THE DESERT
GAZA is upon the verge of the Desert, to which it stands in the same
relation as a seaport to the sea. It is there that you _charter_ your
camels (“the ships of the Desert”), and lay in your stores for the
voyage.
These preparations kept me in the town for some days. Disliking
restraint, I declined making myself the guest of the Governor (as it is
usual and proper to do), but took up my quarters at the caravanserai, or
“khan,” as they call it in that part of Asia.
Dthemetri had to make the arrangements for my journey, and in order to
arm himself with sufficient authority for doing all that was required, he
found it necessary to put himself in communication with the Governor.
The result of this diplomatic intercourse was that the Governor, with his
train of attendants, came to me one day at my caravanserai, and formally
complained that Dthemetri had grossly insulted him. I was shocked at
this, for the man was always attentive and civil to me, and I was
disgusted at the idea of his having been rewarded with insult. Dthemetri
was present when the complaint was made, and I angrily asked him whether
it was true that he had really insulted the Governor, and what the deuce
he meant by it. This I asked with the full certainty that Dthemetri, as
a matter of course, would deny the charge, would swear that a “wrong
construction had been put upon his words, and that nothing was further
from his thoughts,” etc. etc., after the manner of the parliamentary
people, but to my surprise he very plainly answered that he certainly
_had_ insulted the Governor, and that rather grossly, but, he said, it
was quite necessary to do this in order to “strike terror and inspire
respect.” “Terror and respect! What on earth do you mean by that
nonsense?”—“Yes, but without striking terror and inspiring respect, he
(Dthemetri) would never be able to force on the arrangements for my
journey, and vossignoria would be kept at Gaza for a month!” This would
have been awkward, and certainly I could not deny that poor Dthemetri had
succeeded in his odd plan of inspiring respect, for at the very time that
this explanation was going on in Italian the Governor seemed more than
ever, and more anxiously, disposed to overwhelm me with assurances of
goodwill, and proffers of his best services. All this kindness, or
promise of kindness, I naturally received with courtesy—a courtesy that
greatly perturbed Dthemetri, for he evidently feared that my civility
would undo all the good that his insults had achieved.
You will find, I think, that one of the greatest drawbacks to the
pleasure of travelling in Asia is the being obliged, more or less, to
make your way by bullying. It is true that your own lips are not soiled
by the utterance of all the mean words that are spoken for you, and that
you don’t even know of the sham threats, and the false promises, and the
vainglorious boasts, put forth by your dragoman; but now and then there
happens some incident of the sort which I have just been mentioning,
which forces you to believe, or suspect, that your dragoman is habitually
fighting your battles for you in a way that you can hardly bear to think
of.
A caravanserai is not ill adapted to the purposes for which it is meant.
It forms the four sides of a large quadrangular court. The ground floor
is used for warehouses, the first floor for guests, and the open court
for the temporary reception of the camels, as well as for the loading and
unloading of their burthens, and the transaction of mercantile business
generally. The apartments used for the guests are small cells opening
into a corridor, which runs round the four sides of the court.
Whilst I lay near the opening of my cell looking down into the court
below, there arrived from the Desert a caravan, that is, a large
assemblage of travellers. It consisted chiefly of Moldavian pilgrims,
who to make their good work even more than complete had begun by visiting
the shrine of the Virgin in Egypt, and were now going on to Jerusalem.
They had been overtaken in the Desert by a gale of wind, which so drove
the sand and raised up such mountains before them, that their journey had
been terribly perplexed and obstructed, and their provisions (including
water, the most precious of all) had been exhausted long before they
reached the end of their toilsome march. They were sadly wayworn. The
arrival of the caravan drew many and various groups into the court.
There was the Moldavian pilgrim with his sable dress and cap of fur and
heavy masses of bushy hair; the Turk, with his various and brilliant
garments; the Arab, superbly stalking under his striped blanket, that
hung like royalty upon his stately form; the jetty Ethiopian in his
slavish frock; the sleek, smooth-faced scribe with his comely pelisse,
and his silver ink-box stuck in like a dagger at his girdle. And mingled
with these were the camels, some standing, some kneeling and being
unladen, some twisting round their long necks and gently stealing the
straw from out of their own pack-saddles.
In a couple of days I was ready to start. The way of providing for the
passage of the Desert is this: there is an agent in the town who keeps
himself in communication with some of the desert Arabs that are hovering
within a day’s journey of the place. A party of these upon being
guaranteed against seizure or other ill-treatment at the hands of the
Governor come into the town, bringing with them the number of camels
which you require, and then they stipulate for a certain sum to take you
to the place of your destination in a given time. The agreement which
they thus enter into includes a safe conduct through their country as
well as the hire of the camels. According to the contract made with me I
was to reach Cairo within ten days from the commencement of the journey.
