Aẓam prince. The meal was spread under an arbour, but when the guest
saw it he declared that the spot selected did not suit him, and led the
way to the exact place where his slave had been buried. The host
protested, saying that it was a mean corner dose to the refuse heaps, but
the 'Aẓam replied that he was satisfied, and the entertainment began.
Presently the guest raised his head and said, "I perceive a curious
smell." "My lord," said the host, "it is from the refuse heaps." "No,"
said the other, "there is something more;" and summoning his servants he
bade them dig in the ground whereon they sat. The quartered body of the
slave was revealed and recognised, and on an accusation of murder the
lord of the garden was seized and bound, and his possessions taken from
him by way of compensation.
[ILLUSTRATION 110: THE TEKYAH KILLĀNIYYEH, ḤAMĀH]
Nor, said Kbēs, have such summary methods of injustice ceased. Quite
recently a quantity of onions were stolen from a shop belonging to 'Abd
ul Ḳādir el 'Aẓam in the quarter immediately below my camp. The
servants of 'Abd ul Ḳādir came to the house of the sheikh of the
quarter and demanded from him their master's property, and since he knew
nothing of the matter and could not indicate who the thief might have
been, they seized him and his son, wounding the son in the hand with a
bullet, dragged them to the river bank, stripped them, beat them almost
to death, and left them to get home as best they might. The incident was
known all over Hamāh, but the government took no steps to punish 'Abd
ul Ḳādir. I went to the house of Khālid Beg 'Aẓam, which is the
most beautiful in the city, as beautiful as the famous 'Aẓam house in
Damascus. Khālid took me into rooms every inch of which was covered
with an endless variety of Persian patterns in gesso duro and woodwork
and mosaic. They opened upon a courtyard set round with an arcade of the
best Arab workmanship, with a fountain in the centre and pots of
flowering ranunculus and narcissus in the corners. The women of the
house of 'Aẓam have even a greater reputation than the sumptuous walls
that hold them; they are said to be the loveliest women in all Ḥamāh.
The Killāni I visited also in their charming house by the Orontes, the
Tekyah Killāniyyeh. It contains a mausoleum, where three of their
ancestors are buried, and rooms looking over the river, filled with the
pleasant grumbling of a Persian wheel. From thence I went to the
Muteserrif, who is an old man bent almost double, and acquainted with no
tongue but Turkish. I was considerably relieved to find that he bore no
malice for my unruly conduct in the matter of the guard. As we walked
home to lunch we met an aged Afghan clad in white. Dervish Effendi was
his name. He stopped the station-master to inquire who I was, and having
learnt that I was English he approached me with a grin and a salute and
said in Persian, "The English and the Afghans are close friends." He was
in fact as well-informed as the British public--possibly better
informed--of the interchange of visits and civilities between Kabul and
Calcutta; and the moral of the episode (which developed into a long and
tiresome, but most cordial, visit from Dervish Effendi) is that the
report of what happens in the remotest corner of Asia is known almost
immediately to the furthest end, and that it is scarcely an exaggeration
to say that if an English regiment is cut up on the borders of
Afghanistan the English tourist will be mocked at in the streets of
Damascus. Islām is the bond that unites the western and central parts
of the continent, as it is the electric current by which the
transmission of sentiment is effected, and its potency is increased by
the fact that there is little or no sense of territorial nationality to
counterbalance it. A Turk or a Persian does not think or speak of "my
country" in the way that an Englishman or a Frenchman thinks and speaks;
his patriotism is confined to the town of which he is a native, or at
most to the district in which that town lies. If you ask him to what
nationality he belongs he will reply: "I am a man of Isfahān," or "I am
a man of Konia," as the case may be, just as the Syrian will reply that
he is a native of Damascus or Aleppo--I have already indicated that
Syria is merely a geographical term corresponding to no national
sentiment in the breasts of the inhabitants. Thus to one listening to
the talk of the bazaars, to the shopkeepers whose trade is intimately
connected with local conditions in districts very far removed from their
own counters, to the muleteers who carry so much more than their loads
from city to city, all Asia seems to be linked together by fine chains
of relationship, and every detail of the foreign policies of Europe,
from China to where you please, to be weighed more or less accurately in
the balance of public opinion. It is not the part of wanderers and
hearers of gossip to draw conclusions. We can do no more than report,
for any that may care to listen, what falls from the lips of those who
sit round our camp fires, and who ride with us across deserts and
mountains, for their words are like straws on the flood of Asiatic
politics, showing which way the stream is running. Personal experience
has acquainted them with the stock in trade and the vocabulary of
statecraft. They are familiar with war and negotiation and compromise,
and with long nurtured and carefully concealed revenge. Whether they are
discussing the results of a blood feud or the consequences of an
international jealousy their appreciations are often just and their
guesses near the mark.
