A Pilgrimage to Nejd, the Cradle of the Arab Race: A Visit to the Court of the Arab Emir, and ...

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A PILGKIMAGE TO NEJD,

THE CRADLE OF THE ARAB RACE.

A VISIT TO THE COURT OF THE AEAB EMIR, AND

"OUR PERSIAN CAMPAIGN."

By lady ANNE BLUNT.

AUTHOR or "the BRDOCIK tribes ok the EUPHRATES."

IN TWO VOLUMES.--VOJL.. I.

WITH MAP, PORTRAITS. AND ILLUSTRATIONS FROM
THE AUTHOR'S DRAWINGS.

LONDON :
JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET,

1881.

[All RiJjhLs nj^errrjd, ]

■■=. 26
■^ 1885 .

A/C

^tst Valmti itt ^tYuKWh

TO

Sm HENRY OSESWIOKE EAWUNSON

KO.B., F.B.S.

BY

THE AUTHOBESa

i

PREFACE BY THE EDITOR.

Readebs of our last year's adventures on the
Euphrates will haxdly need it to be explained to
them why the present journey was undertaken, nor
why it stands described upon our title page as a
" Pilgrimage." The journey to Nejd forms the
natural complement of the journey through Meso-
potamia and the Syrian Desert ; while Nejd itself,
with the romantic interest attached to its name,
seems no unworthy object of a religious feeling, aucfa
as might prompt the visit to a shrine. Nejd, in the
imagiuation of the Bedouins of the North, is a
region of romance, the cradle of their race, and of
those ideas of chivalry by which they still live
There Antar performed his labours of Hercules,
and Hatim Tfu the more historical hero entertained
his guests. To the Anazeh and Shammar, espe-
cially, whose northward migrations date only &om
a few generations back, the tradition of their birth-
place is still almost a recollection; and even to

Preface by the Editor.

tiie Arabs of the earlier inTaaions, the towcBmen
of such places as Bozca, Palmyra, and Deyr, and
to the T^ Bedouins, once lords of Jebel Shammar,
it appeals with a fascination more than equal to
that of the Hejaz itself. Nejd is to all of them
what Palestine is to tiie Jews, England to the
American and Australian colonists; but with this
difference, that they are cut off from the object of
their filial reverence more absolutely in practice
than these by an intervening gulf of desert less
hospitable than any sea. It is rare to meet any-
where in the North an Arab who has crossed the
Great Nefad.

To us too, imbued as we were with the fancies
of the Desert, Hejd had long assumed the romantic
colouring of a holy land ; and when it was decided
t^t we were to visit Jebel Shammar, the metropolis
of Bedouin life, our expedition presented itself as
an almost pious undertaking ; so that it is hardly an
exaggeratioD, even uow that it is over, and we are
once more in Europe, to speak of it as a pilgrimage.
Our pilgrimage then it is, though the religion in
whose name we travelled was only one of romance.

Its circumstances, in spite of certain disappoint-
ments which the narrative will reveal, were littie
less romantic than the idea. Readers- who followed
our former travels to their close, may remember a

Preface by the Editor,

certain Mohammed Abdallah, son of the Sheykh of
Fakayra, a young man who, after travelling with
us by order of the Pasha fix>m Deyr to his native
town, had at some risk of official displeasure assisted
UB in evading the Tarkish authorities, and accom-
plishing our visit to the Anazeh. It may further be
remembered that, in requital of this service and
because we had conceived an affection for him (for
he appeared a really high-minded young feUow),
Ifohammed had been given his choice between a
round sum of money, and the honour of becoming
" the Beg's " brother, a choice which he had
chivalrously decided in favour of the brotherhood.
"We had then promised him that, if all went well
■with us, we would return to Damascus the follow-
ing winter, and go in his company to Nejd, where
he believed he had relations, and that we would
help him there to a wife from among his own
people.

The idea and the promise were in strict accord-
ance with Bedouin notions, and greatly delighted
both him and bis father Abdallah, to whom
they were in due course communicated. Arab
custom is very little changed on the point of
marriage from what it was in the days of Abraham ;
and it was natural that both &ther and son should
■wish for a wife for him of their own blood, and that

Preface by the Editor,

he should be ready to go fitr to fetch one. Moreover,
Ihe sort of help we proposed giving (for he could
hardly have travelled to Nejd alone) waa just such
as beseemed our new relationship. Assistance in
the choice of a wife ranks in Bedouin eyes with the
gift of a mare, or personal aid in war, both brotherly
acts conferring high honour on those concerned.
Mohammed too had a special reason in the cir-
cumstances of his family history to make the
proposal doubly welcome. He found himself in an
embarrassing position at home with regard to
marriage, and was in a manner forced to look
elsewhere for a wife. The history of the Ibn
ArAks of Tudmur, the family to which he belonged,
will explain this, and is so curious, and so typical
of Arabia, that it deserves a passing notice here.

It would appear that seven or eight generations
ago (probably about the date of the foundation of
the Wahhabi empire) three brothers of the noble
family of Arilk, Sbeykhs of the Beni Khaled of
south-eastern Nejd, quarrelled with their people
and left the tribe. The Ibn Ariiks were then a very
well-known famdy, exercising suzerain rights over
the important towns of Hasa and Katif, and having
independent, even sovereign, power in their own
district. This lay between the Persian Gulf and
Harik, an oasis on the edge of the great southern

Preface by the Editor. xiii

desert, and they retained it until they and the
rest of their fellow Sheykhs in Arabia were reduced
to insignificance by Mohammed Ibn Saoud, the
first Wahhabi Sultan of Nejd.*

At the beginning of last century, all Arabia was
independent of central authority, each tribe, and
to a certain extent each town, maintaining its
separate existence as a State. Eeligion, except in
its primitive Bedouin form, had disappeared &om
the inland districts, and only the Hejaz and Yemen
were more than nominally Mahometan. The
Bedouin element was then supreme. Each town
and village in Arabia was considered the property
of one or other of the nomade Sheykhs in its
neighbourhood, and paid him tribute in return for
his protection. The Sheykh too not unfrequently
possessed a house or castle within the city walls, as
a summer residence, besides his tent outside. He
in such cases became more than a mere suzerain,
and exercised active authority over the towns-
people, administering justice at the gate daily, and
enrolling young men as his body-guard, even on
occasion levying taxes. He then received the title
of Emir or Prince. It was in no other way

* Such at least is the family tradition of the Ibn Ar^iks.
Niebuhr writing in 1765 gives Arar as the name of the Beni
Khaled Sheykhs.

Preface by the Editor.

perhaps that the "Shepherd Kings" of £^ypt
acquired their position and exercised their power ;
and vestiges of the old system may still be found
in many parte of Arabia.

In the middle of the eighteenth century, however,
Ibn Abd-el-Wahhab, the Luther of Mahometanism,
preached his religious reform in Nejd, and con-
verted Ibn Saoud, the Anazeh Sheykh of Deriyeh,
to his doctrineB. By Ibn Abd-el-Wahhab's help Ibn
Saoud, from the mere chief of a tribe, and sovereign
of one city, became Sultan of all Arabia, and reduced
one after another every rival Sheykh to submission.
He even ultimately destroyed the system of tribute
and protection, the original basis of his power, and
having raised a regular army &om among the
townsmen, made these quite independent of Bedouin
rule. Arabia then, for the first time since
Mahomet's death, became a united empire with a
centralised and regular government It must have
been about the year 1760 that the three Ibn Aruks,
disgusted with the new state of things in Nejd,
went out to seek their fortunes elsewhere. Accord-
ing to the tradition, partly embodied in an old
ballad which is still current in Arabia, they were
mounted all three upon a single camel, and had
nothing with them but their swords and their high
birth to gun them credit among strangers. They

Preface by the Editor.

travelled northwards and at first halted in J6f,
the nortiienimoBt oasis of Central Arabia, where
(me of them remained. The other two, quarrelling,
separated ; the younger going, tradition knew not
whither, while the elder held on Ms way still further
north, and settled finally at Tudmur (Palmyra),
where he married a woman of the place, and where
he ultimately became Sheykh. At that time
Tudmur consiflted but of a few houses. His name
was Ali, and from him our friend Mohammed and
his father Abdallah, and his uncle Fans, the real
head of the femily in Tudmur, are descended.

Mohammed then had some reason, as far as his
male ancestry were concerned, to boast of his
btrdi, and look high in making a "matrimomal
alliance ; " but 'par les femmes he was of less
distinguished blood ; and, as purity of descent on
both sides is considered a sine gud non among the
Arabs, the Ibu Arbks of Tudmur had not been
recognized for several generations as asil, or noble.
Th^ had married where they could among the
townspeople of no birth at all, or as in the case
of Mohammed's father, among the Modli, a tribe of
mixed origin. The Anazeh, in spite of the name
of Arftk, wonld not give their daughters to them
to wife. This was Mohammed's secret grief, as it
had been his father's, and it was as much as

Prrfaee by the Editor.

•DTthing else to wipe out tie stain in their pedigree,
that the son ao readily agreed to our proposal

The plan of our journey waa necessarily vague, as
it included the search after two families of relations
of whom nothing had been heard for nearly a
hundred years. The last sign of life shewn by the
Ibn ArAks of Jdf had been on the occasion of
Abdallah's father's death by violence, when sud-
daily a member of the J6f family had appeared at
Tndmur as avenger in the blood feud. This relation
had not, however, stayed longer there than duty
required of him, and having slain his man had as
suddenly disappeared. Of the second family nothing
at all was known ; and, indeed, to the Ibn Aruks as
to the other inhabitants of Tudmur, Nejd itself
was now little more than a name, a country known
by ancient tradition to exist, but unvisited by any
one then living connected with the town.

These singtJar circumstances were, as I have said,
the key-note of our expedition, and will, I hope,
lend an interest beyond that of our own personal
adventures to the present volumes. To Mohammed
and the Arabs with whom we travelled, as well as
to most of those we met upon our journey, his family
history formed a perpetual romance, and the hasid
or ballad of Ibn Aruk came in on every occasion,
seasonable and unseasonable, as a chorus to all that

Preface by the Editor. xvii

happened But for it, I doubt whether the journey
could ever have been accomplished ; and on more
than one occasion we found ourselves borne easily
on by the strength of it over difficulties which,
under ordinary conditions, might have sufficed to
stop us. By extreme good luck, as will be seen
in the sequel, we lit upon both branches of the
feunily we set out in search of, the one citizens of
the J6f oasis, the other Bedouins in Nejd, while the
further we got the better was the Ariik name
known, and relations poured in on us on aU sides,
eager to shew us hospitality and assistance. We
were thus passed on from kinsman to kinsman,
and were everywhere received as friends ; nor is it
too much to say that while in Arabia we enjoyed
the singular advantage of being accepted as mem-
bers of an Arabian family. This gave us an unique
occasion of seeing, and of understanding what we
saw ; and we have only ourselves to blame if we
did not turn it to very important profit.

So much then for the romance. The profit of our
expedition may be briefly summarised.

