MSHATTA
"Thou still unravished bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme."
KEATS
There was so much of interest at Madaba, that we did not succeed in
accomplishing the early start we had intended, and even after we were in
the saddle, and had picked our way, not without difficulty, among the
scattered stones, the middens, the children and dogs and chickens which
occupy such open spaces as serve for paths, a native, speaking excellent
German, came out of a house to suggest a visit to yet another mosaic
pavement. This, however, we reluctantly declined, for, although we had a
journey of but five hours in view, the sun was already high, and we had
a bare plateau to traverse.
We soon left all traces of town life behind, and in little more than an
hour came upon a scene which was, to many of us, a new delight: that of
many hundreds of wandering camels in their native surroundings—we had
almost said their native element, so different are these creatures from
the suffering, melancholy, over-worked, evil-smelling, grumbling brutes
to which we are accustomed in Jerusalem. A camel to be seen to advantage
requires the primeval spaces for which he was originally designed. He
should stand clear against the horizon, however boundless; the
background of narrow streets, the human brutality and noise, the mud
beneath feet intended for desert sands, are an injustice for which we,
and not they, are to blame. Bewildered, tortured, over-driven, he
acquires that air of abject dejection which he shares with the London
cab-horse, that habit of futile remonstrance which we learn to associate
with him, to the entire exclusion of that dignity—an undoubted part of
the freedom which is his birthright—that grace, which is inseparable
from the surroundings that were his when the original type, never yet
adapted to human environment, was first devised.
Camels of all shades of brown and grey were there; camels that had never
had their coats disfigured by clipping nor galled with burdens; white
camels, almost dazzling against the sapphire sky, the golden plain, the
purple hills; baby camels, playful as kittens but with a puppy-like air
of solemnity, and more graceful than young colts, because better
proportioned as to legs. The Bedu speak of the white camels as "blue,"
possibly for the same reason that an inhabitant of the Hebrides, when on
the sea in stormy weather, will speak of his island by a fictitious name
or, after dark, will whistle to his dogs rather than call them by name,
for fear of attracting the attention of the Evil One. Many superstitions
among Arabs are associated with blue, as again, the Highlander
associating them with green, the colour of the fairies, will avoid
naming the hue of the grass, calling it blue if adjective be necessary.
The Arab puts a blue bead on his horse, a blue necklace on his child;
his wife carries blue beads on her market-basket, and one is often hung
over the door of the house, especially a new house. So Caliban, in the
Oriental story which Shakespeare preserves for us in "The Tempest,"
speaks of his mother Setebos, the witch, as "a blue-eyed hag" (not
"blear-eyed" into which certain commentators have corrected the
original); and in a commentary upon an Arabic poem by Al Chirnik, sister
of Tarafah, belonging to the early part of the seventh century, a
seeress is described as "Hy, the blue-eyed one, from the notorious
people of the time of ignorance"—_i.e._ the period before the revelation
of the Moslem faith.
Here and there the vast plain was dotted with the black temporary
villages of the Bedu, generally arranged in a circle or square, _dooah_,
around a central space upon which all the tents open, although, with
some instinct of sanitation, the drapery was generally raised, both "but
and ben," as they say in Scotland. The population seemed to be largely
abroad, and every half mile or so we came upon a little group, more or
less keeping an eye upon the herds, visible for miles, even to the
farthest horizon, where they made long dados of themselves against the
cloudless sky. Almost due south of us, each on its own hill, overlooking
a Roman road running north and south, are two important ruins—Um Weleed
(mother of children) and Um el Kuseir. They are only about half-an-hour
apart, and we longed to make the short détour necessary to visit them,
but the Professor's face was turned where duty called and we did not
venture to propose the expenditure of time. Tristram describes these
cities, and others lying along the same route, and thinks they may have
been at least Maccabean, for they are obviously much older than the
Saracenic khans and the Roman forts, which are alike numerous in the
district. He says that in all he looked in vain for any traces of
Christian worship but that in each case there were the ruins of a
temple, always outside the city, with the entrance to the east, and,
wherever the architecture could be determined, of Doric origin; and he
speculates as to whether these High Places may have originally served
for Baal-worship. Another point which he notes, and which we, later, had
opportunities of verifying, is the immense number of cisterns and
underground storehouses, still in use by the Bedu for storage of grain
and protection of flocks. It is interesting to recall that one of the
commands given upon the Moabite stone, which was found but a few hours'
journey south west, was "Make for yourselves every man a cistern in his
house." The present names of these ruined towns, Um Weleed, Kirbet
el-Herri, Zebîb, Um er-Resâs, Um el-Kuseir, and others, are all Arabic,
and do not help us in identification, and trace of any other name seldom
remains. They must, nevertheless, have been important; Um Weleed, for
example, measures half-a-mile in length within the walls, and has
suburbs in addition.