[Illustration 111: CAPITAL IN THE MOSQUE, ḤAMĀH]
For the moment, so far as my experience goes, the name of the English
carries more weight than it has done for some time past. I noticed a
very distinct difference between the general attitude towards us from
that which I had observed with pain five years before, during the worst
moments of the Boer War. The change of feeling is due, so far as I can
judge from the conversations to which I listened, not so much to our
victory in South Africa as to Lord Cromer's brilliant administration in
Egypt, Lord Curzon's policy on the Persian Gulf, and the alliance with
the conquering Japanese.
When I had at last got rid of the Afghan and was sitting alone on the
fringe of grass that separated my tent from the city hundreds of feet
below, a person of importance drove up to pay his respects. He was the
Mufti, Muḥammad Effendi. He brought with him an intelligent man from
Boṣrā el Ḥarīr, in the Ḥaurān, who had travelled in Cyprus and
had much to say (and little good to say) of our administration there.
The Mufti was a man of the same type as the Ḳāḍi of Ḥomṣ and
the Sheikh Nakshibendi--the sharp-eyed and sharp-witted Asiatic, whose
distinguished features are somewhat marred by an astuteness that amounts
to cunning. He established himself upon the best of the camp chairs, and
remarked with satisfaction:
"I asked: 'Can she speak Arabic?' and when they answered 'Yes,' verily I
ordered my carriage and came."
His talk was of Yemen, whither he had been sent some years before to
restore peace after the last Arab revolt. He spoke of the three days'
journey over torrid desert from the coast, of the inland mountains
covered with trees where there is always rain summer and winter, of the
enormous grapes that hang in the vineyards, and the endless variety of
fruits in the orchards, of the cities as big as Damascus, walled with
great fortifications of mud a thousand years old. The Arabs, said he,
were town dwellers not nomads, and they hated the Ottoman government as
it is hated in few places. When the armies of the Sultan went out
against them they were accustomed to flee into the mountains, where they
could hold out, thought the Mufti, for an indefinite number of years.
But he was wrong; a few months were enough to give victory to the
Sultan's troops, what with daring generalship and the power to endure
desert marches, and the rebellion failed, like many another, because the
Arab tribes hate each other more vindictively than they hate the
Osmanli. But, after the fashion of repressed rebellions in Turkey, it
has already broken out again. The Mufti told me also that in Ḥamāh
wherever they dug they found ancient foundations, even below the river
level.
He was followed by my friend the Turkish telegraph clerk, who rejoiced
to see me so well encamped, and then by the Muteserrif, pursuing an
anxious and tottering course from his carriage through my tent ropes.
The latter lent me his victoria that I might visit the parts of the town
that lie on the eastern banks of the Orontes, and Kbēs and I drove off
with two outriders quite exceptionally free from rags. The eastern
quarter, the Hāḍir it is called, is essentially the Bedouin quarter;
the city Arabic is replaced here by the rugged desert speech, and the
bazaars are filled with Arabs who come in to buy coffee and tobacco and
striped cloaks. It contains a beautiful little ruined mosque, said to be
Seljuk, called El Ḥayyāt, the mosque of Snakes, after the twisted
columns of its windows. At the northern end of the courtyard is a
chamber which holds the marble sarcophagus of Abu'l Fīda, Prince of
Ḥamāh, the famous geographer. He died in 1331; his tomb is carved
with a fine inscription recording the date according to the era of the
Hejra.
[Illustration 112: A CAPITAL, ḤAMĀH]
I gave a dinner party that night to the station-master, the Syrian
doctor, Sallūm, and the Greek priest. We talked till late, a congenial
if incongruous company. Sallūm had received his training in the
American College at Beyrout, from whence come all the medical
practitioners, great and small, who are scattered up and down Syria. He
was a Christian, though of a different brand from the priest, and Kbēs
represented yet another variety of doctrine. On the whole, said the
priest, there was little anti-Christian feeling in Ḥamāh, but there
was also little respect for his cloth; that very day as he walked
through the town some Moslem women had thrown pebbles at him from a
house-top, shouting, "Dog of a Christian priest!" Kbēs discussed the
benefits conferred by the railway (a remarkably ill-managed concern I
fancy) and said that without doubt Ḥamāh had profited by it. Prices
had gone up in the last two years, meat that would otherwise have found
no market was now sent down to Damascus and Beyrout, and he himself who,
when he first came, had been able to buy a sheep for a franc, was now
obliged to pay ten.