First as to geography. Though not the only
Europeans who have visited Jebel Shammar, we are
the only ones who have done so openly and at our
leisure, provided with compass and barometer and
free to take note of all we saw. Our predecessors.

xviii Pref(ue by the Editor.

three in number, Wallin, Guarmani, and Palgrave,
travelled in disguise, and under circumstances im-
favourable for geographical observation. The first,
a Finnish professor, proceeded in 1848, as a
Mussulman divine, from the coast of the Red Sea to
Hail and thence to the Euphrates. The account of
his journey, given in the Proceedings of the Royal
Greographical Society, is unfortunately meagre; and
I imderstand that, though one more detailed was
published in his own language, he did not live long
enough to record the whole body of his information.
The second, Guarmani, a Levantine of Italian origin,
paietrated in disguise to Jebel Shammar, com-
missioned by the French Government to procure
them horses from Nejd ; and he communicated a
lively and most interesting account of his adventures
to the "Soci^t^ de Geographic" in 1865. He too
went as a Turkish mussulman, and, being rather
an Oriental than a European, collected a mass of
valuable information relating chiefly to the Desert
Tribes through which he passed. It is difficult,
however, to understand the route maps with which
Ms account is illustrated, and, though he crossed the
Neflid at more than one point, he is silent as to its
singular physical features. Guarmani started from
Jerusalem in 1863 and visited Teyma, Kheybar,
Aneyzeh, Bereydah, and HaiQ, returning thence to

Preface by the Editor.

j^niaby J6f and the Wady Sirhin. Mr. Palgrave's
joumey is better known. A Jesuit missionary
and an accomplished Arabic scholar, he was
entrusted with a secret? political mission by Napoleon
III. and executed it with the permission of his
superiors. He entered Nejd, disguised as a Syrian
merchant, from Maan, and passing through Ha'il in
1864 reached Eiad, the capital of the Wahhabi
kingdom, and eventually the Persian Gulf at Katif.
Q Eis account of Central Arabia is by far the most
J complete and life-like that has been published, and
in aU matters of town life and manners may be
depended upon as accurate. But his faculty of
observation seems chiefly adapted to a study of
society, and the nature he describes is human nature
only. He is too little in sympathy with the desert
to take accurate note of its details, and the> circum-
stances of his joumey precluded him &om observing
it geographicaUy. He travelled in the heat of
summer and mostly by night, and was besides
in no position, owing to his assumed character
and the doubtful company in which he was often
compelled to travel, to. examine at leisure what
he saw. Mr. Palgrave's account of the phjrsical
features of the Nef&d, and of Jebel Shammar,
tiie only one hitherto published, beara very little
resemblance to the reality ; and our own obser-

Preface by the Editor.

vations, taken quietly in the clear atmosphere
of an Arabian winter, are therefore the first
of the kind which have reached Europe. By
taldng continuous note of the variations of the
barometer while we faravelled, we have been able
to prove that the plateau of Hail is nearly twice the
height supposed for it above the sea, while the
granite range of Jebel Shammar exceeds this
plateau by about 2000 feet. Again, the great
pilgrim-road &om the Euphrates, though well-known
by report to geographers, had never before been
travelled by an European, and on this, as on other
parts of our route, we have corrected previous maps.
The map of Northern Arabia appended to the first
voliune of our work may be now depended upon as
within its limits substantially accurate.

In geology, though possessing a superficial know-
ledge only of our subject, we have, I believe, been
able to correct a few mistakes, and to clear up a
doubt, much argued by Professor Wctzstein, as to
tiie rock formation of Jebel Aja ; while a short
memoir I have appended, on the physical conforma-
tion of the great sand desert, will contain original —
possibly valuable — matter. The sketches, above all,
which illustrate these volumes, may be relied on as
conscientious representations of the chief ph^^ical
features of Central Arabia.

Preface by the Editor.

Botanists and zoologists will be disappointed in
the meagre accounts of plants and ftwitwala I am able
to give. But tiie existence now proved of tiie wbit6
antelope (Orya; Beatrix) in Nejd is, I believe, a fact
new to sdoice, as may be that of the Wdiher, a
smsU climbing quadruped allied to the marmots.

A moie important contribution to knowledge
will, I hope, be recognised in a description of the
political system to which I have just alluded vmiet
the name of Shepherd rule, and which is now
once more foxmd in Central Arabia. I do not
know that it has ever previously been noticed by
■writers on Arabia, Neither Niebuhr nor Burck-
hardt seem to have come across it in its pure
form, and Mr. Palgrave misunderstood it altogether'
in his contempt of Bedouin as contrasted with town
life. Yet it is probably the oldest form of govern-
ment existing in Arabia, and the one best suited
for the coimtry's needs. In connection with this
matter too, the recent history of Nejd, with an
account of the downfall of the Ibn Saouds, for
which I am mainly indebted to Colonel Boss,
British Resident at Bushire, and the decay of Wah-
habism in Arabia, will prove of interest, as may in
a lesser degree the imperfect picture given in the
Becond volmne of the extreme resiilts produced in
P^csia by despotic rule, and the iniquitous annexa-

Prefab by the Editor.

tion of Hasa by the Turks. The value, however,
of tiiese "discoTeiies " I leave to our readers to
determine, premising only that they are here
pointed out leas on account of their own import-
ance, than as an excuse in matter for the manner
of t^e narrative.

With regard to the sequel of our Arabian journey,
the further journey from Bagdad to Bushire, I
should not intrude it on the notice of tie public,
but that it serves as an additional proof, if such be
wanting, of the folly of those schemes which, under
tiie name of " Euphrates Valley " and " Indo-Mediter-
zanean " railway companies, have £rom time to time
been dangled before the eyes of speculators. A
country more absolutely unsuited for nulway enter-
prise than that between the Mediterranean and l^e
Persian Gulf, has probably never been selected for
Buch operatious ; and, if the recital of our passage
through the uninhabited tracts, which form nine
tenths of the whole region, shall deter my country-
men from embarking their capital in an enterprise
financially absurd, I feel that its publication wUl
not have been in vain.

One word before I end my Preface. It was
objected to me at the Royal Geographical Society's
meeting, where I read a paper on this " Visit to
Nejd," tiat though we had crossed tie Great Sand

Preface by the Editor.

Desert, and visited Jebel Shammar, we had after all
not been to Nejd. Nejd, I was told on the " best
authority," was a term applicable only to that dis-
trict of Central Arabia ■which is bounded by the
Jebel Toweykh and the leaser Nef&ds, neither Jebel
Shammar nor Kasim being included in it. Strange
as this statement sounded to ears fresh from the
country itself, I was unable at the time to fortify
my lefasal to believe by any more special argument
than that the inhabitants of the districts in question
bad always called them so,— an argument "quod
semper et ab omnibuB" which to some seemed
insufficient I have therefore taken pains to
examine the grounds of the objection raised, and to
give a reason for the belief which is still strong
within me that Hail is not only an integral part
of Nejd, but Nejd^r excellence.

First then, to repeat the argument "quod ab
omnibus," I state emphatically that according to the
Arabs themselves of every tribe and town I have
visited, Nejd is held to include the lands which
lie within the Nef6ds. It is a geographical expres-
non including three principal sub-districts, Jebel
Shwumar and Kasim in the North, and Aared in
the South. The only doubt I have ever heard ex-
pressed was as to the Nefiids themselves, whether
they were included or not in the term. The

Preface by the Editor.

Bedouins certainly so consider them, for they are
the only part of Nejd which they habitually in-
habit, the stony plateaux of the centre being unfit
for pastoral life. J6f is considered outside the
limit northwards, as are Eheybar and Teyma to the
north-west, while Jobba and Hatik are doubtful,
being towns of the Neffld.

Secondly, I plead written authority:—!. Abul-
feda and Edrisi, quoted by Colonel Boss in his
memorandum, include in the term Nejd all those
lands lying between Yemen, Hejaz, and Irak.
2. Yakut, an Arabian geographer of the thirteenth
coitury, quoted by Wetzstein, expressly mentions
Aja aa being in Nejd. 3. Merasid confirms Yakut
in his geographical lexicon. 4. Sheykh Hamid of
Kasim, also quoted by Wetzstein, says, " Nejd in its
widest sense is the whole of Central Arabia ; — in its
narrowest and according to modem usage, only the
Shammar Mountains and the Land of Kasim, witb
the Great Desert bordering it to the South."
S. Niebubr, the oldest and most respectable of
European writers, enumerating the towns of Nejd,
says, "Le mont Schamer n'est qu*^ dix joum^es de
Bagdad ; il comprend Hail, Monkek, Kafar, et
Bok^ L'on place aus^ dans le Nejdsjed ime
coQtr^e montagneose nomm^e Djof-al-Sirhan entre
le mont Sch&mer et ShUm (la Syiie)," &c ; thus

Preface by the Editor.

showing that all, and more than all I claim, were in
Niebnhr'e day accounted Nejd. 6. Chesney, in his
map of Arabia, published in 1838. includes Kaaim
and Jebel Shammar within the boundary of Nejd,
and gives a second boundary besides, still further
north, including districts " sometimes counted to
Nejd." 7. Wallin defines Nejd as tiie whole dis-
trict where tiie ghada grows, a definition taken
doubtless &om the Bedouins with whom he travelled,
and which would include not only Jebel Shammar,
but the Nefflds and even the Soutbem half of the
Wady Sirhdn. 8. In Kazimirski's dictionary, 1860,
I find, " Ahlu'lghada, sumom donn^ auz habitants
de la fronti^ de Nejd oh la plaute ghada croit en
abondance." Finally, Guarmani gives the follow-
ing as the result of his inquiries in the country
itself : " Le Gebel est la province la plus septen-
trionale du Neged. C'est, comme disent les Arabes,
un des sept Negged ; '' and on the authority of
Zamil, Sheykh of Aueyzeh, explains these seven to
be Aared, Hasa, and Harik, in the south, Woshem
in the centre, and Jebel Shammar, Kasim, and
Sudeyr, in the north.

Opposed to this mass of testimony, we find
among travellers a single competent authority, Mr.
Palgrave ; and even his opinion is much qualified.
After explaining that the name Nejed signifies

Pre/eue by the Editor.

*' highland^" in contradistdnction to the coast and the
outlying provinces of leaser elevation, he sums up
his opinion thus: "The denomination 'Nejed' is
commonly enough applied to the whole space
included between Djebel Shomer on the north, and
tiie great desert to the south, from the extreme
range of Jebel Toweyk on the east to the neigh-
bourhood of the Turkish pilgrim-road or Derb-el-
Hajj on the west. However, this central district,
forming a huge parallelogram, placed almost diago-
nally across the midmost of Arabia from north-^ast-
by-east to south-west-by-west, as a glance at the
map may show, is again subdivided by the natives
of the country into the Nejed-el-aala or Upper
Nejed, and the Nejed-el-owta or Lower Nejed, a
distinction of which more hereafter, while Djebel
Shomer is generally considered as a sort of appen-
dage to Nejed, rather than as belong^g to that
district itself. But the Djowf is always excluded
by the Arabs from the catalogue of upland provinces,
though strangers sometimes admit it also to the
title of Nejed, by an error on their part, since
it is a solitary oasis, and a door to highland
or inner Arabia, not in any strict sense a portion
of it."