Of Ziza, however, where we halted for a short time about four hours
after leaving Madaba, we find a clear record in the Roman _Notitia_,
where the name occurs, unchanged by a single letter, as an important
military station, "_Equites Dalmatici Illyriciani Ziza_". Here we found
traces of what must have been one of the largest towns of Roman Arabia,
the most prominent feature being a great tank of solid masonry, 420 by
330 feet, still larger than that at Madaba, and, although the dry season
was far advanced, and the reservoir is much reduced in available extent
by debris, containing still a good supply of water. Steps, so wide and
shallow as to be accessible even to horses, lead down to the water; many
of the single stones are over six feet in length, and the reservoir was
fed by an ingenious contrivance which, aided by two sets of strong
sluice gates and an embankment of earth and masonry, formerly economised
all the water which, in the heavy winter rains, would come rushing along
the valley and down the hill side, upon which the town was built. In
various parts of the valley there are embankments, to turn the water
from other gorges and depressions into this central reservoir, which is
also provided with dams in the event of flood, floods being frequent and
dangerous in this country, where, in the early rains, the water rushes
in torrents along the surface of the baked and hardened earth. In the
neighbourhood of such provision for a large population one naturally
looks for buildings of importance. Tristram observes that the tank,
though of such infinite consequence as is barely conceivable to those
who do not know the East, is not defended, pointing to a period of
security, when the Dalmatian cavalry swept the surrounding plains and
made their headquarters here and, possibly, at Castal. Against the
horizon, on the crest of the ridge, are two castles, which we were
unable to visit but which were described by Tristram: one a
solidly-built fort, apparently Saracenic, although constructed of older
materials, which, to judge from the sculpture remaining upon them, may
have been the ruins of Byzantine churches, the other, to the east, is,
he tells us, in a much more ruinous condition. The present remains seem
to be Roman, but show traces of use as a mosque, and among the material
are sculptured stones, possibly Byzantine, according to some Persian, as
well as fragments of cufic inscriptions. Eastward, again, is the Roman
town of Ziza, which includes a strange aggregation such as is found in
no country other than Syria. There is a fine Saracenic building, said by
the Arabs to have been perfect until the Egyptian invasion of 1832;
there are cufic inscriptions and sculptured crosses; an olive mill of
basalt; remains of sarcophagi; and a large Christian church, of which
one apse still remains standing. All these ruins suffered considerably
from the wanton destruction wrought by the Egyptian troops, who, it is
said, threw down a very perfect building in the town, and several entire
Christian churches. Tristram was the first European to visit Mshatta and
Castal as well as Ziza; the last, at the suggestion of Zadam, the son of
the great shech of the Beni Sakr, the local tribe of Bedu, who, by the
intervention of Klein, the German missionary famous for the discovery of
the Moabite stone, accompanied Tristram as companion, and protector of
the expedition. The ruins appear to have been previously pointed out to
Captain, now Sir Charles, Warren, the representative of the Palestine
Exploration Fund, who, however, made no investigation, so that it fell
to the share of Tristram to be the discoverer of Mshatta, one of the
most remarkable architectural monuments in the world.
It was with ever-increasing eagerness of expectation that we hastened
on, after asking our way from some railway workmen—Europeans—who were
living in tents among the ruins, and who spoke a polyglot of Arabic,
French, and Italian. Within a few minutes we crossed the line upon which
they were engaged, intended—strange anachronism!—to connect Damascus
with Mecca, an undertaking for which the Turkish Government deserves the
credit of immense perseverance under very difficult conditions. It may
be mentioned, in passing, as also to their credit, that they are now
rapidly carrying out the line from Haifa northwards, undertaken some
years ago by the English, and which—after the whole district had been
surveyed, the line planned by the skill of Dr Schumacher, the
German-American Vice-Consul at Haifa, and the work, in the hands of an
English engineer and English foreman, had made some progress—was
mysteriously abandoned, to the serious loss of many of the employés.