I had four camels, one for my baggage, one for each of my servants, and
one for myself. Four Arabs, the owners of the camels, came with me on
foot. My stores were a small soldier’s tent, two bags of dried bread
brought from the convent at Jerusalem, and a couple of bottles of wine
from the same source, two goatskins filled with water, tea, sugar, a cold
tongue, and (of all things in the world) a jar of Irish butter which
Mysseri had purchased from some merchant. There was also a small sack of
charcoal, for the greater part of the Desert through which we were to
pass is destitute of fuel.
The camel kneels to receive her load, and for a while she will allow the
packing to go on with silent resignation; but when she begins to suspect
that her master is putting more than a just burthen upon her poor hump
she turns round her supple neck and looks sadly upon the increasing load,
and then gently remonstrates against the wrong with the sigh of a patient
wife. If sighs will not move you, she can weep. You soon learn to pity,
and soon to love, her for the sake of her gentle and womanish ways.
You cannot, of course, put an English or any other riding saddle upon the
back of a camel, but your quilt or carpet, or whatever you carry for the
purpose of lying on at night, is folded and fastened on to the
pack-saddle upon the top of the hump, and on this you ride, or rather
sit. You sit as a man sits on a chair when he sits astride and faces the
back of it. I made an improvement on this plan. I had my English
stirrups strapped on to the cross-bars of the pack-saddle, and thus by
gaining rest for my dangling legs, and gaining too the power of varying
my position more easily than I could otherwise have done, I added very
much to my comfort. Don’t forget to do as I did.
The camel, like the elephant, is one of the old-fashioned sort of animals
that still walk along upon the (now nearly exploded) plan of the ancient
beasts that lived before the Flood. She moves forward both her near legs
at the same time, and then awkwardly swings round her off shoulder and
haunch so as to repeat the manœuvre on that side. Her pace, therefore,
is an odd, disjointed and disjoining, sort of movement that is rather
disagreeable at first, but you soon grow reconciled to it. The height to
which you are raised is of great advantage to you in passing the burning
sands of the Desert, for the air at such a distance from the ground is
much cooler and more lively than that which circulates beneath.
For several miles beyond Gaza the land, which had been plentifully
watered by the rains of the last week, was covered with rich verdure, and
thickly jewelled with meadow flowers so fresh and fragrant that I began
to grow almost uneasy, to fancy that the very Desert was receding before
me, and that the long-desired adventure of passing its “burning sands”
was to end in a mere ride across a field. But as I advanced the true
character of the country began to display itself with sufficient
clearness to dispel my apprehensions, and before the close of my first
day’s journey I had the gratification of finding that I was surrounded on
all sides by a tract of real sand, and had nothing at all to complain of
except that there peeped forth at intervals a few isolated blades of
grass, and many of those stunted shrubs which are the accustomed food of
the camel.
Before sunset I came up with an encampment of Arabs (the encampment from
which my camels had been brought), and my tent was pitched amongst
theirs. I was now amongst the true Bedouins. Almost every man of this
race closely resembles his brethren. Almost every man has large and
finely formed features; but his face is so thoroughly stripped of flesh,
and the white folds from his headgear fall down by his haggard cheeks so
much in the burial fashion, that he looks quite sad and ghastly. His
large dark orbs roll slowly and solemnly over the white of his deep-set
eyes; his countenance shows painful thought and long-suffering, the
suffering of one fallen from a high estate. His gait is strangely
majestic, and he marches along with his simple blanket as though he were
wearing the purple. His common talk is a series of piercing screams and
cries, {181} more painful to the ear than the most excruciating fine
music that I ever endured.
The Bedouin women are not treasured up like the wives and daughters of
other Orientals, and indeed they seemed almost entirely free from the
restraints imposed by jealousy. The feint which they made of concealing
their faces from me was always slight. They never, I think, wore the
_yashmak_ properly fixed. When they first saw me they used to hold up a
part of their drapery with one hand across their faces, but they seldom
persevered very steadily in subjecting me to this privation. Unhappy
beings! they were sadly plain. The awful haggardness that gave something
of character to the faces of the men was sheer ugliness in the poor
women. It is a great shame, but the truth is that, except when we refer
to the beautiful devotion of the mother to her child, all the fine things
we say and think about women apply only to those who are tolerably
good-looking or graceful. These Arab women were so plain and clumsy,
that they seemed to me to be fit for nothing but another and a better
world. They may have been good women enough so far as relates to the
exercise of the minor virtues, but they had so grossly neglected the
prime duty of looking pretty in this transitory life, that I could not at
all forgive them. They seemed to feel the weight of their guilt, and to
be truly and humbly penitent. I had the complete command of their
affections, for at any moment I could make their young hearts bound and
their old hearts jump by offering a handful of tobacco, and yet, believe
me, it was not in the first _soirée_ that my store of Latakia was
exhausted.