The exact truth of the matter I take, then, to be
this. Ncjd, in its original and popular sense of

Preface by the Editor.

"Highlands," was a term of physical geography,
and necessarily embraced Jebel Shammar, tiie most
eleTated district of all, as well as Easim, which lay
between it and Aared ; and so it was doubtless con-
sidered in Niehohr's time, and is still considered
by the Bedouins of the North, whose recollections
date from an age previous to Niebuhr's. With
the foundation, however, of the Wahhabi Empire of
Nejd, the term &om a geographical became a poli-
tical one, and has since followed the fluctuating
fortunes of the Wahhabi State. Id this way it
once embraced not only the upland plateaux, but
J6f and Hasa ; the latter, though a low-lying dis-
trict on the coasts retaining in Turkish official
nomenclature its political name of Nejd to the
present day. At the time of Mr. Palgiave's visit,
the Wahhabis, &om whom doubtless his information
was acquired, considered Jebel Shammar no longer
an integral part of their'State, but, as he expresses
it, an appendage. It was already politically inde-
pendent, and had ceased in their eyes to be Nejd.
But since his day the Nejd State has seen a still
farther disruption. Kasim has regained its inde-
pendence, and Hasa has been annexed to the
Turkish Empire. Nejd has therefore become once
more what it was before the Empire of Nejd
arose, a term of physical geography only, and one

iM

xxviii Preface dy the Ediior.

pretty nearly co-extenaive with oar term Central
Arabia.

I hold, then, to the conectness of our title, though
in this matter, as in die rest, craving indulgence of
the learned.

WILFBH) SCA.WEN BLXniT.

CsABBm Faux,
AMgyul I,

PILOKOl BAXmL

CONTENTS TO VOL. I.

CHAPTER I.

The ciuurm of Asia— A retura to old friendfr—Desert News— The
Pahnyrene colony at Damascas — ^New hones and camels-
Mrs. Digby and her husband Mijael the Mizrab — ^A blood fend
— ^Abd el-Eader's Hfe— Midhat Pasha disconrses on canals and
tramways — He raises a loan

PAOS

CHAPTER II.

Brotherly offices — ^We prepare for a campaign — Mohammed Dakhi
comes to court — ^A night robber — ^We start for Nejd — Tale of
a penitent — The duty of reyenge— We are entertained by poor
relations — ^The fair at Mezarib

21

CHAPTER III.

Beating aboat— Bosra — ^We leaye the Turkish dominions — Moham-
med TOWS to kill a sheep— The citadel of Salkhad and the
independent Druses — ^We are received by a Druse chieftain —
Historical notice of the Hanran

46

CHAPTER IV.

We start in esmeBt— The Harra— A theory of Mirage— Gamp of the
Beni Sokkhr— Wady er Bajel— A Christmas Dmner in the
Desert— 8aad-8torm— We reach Eftf

64

XXX Contents.

CHAPTER V.

PAOB

KAf and Itheri — ^More relations — ^The Wady Sirhan — ^Locnst hunt-
ing — Hanna mts down to die — ^Tales of robbery and violence —
We are surprised by a ghasa and made prisoners — Sherarat
statistics — JOf S4

CHAPTER VL

The Jdf oasis— We are entertained by Ibn Bashid*8 lientenant— A
haunch of wild cow — Dancing in the castle — Prayers — We go
on to Meskakeh 113

CHAPTER VIL

The Ibn Araks of Jdf — ^Mohanuned contracts a matrimonial alliance
— Leah and Bachel — We cheapen the bride's dower— A negro
gOTemor and his suite— A thunder-storm 129

CHAPTER VIIL

Mohammed in Ioto— We enter the red sand desert — Geology of the
Nefdd — Badi — The great well of Shakik — Old acquaintance —
Tales of the NefCld— The soldiers who perished of thirst— The
loTers— We nearly remain in the sand — Land at last . .150

CHAPTER IX,

Jobba— an tmpleasant dream—We hear strange tales of Ibn Bashid
— Romping in the NefCld — ^A last night there — ^The Zodiacal
light— We enter Nejd— The granite range of Jebel fihammar . 187

Contents.

XXXI

CHAPTER X,

PAOI

HaQ — The Emir Mohammed Ibn Bashid — ^Hia menagerie— His
hones — His courtiers — His wiyes— Amusements of the ladies
of Han — ^Their domestic life — an evening at the castle— The
telephone 213

CHAPTER XL

Political and historical — Shepherd role in Arabia — An hereditary
policy— The anny— The Law— Taxation— The finances of Jebel
Shamma^-Ibn Bashid's ambition 257

LIST OF ILLUSTEATI0N8 TO VOL. 1.

FoBTKAiT OF Ljldt Aura Bldht in hzb Arab Costumx (bt

UOLOITT) WTMlOfUK

Ftixaiii Bahhkr xzri

Bex TO Easts SS

Saxi>-stoei( ih thk Wast x&-Bajel .... tafui 80

Elv $3

QHA24 IH THE WasY SirhIk te/uc IM

Castle of JAf 113

The Oasis of JAf lo/u* 120

A Hejd Sheep 14a

Thb Nsnh) OE Great Red Sand Deseet of Arabia, tojaa ISO

A Dbl^l Bideb 188

Bkbftion at HaXl S13

Tax OEEAT Kahwah toybn 311

Im Bashid's Stables at HaIl mfme SCO

XrKXIHa WITH THE Ehik 256

Oub Hovsb at HaYl 273

Hap op Nud AtihiEnd.

PILGEIMAGE TO NEJD.

CHAPTER I.

" You li»vB been » gTBftt tmveller, MoToary ? "

" 1 brnm Man the iroiid."

" Ab, m wondroni ipMUicle. I long to Mkrel."

*' Tbe eame thiag otbt K^&ln. Uttle novelty uid mnch ohmo^,
I am wearied with emtkn, end tf 1 could get k peDBlon wDold ntin."

" And yet travel bringa nlBdom,"

" U cnree ns of can. Seeing mnoli we feel little, and leam how
very petty are »U tboee great Jblia wUcb ooatna auoh anxiety."
IxiOB ur Hiiviv.

The charm of Asia — A return to old friendB— Deeert news— The
Palmyrene colony at Damoscne — New horsea and camels —
Mrs. Digbyand herhoaband MiJQel the Mixrab — Abloodfeud
— Abd el-Kader'e life— Midhat Faaha diBcouises oa canala and
tramwaya — He fails to raiee a loon,

Damascus, Dec. 6, 1878. — It is strange how-
gloomy thoughts yanish as one sets foot in Asia.
Only yesterday we were still tossing on the sea of
European thought, with its political anxieties, its
social miseries and its restless aspirations, the
heritage of the unquiet race of Japhet — and now
we seem to have ridden into still water, where we
can rest and forget and be thankfuL The charm of
the East is the absence of intellectual life there, the
freedom one's mind gets from anxjety in looking
forward or pain in looking back. Nobody here
thinks of the past or the future, only of the

2 A Pilgrimage to Nejd. [ch. i.

present ; and till the day of one's death comes, I
suppose the present will always be endurable. Then
it has done us good to meet old friends, friends
all demonstratively pleased to see us. At the coach
office when we got down, we found a little band of
dependants waiting our arrival — first of all Moham-
med ibn *Aruk, the companion of our last year's
adventures, who has come from Palmyra to meet
and travel with us again, and who has been waiting
here for us, it would seem, a montL Then Hanna^
the most courageous of cowards and of cooks, with
his ever ready tears in his eyes and his double row
of excellent white teeth, agrin with welcome. Each
of them has brought with him a friend, a relation
he insists on calling him, who is to share the
advantage of being in our service, and to stand by
his patron in case of need, for servants like to travel
here in pairs. Mohammed's cousin is a quiet, re-
spectable looking man of about five and thirty, rather
thick set and very broad shouldered. He is to act
as head camel man, and he looks just the man for
the place. Hanna's brother bears no likeness at all
to Hanna. He is a young giant, with a rather feck-
less face, and great splay hands which seem to
embarrass him terribly. He is dressed picturesquely
in a tunic shaped like the ecclesiastical vestment
called the " dalmatic," and very probably its origin,
with a coloured turban on his head. He too may be
useful, but he is a Christian, and we rather doubt the
prudence of taking Christian servants to Nejd. Only

VB. I.] Desert news.

Ferban, our Agheyl camel-driver, is missing, and
this is a great disappointment, for he was the best
tempered and the moat trustworthy of all our fol-
lowers last year. I fancy we may search Damascus
with a candle before we find his like again.

The evening we spent in giving and receiving
news. Mohammed in his quality of Wilfrid's
" brother," was invited to dine with us, and a very
pleasant hour or two we had, hearing all that has
happened in the desert during the summer. First
of all, the sensation that has been caused there by
our purchase of Beteyen's mare, which after all we
have secured, and the heart-burnings and jealousies
raised thereby. Then there have been high doings
among our friends in the Hamdd. Faris and
Jedaan have (wonderful to relate) made peace,*
and between them have it all their own way now on
the Euphrates, where the caravan road has become
quite unsafe in consequence. Ferhan ibn Sfuk,
it seems, marched against his brother with some
Turkish troops to help him, and Faris retreated
across the river ; but most of the Shammar have, as
we anticipated last year, come over to him. The
Koala war is not yet finished. Ibn Shaalan, reject-
ing the proposals made him through us by Jedaan,
persisted in reoccupying the Hama pastures last
spring, and Jedaan attacked and routed him ; so
that he has retreated southwards to his own countrj".
Mohammed Dukhi and Jedaan have parted company,

* A traoe only, I fsor.

4 A Pilgritnage to Nejd. [ch. i.

the Sebaa having cleared oflF scores with the Roala,
and being satisfied with the summer's campaign ;
while the Welled Ali are still a long way on the cre-
ditor side in their blood feud. Mohammed Dukhi
is a long-headed old rogue, but it is difficult to see
how he is to hold his own with Sotamm in spite
of a new alliance with Fans el Meziad, Sheykh of the
Mesenneh, who still has some hundred horsemen to
help him with, and of another with Mohammed
Aga of Jenid. The Welled Ali are at the present
moment encamped close to Jerdd, so we shall pro-
bably go there, as the first step on our road to Nejd.
Mohammed of course knows nothing about the
roads to Nejd or J6f, except that they are some-
where away to the south, and that he has relations
there, and I doubt if anybody in Damascus can
give us more information. The Welled Ali, how-
ever, would know where the Roala are, and the
Koala could send us on, as they go further south
than any of the Anazeh. The difficulty, we fear,
this winter will be the accident of no rain having
fallen since last spring, so that the Hamdd is quite
burnt up and without water. If it were not for
this, our best course would undoubtedly be outside
the Haurau, which is always dangerous, and is said
to be especially so this year. The desert has often
been compared to the sea, and is like it in more
ways than one, amongst others in this, that once
well away from shore it is comparatively safe, while
there is always a risk of accidents along the coast.