It is of this railway that Professor George Adam Smith prognosticated so
hopefully, as being the most important material innovation from the
West. "... Not only will it open up the most fertile parts of the
country, and bring back European civilisation to where it once was
supreme—on the east of Jordan—but, if ever European arms return to the
country—as in a contest for Egypt or for the Holy Places when may they
not return?—this railway, running from the coast across the central
battlefield of Palestine, will be of immense strategic value" ("Hist.
Geog. of the Holy Land," p. 20).
At the point where we cross the line the rails are not yet in place, but
the iron monster will soon be here—fit symbol of an age which mocks the
time that is, but creates few monuments which shall defy the time that
shall be; which enables the curious to gaze at the wonders of the past,
but leaves him no leisure to initiate what may survive our race, and
speak, as do the ruins of Moab, to an age and a people of a distant
future. We come on the wings of steam, and with all the miracles of
science, but we leave no trace but unsightly heaps and a scar upon the
face of the landscape. We were glad, some of us, when we had reached and
crossed the unshamed anachronism, and, forgetting the noise that would
break the silence of the plain, the smoke that would soil its purity,
the advertisement, the competition, with their attendant vulgarity and
vice, we could throw ourselves again into the arms of Nature, and listen
to the voices of our Mother Earth.
It seemed far more in keeping with our mood of the moment when, an hour
or so later, we crossed the _Haj_ (pilgrim) Road from Damascus to Mecca;
the road, or rather aggregation of paths, some hundreds of parallel
tracks, dispersed over a width of 1000 yards, alternately dividing and
amalgamating, over which, for some twelve hundred years, the followers
of the Prophet have passed to the visible centre and cradle of their
faith. It is possible that the sons of Isaac may have trodden this very
path on their way from the desert to the land of promise, for here there
can be little variation in roadways, as they are determined not by
mountain passes or choice of gradient, but by the presence of water. The
shech of the district is responsible for the safe conduct of the
pilgrimage across his territory, and it is at their own risk that any
wander from the caravan. It is not many years since a body of pilgrims,
tempted by some vision of a nearer route, had to be followed up when
they did not reappear. A few only were saved, but two hundred perished
from thirst, and one shudders to think of the possible animal suffering
involved, although, happily, most would be mounted on the long-enduring
camel. The Professor told us that at times, when his caravan had lost
its way in the desert at night, his mukaris would stoop down and scoop
up a handful of sand some two or three inches deep, which they would
smell for traces of camel droppings, showing, when they were deeper than
a possible surface accident, that the travellers were on the timeworn
track.
Almost involuntarily we drew rein, and paused, with mingled feelings,
before this record of human emotions. Five times a day every good Moslem
must turn toward Mecca, and once in a lifetime, if possible, he must
journey thither in pilgrimage, either personally or by proxy. The road
is strewn with the bones not only of animals but of men, who have fallen
by the way, from thirst or exhaustion, it may be, or from plague and the
cholera, which so constantly dog their footsteps. The Arabs have a story
that a good Derwish in Mecca begged the leader of the pilgrimage to take
the cholera away with him from a place where so many holy men were daily
perishing. "But," said the Haj, "there are many good men in Jerusalem,
whom we can ill spare!" "Well," said the Derwish, "take it, anyway, and
if Allah does not want it in Jerusalem He will send it on elsewhere";
and that, says history, as well as tradition, has happened annually ever
since, for though Jerusalem is left untouched, the dread cholera
accompanies the returning pilgrims almost every season, and is seldom
far away from the track which lay before us.
Although many now avail themselves of the steamers on the Red Sea and
Persian Gulf, thousands assemble every year at Damascus, where the holy
tent of the caravan is kept, and large numbers still come, even from
Circassia, Central Asia, and Northern Africa, in order to make the
orthodox journey in its entirety. Formerly it was reckoned as lasting
twenty-seven days but, owing to various mitigations in the difficulty of
travel, the time tends, every year, to become shorter. Nevertheless, the
Arabs have a saying which expresses a journey of indefinite length (much
as we say "to go to Jericho"): "To go to the gate of God"; (Bab-el
Allah) the gate that is, at the end of the Meidân, the suburb of
Damascus, where the pilgrimage assembles, known as Bawâbet Allâh.