The Bedouin women have no religion. This is partly the cause of their
clumsiness. Perhaps if from Christian girls they would learn how to
pray, their souls might become more gentle, and their limbs be clothed
with grace.
You who are going into their country have a direct personal interest in
knowing something about “Arab hospitality”; but the deuce of it is, that
the poor fellows with whom I have happened to pitch my tent were scarcely
ever in a condition to exercise that magnanimous virtue with much
_éclat_. Indeed, Mysseri’s canteen generally enabled me to outdo my
hosts in the matter of entertainment. They were always courteous,
however, and were never backward in offering me the _youart_, a kind of
whey, which is the principal delicacy to be found amongst the wandering
tribes.
Practically, I think, Childe Harold would have found it a dreadful bore
to make “the Desert his dwelling-place,” for at all events, if he adopted
the life of the Arabs he would have tasted no solitude. The tents are
partitioned, not so as to divide the Childe and the “fair spirit” who is
his “minister” from the rest of the world, but so as to separate the
twenty or thirty brown men that sit screaming in the one compartment from
the fifty or sixty brown women and children that scream and squeak in the
other. If you adopt the Arab life for the sake of seclusion you will be
horribly disappointed, for you will find yourself in perpetual contact
with a mass of hot fellow-creatures. It is true that all who are inmates
of the same tent are related to each other, but I am not quite sure that
that circumstance adds much to the charm of such a life. At all events,
before you finally determine to become an Arab try a gentle experiment.
Take one of those small, shabby houses in Mayfair, and shut yourself up
in it with forty or fifty shrill cousins for a couple of weeks in July.
In passing the Desert you will find your Arabs wanting to start and to
rest at all sorts of odd times. They like, for instance, to be off at
one in the morning, and to rest during the whole of the afternoon. You
must not give way to their wishes in this respect. I tried their plan
once, and found it very harassing and unwholesome. An ordinary tent can
give you very little protection against heat, for the fire strikes
fiercely through single canvas, and you soon find that whilst you lie
crouching and striving to hide yourself from the blazing face of the sun,
his power is harder to bear than it is where you boldly defy him from the
airy heights of your camel.
It had been arranged with my Arabs that they were to bring with them all
the food which they would want for themselves during the passage of the
Desert, but as we rested at the end of the first day’s journey by the
side of an Arab encampment, my camel men found all that they required for
that night in the tents of their own brethren. On the evening of the
second day, however, just before we encamped for the night, my four Arabs
came to Dthemetri, and formally announced that they had not brought with
them one atom of food, and that they looked entirely to my supplies for
their daily bread. This was awkward intelligence. We were now just two
days deep in the Desert, and I had brought with me no more bread than
might be reasonably required for myself and my European attendants. I
believed at the moment (for it seemed likely enough) that the men had
really mistaken the terms of the arrangement, and feeling that the bore
of being put upon half rations would be a less evil (and even to myself a
less inconvenience) than the starvation of my Arabs, I at once told
Dthemetri to assure them that my bread should be equally shared with all.
Dthemetri, however, did not approve of this concession; he assured me
quite positively that the Arabs thoroughly understood the agreement, and
that if they were now without food they had wilfully brought themselves
into this strait for the wretched purpose of bettering their bargain by
the value of a few paras’ worth of bread. This suggestion made me look
at the affair in a new light. I should have been glad enough to put up
with the slight privation to which my concession would subject me, and
could have borne to witness the semi-starvation of poor Dthemetri with a
fine, philosophical calm, but it seemed to me that the scheme, if scheme
it were, had something of audacity in it, and was well enough calculated
to try the extent of my softness. I well knew the danger of allowing
such a trial to result in a conclusion that I was one who might be easily
managed; and therefore, after thoroughly satisfying myself from
Dthemetri’s clear and repeated assertions that the Arabs had really
understood the arrangement, I determined that they should not now violate
it by taking advantage of my position in the midst of their big Desert,
so I desired Dthemetri to tell them that they should touch no bread of
mine. We stopped, and the tent was pitched. The Arabs came to me, and
prayed loudly for bread. I refused them.
“Then we die!”
“God’s will be done!”