CH, I.] The Palmyrene colony. 5

Bat we shall see. In the meantime we talk to
Mohammed of the J6f only, for fear of scaring him.
Nejd, in the imagination of the northern Arabs, is
an immense way off, and no one has ever been
known to go there from Damascus. Mohammed
professes unbounded devotion to Wilfrid, and he
really seems to be sincere ; but six hundred miles
of desert as the crow flies will be a severe test of
afiection. We notice that Mohammed has grown
in dignity and importance since we saw him last,
and has adopted the style and title of Sheykh, at
least for the benefit of the hotel servants ; he has
indeed good enough manners to pass very well for a
true Bedouin.

There is a small colony of Palmyra people at
Damascus, or rather in the suburb of the town
called the Maidan, and with them Mohammed has
berai staying. We went there with him this
morning to see some camels he has been buying
for us, and which are standing, or rather sitting, in
his friends' yard. The colony consists of two or
three families, who live together in a very poor Uttlo
house. They left Tudmur about six yeara ago " in
a huflf,'' they say, and have been waiting on here
from day to day ever since to go back. The men
of the house were away from home when we called,
for they make their living like most Tudmuri as
carriers ; but the women received us hospitably,
adced us to sit down and drink cofiee, excellent
coffee, such as we had not tasted for long, and sent

6 A Pilgrimage to Nejd. [ch. i.

«

a little girl to bring the camels out of the yard for
us to look at The child managed these camels just
as well as any man could have done. Mohammed
seems to have made a good selection. There are
four deluls for riding, and four big baggage camels ;
these laat have remarkably ugly heads, but they
look strong enough to carry away the gates of
Gaza, or anything else we choose to put upon their
backs. In choosing camels, the principal points to
look at are breadth of chest, depth of barrel, short-
ness of leg, and for condition roundness of flimk. I
have seen the strength of the hocks tested by a man
standing on them while the camel is kneeling. If
it can rise, notwithstanding the weight, there can
be no doubt as to soundness. One only of the
camels did not quite please us, as there was a sus-
picion of recent mange ; but Abdallah (Mohammed's
cousin) puts it " on his head " that all is right with
this camel, as with the rest. They are not an ex-
pensive purchase at any rate, as they average less
than £10 a piece. One cannot help pitying them>
poor beasts, when one thinks of the immense
journey before them, and the little probability there
is that they will all live to see the end of it. Fortu-
nately they do not know their fate any more than
we know ours. How wretched we should be for
them if we knew exactly in what wady or at what
steep place they would lie down and be left to die ;
for such is the fate of camels. But if we did, we
should never have the heart to set out at alL

CH. I.] New horses and camels. 7

Next in importance to the camels are the horses
we are to ride. Mohammed has got his little Jilfeh
mokhra of last year which is barely three years old,
but he declares she is up to his weight, thirteen
stone, and I suppose he knows best. Mr. S. has
sent us two mares from Aleppo by Hanna, one, a
Eas el Fedawi, very handsome and powerful, the
other, a bay three year old Abeyeh Sherrak, without
pretension to good looks, but which ought to be fast
and able to carry a light weight. We rode to the
Maidan, and the chestnut's good looks attracted
general attention. Everybody turned round to
look at her; she is perhaps too handsome for a
journey.

December 7. — We have been spending the day
with Mrs. Digby and her husband, Mijuel of the
Mizrab, a very well bred and agreeable man, who
has given us a great deal of valuable advice about
our journey. They possess a charming house out-
side the town, surrounded by trees and gardens,
and standing in its own garden with narrow
streams of running water and paths with borders
full of old fashioned English flowers — wall-flowers
especially. There are birds and beasts too ; pigeons
and turtle doves flutter about among the trees, and
a pelican sits by the fountain in the middle of the
courtyard guarded by a fierce watch-dog. A hand-
some mare stands in the stable, but only one, for
more are not required in town.

The main body of the house is quite simple in its

8 A Pilgrimage to Nejd. [cu. k

bare Arab famishing, but a separate building in the
garden is fitted up like an English drawing-room,
with chairs, sofas> books, and pictures. Among
many interesting and beautiful sketches kept in a
portfolio, I saw some really fine water-colour viewa
of Palmyra done by Mrs. Digby many years ago
when that town was less known than it is at
present.

The Sheykh, as he is commonly called, though in-
correctly, for his elder brother Mohammed is reign-
ing Sheykh of the Mizrab, came in while we were
talking, and our conversation then turned naturally
upon desert matters, which evidently occupy most
of his thoughts, and are of course to us of all-
important interest at this moment He gave us
among other pieces of information an account of his
own tribe, the Mizrab, to which in our published
enumeration of tribes we scarcely did justice.

But before repeating some of the particulars we
learned from him, I cannot forbear saying a few
words about Mijuel himself, which will justify the
value we attach to information received from him as
fix)m a person entitled by birth and position to
speak with authority. In appearance he shews all
the characteristics of good Bedouin blood. He is
short and slight in stature, wdth exceedingly small
hands and feet, a dark olive complexion, beard
originally black, but now turning grey, and dark
eyes and eyebrows. It is a mistake to suppose that
true Arabs are ever fair or red-haired. Men may

cH. I.] Mijuel of the Mizrab, 9

occasionally be seen in the desert of comparatively
fair complexion, but these always (as far as my
experience goes) have features of a correspondingly
foreign type, showing a mixture of race. No
Bedouin of true blood was ever seen with hair or
eyes not black, nor perhaps with a nose not aquiline,
Mijuel's father, a rare exception among the Anazeh,.
could both read and write, and gave his sons, when
they were boys, a learned man to teach them their
letters. But out of nine brothers, Mijuel alone took
any pains to learn. The strange accident of his
mirfage with a. English lad.h Jwithdxawn him for
months at a time, but not estranged him, from the
desert ; and he has adopted little of the townsman
in his dress, and nothing of the European. He
goes^ it is true, to the neighbouring mosque, and
recites the Mussulman prayers daily ; but with this
exception, he is undistinguishable from the Ibn
Shaalans and Ibn Mershids of the Hamdd. It is
also easy to see that his heart remains in the
desert, his love for which is fully shared by the
lady he has married ; so that when he succeeds to
the Sheykhat, as he probably will, for his brother
appears to be considerably his senior, I think they
will hardly care to spend much of their time at
Damascus. They will, however, no doubt, be in-
fluenced by the course of tribal politics, with which
I imderstand Mijuel is so much disgusted, that he
might resign in favour of his son Afet; in that
case, they might continue, as now, living partly at

lO A Pilgrimage to Nejd. [ch. i.

Damascus, partly at Horns, partly in tents^ and
always a providence to their tribe, whom they supply
with all the necessaries of Bedouin life, and guns,
revolvers, and ammunition besides. The Mizrab,
therefore, although numbering barely a hundred
tents, are always well mounted and better armed
than any of their fellows, and can hold their own
in all the warUke adventures of the Sebaa.

According to Mijuel, the Mizrab, instead of being,
as we had been told, a mere section of the Resallin,
are in fact the original stock, from which not only
the Resallin but the Modhib and the Gomussa them-
selves have branched off. In regard to the last-
mentioned tribe he related the following curious
fitory : —

An Arab of the Mizrab married a young girl
of the Suellmat tribe and soon afterwards died«
In a few weeks his widow married again, taking
her new husband from among her own kinsmen.
Before the birth of her first child a dispute arose
as to its parentage, she afiirming her Mizrab husband
to be the father while the Suellmat claimed the
child. The matter, as all such matters are in the
desert, was referred to arbitration, and the mother's
assertion was put to the test by a live coal being
placed upon her tongue. In spite of this ordeal
she persisted in her statement, and got a judgment
in her favour. Her son, however, is supposed to
have been dissatisfied with the decision, for as soon
as bom he turned angrily on his mother, from

<JH. I.] A blood fetid. ii

which circumstance he received the name of
Gomussa or the "scratcher." From him the Go-
mussa tribe are descended. They first came into
notice about seventy years ago when they attacked
and plundered the Bagdad caravan which happened
to be conveying a large sum of money. With these
sudden riches they acquired such importance that
they have since become the leading section of the
tribe, and they are now imdoubtedly the possessors
of the best mares among the Anazeh. The Mizrab
Sheykhs nevertheless still assert superiority in
point of birth, and a vestige of their old claims
still exists in their titular right to the tribute of
Palmyra.

Mijuel's son, Afet, or Japhet, whom we met at
Beteyen's camp last spring, has taken, it would
appear, an active part in the late fighting. During
the battle where Sotamm was defeated by the
Sebaa and their allies, the head of the Ibn Jendal *
family, pursued by some Welled Ali horsemen,
yielded himself up a prisoner to Afet whose father-
in-law he was, and who sought to give him pro-
tection by covering him with his cloak. But
the Ibn Smeyr were at blood feud with the Ibn
Jendals, and in such cases no asylum is sacred.
One of Mohammed Dukhi's sons dragged Ibn
Jendal out of his hiding-place and slew him before
Afet's eyes. On that day the Sebaa took most of
the mares and camels they had lost in the previous

* One of the noblest of the Hoala families.

12 A Pilgrijnage to Nejd. [ch. r.

fighting, and our friend Ferhan Ibn Hedeb is now
in tolerable comfort again Avith tents and tent
furniture, and coffee-pots to his heart's content.
I hope he will bear his good fortune as well as he
bore the bad.

Mijuel can of course give us better advice than
anybody else in Damascus, and he says that we
cannot do better in the interests of our journey
than go first to Jenid and consult Mohammed
Dukhi. The Welled Ali after the Roala are the
tribe which knows the western side of the desert
best, and we should be sure of getting correct
information from them, if nothing more. The
Sebaa never go anyijrhere near the Wady Sirhin, as
they keep almost entirely to the eastern half of the
Hamdd ; and even their ghazus hardly ever meddle
with that inhospitable region. -Mijuel has once
been as far south as to the edge of the Nefud, which
he describes as being covered with grass in the
spring. The Wady Sirhdn, he believes, has wells,
but no pasturage.

Another interesting visit which we paid while at
Damascus was to Abd el-Kader, the hero of the
French war in Algiers. This charming old man,
whose character would do honour to any nation and
any creed, is ending his days as he began them, in
learned retirement and the exercises of his religion.
The Arabs of the west, "Maghrabi" (Mogrebins),
are distinguished from those of the Peninsula^ and
indeed from all others, by a natural taste for piety

CH. I.J Abd el'Kader's life. 13

and a religious tone of thought. Arabia proper,
except in the first age of Islam and latterly during
the hundred years of Wahhabi rule, has never been a
religious country. Perhaps out of antagonism to
Persia, its nearest neighbour, it neglects ceremonial
observance, and pays little respect to saints, miracles,
and the supernatural world in general. But with
the Moors and the Algerian Arabs this is diflFerent
Their religion is the reason of their social life and
a prime mover in their politics. It is the fashion
there, even at the present day, for a rich man to
spend his money on a mosque, as elsewhere he would
epend it on his stud and the entertainment of
guests, and nothing gives such social distinction as
regular attendance at prayer. There is too, besides
the lay nobility, a class of spiritual nobles held
equally high in public estimation. These are the
marabous or descendants of certain saints, who by
virtue of their birth partake in the sanctity of their
ancestors and have hereditary gifts of divination and
miraculous cure. They hold indeed much the same
position with the vulgar as did the sons of the
prophets in the days of Saul.