Though, in these days when, even among Moslems, the tendency shows
itself to minimise the duties of life, and many only contribute to the
cost of the general pilgrimage, and compromise with conscience by a mere
payment in money, nevertheless, even yet, custom, superstition,
temporary advantage, hereditary conventionality or, it may be, pious
instinct, religious fervour, cosmic yearning, avail now, as in all ages,
to the direction of human conduct, and the parallel tracks are still
well trodden. To us, who can enter in part only into the spirit of the
East—its absolute faith in predestination, in the predetermination of
salvation or perdition, in the irrelevance between religion and conduct,
in the resignation which seems to us so utterly without hope, in its
limitation of the relations between Man and God, its perpetual
ascription of praise with but little margin for intercession—the whole
position is a great mystery, and in the tramp, tramp of thousands of
feet, which seems to us to echo wearily through vast avenues of time, we
find it difficult to catch any note of love, or hope, or aspiration.
They carry an inevitable burden of human sorrow, which is no fit
offering at such a shrine as theirs; they have hopes and fears and human
longings which they may confide to none but human hearts: God is great;
there is no god but God; all that befalls them is already decreed; and
the pilgrimage is to His glory and in no sense for their own
consolation. Browning's _Epistle of an Arab Physician_ recurred to the
mind of some among us, with the startled utterance of the Syrian
contemporary of Jesus of Nazareth:
"... think, Abib; dost thou think?"
So, the All-great were the All-loving too!
So through the thunder comes a human voice
Saying: "O heart I made, a _heart_ beats here!"
Thus dreaming, we journeyed on, still over vast spaces with dim
horizons, bounded by low ranges of hills, showing in deep purple against
the cloudless, sapphire sky.
Suddenly all was changed! We were no longer among the unsatisfied
yearnings of pilgrimage but the companions of that youngest brother in
the fairy tales, whose long journeyings had so often entered into our
dream of the distant lands, for were we not drawing up at the gate of
the Enchanted Palace, more beautiful than any dream, more deeply
mysterious than the wonders of the Arabian Nights?
"Here all things in their place remain,
As all were ordered, ages since.
Come, Care and Pleasure, Hope and Pain,
And bring the fated fairy Prince!"
Truly the place was under a spell—here in this wide wilderness, an
unfinished dream of the sculptor of a giant age, stood the Castle of
Mshatta; far exceeding any description which we had read or heard;
paralysing us with such awe of its beauty and mystery as seldom seizes
one before the work of Man; its immensity, its majesty, the unique
perfection of its workmanship, above all, its silence, its absolute
mystery, seeming in unison with the vast works of Nature all around,
rather than with any conception of a merely human mind.
We were speechless in presence of this monument of a race to which we
could give no name, of a purpose at which we could not even guess, of
aspirations never fulfilled, hopes never realised.
"Titanic forces taking birth
In divers seasons, divers climes.
For we are Ancients of the earth
And in the morning of the times."
Tristram, after his second visit in the year 1872, returned to England,
declaring that the whole question continued to be an insoluble mystery.
Even the name gave no clue, and such meaning as it may even have had as
_Um shita_, "mother of winter," presumably so called as affording winter
shelter for the flocks, is now subtracted, for although the spelling of
Mashita or Meshita has been employed up to the present, even by the
precise Baedeker in his English edition of 1900, the derivation is now
declared fanciful, and _Mshatta_ the more accurate rendering of the name.
That the problem is a difficult one is the more obvious from the very
fact that it has none of the complications which beset the archæologist
elsewhere. There have been no subtractions, no accretions, no changes.
Hardly a ruin remains in Syria where Moslem zeal has not destroyed its
sculptured imagery. Here all is perfect as when the artist laid down his
chisel. Not a detail is defaced; the few stones which may have been
removed have in no degree marred its completeness; its position has been
its protection; far alike from the ignorant zeal of the fellahin Moslem,
from the misdirected industry of the town Christian, it has inherited
none of the blessings of civilisation. It is still the "unravished bride
of quietness." As Tristram has well said: "Too proud to cultivate,
happily too careless to destroy, the incurious Bedawin has roamed over
its rich pasture lands: never tempted to loosen a stone, for he needs no
building materials, and content if the old cisterns and arches afford a
shelter in winter for his flocks."