The Muteserrif of Ḥamāh provided me with the best zaptieh that I was
to have on all my travels, Ḥājj Maḥmūd, a native of Ḥamāh. He
was a tall broad-shouldered man, who had been in the Sultan's own guard
at Constantinople, and had made the pilgrimage three times, once as a
pilgrim and twice as a soldier of the escort. He rode with me for ten
days, and during that time told me more tales than would fill a volume,
couched in a fine picturesque speech of which he was the master. He had
travelled with a German archaeologist, and knew the strange tastes of
the Europeans in the matter of ruins and inscriptions.
"At Ḳal'at el Mudīk I said to him: 'If you would look upon a stone
with a horse written upon it and his rider, by the Light of God! I can
show it to you!' And he wondered much thereat, and rewarded me with
money. By God and Muḥammad the Prophet of God! you too, oh lady, shall
gaze on it."
Now this exploit of Maḥmūd's was more remarkable than would appear at
first sight, for one of the great difficulties in searching for
antiquities is that the people in out-of-the-way places do not recognise
a sculpture when they see it. You are not surprised that they should
fail to tell the difference between an inscription and the natural
cracks and weather markings of the stone; but it takes you aback when
you ask whether there are stones with portraits of men and animals upon
them, and your interlocutor replies: "Wāllah! we do not know what the
picture of a man is like." Moreover, if you show him a bit of a relief
with figures well carved upon it, as often as not he will have no idea
what the carving represents.
Maḥmūd's most memorable travelling companion had been a Japanese who
had been sent by his government, I afterwards learnt, to study and
report on the methods of building employed in the eastern parts of the
Roman empire--to such researches the Japanese had leisure to apply
themselves in the thick of the war. Maḥmūd's curiosity had evidently
been much excited by the little man, whose fellows were snatching
victory from the dreaded Russians.
"All day he rode, and all night he wrote in his books. He eat nothing
but a piece of bread and he drank tea, and when there came a matter for
refusal he said (for he could talk neither Arabic nor Turkish), 'Noh!
noh!' And that is French," concluded Maḥmūd.
I remarked that it was not French but English, which gave Maḥmūd food
for thought, for he added presently:
"We had never heard their name before the war, but by the Face of the
Truth! the English knew of them."
The Orontes makes a half circle between Ḥamāh and Ḳal'at es Seijar,
and we cut across the chord of the arc, riding over the same dull
cultivated plain that I had crossed on my way from Masyād. It was
strewn with villages of mud-built, beehive-shaped huts; they are to be
met with on the plains all the way to Aleppo, and are like no other
villages save those that appear in the illustrations to Central African
travel books. As a man grows rich he adds another beehive and yet
another to his mansion, till he may have a dozen or more standing round
a courtyard, some inhabited by himself and his family, some by his
cattle, one forming his kitchen, and one his granary. We saw in the
distance a village called Al Ḥerdeh, which Maḥmūd said was
Christian and used to belong entirely to the Greek communion. The
inhabitants lived happily together and prospered, until they had the
misfortune to be discovered by a missionary, who distributed tracts and
converted sortie sixty persons to the English Church, since when there
has not been a moment's rest from brawling in Al Ḥerdeh. As we rode,
Maḥmūd told tales of the Ismailis and the Noṣairis. Of the former
he said that the Agha Khān's photograph was to be found in every house,
but it is woman that they worship, said he. Every female child born on
the 27th of Rajab is set apart and held to be an incarnation of the
divinity. She is called the Rōẓah. She does not work, her hair and
nails are never cut, her family share in the respect that is accorded to
her, and every man in the village will wear a piece of her clothing or a
hair from her body folded in his turban. She is not permitted to marry.
"But what," said I, "if she desire to marry?"
"It would be impossible," replied Maḥmūd. "No one would marry her,
for is there any man that can marry God?"