Abd el-Kader was the representative of such a
fjEonily, and not, as I think most people suppose, a
Bedouin Sheykh. In point of fact he was a
townsman and a priest, not by birth a soldier, and
though trained, as nobles of either class were, to
arms, it was only the accident of a religious war that
made him a man of action. He gained his first

14 A Pilgrimage to Nejd. [ch. r.

victories by his sermons, not by his sword ; and, now
that the fight is over, he has returned naturally to
his first profession, that of saint and man of letters.
As such, quite as much as for his military renown,
he is revered in Damascus.

To us, however, it is the extreme simplicity
of his character and the breadth of his good sense,
amounting to real wisdom, which form his principal
charm. " Saint " though he be "by profession," as
one may say, for such he is in his own eyes as well
as those of his followers, he is uninjured by his high
position. It is to him an obligation. His charity
is imbounded, and he extends it to all alike ; to be
poor or suffering is a sufficient claim on him.
During the Damascus massacres he opened his doors
to every fugitive; his house was crowded with
Christians, and he was ready to defend his guests
by force if need were. To us he was most amiable,
and talked long on the subject of Arab genealogy
and tradition. He gave me a book which has
been lately written by one of his sons on the
pedigree of the Arabian horse, and took an evi-
dent interest in our own researches in that direc-
tion. He made the pilgrimage to Mecca many
years ago, travelling the whole way from Algeria by
land and returning through Nejd to Meshhed All
and Bagdad. This was before the French war.

Abd el-Kader returned our visit most politely
next day, and it was strange to see this old warrior
humbly mounted on his little Syrian donkey, led

cH. I.] Midhat Pasha. 15

by a single servant, riding into the garden where
we were. He dresses like a mollah in a cloth gown,,
and with a white turban set far back from his fore-
head after the Algerian fashion. He never, I
believe, wore the Bedouin kefiyeh. His face is now
very pale as becomes a student, and his smile is that
of an old man, but his eye is still bright and piercing
like a falcon's. It is easy to see, however, that it
will never flash again with anjrthing like anger.
Abd el-Kader has long possessed that highest
philosophy of noble minds according to Arab
doctrine, patience.

A man of a very different sort, but one whom we
were also interested to see, was Midhat Pasha, just
arrived at Damascus as Governor-General of Syria.
He had come with a considerable flourish of
trumpets, for he was supposed to represent the
doctrine of administrative reform, which was at
that time seriously believed in by Europeans for the
Turkish Empire. Midhat was the prot^g^ of our own
Foreign Office, and great things were expected of
him. For ourselves, though quite sceptical on these
matters and knowing the history of Midhat's doings
at Bagdad too well to have any faith in him as a
serious reformer, we called to pay our respects, partly
as a matter of duty, and partly it must be owned out
of curiosity. It seemed impossible that a man who
had devised anything so fanciful as parliamentary
government for Turkey should be otherwise than
strange and original. But in this we were grievously

1 6 A Pilgrimage to Nejd, [ch. i.

disappointed, for a more essentially commonplace,
even silly talker, or one more naively pleased with
himself, we had never met out of Europe. It is
possible that he may have adopted this tone with
us as the sort of thing which would suit TCngliflTi
people, but I don t think so. We kept our own
counsel of course about our plans, mentioning
only that we hoped to see Bagdad and Bussora and
to go on thence to India, for such was to be
ultimately our route. On the mention of these two
towns he at once began a panegyric of his own
administration there, of the steamers he had
established on the rivers, the walls he had pulled
down and tramways built *'Ah, that tramway,"
he exclaimed affectionately. " It was I that devised
it, and it is running still. Tramways are the first
8teps in civilisation. I shall make a tramway round
Damascus. Everybody wiU ride in the trucks. It
will pay five per cent. You will go to Bussora.
You will see my steamers there. Bussora, through
me, has become an important place. Steamers and
tramways are what we want for these poor countries.
The rivers of Damascus are too small for steamers,
or I should soon have some afloat. But I will
make a tramway. If we could have steamers and
tramways everywhere Turkey would become rich."
**And canals," we suggested, maliciously remem-
bering how he had flooded Bagdad with his experi-
ments in this way. " Yes, and canals too. Canals,
steamers, and tramways, are what we want." " And

His railways and canals.

railways." " Yea, railways. I hope to have a rail-
"way 30on running alongside of the carriage road
from Beyrout. Railways are important for the
guaranteeing of order in the country. If there was
a railway across the desert we should have no
more trouble with the Bedouins. Ah, those poor
Bedouins, how I trounced them at Bagdad. I war-
rant my name is not forgotten there." We assured
him it was not

He then went on to talk of the Circassians, " ces
^uvres Circassiens," for he was speaking in French,
"ilfaut quejefasse quelque chose pour eux." I
■wish I could give some idea of the tone of tender-
ness and almost tearful pity in Midhat's voice as he
pronounced this sentence ; the Circassians seemed
to be dearer to him than even his steamers and
tramways. These unfortunate refugees are, in truth,
a problem not easy of solution : they have been a
terrible trouble to Turkey, and, since they ■were
originally deported from Eussia after the Crimean
■war, they have been passed on from province to
province \mtil they can be passed no further. They
are a scourge to the inhabitants wherever they go,
because they arc hungry and armed, and insist on
robbing to get a livelihood. To the Sjnian Arabs
they are especially obnoxious, because they shed
blood as well as rob, which is altogether contrary
to Arab ideas. The Circassians are like the foxes
■which sportsmen turn out in their covers. It is a
public-Ejiirited act to have done so, but they cannot

TOL. I.

1 8 A Pilgrimage to Nejd. [en. i.

be made to live in peace with the hares and rabbits.
Midhat, however, had a notable scheme for setting
things to rights. He would draft all these men
into the corps of zaptiehs, and then, if they did rob,
it would be in the interests of Government, Some
score of them were waiting in the courtyard at the
time of our visit, to be experimented on ; and a
more evil-visaged set it would have been difficult
to select.

On the Avhole, we went away much impressed
with Midhat, though not as we had hoped. He
had astonished us, but not as a wise man. To
speak seriously, one such reforming pasha as this
does more to ruin Turkey than twenty of the old
dishonest sort. Midhat, though he fails to line
his own purse, may be counted on to empty the
public one at Damascus, as he did at Bagdad, where
he spent a million sterling on unproductive works
within a single year. As we wished him good-bye,
we were amused to notice that he retained Mr.
Siouffi, the manager of the Ottoman Bank, who
had come with us, Avith him for a private con-
ference, the upshot of which was his first public act
as Governor of Syria, the raising of a loan.

^t

^ Midhat's reign at Damascus lasted for twenty months, and is
remarkable only for the intrigues in which it was spent. It
began with an adion (Tedat, the subjugation of the independent
Druses of the Hauran, a prosperous and unoffending community
whom Midhat with the help of the Welled Ali reduced to ruin.
The rest of his time and resources were spent in an attempt to gain
for himeelf the rank and title of khodiye, a scheme which ended in.

«H. 1.] He fails to raise a loan. 19

bis recall. Of improvements, material or adminiHtratiTe, notlun^
at all has been heard, bat it is worth recording that a series of fires
'duriiig his term of ofBx» faomt down great part of the bazaars at
Damascus, caumng much loss of property, and that their place has
been taken by a boulevard. Midhat has been now removed to
Smyrna, vhere it ia amuaing to read the following account of

"Mtdiiat PAfiHA. — September 26: — ' A private correspondent of
the Jowmal de Oenivt, writing ten days ago from Smyrna, says that
Midhat Pasha, being convinced that he possessed the sympathy of
the inhabitants and could count on their active co-operation, con-
ceived a short time since vast schemes of improvement and reform
for the benefit of the province which he has been called upon to
administer. The first works he proposed to take in hand were the
drainage of the great marshes of Halka-Bournar (the Baths of
Diana of the ancients), the cleansing of the sewers of Smyrna, and
the removal of the filth which cumbers the streets, pollutes tho
air, and, as an eminent physician has told him, impairs the health
of the city and threatens at no distant date to breed a pestilence.
He next proposed, at the instance of a clever engineer Effendi, to
repress the ravages of the river Hermus, which in winter overflows
ite banks and does immense damage in the plain of Uenemen.
Onlers were given for the execution of engineering works on a
great scale which, it was thought, would correct this evil and
Testore to agriculture a vast eitont of fertile, albeit at present
nnprodoctive, land. Administrative reibrm was to be aleo serionsly
undertaken. The police were to be re-organized, and order and
honesty enforced in the courts of justice. The scandal of gen-
dannes being constrained, owing to the insufficiency of their pay,
to enter into an alliance, offensive and defensive, with all the
thieves and cat-throats of the city — the disgrace of judges receiving
bribes from rogues and other evil-doers — were to be promptly pnt
down. It was ordered that every caimacan, mudir, chief of police,
and president of tribunal, guilty either of malfeasance or robbery,
shoold be arrested and imprisoned. The munidpalities were to
«eaae being the mere mouthpieces of the yalis, and consider solely
the interests of their conetituencies. The accounts of functionaries
who, with nominal salaries of 800 francs a year, spend 10,000,
vrere to be strictly investigated and their malversations severely
punished ; and many other measures, equally praiseworthy and
desirable, were either projected or begun. But energy and good-
will in a reformer — whether ho be a Midhat or a Uamid — arc.

20 A Pilgrimage to Nejd. [en. j.

unfortunately, not alone sufficient to accomplish reforms. To drain
marshes, embank rivers, cleanse sewers, remove filth, pay magis-
trates and policemen, procure honest collectors of revenue, much
money is necessary. How was it to be obtained ? Not from the
revenues of the port or the province ; these are sent regularly, to
the last centime, to Constantinople, for the needs of the Qovem-
ment are urgent and admit of no delay. Midhat Pasha, not know-
ing which way to turn, called a medjelesa (council), but the members
were able neither to suggest a solution of the difficiilty nor to find
any money. In this emergency it occurred to the Grovemor that
there existed at Smyrna a branch of the Ottoman Bank, at the door
of which are always stationed two superb nizams in gorgeous uni-
forms, who give it the appearance of a Qovemment establishment.
AVhy should not the bank provide the needful? The idea com-
mended itself to the Pasha, and the manager was requested to call
forthwith at the Konak on urgent public business. When h»
arrived there Midhat imfolded to him his plans of reform, and
proved, with the eloquence of a new convert, that the public worka
he had in view could not fail to be an unspeakable benefit to the
province and restore its waning prosperity. Never, he assured the
wondering manager, could the bank have a finer opportunity of
making a splendid investment than this of lending the (Govern-
ment a few million firancs, to be strictly devoted to the purposes he
had explained. The projected schemes, moreover, were to be
80 immediately profitable that the bank might reckon with the
most implicit confidence on receiving back, in the coiu-se of a few
years, both interest and principal. Unfortunately, however, all
these arguments were lost on M. Heintze, the manager ; and he
had to explain to the Pasha that, although he, personally, would
have been delighted to advance him the millions he required, hia
instructions allowed him no discretion. He was there to do ordi-
nary banking business, and collect certain revenues which had been
assigned to the bank by way of security ; but he had been strictly
eigoined to make no loans whatever, however promising and
profitable they might appear. And this was the end of Midhat
Pasha's great schemes of public improvement and administrative
reform. In these circumstances it would be the height of iigustice
to accuse him of not having kept the promises which he made on
entering office ; for nobody, not even a Turkish Governor-General^
be expected to achieve impossibilities.' "

CHAPTEE II.