In the wonderful façade upwards of fifty animals, exquisitely
sculptured, in every variety of attitude, still quench their thirst in
pairs, bending opposite each other, over a graceful vase; their outline,
their very motion perfectly rendered; lions, lynxes, panthers, gazelle,
buffaloes; here is a man with a dog, there a man carries a basket of
fruit; birds hover; peacocks, storks, partridges, parrots, vaunt their
beauty, with the grace of the models from which they were drawn, in days
when we were living in wattled huts. The more conventional outlines—the
cornices and mouldings, the continuous vandyke, with a great rose boss
at every angle—although strikingly unfamiliar, are eminently satisfying
to the eye, and the wonderful realism of the flowers, grapes, and
vine-leaves, which fill up every remaining inch of the façade, is like a
dream of Grinling Gibbon carved out in massive stone.
Where, unless in the Alhambra, or (as we learn from Fergusson, De Vogüe,
Dieulafoy, and other authorities on Persian art) in remote parts of
Persia, can we find anything in the least comparable to the bewildering
richness of the designs which have blossomed for us here in the
wilderness?—far, not only from mankind, but from such gifts of nature as
would make possible the presence of mankind; where, for lack of water,
even the rich soil of the great tableland cannot be cultivated, and the
district must for ever remain, as it has ever been, a desert! The Arabs
have no traditions of this place, as they have of so many other ruins,
and they do not even ascribe its foundation to Saladdin or the Khalifs,
to whom all that is great is almost invariably assigned. Can a building
covered with human and animal designs owe its origin to the Moslem, to
whom all such representations were forbidden? Although Thompson, the
author of "The Land and the Book," proposed to consider the ruins as
those of a church and convent, there is, apart from all other
difficulties as to size, plan, and position, no single indication of
Christian workmanship or symbol. Were the Romans likely to build a
sumptuous Oriental palace in a lonely desert, far from any military
road? If the Bedawy, the wandering Ishmaelite, sole denizen of deserts
such as this, were for once to depart from his normal style of
architecture—two or three poles and a piece of cloth—is it likely that
his descendants would have preserved no tradition of so extraordinary a
deviation?
One solution offered is, nevertheless, that it was the work of Byzantine
architects, employed by the desert tribes, notably the Beni Sakr, in the
days when they were rich with the subsidies paid to them by the Romans
for protection of their colonies and forts and roads from the
encroachments of other enemies of the desert; that it was never intended
as a place of residence but merely for the reception of ambassadors, who
were to be over-awed, partly by the miracle of this rose of the
wilderness, partly by the skill shown in the triumph over niggard
Nature; or, in the event of this being insufficient, were to be
separated from their steeds, and presented with free house room until
hunger, thirst, and loneliness should make them amenable. Whether the
work remained incomplete from paucity of money or of ambassadors, is not
revealed.
Another solution, of which Fergusson is the originator, is that it was
the work of the Persian king, Chosroes II., who, between the years 611
and 614, overran the whole of Northern Syria and Asia Minor. Gibbon's
enumeration, gathered from contemporary authors (Gibbon's "Decline and
Fall," Chap. x. 701), of his 20,000 camels and 3000 concubines, his 960
elephants and 6000 horses, suggests, at least, that he had the money for
the building of artistic palaces, and the fact that he spent the years
of his youth at Hierapolis, where he had ample opportunity for studying
the art and culture of Asia Minor, may suggest, further, that he
possibly had the taste. These kings of the Sassanian dynasty were,
indeed, noted for their love of architecture, and the Court favourite of
Chosroes II., Ferhad, was an architect. A drawing of an ancient
bas-relief at Shiraz, to be seen at the Institute of British Architects,
presents Chosroes as slaying a lion, while his fair favourite, Shireen,
watches Ferhad sculpturing birds and foliage upon a rock. Some forty or
fifty Sassanian bas-reliefs, sculptured pictures such as those at
Mshatta, still remain in various places. Moreover, we learn that
Chosroes II. had thousands of Greek and Syrian slaves, whom he employed
in the construction of sumptuous buildings. The site of Mshatta might
well lie in his route between Damascus and the Nile. (_See_ Chap. iii.
p. 53.)