The sect is known to have sacred books, but none have yet fallen into
the hands of European scholars. Maḥmūd had seen and read one of
them--it was all in praise of the Rōẓah, describing every part of her
with eulogy. The Ismailis read the Ḳur'ān also, said he. Other
strange matters he related which, like Herodotus, I do not see fit to
repeat. The creed seems to spring from dim traditions of Astarte
worship, or from that oldest and most universal cult of all, the
veneration of the Mother Goddess; but the accusations of indecency that
have been brought against it are, I gather, unfounded.[10]
Of the Noṣairis Maḥmūd had much to tell, for he was we acquainted
with the hills in which they live, having been for many years employed
in collecting the capitation tax among the sect. They are infidels, said
he, who do not read the Ḳur'ān nor know the name of God. He related a
curious tale which I will repeat for what it is worth:
"Oh lady, it happened in the winter that I was collecting the tax. Now
in the month of Kānūn el Awwal (December) the Noṣairis hold a great
feast that occurs at the same time as the Christian feast (Christmas),
and the day before, when I was riding with two others in the hills,
there fell a quantity of snow so that we could go no further, and we
sought shelter at the first village in the house of the Sheikh of the
village. For there is always a Sheikh of the village, oh lady, and a
Sheikh of the Faith, and the people are divided into initiated and
uninitiated. But the women know nothing of the secrets of the religion,
for by God! a woman cannot keep a secret. The Sheikh greeted us with
hospitality and lodged us, but next morning when I woke there was no man
to be seen in the house, nothing but the women. And I cried: 'By God and
Muḥammad the Prophet of God! what hospitality is this? and are there
no men to make the coffee but only women?' And the women replied: 'We do
not know what the men are doing, for they have gone to the house of the
Sheikh of the Faith, and we are not allowed to enter.' Then I arose and
went softly to the house and looked through the window, and, by God! the
initiated were sitting in the room, and in the centre was the Sheikh of
the Faith, and before him a bowl filled with wine and an empty jug. And
the Sheikh put questions to the jug in a low tone, and by the Light of
the Truth I heard the jug make answer in a voice that said: 'Bl... bl...'
And without doubt, oh lady, this was magic. And while I looked, one
raised his head and saw me. And they came out of the house and seized
hold of me and would have beaten me, but I cried: 'Oh Sheikh! I am your
guest!' So the Sheikh of the Faith came forth and raised his hand, and
on the instant all those that had hold of me released me. And he fell at
my feet and kissed my hands and the hem of my coat and said: 'Oh
Ḥājji! if you will not tell what you have seen I will give you ten
mejides!' And by the Prophet of God (upon him be peace!) I have never
related it, oh lady, until this day."
[Illustration 113: ḲAL'AT ES SEIJAR]
After four hours' ride we came to Ḳal'at es Seijar. It stands on a
long hog's back broken in the middle by an artificial cutting and
dropping by steep bluffs to the Orontes, which runs here in a narrow bed
between walls of rock. The castle walls that crown the hill between the
cutting and the river make a very splendid appearance from below. There
is a small village of beehive huts at the bottom of the hill. The
Seleucid town of Larissa must have lain on the grassy slopes to the
north, judging from the number of dressed stones that are scattered
there. I pitched my camp at the further end of the bridge in a grove of
apricot trees, snowy with flower and a-hum with bees. The grass was set
thickly with anemones and scarlet ranunculus. The castle is the property
of Sheikh Aḥmed Seijari and has been held by his family for three
hundred years. He and his sons live in a number of little modern houses,
built out of old stones in the middle of the fortifications. He owns a
considerable amount of land and about one-third of the village, the rest
being unequally divided between the Killānis of Ḥamāh and the
Smātiyyeh Arabs, a semi-nomadic tribe that dwells in houses during the
winter. I had a letter of introduction to Sheikh Aḥmed from
Muṣṭafa Barāzi, and, though Maḥmūd was of opinion that I should
not find him in the castle owing to a long-drawn trouble between the
Seijari family and the Smātiyyeh, we climbed up to the gate and along a
road that showed remains of aulting, like the entrance to Ḳal'at el
Ḥuṣn, and so over masses of ruin till we came to the modern village
where the Seijari sheikhs live. I inquired which was the house of
Aḥmed, and was directed to a big wooden door, most forbiddingly shut.
I knocked and waited, and Maḥmūd knocked yet louder and we waited
again. At last a very beautiful woman opened a shutter in the wall above
and asked what we wanted. I said I had a letter from Muṣṭafa to
Aḥmed, and wished to see him. She replied:
"He is away."