I gave the Arabs to understand that I regretted their perishing by
hunger, but that I should bear this calmly, like any other misfortune not
my own, that, in short, I was happily resigned to _their_ fate. The men
would have talked a great deal, but they were under the disadvantage of
addressing me through a hostile interpreter; they looked hard upon my
face, but they found no hope there; so at last they retired as they
pretended, to lay them down and die.
In about ten minutes from this time I found that the Arabs were busily
cooking their bread! Their pretence of having brought no food was false,
and was only invented for the purpose of saving it. They had a good bag
of meal, which they had contrived to stow away under the baggage upon one
of the camels in such a way as to escape notice. In Europe the detection
of a scheme like this would have occasioned a disagreeable feeling
between the master and the delinquent, but you would no more recoil from
an Oriental on account of a matter of this sort, than in England you
would reject a horse that had tried, and failed, to throw you. Indeed, I
felt quite good-humouredly towards my Arabs, because they had so woefully
failed in their wretched attempt, and because, as it turned out, I had
done what was right. They too, poor fellows, evidently began to like me
immensely, on account of the hard-heartedness which had enabled me to
baffle their scheme.
The Arabs adhere to those ancestral principles of bread-baking which have
been sanctioned by the experience of ages. The very first baker of bread
that ever lived must have done his work exactly as the Arab does at this
day. He takes some meal and holds it out in the hollow of his hands,
whilst his comrade pours over it a few drops of water; he then mashes up
the moistened flour into a paste, which he pulls into small pieces, and
thrusts into the embers. His way of baking exactly resembles the craft
or mystery of roasting chestnuts as practised by children; there is the
same prudence and circumspection in choosing a good berth for the morsel,
the same enterprise and self-sacrificing valour in pulling it out with
the fingers.
The manner of my daily march was this. At about an hour before dawn I
rose and made the most of about a pint of water, which I allowed myself
for washing. Then I breakfasted upon tea and bread. As soon as the
beasts were loaded I mounted my camel and pressed forward. My poor
Arabs, being on foot, would sometimes moan with fatigue and pray for
rest; but I was anxious to enable them to perform their contract for
bringing me to Cairo within the stipulated time, and I did not therefore
allow a halt until the evening came. About midday, or soon after,
Mysseri used to bring up his camel alongside of mine, and supply me with
a piece of bread softened in water (for it was dried hard like board),
and also (as long as it lasted) with a piece of the tongue; after this
there came into my hand (how well I remember it) the little tin cup
half-filled with wine and water.
As long as you are journeying in the interior of the Desert you have no
particular point to make for as your resting-place. The endless sands
yield nothing but small stunted shrubs; even these fail after the first
two or three days, and from that time you pass over broad plains, you
pass over newly reared hills, you pass through valleys that the storm of
the last week has dug, and the hills and the valleys are sand, sand,
sand, still sand, and only sand, and sand and sand again. The earth is
so samely that your eyes turn towards heaven—towards heaven, I mean, in
the sense of sky. You look to the sun, for he is your taskmaster, and by
him you know the measure of the work that you have done, and the measure
of the work that remains for you to do. He comes when you strike your
tent in the early morning, and then, for the first hour of the day as you
move forward on your camel, he stands at your near side and makes you
know that the whole day’s toil is before you; then for a while, and a
long while, you see him no more, for you are veiled and shrouded, and
dare not look upon the greatness of his glory, but you know where he
strides overhead by the touch of his flaming sword. No words are spoken,
but your Arabs moan, your camels sigh, your skin glows, your shoulders
ache, and for sights you see the pattern and the web of the silk that
veils your eyes and the glare of the outer light. Time labours on; your
skin glows and your shoulders ache, your Arabs moan, your camels sigh,
and you see the same pattern in the silk, and the same glare of light
beyond, but conquering Time marches on, and by and by the descending sun
has compassed the heaven, and now softly touches your right arm, and
throws your lank shadow over the sand right along on the way to Persia.
Then again you look upon his face, for his power is all veiled in his
beauty, and the redness of flames has become the redness of roses; the
fair, wavy cloud that fled in the morning now comes to his sight once
more, comes blushing, yet still comes on, comes burning with blushes, yet
hastens and clings to his side.
Then arrives your time for resting. The world about you is all your own,
and there, where you will, you pitch your solitary tent; there is no
living thing to dispute your choice. When at last the spot had been
fixed upon and we came to a halt, one of the Arabs would touch the chest
of my camel and utter at the same time a peculiar gurgling sound. The
beast instantly understood and obeyed the sign, and slowly sunk under me
till she brought her body to a level with the ground, then gladly enough
I alighted. The rest of the camels were unloaded and turned loose to
browse upon the shrubs of the desert, where shrubs there were, or where
these failed, to wait for the small quantity of food that was allowed
them out of our stores.