SHiiuraus.

Brotherly offlcee — We prepare for ft campaign — Uohammed Daklii
comra to court — A night robber — We start for Nejd — Tola of a
penitent — The duty of revenge — We are entertained by poor
rehitionB — The &ir at Ibzonb.

"We spent a week at Damascus, a week not alto-
gether of pleasure, although it was to be our laat
of civilised life. We had an immense number of
things to buy and arrange and think over, before
Starting on so serious a journey as this, which we
knew must be very unlike the pleasure trip of laat
year. We could not afford to leave anything to
chance with the prospect of a three months' wan-
dering, and a thousand mUes of desert, where it was
impossible to count upon fresh supplies even of the
commonest necessaries of life. J6f, the first station
ou our road, was four hundred miles off, and then
we must cross the Nefiid, with its two hundred
miles of sand, before we could get to Nejd. The
return journey, too, to the Persian Gulf, would
have to be made without coming to anything so
European as a Turkish town. Nobody could tell
113 what supplies were to be had in Nejd, beyond
dotes and com. Mr. Palgrave's account of Jebel

22 A Pilgninage to Nejd. [ch. n.

Shammar was, in fact, the only guide we had to
go on, and its accuracy had been so much doubted
that we felt obliged to take into consideration the
possibility of finding the Nejd towns mere oases^
and their cultivation only that of the date.

Mohammed, less " insouciant *' than most of his
countrymen are on such matters, now made himself
most useful, spending many hours in the bazaars
with Wilfrid, as I did with the cook and the camel-
man; and being a town Arab and a trader bom^
he saved us an infinity of trouble and time, and no
few mejidies.

They began by choosing a complete suit of
Bedouin clothes for Wilfrid, not exactly as a dis-
guise, for we did not wish, even if we could have
done so, not to pass for Europeans, but in order to
avoid attracting more notice than was necessary on
our way. The costume consisted of a striped silk
jibbeh or dressing-gown worn over a long shirt, a
blue and white abba of the kind made at Karieteyn,
and for the head a black kefiyeh embroidered with
gold which was fastened on with the Bedouin aghal,
a black lamb's- wool rope. Mohammed had brought
with him a sword which had belonged to his grand-
father, a fine old Persian blade curved like a sickle.
He gave it to Wilfrid and received in return a hand-
some weapon somewhat similar but silver-mounted>
which they found in the bazaar. Thus rigged out^
for Mohammed too had been reclothed fi-om head to
foot (and he much required it), they used to sally

cH. II.] Brotherly offices. 23

out in the town as two Bedouin gentlemen.
Wilfrid by holding his peace was able to pass with
the unwary as an unconcerned friend, while Mo-
hammed did the bargaining for cloaks, kefiyehs, and
other articles suitable as presents to the Sheykhs
whose acquaintance we might make. Mohammed
was an expert in driving a hard bargain and knew
the exact fashion in vogue in each Bedouin tribe, so
that although his taste did not always quite agree
Avith ours, we let him have his way. The only
mistake he made, as it turned out, was in imder-
estimating the value of gifts necessary in Hail.
Not one of us had the least idea of the luxury
existing in Nejd, and Mohammed, like most of the
northern Arabs, had heard of Ibn Rashid only as a
Bedouin Sheykh, and fancied that a red cloth jibbeh
would be the ne plus ultra of magnificence for him,
as indeed it would have been for an Ibn Shaalan or
an Ibn Mershid. We had, however, some more
serious presents than these to produce, if necessary,
in the rifles and revolvers we carried with us, so that
we felt there was no real danger of arriving empty-
handed.

The purchases which it fell to my share to make,
with the assistance of Abdallah and the cook,
were entirely of a useful sort, and do not require a
detailed description here. As to dress, it was un-
necessary for me to make any change, save that of
substituting a kefiyeh for a hat and wearing a
Bedouin cloak over my ordinary travelling ulster.

24 A Pilgrimage to Ncjd, [ch. u.

Hanna and Abdallah were both of them masters in
the art of haggling, and vied with each other in
beating down the prices of provisions. Dates,
flour, burghul (a kind of crushed wheat, which in
Syria takes the place of rice), carrots, onions, coffee,
and some dried fruit were to be the mainstay of
our cooking, and of these we bought a supply suffi-
cient to last us as far as J6f. We had brought from
England some beef tea, vegetable soup squares, and
a small quantity of tea in case of need. We had
agreed to do without bulky preserved provisions,
which add greatly to the weight of baggage, and
that as to meat, we would take our chance of an
occasional hare or gazelle, or perhaps now and then
a sheep.

All began well. Our servants seemed likely to
turn out treasures, and we liad no difficulty in
getting a couple of Agheyls to start with us as
camel diivers. We thought it prudent to keep our
own counsel as to the direction we intended to
take, and it was generally supposed that Bagdad
was to be our first object Only Mohammed and
Hanna were informed of the real design, and them
we could trust. Not but what Hanna had oc-
casional fits of despondency about the risk he ran.
He did not pretend to be a hero, he had a wife and
children to whom he was sincerely attached, and he
felt, not quite wrongly, that Central Arabia was
hardly the place for one of his nation and creed.
He came to us, indeed, one morning, to announce

^H. iL] We prepare for a campaign. 55

liis intention of returning home to Aleppo, and he
required a good deal of humouring before he
jfecovered his spirits ; but I do not think that he ever
iseriously intended to desert us. He had come all
the way from Aleppo to join us, and, besides, the
companionship of the young giant he called his
*^ brother/* who was to share his tent, reassured
him. Once started, we knew that he would bear
patiently all that fortune might inflict.

By the 11th the necessary preparations had been
made^ and we were ready to start. As a pre--
liminary, we moved into a garden outside the town
with our camels and our mares, so as to be at
liberty to go oflF any morning without attracting
notice and in the direction we might choose. It
Xvas generally believed in Damascus that we in-
tended going to Bagdad, and we had made up our
minds to start in that direction, partly to avoid
questions, and partly because at JerAd, the first
village on the road to Palmyra, we should find
Mohammed Dtikhi with the Welled Ali. He seemed
the most likely person to put us on our way, and
in expeditions of this sort the first few marches are
generally the most difficult, if not the most dangerous.
The edges of the desert are always unsafe, whereas,
once clear of the shore, so to speak, there is com-
paratively little risk of meeting anybody, friend or
foe. We thought then that we should be able to get
a man from Mohammed Dukhi to take us in a straight
line from Jeriid to some point in the Wady Sirhdn,

26 A Pilgrimage to A^cjd. [en. n.

keeping well outside the Hauran, a district of the
worst reputation, and following perhaps a line of
pools or wells which the Bedouins might know.
But just as we had settled this, Mohammed Dukhi
himself appeared unexpectedly at Damascus, and
our plan was changed.

Mohammed Dukhi ibn Sme)rr is the greatest
personage in the north-western desert next to Ibn
Shaalan, and as I have said before was at that time
hotly engaged in a war with the Koala chief. His
object in visiting Damascus was as follows : in the
course of the autumn a detachment of fifteen
Turkish soldiers attacked his camp without pro-
vocation and, firing into it, killed a woman and a
child. This camp numbered only a few tents, the
tribe being at the time scattered on account of
pasturage, and the Sheykh himself was absent with
most of the men. Those, however, who had
remained at home managed to cut off and surround
the soldiers, one of whom was killed in the fray.
The Welled Ali would have killed the rest but for
Mohammed Dukhi's wife, Herba,* who rushed in
among the combatants, and remonstrated with her
people on the folly of involving themselves in
a quarrel with the Government. Her pluck saved
the soldiers' lives. She took them under her
protection, and the next morning sent them under
escort to a place of safety.

Now Mohanuned Dukhi, ha\4ng the Koala war

* Daughter of Faris-el-Meziad, Sheykh of the Mesenneh.

CH. TL] Mohammed DukhL 27

on his hands and being obliged to shelter himself
£rom Ibn Shaalan under the walls of Jenid, was
naturally anidous to clear up this matter of the
soldier's death ; and, directly he heard of Midhat's
aniyal at Damascus, he shrewdly determined to
make his count with the new Pasha by an early call
at the Serai. Ibn Shaalan was out of the way, and
the first comer would doubtless be the one most
readily listened to. Ibn Smeyr had besides a little
intrigue on foot respecting the escort of the Damas-
cus pilgrims, which he in part provided or hoped to
provide. Abd el-ILader was his friend, and it
was at the Emir's house that he alighted and that
we found him. Mohammed Dukhi, noble though
lie is in point of blood, is not a fine specimen of a
great Bedouin Sheykh. His politeness is over-
strained and unnatural, reminding one rather of
city than of desert manners; there are also ugly
stories of his want of faith, which one finds no
difficulty in believing when one sees him. He
afiected, however, great pleasure at seeing us again,
and professed an entire devotion to our welfare
and our plans. He would himself accompany us
on the first stages of our road, or at least send his
sons or some of his men; ofiers which dwindled,
till at last they resulted in his merely writing some
letters of recommendation for us, and giving us a
large amount of good advice. As regards the latter,
he informed us that a j<5umey such as we proposed
outside the Hauran would not at the present

^8 A Pilgritnage to Nejd, [ch. n.

moment be practicable. No rain had fallen during
the autumn, and the Hamdd was without water;
indeed, except in the Wady Sirhdn, where the wells
were never dry, there was no watering place south-
wards at any distance from the hills. He advised
us, therefore, to leave Damascus by the pilgrim
road, which keeps inside the Hauran, and follow it
till we came across the Beni Sokkhr, whom we
should find encamped not far to the east of it.
There was besides a capital opportunity for us of
doing this in company ^4th the Jerdeh, now on
the point of starting for Mez4rib, a station on the
Haj road. The Jerdeh, he explained, for the name
was new to us, are a kind of relief party sent every
year from Damascus, to meet the pilgrims on their
homeward route, carrying with them supplies of
all the necessaries of life, provisions, and extra
camels to replace those broken down. The party is
escorted by Mohammed Dukhi, or rather by his
men, and the idea of joining them seemed exactly
suited to our purpose; though when we came to
put it in practice, it turned out to be of as little
value as the rest of the smooth-spoken Sheykh's
offers. It was something, however, to have a plan,
good or bad, and letters from so great a man as Ibn
Smeyr were of value, even though addressed to the
wrong people*

Accordingly, on the 12th we bade good-bye to
our Damascus friends, wrote our last letters to our
friends in England, and said a long farewell to

CH. II.] A night robber. 29

the pleasures and pains of European life. On the
13th we started.

December 1 3. — ^We have started at last, and on
a Friday, the 13th of the month. I have no
personal objection to any particular day of the
week, or of the month. But, as a matter of fact,.
the only seriously unfortunate journey we ever
made was begun on a Friday, and Wilfrid pro-
fesses himself to be superstitious and full of dark
forebodings. He, however, insisted on starting this
Friday, and with some inconsistency argues that
forebodings are lucky, or that at any rate the
absence of them is unlucky, and that it would not
be safe to begin a journey in a cheerful frame of
mind.