I said: "I would salute his son."
"You cannot see him," she returned. "He is in prison at Ḥamāh,
charged with murder."
[Illustration 114: ḲAL'AT ES SEIJAR, THE CUTTING THROUGH
THE RIDGE]
And so she closed the shutter, leaving me to wonder how good manners
would bid me act under these delicate conditions. At that moment a girl
came to the door and opened it a hand's breadth. I gave her the letter
and my card written in Arabic, murmured a few words of regret, and went
away. Maḥmūd now tried to explain the matter. It was one of those
long stories that you hear in the East, without beginning, without end,
and without any indication as to which of the protagonists is in the
right, but an inherent probability that all are in the wrong. The
Smātiyyeh had stolen some of the Seijari cattle, the sons of Aḥmed
had gone down into the village and killed two of the Arabs--in the
castle it was said that the Arabs had attacked them and that they had
killed them in self-defence--the Government, always jealous of the
semi-independence of ruling sheikhs, had seized the opportunity to
strike down the Seijari whether they were at fault or no; soldiers had
been sent from Ḥamāh, one of Aḥmed's sons had been put to death,
two more were in prison, and all the cattle had been carried off. The
rest of the Seijaris were ordered not to stir from the castle, nor
indeed could they do so, for the Smātiyyeh were at their gates ready
and anxious to kill them if they stepped beyond the walls. They appealed
to Ḥamāh for protection, and a guard of some ten soldiers was posted
by the river, whether to preserve the lives of the sheikhs or to keep
them the more closely imprisoned it was difficult to make out. These
events dated from two years back, and for that time the Seijaris had
remained prisoners at Ḥamāh and in their own castle, and had been
unable to superintend the cultivation of their fields, which were
running in consequence to rack and ruin. Moreover, there seemed to be no
prospect of improvement in the situation. Later in the afternoon a
messenger arrived saying that Aḥmed's brother, 'Abd ul Ḳādir, would
be pleased to receive me and would have come himself to welcome me if he
could have left the castle. I went up without Maḥmūd and heard the
whole story again from the point of view of the sheikhs, which helped me
to no conclusion, since it was in most essentials a different story from
that which I had heard from Maḥmūd. The only indisputable point (and
it was probably not so irrelevant as it seems) was that the Seijari
women were wonderfully beautiful. They wore dark blue Bedouin dress, but
the blue cloths hanging from their heads were fastened with heavy gold
ornaments, like the plaques of the Mycenæan treasure, one behind either
temple. Agreeable though their company proved to be I was obliged to cut
my visit short by reason of the number of fleas that shared the
captivity of the family. Two of the younger women walked down with me
through the ruins of the castle, but when we reached the great outer
gate they stopped and looked at me standing on the threshold.
"Allah!" said one, "you go forth to travel through the whole world, and
we have never been to Ḥamāh!"
I saw them in the gateway when I turned again to wave them a farewell.
Tall and straight they were, and full of supple grace, clothed in narrow
blue robes, their brows bound with gold, their eyes following the road
they might not tread. For whatever may happen to the sheikhs, nothing is
more certain than that women as lovely as those two will remain
imprisoned by their lords in Ḳal'at es Seijar.
We rode next day by cultivated plains to Ḳal'at el Mudīk, a short
stage of under four hours. Although there were several traces of ruined
towns--one in particular I remember at a hamlet called Sheikh Ḥadīd,
where there was a mound that looked as if it might have been an
acropolis--the journey would have been uninteresting but for Maḥmūd's
stories. His talk ran through the characteristics of the many races that
make up the Turkish empire, with most of which he was familiar, and when
he came to the Circassians it appeared that he shared my aversion to
them.
"Oh lady," said he, "they do not know what it is to make return for
kindness. The father sells his children, and the children would kill
their own father if he had gold in his belt. It happened once that I was
riding from Tripoli to Ḥomṣ, and near the khān--you know the
place--I met a Circassian walking alone. I said: 'Peace be upon you! Why
do you walk?' for the Circassians never go afoot. He said: 'My horse has
been stolen from me, and I walk in fear upon this road.' I said: 'Come
with me and you shall go in safety to Ḥomṣ.' But I made him walk
before my horse, for he was armed with a sword, and who knows what a
Circassian will do if you cannot watch him? And after a little we passed
an old man working in the fields, and the Circassian ran out to him and
spoke with him, and drew his sword as though to kill him. And I called
out: 'What has this old man done to you?' And he replied: 'By God! I am
hungry, and I asked him for food, and he said "I have none!" wherefore I
shall kill him.' Then I said: 'Let him be. I will give you food.' And I
gave him the half of all I had, bread and sweetmeats and oranges. So we
journeyed until we came to a stream, and I was thirsty, and I got off my
mare and holding her by the bridle I stooped to drink. And I looked up
suddenly and saw the Circassian with his foot in my stirrup on the other
side of the mare, for he designed to mount her and ride away. And, by
God! I had been a father and a mother to him, therefore I struck him
with my sword so that he fell to the ground. And I bound him and drove
him to Ḥomṣ and delivered him to the Government. This is the manner
of the Circassians, may God curse them!"