The sudden arrest of the work—one stone west of the entrance gate has
been just laid down beside the place prepared for it, many stones have
the sculpture incomplete, or merely indicated, we saw slabs upon which
tentative sketches of horses had been made—might be accounted for by the
fact that, in 623, the Emperor Heraclius, "the Roman eagle swooping
magnificently in her dying throes," compelled Chosroes, after only, at
the utmost, fourteen years of power in Syria, to recall his troops from
Egypt, Syria, and Asia Minor, and though, for four years, the strife was
fierce between Persian and Roman, the latter ultimately triumphed, and
Chosroes died miserably in a dungeon. Barely ten years later the Romans
were banished by the Saracens.
The learned Professor Brünnow has made the suggestion that this building
originated with the Ghassanides, the Beni Jafn, who migrated from Yemen
in the first Christian century and, having been made, by the Romans,
wardens of the marches of the Empire, developed later into an important
dynasty; submitting even to the civilising influences of Christianity,
for, in 180, Amir I. founded a monastery in Haurân. Brünnow observed the
same vandyke pattern, which, however, is in itself a somewhat elementary
design, upon a water jar in Jaulan, a district considerably north of
Mshatta, but where, he observes, the Ghassanides were at home. Although
the jar was modern it was conceivably copied from an ancient design, as
was, undoubtedly, another standing beside it. Moreover, he found a
pattern of double vandykes—that is, of squares joined at the corners,
upon a frieze in the same district. Other archæologists object that
certain details cannot be older than Justinian, when Arabian kings held
no sway near the Jordan, others doubt whether the Arabian kings ever
extended their power into this unquestionably Roman province. To the
mere layman it seems so probable that a row of vandykes was the first
thing that Adam drew with a stick upon the sand, that he fails to find
in it anything distinctive enough to form the basis of a historical or
architectural theory.
The entrance, with its magnificent façade, is to the south, the
sculpture, extending over 156 feet in the centre of the face, is broken
by a gateway, and rises to the height of 18 feet. Behind this is a
quadrangle, 170 yards square, at each angle a round bastion, and five
others, semicircular, between them. On the south front alone there are
six, the central gateway being flanked by two, boldly octagonal, and
magnificently sculptured. The interior is best described as being
divided into three portions, by parallel lines running north and south,
the side ones about 46, the centre about 66, yards in width. The centre
one has been divided into three sections; that nearest the gate, which
is portioned into many chambers, was probably intended for a guard
house; the second may have been an open space, with a fountain, and the
third or northernmost was the palace itself. This consists of brick
walls, resting on three courses of stone, the bricks, of somewhat
curious form, resembling, it is said, those of no known building, except
a ruined palace north-east of Damascus, described by Tyrwhitt Drake and
Sir Richard Burton. They are like Roman tiles, but larger and thinner, 3
inches thick and about 18 inches square. The palace is divided into
twenty-four rooms, the entrance hall being about 50 feet square, four
others being perhaps two-thirds of that size. The entrance is through a
wide doorway, with massive pilasters and elaborate capitals, with
ornamentation, possibly, of Persian or Egyptian—certainly not of
Greek—design. Architects have perplexed themselves over the problem,
still unsolved, as to how the palace was lighted, as there is not a
single window from without, and within only a few small round openings
over the doors. Bliss, of Beirut, the distinguished American
archæologist, conjectures that the large halls were unroofed, and that
the smaller rooms opened upon them, a plan quite consistent with the
Oriental conception of a house, originally derived from tents opening
into a central space, and developing, first into rooms opening into a
court, and, later, into the modern house, in which all rooms on both
floors open into a leewan, or central apartment.
Naturally, all these observations were made later, for it was our
privilege to remain for some nights within the palace walls, where, amid
kind and hospitable friends, and in comfortable tents, bearing the
familiar initials T. I. W. (Thames Iron Works), relics of the abandoned
English railway, we found leisure to rest and to dream. Some of us found
the spell of fairyland so strong that little else than dream seemed
possible. Never, perhaps, so loud as here, did we "hear the East
a-calling,"
"something which possessed
The darkness of the world, delight,
Life, anguish, death, immortal love
Ceasing not, mingled, unrepressed
Apart from space, withholding time,
But flattering the golden prime
Of good Haroun Alraschid."