My servants, helped by the Arabs, busied themselves in pitching the tent
and kindling the fire. Whilst this was doing I used to walk away towards
the east, confiding in the print of my foot as a guide for my return.
Apart from the cheering voices of my attendants I could better know and
feel the loneliness of the Desert. The influence of such scenes,
however, was not of a softening kind, but filled me rather with a sort of
childish exultation in the self-sufficiency which enabled me to stand
thus alone in the wideness of Asia—a shortlived pride, for wherever man
wanders he still remains tethered by the chain that links him to his
kind; and so when the night closed around me I began to return, to
return, as it were, to my own gate. Reaching at last some high ground I
could see, and see with delight, the fire of our small encampment, and
when at last I regained the spot it seemed to me a very home that had
sprung up for me in the midst of these solitudes. My Arabs were busy
with their bread; Mysseri rattling teacups; the little kettle, with her
odd old-maidish looks, sat humming away old songs about England; and two
or three yards from the fire my tent stood prim and tight, with open
portal, and with welcoming look, like “the old arm-chair” of our lyrist’s
“sweet Lady Anne.”
At the beginning of my journey the night breeze blew coldly; when that
happened, the dry sand was heaped up outside round the skirts of the
tent, and so the wind, that everywhere else could sweep as he listed
along those dreary plains, was forced to turn aside in his course and
make way, as he ought, for the Englishman. Then within my tent there
were heaps of luxuries—dining-rooms, dressing-rooms, libraries, bedrooms,
drawing-rooms, oratories, all crowded into the space of a hearthrug. The
first night, I remember, with my books and maps about me, I wanted light;
they brought me a taper, and immediately from out of the silent Desert
there rushed in a flood of life unseen before. Monsters of moths, of all
shapes and hues, that never before perhaps had looked upon the shining of
a flame, now madly thronged into my tent, and dashed through the fire of
the candle till they fairly extinguished it with their burning limbs.
Those who had failed in attaining this martyrdom suddenly became serious,
and clung despondingly to the canvas.
By and by there was brought to me the fragrant tea and big masses of
scorched and scorching toast, and the butter that had come all the way to
me in this Desert of Asia from out of that poor, dear, starving Ireland.
I feasted like a king, like four kings, like a boy in the fourth form.
When the cold, sullen morning dawned, and my people began to load the
camels, I always felt loath to give back to the waste this little spot of
ground that had glowed for a while with the cheerfulness of a human
dwelling. One by one the cloaks, the saddles, the baggage, the hundred
things that strewed the ground and made it look so familiar—all these
were taken away and laid upon the camels. A speck in the broad tracts of
Asia remained still impressed with the mark of patent portmanteaus and
the heels of London boots; the embers of the fire lay black and cold upon
the sand, and these were the signs we left.
My tent was spared to the last, but when all else was ready for the start
then came its fall; the pegs were drawn, the canvas shivered, and in less
than a minute there was nothing that remained of my genial home but only
a pole and a bundle. The encroaching Englishman was off, and instant
upon the fall of the canvas, like an owner who had waited and watched,
the genius of the Desert stalked in.
To servants, as I suppose of any other Europeans not much accustomed to
amuse themselves by fancy or memory, it often happens that after a few
days journeying the loneliness of the Desert will become frightfully
oppressive. Upon my poor fellows the access of melancholy came heavy,
and all at once, as a blow from above; they bent their necks, and bore it
as best they could, but their joy was great on the fifth day when we came
to an oasis called Gatieh, for here we found encamped a caravan (that is,
an assemblage of travellers) from Cairo. The Orientals living in cities
never pass the Desert except in this way; many will wait for weeks, and
even for months, until a sufficient number of persons can be found ready
to undertake the journey at the same time—until the flock of sheep is big
enough to fancy itself a match for wolves. They could not, I think,
really secure themselves against any serious danger by this contrivance,
for though they have arms, they are so little accustomed to use them, and
so utterly unorganised, that they never could make good their resistance
to robbers of the slightest respectability. It is not of the Bedouins
that such travellers are afraid, for the safe conduct granted by the
chief of the ruling tribe is never, I believe, violated, but it is said
that there are deserters and scamps of various sorts who hover about the
skirts of the Desert, particularly on the Cairo side, and are anxious to
succeed to the property of any poor devils whom they may find more weak
and defenceless than themselves.