I asked him of the road to Mecca and of the hardships that the pilgrims
endure upon the way.
"By the Face of God! they suffer," said he. "Ten marches from Ma'ān to
Medā'in Ṣāleḥ, ten from there to Medīna, and ten from Medīna to
Mecca, and the last ten are the worst, for the Sherif of Mecca and the
Arab tribes plot together, and the Arabs rob the pilgrims and share the
booty with the Sherif. Nor are the marches like the marches of
gentlefolk when they travel, for sometimes there are fifteen hours
between water and water, and sometimes twenty, and the last march into
Mecca is thirty hours. Now the Government pays the tribes to let the
pilgrims through in peace, and when they know that the Ḥājj is
approaching they assemble upon the hills beside the road and cry out to
the Amīr ul Ḥājj: 'Give us our dues, 'Abd ur Raḥmān Pasha!' And
to each man he gives according to his rights, to one money, and to
another a pipe and tobacco, to a third a kerchief, and to a fourth a
cloak. Yet it is not the pilgrims that suffer most, but those who keep
the forts that guard the water tanks along the road, and every fort is
like a prison. It happened once that I was sent with the military
escort, and my horse fell sick and could not move, and they left me at
one of the forts between Medā'in Ṣāleḥ and Medina till they should
return. Six weeks or more I lived with the keeper of the fort, and we
saw no one, and we eat and slept in the sun, and eat again, and slept,
for we could not ride out for fear of the Ḥoweiṭāṭ and the Beni
'Atiyyeh who were at war together. And the man had lived there ten years
and never gone a quarter of an hour from that spot, for he watched over
the stores that feed the Ḥājj when it passes. By the Prophet of God!"
said Maḥmūd, with a sweeping gesture of the hand from earth to sky,
"for ten years he had seen nothing but the earth and God! Now he had a
little son, and the boy was deaf and dumb, but his eyes saw further than
any man's, and he watched all day from the top of the tower. And one day
he came running to his father and pointed with his hands, and the father
knew he had seen a raiding party far off, and we hastened within and
shut the doors. And the horsemen drew near, five hundred of the Beni
'Atiyyeh, and they watered their mares and demanded food, and we threw
down bread to them, for we dared not open the doors. And while they eat
there came across the plain the raiders of the Ḥoweiṭāṭ, and they
began to fight together by the castle wall, and they fought until the
evening prayer, and those who lived rode away, leaving their dead to the
number of thirty. And we remained all night with locked doors, and at
dawn we went down and buried the dead. But it is better to live in a
fortress by the Ḥājj road," he continued, "than to serve as a soldier
in Yemen, for there the soldiers receive no pay and of food not enough
on which to live, and the sun bums like a fire. In Yemen if a man stood
in the shade and saw a purse of gold lying in the sun, by God! he would
not go out to pick it up, for the heat is like the fire of hell. Oh
lady, is it true that in Egypt the soldiers get their pay week by week
and month by month?"
I replied that I believed it to be the case, such being the custom in
the English army.
"As for us," said Maḥmūd, "our pay is always due to us for half a
year, and often out of twelve months' pay we receive but six months'.
Wāllah! I have never touched more than eight months' pay for a complete
year. Once," he added, "I was in Alexandria--Māsha'llah, the fine city!
Houses it has as big as the palaces of kings, and all the roads have
paved edges whereon the people walk. And there I saw a cabman who sued a
lady for his fare, and the judge gave it to him. By the Truth! the ways
of judges are different with us," observed Maḥmūd thoughtfully; and
then, with an abrupt transition, he exclaimed: "Look, oh lady! there is
Abu Sa'ad."