We were roused in the middle of the night by a
cry of thieves in the garden, and running out of
our tent found a scuflfle going on, which, when
lights were brought, proved to have been caused by
two men, one the keeper of the garden and the
other a soldier, whom he was taking prisoner. Our
Bervants were standing round them, and Hanna,
seeing the man to be securely bound, was belabour*
ing him with a stick, ejaculating at intervals, "
robber, dog, pig ! pig, dog, robber ! "^
The story told us was that the gardener had found
this man prowling about, and had, after a terrible
engagement, succeeded in his capture. There were>
however, no blood or wounds to show ; and, the
evidence of the prisoner's wicked designs not being

30 A Pilgrimage to Ncjd. [ch. n.

very overwhelming, Wilfrid gave orders that he
should be let go as soon as it should be daylight.
In the first place, any handing over of the nuui to
justice would have delayed our start, and secondly*
it was more than probable that the whole thing
had been got up by the gardener with the accused
person for the sake of the present the two would
receive. Such little comedies are quite common
in the East; and when we declined to take it
seriously, the two men very good-humouredly let
the matter drop.

At the first streak of dawn we struck our tents^
loaded our camels, and a little after sunrise were on
our mares and well away from the town in marching
order for Nejd ! At first we skirted the city, passing
the gate where St. Paul is said to have entered, and
the place where he got over the wall, and then along
the suburb of Ma'idan, which is the quarter occupied
by Bedouins when they come to towTi, and where
we had found the Tudmuri and our camels. Here
we were to have met the Jerdeh, and we waited
some time outside the Baw4bat Allah, or " Gates of
God," while Mohammed went in to make inquiries,
and take leave of his Tudmuri friends. It is in front
of this gate that the pilgrims assemble on the day of
their start for Mecca, and from it the Haj road leads
away in a nearly straight line southwards. The Haj
road is to be our route as far as Mezdrib, and is a
broad, well worn track, though of course not a road
4it all according to English ideas. It has, nevertheless.

en. II. J We start for Nejd, 31

a sort of romantic interest, one cannot help feeling,
going as it does so far and through such desolate
lands, a track so many thousand travellers have
followed never to return. I suppose in its long
history a grave may have been dug for every yard
of its course from Damascus to Medina, for, espe-
cially on the return journey, there are constantly
deaths among the pilgrims from weariness and
insufficient food.

Our caravan, waiting at the gate, presented a
Tery picturesque appearance. Each of the deMls
carries a gay pair of saddle-bags in carpet-work,
•with long worsted tassels hanging down on each
side half way to the ground ; and they have orna-
mented reshmehs or headstalls to match. The
camels, too, though less decorated, have a gay
look ; and Wilfrid on the chestnut mare ridden in a
halter wants nothing but a long lance to make him
a complete Bedouin. The rest of our party consists,
besides Mohammed and Hanna, who have each of
them a delul to ride, of Mohammed's "cousin''
Abdallah, whom we call Sheykh of the camels, with
his two Agheyl assistants, Aw wad, a negro, and a
nice-looking boy named Abd er-Rahman, These,
with Mohammed, occupy one of the servants' tents,
whUe Hanna and his "brother" Ibrahim have
another, for even in the desert distinctions of re-
ligious caste will have to be preserved. It is a great
advantage in travelling that the servants should be
as much as possible strangers to each other, and of

32 A Pilgrimage to Nejd, [ch. ir.

different race or creed, as this prevents any com-'
bination among them for mutiny or disobedience.
The Agheyls will be one clique, the Tudmuri
another, and the Christians a third, so that
though they may quarrel with one another, they
are never likely to unite against us. Not that
there is any prospect of diflBculty from such a
cause ; but three months is a long period for a
journey, and everything must be thought of before-
hand.

Mohammed was not long in the Maidan, and
came back with the news that the Jerdeh has not
been seen there, but might be at a khan some milea
on the road called KJian Deniin. It was useless to
wait for them there, and so, wishing our friend, Mr*
SiouflS, good-bye (for he had accompanied us thus
far) we rode on. Nothing remarkable has marked
our first day's journey ; a gazelle crossing the
track, and a rather curious squabble between a kite^
a buzzard, and a raven, in which the raven got all
the profit, being the only events. From the crest
of a low ridge we looked back and saw our last of
Damascus, with its minarets and houses imbedded
in green. We shall see no more buildings, I sup-
pose, for many a day. Mount Hermon to the left
of it rose, an imposing mass, hazy in the hot sun,
for, December though it is, the sunmier is far fron:^
over. Indeed, we have suffered from the heat to-
day more than we did during the whole of our last
joumeyr

CH. II.] Tale of a penitent. 33

At Denlin no sign or knowledge of the Jerdeh,
so we have decided to do without them. On a
road like this we cannot want an escort. There
are plenty of people passing all day long, most of
them, like ourselves, going to Mezdrib for the annual
fair which takes place there on the occasion of the
Jerdeh visit. Among them, too, are zaptiehs and
even soldiers ; and there are to be several villages
on the way. We filled our goat-skins at Deniin
and camped for this our first night on some rising
ground looking towards Hermon. It is a still,
delightful evening, but there is no moon. The
sun is setting at five o'clock.

December 14. — Still on the Haj road and through
cultivated land, very rich for wheat or barley,
Mohammed says, though it has a fine covering of
stones. These are black and volcanic, very shiny
and smooth, just as they were shot up from the
Hauran when the Hauran was a volcano. The soil
looks as if it ought to grow splendid grapes, and
some say the bunches the spies brought to Joshua
came from near here. The villages, of which we
have passed through several, are black and shiny
too, dreary looking places even in the sunshine,
without trees or anything pleasant to look at round
them. The fields at this time of year are of course
bare of crops, and it is so long since there was any
rain that even the weeds are gone. This is part of
what is called the Leja, a district entirely of black
boulders, and interesting to archaeologists as being

TOU L

34 -^ Pilgrimage to Nejd. [ch. u.

the land of Og, king of Basan^ whose cities some
have supposed to exist in ruins to the present day.

In the middle of the day we passed a small ruin,
about which Mohammed, who has been this road
before, as his father was at one time camel-con-
tractor for the Haj, told us a curious story. Once
upon a time there were two children, left orphans
at a very early age. The elder, a boy, went out into
the world to seek his fortune, while the other, a
girl, was brought up by a charitable family in Da-
mascus. In course of time the brother and
sister came together by accident, and, without
knowing their relationship, married, for according
to eastern usage the marriage had been arranged
for them by others. Then, on comparing notes,
they discovered the mistake which had been made ;
and the young man, anxious to atone for the guilt
they had inadvertently incurred, consulted a wise
man as to what he should do in penance. He was
told to make the pilgrimage to Mecca seven times,
and then to live seven years more in some desert
place on the Haj road offering water to the pilgrims.
This he did, and chQse the place we passed for the
latter part of his penance. When the seven years
were over, however, he returned to Damascus, and
the little house he had built and the fig-trees he had
planted remain as a record of his story. Moham-
med could not tell me what became of the girl, and
seemed to think it did not matter.

He has been talking a great deal to us on the duties

en. II.] The duty of revenge. 35

of brotherhood, which seemed a little like a suggea-
tion. The rich brother, it would seem, should make
the poor one presents, not only of fine clothes, but of
a fine mare, a fiue dclul, or a score of sheep, — while
the poor brother should be very careful to protect the
life of his sworn ally, or, if need be, to avenge his
death. Wilfrid asked him how he should set about
this last, if the case occurred. " First of all," said
Mohammed, " I should inquire who the shedder of
blood wa8. I should hear, for instance, that you
had been travelling in the Hauran and had been
killed, but I shoiJd not know by whom. I should
then leave Tudmur, and, taking a couple of camels
so as to seem to be on business, should go to the
place where you had died, under a feigned name,
and should pretend to wish to buy com of the
nearest villagers. I should make acquaintance with
the old women, who are always the greatest talkers,
and should sooner or later hear all about it. Then,
when I had found out the real person, I should
watch carefully all his goings out and comings in,
and should choose a good opportunity of taking him
unawares, and run my sword through him. Then I
should go back to Tudmur as fast as my deliil could
carry me." Wilfrid objected that in England we
thought it more honourable to give an enemy the
<;hanee of defending himself; but Mohammed would
not hear of this. " It would not be right My
duty," he said, " would be to avenge your blood,
jQot to fight with the man ; and if I got the oppor-

36 A Pilgrimage to Nejd. [ch. h.

tiuiity, I should come upon him asleep or unarmed.
If he was some poor wretch, of no consequence, I
bhould take one of his relations instead, if possible
the head of his family. I cannot approve of your
way of doing these things. Ours is the best."
Mohammed might have reasoned (only Arabs never
reason), that there were others besides himself con-
cerned in the deed being secretly and certainly
done. An avenger of blood carries not only his
own life but the lives of his family in his hand ;
and if he bungles over his vengeance, and himself
gets killed, he entails on them a further debt of
blood. To Mohammed, however, on such a point,
reasoning was unnecessary. What he had de-
scribed was the custom, and that was enough.

We are now a little to the south of the villaore of
Gunaych where we have sent Abdallah with a deliil
to buy straw. There is no camel pasture here nor
anything the horses can eat. To the east we can
see the blue line of the Hauran range, and to the
west the Syrian hills from Hermon to Ajalon. I
told Mohammed the story of the sun standing still
over Gibeon and the moon over Ajalon, which he
took quite as a matter of course, merely mentioning
that he had never heard it before.

I forgot to say that we crossed the old Eoman
road several times to-day. It is in fair preservation,
but the modern caravan track avoids it. Perhaps
in old days wheeled carriages were common and
required a stone road. Now there is no such

CH. II.] The Roman road. 37

necessity. At Ghabaghat, a village we passed
about eleven o'clock, we found a tank supplied with
water from a spring, and while we were waiting
there watering the camels a fox ran by pursued by
two greyhounds, who soon came up with and killed
him. One of the dogs, a blue or silver grey, was very
handsome and we tried to buy him of his owner, a
soldier, but he would not take the money. After
that we had a bit of a gallop in which we were
pleased with our new mares. But we are both
tired with even this short gallop, being as yet not
in training, and we feel the heat of the sun.

Sunday J December 15. — We have left the Leja
country and are now in bare open fields, a fine
district for farmers, but as uninteresting as the
plains of Germany or northern France. These fields
are better watered than the Leja, and we crossed
several streams to-day by old stone bridges belong-
ing to the Eoman road. The streams run, I
believe, eventually into the Jordan, and in one place
form a marsh to the right of the road which
Mohammed declared to be infested by robbers,
men who lurk about in the tall reeds and when they
have made a capture run oflf with their booty into it
and cannot be followed. We saw nothing suspicious,
however, nor anjrthing of interest but a huge flock of
sand grouse, of which we got four as they passed
overhead. There were also immense clouds of
starlings, and we started a hare. We passed many
villages, the principal one being Shemskin, where

38 A Pilgrimage to Nejd. [ch. u.

there are the ruins of an old town. Our road then
bore away to the right, leaving the Eoman road for
good. This goes on straight to Bozra, the chief town
of the Hauran in former days.