These people from Cairo professed to be amazed at the ludicrous
disproportion between their numerical forces and mine. They could not
understand, and they wanted to know, by what strange privilege it is that
an Englishman with a brace of pistols and a couple of servants rides
safely across the Desert, whilst they, the natives of the neighbouring
cities, are forced to travel in troops, or rather in herds. One of them
got a few minutes of private conversation with Dthemetri, and ventured to
ask him anxiously whether the English did not travel under the protection
of evil demons. I had previously known (from Methley, I think, who had
travelled in Persia) that this notion, so conducive to the safety of our
countrymen, is generally prevalent amongst Orientals. It owes its
origin, partly to the strong wilfulness of the English gentleman (which
not being backed by any visible authority, either civil or military,
seems perfectly superhuman to the soft Asiatic), but partly too to the
magic of the banking system, by force of which the wealthy traveller will
make all his journeys without carrying a handful of coin, and yet when he
arrives at a city will rain down showers of gold. The theory is, that
the English traveller has committed some sin against God and his
conscience, and that for this the evil spirit has hold of him, and drives
him from his home like a victim of the old Grecian furies, and forces him
to travel over countries far and strange, and most chiefly over deserts
and desolate places, and to stand upon the sites of cities that once were
and are now no more, and to grope among the tombs of dead men. Often
enough there is something of truth in this notion; often enough the
wandering Englishman is guilty (if guilt it be) of some pride or
ambition, big or small, imperial or parochial, which being offended has
made the lone place more tolerable than ballrooms to him, a sinner.
I can understand the sort of amazement of the Orientals at the scantiness
of the retinue with which an Englishman passes the Desert, for I was
somewhat struck myself when I saw one of my countrymen making his way
across the wilderness in this simple style. At first there was a mere
moving speck on the horizon. My party of course became all alive with
excitement, and there were many surmises. Soon it appeared that three
laden camels were approaching, and that two of them carried riders. In a
little while we saw that one of the riders wore European dress, and at
last the travellers were pronounced to be an English gentleman and his
servant. By their side there were a couple, I think, of Arabs on foot,
and this was the whole party.
You, you love sailing; in returning from a cruise to the English coast
you see often enough a fisherman’s humble boat far away from all shores,
with an ugly black sky above and an angry sea beneath. You watch the
grizzly old man at the helm carrying his craft with strange skill through
the turmoil of waters, and the boy, supple-limbed, yet weather-worn
already, and with steady eyes that look through the blast, you see him
understanding commandments from the jerk of his father’s white eyebrow,
now belaying and now letting go, now scrunching himself down into mere
ballast, or baling out death with a pipkin. Stale enough is the sight,
and yet when I see it I always stare anew, and with a kind of Titanic
exultation, because that a poor boat with the brain of a man and the
hands of a boy on board can match herself so bravely against black heaven
and ocean. Well, so when you have travelled for days and days over an
Eastern desert without meeting the likeness of a human being, and then at
last see an English shooting-jacket and his servant come listlessly
slouching along from out of the forward horizon, you stare at the wide
unproportion between this slender company and the boundless plains of
sand through which they are keeping their way.
This Englishman, as I afterwards found, was a military man returning to
his country from India, and crossing the Desert at this part in order to
go through Palestine. As for me, I had come pretty straight from
England, and so here we met in the wilderness at about half-way from our
respective starting-points. As we approached each other it became with
me a question whether we should speak. I thought it likely that the
stranger would accost me, and in the event of his doing so I was quite
ready to be as sociable and chatty as I could be according to my nature;
but still I could not think of anything particular that I had to say to
him. Of course, among civilised people the not having anything to say is
no excuse at all for not speaking, but I was shy and indolent, and I felt
no great wish to stop and talk like a morning visitor in the midst of
those broad solitudes. The traveller perhaps felt as I did, for except
that we lifted our hands to our caps and waved our arms in courtesy, we
passed each other as if we had passed in Bond Street. Our attendants,
however, were not to be cheated of the delight that they felt in speaking
to new listeners and hearing fresh voices once more. The masters,
therefore, had no sooner passed each other than their respective servants
quietly stopped and entered into conversation. As soon as my camel found
that her companions were not following her she caught the social feeling
and refused to go on. I felt the absurdity of the situation, and
determined to accost the stranger if only to avoid the awkwardness of
remaining stuck fast in the Desert whilst our servants were amusing
themselves. When with this intent I turned round my camel I found that
the gallant officer who had passed me by about thirty or forty yards was
exactly in the same predicament as myself. I put my now willing camel in
motion and rode up towards the stranger, who seeing this followed my
example and came forward to meet me. He was the first to speak. He was
much too courteous to address me as if he admitted the possibility of my
wishing to accost him from any feeling of mere sociability or
civilian-like love of vain talk. On the contrary, he at once attributed
my advances to a laudable wish of acquiring statistical information, and
accordingly, when we got within speaking distance, he said, “I daresay
you wish to know how the plague is going on at Cairo?” And then he went
on to say, he regretted that his information did not enable him to give
me in numbers a perfectly accurate statement of the daily deaths. He
afterwards talked pleasantly enough upon other and less ghastly subjects.