I looked, and saw Abu Sa'ad walking in the ploughed field, with his
white coat as spotless as though he had not just alighted from a journey
as long as one of Maḥmūd's, and his black sleeves folded neatly
against his sides, and I made haste to welcome the Father of Good Luck,
for in Syria the first stork is like the first swallow with us. He
cannot, however, any more than the swallow make summer, and we rode that
day into Ḳal'at el Mudīk, in drenching rain.
[Illustration 115: A CAPITAL, ḤAMĀH]
Ḳal'at el Mudīk is the Apamea of the Seleucids. It was founded by
Seleucus Nicator, that great town builder who had so many cities for his
god-daughters: Seleucia in Pieria, Seleucia on the Calycadnus, Seleucia
in Babylonia, and more besides. Though it has been utterly destroyed by
earthquakes, enough remains in ruin to prove its ancient splendour, the
wide circuit of its walls, the number of its temples and the
magnificence of its columned streets. You can trace the main
thoroughfares from gate to gate by the heaped masses of the colonnades,
and mark the stone bases of statues at the intersections of the ways.
Here and there a massive portal opens into vacuity, the palace which it
served having been razed to the ground, or an armed horseman decorates
the funeral stele on which the living merits of his prototype are
recorded. The Christians took up the story where the Seleucid kings had
left it, and the ruins of a great church with a courtyard set round with
columns lie on the edge of the main street. As I plunged in the soft
spring rain through deep grass and flowers and clumps of asphodel, to
the discomfiture of the grey owls that sat blinking on the heaps of
stones, the history and architecture of the town seemed an epitome of
the marvellous fusion between Greece and Asia that came of Alexander's
conquests. Here was a Greek king whose capital lay on the Tigris,
founding a city on the Orontes and calling it after his Persian
wife--what builders raised the colonnades that adorned this and all the
Greek-tinged towns of Syria with classic forms used in a spirit of
Oriental lavishness? what citizens walked between them, holding out
hands to Athens and to Babylon?
The only inhabited part of Ḳal'at el Mudīk is the castle itself,
which stands on the site of the Seleucid acropolis, a hill overlooking
the Orontes valley and the Noṣairiyyeh mountains. It is mainly of Arab
workmanship, though many hands have taken part in its construction, and
Greek and Arabic inscriptions are built pellmell into the walls. To the
south of the castle there is a bit of classical building of which I have
seen no explanation. It looks as if it might be part of the proscenium
of the theatre, for the rising ground behind it is scooped away in the
shape of an auditorium. A very little digging would be enough to show
whether traces of seats lie under the grassy bank. In the valley there
is a ruined mosque and a fine khān, half ruined also. The Sheikh of the
castle gave me coffee, and told me yet another version of the Seijari
story, irreconcilable with either of the two first, whereat I
congratulated myself on having early determined not to attempt to
resolve that tangled problem. From the castle top the valley of the
Orontes seemed to be all under water: it was the great swamp of the
'Asī, said the Sheikh, which dries in summer when the island villages
(as I saw them now) resume their places as parts of the plain. Yes,
certainly they were very unhealthy, summer and winter they were
fever-stricken, and most of the inhabitants died young--lo, we belong to
God and unto Him do we return! In winter and spring these short-lived
folk follow the calling of fishermen, but when the swamp dried they turn
into husbandmen after a fashion of their own. They cut the reeds and
sowed maize upon them, and set them alight, and the maize rose out of
the ashes and grew--a phœnix-like method of agriculture.
At Apamea the excellent cakes I had bought in Damascus came to an
end--it seemed a serious matter at the time when the bill of fare was
apt to be monotonous. Lunch was the least palatable of all our meals.
Hard-boiled eggs and chunks of cold meat cease to tempt the appetite
after they have been indulged in for a month or two. Gradually I taught
Mikhāil to vary our diet with all the resources the country offered,
olives and sheep's milk cheese, salted pistachios, sugared apricots and
half a dozen other delicacies, including the Damascus cakes. The native
servant, accustomed to feeding Cook's tourists on sardines and tinned
beef, thinks it beneath the dignity of a European to eat such food, and
you must go hunt the bazaars with him yourself and teach him what to
buy, or you may pass through the richest country and starve on cold
mutton.
[Footnote 9: It will be the terminus only for a month or two longer for
the line has at length been continued to Aleppo.]
[Footnote 10: The plural of Ismaili in the vernacular is Samawīleh. I
do not know whether this is the literary form, but it is the one I have
always heard.]