It was, perhaps, bathos, on our part, but we wished Tennyson had known
enough Arabic to write Er-Rashid!
How far it all seemed from the littlenesses we have learned to confuse
with realities—"the greeting where no kindness is," "the dreary
intercourse of daily life"!
"We grew in gladness, till we found
Our spirits in the golden age."
Our thoughts turned to dear ones far away as, we may fancy, do those of
some who have gone from among us, so far removed we seemed even from
those nearest in spirit! We were ready
"To pass with all our social ties
To silence, from the paths of men,
And every hundred years to rise
And learn the world, and sleep again."
Towards evening, when the golden light was fading from over the wide
plain, we turned our steps towards the eastern hills, a long, low,
limestone range, a day's ride distant, although, in the clear
atmosphere, it seemed as if we might almost reach their foot in time to
see the sun set. One of the soldiers in charge of our party kept us in
sight all the time; for away in those dim recesses are wild tribes, who
submit to no government but that of their own chief, Ibn Rashid, the
great Arabian potentate, whose stronghold is far away beyond the hills,
in the city of Hayil, and whom all other shechs hold in awe. Our host,
Dr Schumacher, told us that not even his Circassian soldiers, fierce and
fearless as they are, would consent to accompany him beyond that plain
into the district of Hadramat, and it was still with the sensation of
being in touch with fairy lore that we listened while the Professor told
us stories of his sojourn in that distant land, of hospitality received
in that far-away stronghold, and of personal and friendly intercourse
with the great chief himself. We were interested later to note the
anachronism of the two cairns, on widely distant hills, remains of Dr
Schumacher's survey for the great German map of East Jordan.
As our shadows lengthened we stood to watch the herds of gazelle
descending into the plain; the graceful creatures, secure in their
swiftness, coming so near that we could watch their movements even
without our field-glasses. We had already learnt that they came down
daily, towards sunset, often close to the palace walls, and our
Sportsmen had long lain in wait for them there in the hope of game, but
the news of the human invasion, the profane breaking of the silence, had
gone forth, and the gentle creatures, having little reason to feel
confidence in the lords of creation, had turned away elsewhere.
As we retraced our steps we lingered, picking up here a flint
arrow-head, gift of a distant past, there a bleached snake-skin, perfect
as though worn but yesterday. Other treasures, too, we found: wonderful
velvety arums, crimson, purple, and black, not the large _arum
palæstinum_ of the spring, but a minute, dainty, fairy-like copy of it,
fitly adorning this dream world; crocuses, leafless, almost stalkless,
white, mauve, and pink, rich relations of the "naked ladies" of our home
meadows, and tiny pink geraniums, the lingering guests of summer.
Scarcely were we again at home, when Nature endowed us with another, and
truly royal, spectacle. As the full moon rose, above our palace walls,
she was eclipsed, and we stood long, watching alternately the western
miracle of sunset and the eastern pageant of the slow and, as it seemed,
reluctant moonrise. Some of the Arab servants watched with us, but they
were of so superior a class that they showed but the faint,
unimaginative interest of average civilised man elsewhere. They told us,
however, of the superstitious practices still pursued by those "who knew
no better"—the singing and beating of tom-toms and sacrifice of a cock.
They were wonderful servants, or seemed so to us, the slaves of the
kitchen of the West. The cook produced excellent dinners, of three hot
courses, upon a box of charcoal embers he could lift with one hand, and
the waiters, summoned with a hand-clap, not only brought but _ran_ to
bring whatever you might want. Everything was spotlessly clean, and the
waiting at table would have done credit to an English "Jeames." They all
spoke at least three languages, and they amused our leisure moments with
games and songs. The native, however, must come out somewhere, and we
are bound to record that, when an imprisoned cock crowed from a small
wooden box, these Arabs, who are never quiet one second themselves, took
him out and whipped him!
We went to rest early in our luxurious tents, and woke next morning to
find, among other miracles, that the water in our jugs was barely above
freezing point.