I thought him manly and intelligent, a worthy one of the few thousand
strong Englishmen to whom the empire of India is committed.
The night after the meeting with the people of the caravan, Dthemetri,
alarmed by their warnings, took upon himself to keep watch all night in
the tent. No robbers came except a jackal, that poked his nose into my
tent from some motive of rational curiosity. Dthemetri did not shoot him
for fear of waking me. These brutes swarm in every part of Syria, and
there were many of them even in the midst of the void sands that would
seem to give such poor promise of food. I can hardly tell what prey they
could be hoping for, unless it were that they might find now and then the
carcass of some camel that had died on the journey. They do not marshal
themselves into great packs like the wild dogs of Eastern cities, but
follow their prey in families, like the place-hunters of Europe. Their
voices are frightfully like to the shouts and cries of human beings. If
you lie awake in your tent at night you are almost continually hearing
some hungry family as it sweeps along in full cry. You hear the exulting
scream with which the sagacious dam first winds the carrion, and the
shrill response of the unanimous cubs as they sniff the tainted air,
“Wha! wha! wha! wha! wha! wha! Whose gift is it in, mamma?”
Once during this passage my Arabs lost their way among the hills of loose
sand that surrounded us, but after a while we were lucky enough to
recover our right line of march. The same day we fell in with a Sheik,
the head of a family, that actually dwells at no great distance from this
part of the Desert during nine months of the year. The man carried a
matchlock, of which he was very proud. We stopped and sat down and
rested a while for the sake of a little talk. There was much that I
should have liked to ask this man, but he could not understand
Dthemetri’s language, and the process of getting at his knowledge by
double interpretation through my Arabs was unsatisfactory. I discovered,
however (and my Arabs knew of that fact), that this man and his family
lived habitually for nine months of the year without touching or seeing
either bread or water. The stunted shrub growing at intervals through
the sand in this part of the Desert enables the camel mares to yield a
little milk, which furnishes the sole food and drink of their owner and
his people. During the other three months (the hottest of the months, I
suppose) even this resource fails, and then the Sheik and his people are
forced to pass into another district. You would ask me why the man
should not remain always in that district which supplies him with water
during three months of the year, but I don’t know enough of Arab politics
to answer the question. The Sheik was not a good specimen of the effect
produced by the diet to which he is subjected. He was very small, very
spare, and sadly shrivelled, a poor, over-roasted snipe, a mere cinder of
a man. I made him sit down by my side, and gave him a piece of bread and
a cup of water from out of my goatskins. This was not very tempting
drink to look at, for it had become turbid, and was deeply reddened by
some colouring matter contained in the skins, but it kept its sweetness,
and tasted like a strong decoction of Russia leather. The Sheik sipped
this, drop by drop, with ineffable relish, and rolled his eyes solemnly
round between every draught, as though the drink were the drink of the
Prophet, and had come from the seventh heaven.
An inquiry about distances led to the discovery that this Sheik had never
heard of the division of time into hours; my Arabs themselves, I think,
were rather surprised at this.
About this part of my journey I saw the likeness of a fresh-water lake.
I saw, as it seemed, a broad sheet of calm water, that stretched far and
fair towards the south, stretching deep into winding creeks, and hemmed
in by jutting promontories, and shelving smooth off towards the shallow
side. On its bosom the reflected fire of the sun lay playing, and
seeming to float upon waters deep and still.
Though I knew of the cheat, it was not till the spongy foot of my camel
had almost trodden in the seeming waters that I could undeceive my eyes,
for the shore-line was quite true and natural. I soon saw the cause of
the phantasm. A sheet of water heavily impregnated with salts had filled
this great hollow, and when dried up by evaporation had left a white
saline deposit, that exactly marked the space which the waters had
covered, and thus sketched a good shore-line. The minute crystals of the
salt sparkled in the sun, and so looked like the face of a lake that is
calm and smooth.
The pace of the camel is irksome, and makes your shoulders and loins ache
from the peculiar way in which you are obliged to suit yourself to the
movements of the beast, but you soon, of course, become inured to this,
and after the first two days this way of travelling became so familiar to
me, that (poor sleeper as I am) I now and then slumbered for some moments
together on the back of my camel. On the fifth day of my journey the air
above lay dead, and all the whole earth that I could reach with my utmost
sight and keenest listening was still and lifeless as some dispeopled and
forgotten world that rolls round and round in the heavens through wasted
floods of light. The sun, growing fiercer and fiercer, shone down more
mightily now than ever on me he shone before, and as I dropped my head
under his fire, and closed my eyes against the glare that surrounded me,
I slowly fell asleep, for how many minutes or moments I cannot tell, but
after a while I was gently awakened by a peal of church bells, my native
bells, the innocent bells of Marlen, that never before sent forth their
music beyond the Blaygon hills! My first idea naturally was that I still
remained fast under the power of a dream. I roused myself and drew aside
the silk that covered my eyes, and plunged my bare face into the light.
Then at least I was well enough wakened, but still those old Marlen bells
rung on, not ringing for joy, but properly, prosily, steadily, merrily
ringing “for church.” After a while the sound died away slowly. It
happened that neither I nor any of my party had a watch by which to
measure the exact time of its lasting, but it seemed to me that about ten
minutes had passed before the bells ceased. I attributed the effect to
the great heat of the sun, the perfect dryness of the clear air through
which I moved, and the deep stillness of all around me. It seemed to me
that these causes, by occasioning a great tension, and consequent
susceptibility, of the hearing organs, had rendered them liable to tingle
under the passing touch of some mere memory that must have swept across
my brain in a moment of sleep. Since my return to England it has been
told me that like sounds have been heard at sea, and that the sailor
becalmed under a vertical sun in the midst of the wide ocean has listened
in trembling wonder to the chime of his own village bells.
At this time I kept a poor shabby pretence of a journal, which just
enabled me to know the day of the month and the week according to the
European calendar, and when in my tent at night I got out my pocket-book
I found that the day was Sunday, and roughly allowing for the difference
of time in this longitude, I concluded that at the moment of my hearing
that strange peal the church-going bells of Marlen must have been
actually calling the prim congregation of the parish to morning prayer.
The coincidence amused me faintly, but I could not pluck up the least
hope that the effect which I had experienced was anything other than an
illusion, an illusion liable to be explained (as every illusion is in
these days) by some of the philosophers who guess at Nature’s riddles.
It would have been sweeter to believe that my kneeling mother by some
pious enchantment had asked, and found, this spell to rouse me from my
scandalous forgetfulness of God’s holy day, but my fancy was too weak to
carry a faith like that. Indeed, the vale through which the bells of
Marlen send their song is a highly respectable vale, and its people (save
one, two, or three) are wholly unaddicted to the practice of magical
arts.
After the fifth day of my journey I no longer travelled over shifting
hills, but came upon a dead level, a dead level bed of sand, quite hard,
and studded with small shining pebbles.
The heat grew fierce; there was no valley nor hollow, no hill, no mound,
no shadow of hill nor of mound, by which I could mark the way I was
making. Hour by hour I advanced, and saw no change—I was still the very
centre of a round horizon; hour by hour I advanced, and still there was
the same, and the same, and the same—the same circle of flaming sky—the
same circle of sand still glaring with light and fire. Over all the
heaven above, over all the earth beneath, there was no visible power that
could balk the fierce will of the sun: “he rejoiced as a strong man to
run a race; his going forth was from the end of the heaven, and his
circuit unto the ends of it; and there was nothing hid from the heat
thereof.” From pole to pole, and from the east to the west, he
brandished his fiery sceptre as though he had usurped all heaven and
earth. As he bid the soft Persian in ancient times, so now, and fiercely
too, he bid me bow down and worship him; so now in his pride he seemed to
command me, and say, “Thou shalt have none other gods but me.” I was all
alone before him. There were these two pitted together, and face to
face—the mighty sun for one, and for the other this poor, pale, solitary
self of mine, that I always carry about with me.
But on the eighth day, and before I had yet turned away from Jehovah for
the glittering god of the Persians, there appeared a dark line upon the
edge of the forward horizon, and soon the line deepened into a delicate
fringe, that sparkled here and there as though it were sewn with
diamonds. There, then, before me were the gardens and the minarets of
Egypt and the mighty works of the Nile, and I (the eternal Ego that I
am!)—I had lived to see, and I saw them.
When evening came I was still within the confines of the Desert, and my
tent was pitched as usual; but one of my Arabs stalked away rapidly
towards the west, without telling me of the errand on which he was bent.
After a while he returned; he had toiled on a graceful service; he had
travelled all the way on to the border of the living world, and brought
me back for token an ear of rice, full, fresh, and green. The next day I
entered upon Egypt, and floated along (for the delight was as the delight
of bathing) through green wavy fields of rice, and pastures fresh and
plentiful, and dived into the cold verdure of groves and gardens, and
quenched my hot eyes in shade, as though in deep, rushing waters.