At Tafazz we stopped to pay a visit to some
Tudmuri settled there, relations of Mohammed's but
not on the Ibn Aruk side, very worthy people
though hardly respectable as relations. Tafazz
from the outside looks like a heap of ruins half
smothered in dunghills. There has been a mur-
rain among the cattle this year, and dead cows
lay about in every stage of decomposition. We
had some difficulty in groping our way through
them to the wretched little mud hovel where the
Tudmuri lived. The family consisted of two
middle-aged men, brothers, with their mother, their
wives, and a pretty daughter named Shemseh (sim-
shine), some children, and an old man, uncle or
grandfather of the others. These were all presently
clustering round us, and hugging and kissing Mo-
hammed who, I must say, showed a complete
absence of false pride in spite of his fine clothes
and noble appearance. Their welcome to us, poor
people, was very hearty ; and in a few minutes
coffee was being pounded, and a breakfast of im-
leavened loaves, thin and good, an omelette, butter-
milk (lebben), and a sweet kind of treacle (dibs),
made of raisins, prepared. While we were at*
breakfast a little starved colt looked in at the
door from the yard; and some chickens and a

en. II.] We -find some poor relations. 39

pretty fawn greyhound, all equally hungry I
thought, watched us eagerly. The people were
very doleful about the want of rain, and the
loss of their yoke-oxen, which makes their next
year's prospects gloomily uncertain. They told
XLS, however, that they had a good stock of wheat
in their underground granaries, sufficient for a
year or even more, which shows a greater amount
of forethought than I should have expected of
them. In these countries it is quite necessary to
provide against the famines which happen ever}^
few years, and in ancient times I believe it was a
universal practice to keep a year's harvest in store.

After many entreaties that we would stay the
night under their roof they at last suflfered us to
depart, promising that the^men of the party would
rejoin us the following day at Mezdrib, for Mezdrib
was close by. There we arrived about three o'clock
and are encamped on the piece of desert ground
where the fair is held. The view from our tents
is extremely pretty, a fine range of distant hills,
the Ajlun to the south-west, and about a mile oft'
a little lake looking very blue and bright, with a
rather handsome ruined khan or castle in the fore-
ground* To the left the tents of the Suk, mostly
white and of the Turkish pattern. There are about
a hundred and fifty of them in four rows, making
a kind of street The village of Mezdrib stands
on an island in the lake, connected by a stone
causeway with the shore, but the Suk is on the

40 A Pilgrifnage to NejcL [ch. n.

mainland. There is a great concourse of people
with horses, and donkeys, and camels, and more
are constantly coming from each quarter of the
compass. They have not as yet paid much at-
tention to us, so that we have been able to make
ourselves comfortable. There is a fresh wind
blowing from the south, and there is a look in
the clouds of something like rain. I have never
before wished for rain on a journey, but I do so
heartily now ; these poor people want it badly.

December 16. — To-day we have done nothing
but receive visits. First there came a Haurani, who
announced himself as a sheykh, and gave us the in-
formation that Sotamm ibn Shaalan and the Roala
are somewhere near Ezrak. If this be true it will
be a great piece of good luck for us, but other
accounts have made it doubtful. A more interest-
ing visitor was a young man, a native of Bereydeh
in Nejd, who, hearing that we were on our way to
J6f, came to make friends wdth us. Though a well-
mannered youth, he is evidently nothing particular
in the way of position at home, and admits having
been somebody's servant at Bagdad, but on the
strength of a supposed descent from the Beni Laam
in Nejd, he has claimed kinship with Mohanuned
and they have been sitting together affectionately
all the morning, holding each an end of Moham-
med's rosary. We have cross-questioned him about
Nejd; but though he knows Hail and Kasfm and
other places, ho can give us little real .informa-

en. n.] The Bent Sokkhr, 41

tion. He seems to have left it as a boy. We are
cheered, however, by the little he has had to tell us,
as he seems to take it for granted that everybody
in Nejd will be delighted to see us, and he has
given us the name and address of his relations there.

Mohammed went last night to find out whether
any of the Beni Sokkhr Sheykhs were at the Suk,
for it is to them that we have letters from Moham-
med Dukhi, and in the middle of the day Sdkhn, a
son of Fendi el-Faiz, the nominal head of the tribe,
was introduced. He was a not ill-looking youth,
and when we had shewn him our letter to his father
informed us that the Sheykh had just arrived, so
we sent him to fetch him. While Hanna was pre-
paring coffee, the old man came to our tent In
person he is very different from any of the Anazeh
Sheykhs we have seen, reminding one rather of the
Jiburi, or other Euphrates Arabs. The Beni Sokkhr
are in fact of Shimali or Northern race, which is
quite distinct from the Nejdi, to which both Anazeh
and Shammar belong. He is a fine picturesque old
man, with rugged features and grey beard and an
immense nose, which put us in mind of the conven-
tional Arab types of Scripture picture books, and
seemed to correspond with a suggestion I have
heard made, that the Beni Sokkhr * are really the
Beni Issachar, a lost tribe.

The Sheykh was very much " en c^r^monie,'' and
•we found it difficult to carry on conversation with

'^ Sakhr, a stone— the real origin of their name.

42 A Pilgrimage to Nejd. [ch. n.

him. Either he had not much to say, or did not
care to say it to ns ; and the talk went on princi-
pally between his second son Telldl, a Christian
merchant (here on business), and Mohammed. We
did not, ourselves, broach the subject of our journey ;
but after coflfee had been served, Mohammed had a
private conversation with the Sheykh, which resulted
in an invitation from him to his tents, which he
described as being somewhere near Zerkaonthe Haj
road, from which he will send us on to Maan, and
ultimately to J6f. This plan, however, does not at
all suit Wilfrid, who is determined on exploring the
Wady Sirhan, which no European has ever done,
and he insists that we must go first to Ezrak.
Fendi, it appears, cannot take us that way, as he is
on bad terms with the Kjeysheh, a branch of his
own tribe who are on the road. Perhaps, too, he is
afraid of the Eoala. It is very perplexing, as some
sort of introduction we must have at starting, and
yet we cannot afford to go out of our way or even
wait here indefinitely till Fendi is ready. The
Jerdeh people are after all not expected for another
two days, and it may be a week before they go on.

Later in the day Sottan, Fendi's youngest son,
came to us and offered to accompany us himself to
J6f, but at a price which was altogether beyond our
ideas. He had travelled once with some English
people on the Syrian frontier, and had got foolish
notions about money. Five pounds was the sum we
had thought of giving ; and he talked about a hundred.

CH. II.] H^e try to eftgage a guide. 43

So we sent him away. Later still, came a Shammar
from the Jebel, who said he was willing to go for
fifteen mejidies, and a Kreysheh who made similar
offers. We have engaged them both, but neither
could do more than show us the road. They would
be no introduction. The difficulty, by all accounts,
of going down the Wady Sirhdn, is from the
Sherar4t, who hang about it, and who having no
regular Sheykh, cannot easily be dealt with. They
are afraid, however, of the Beni Sokkhr Sheykhs,
and of course of Mohammed Dukhi and Ibn Shaalan ;
and if we could only get a proper representative of
one or other of these to go with us, all would be
right But how to get such a one is the question.

It has been very hot and oppressive here to-day,
and the appearance of rain is gone. The thermo-
meter about noon stood at 86°.

December 17. — We have decided not to wait
here any longer, but to go off to-morrow in the
direction of Ezrak, trusting to find some one on the
road. We shall have to pass through Bozra, and
may have better luck there. Our Shammar seems
to think it will be all right; but the Kreysheh
came back this morning with a demand for thirty
pounds, instead of the two pounds ten shillings,
which he informed Mohammed, Fendi had told
him to ask. He seems to be with Fendi, although
his branch of the tribe are not on terms with their
principal chief. He still talks, however, of coming
on the original terms, but that will be without

44 -^ Pilgrimage to Nejd. [ch. n.

Fendi's permission. It is quite necessary to be, or
appear to be stingy with these people, as throwing
money away is considered by them the act of a
simpleton.

Mohammed has been sent to the Suk to make
some last purchases, and inquire about two more
camels. Now that it is decided we are to go by
the Wady Sirhdn, we shall be obliged to buy two
extra camels to carry food for the rest. In ordinary
seasons this would not be necessary, but this year
everybody tells us we shall find no pasture.
Allele^ which is the camel food used at Damascus^
is made of a sort of grain, like smaU misshapen
peas or lentils, the husk green and the seed red.
It is mixed up into dough with wheaten flour and
water, and then kneaded into egg-shaped baUs five
inches long. Six of these balls are a camel's daily
ration, which, if he can pick up any rubbish by the
way, will be enough to keep him fat. We are carry-
ing barley for the mares.

Aamar and Selim, oiu* Taffazz relations, have
come to pay us then: promised visit, and will per-
haps accompany us to-morrow. They brought
with them a measure of ferlkeliy wheat crushed
very fine, a sort of burghul, some bread, and a
couple of fowls ; also Mohammed's sheepskin coat,
w^hich one of the women has been lining for him;
and lastly, the little greyhound we saw at their
house, all as a present, or very nearly so, after the
fashion of the country.

CH. II.] The fair at Mezarib. 45

Mohammed has come back with two camels for
our approval, one a very handsome animal, but
rather long-legged, the other short and broad-
cheated like a prize-fighter. TV^e have paid ten
pounds and eleven pounds for them. Nothing is
absolutely settled about who is going and who is not
going with us. Nothing but this, that we leave
Mezd,rib to-mon"ow.

As I write, an immense hubbub and a cry of
thieves from the Suk. They are ducking a man in
the lake.

CHAPTER III.

" Rather proclaim it
That he which hath no stomach to this flght
Let him depart. His passport shall be made

*t

Beating about — Bozra — ^We leave the Turkish dominions — Moham-
med TOWS to kill a sheep— The citadel of Salkhad and the
independent Druses — We are received by a Dmae chieftain —
Historical notice of the ELauran.

December 18. — Our caravan has lost some of its
members. To begin with the two guides, the
Kreysheh and the Shammar have failed to make
their appearance. Then Abd er-Rahman, the little
Agheyl, -came with a petition to be allowed to go
home. He was too young, he said, for such a journey,
and afraid he might die on the road. He had
brought a cousin with him as a substitute, who
would do much better than himself, for the cousin
was afraid of nothing. The substitute was then
introduced, a wild picturesque creature all rags and
elf locks and with eyes like jet, armed too with a
matchlock rather longer than himself, and evidently
no Agheyl. We have agreed, however, to take him
and let the other go. Unwilling hands are worse
than useless on a journey. Lastly, the slave Awwad
has gone. Like most negroes he had too good an
opinion of himself, and insisted on being treated as
something more than a servant, and on having a

cH. III.] Beating about. 47

donkey to ride. So we have packed him too off.
He was very angry when told to go, and broke a
rebab we had given him to play on, for he could
both play and sing well. We are now reduced to
our two selves, Mohammed, Abdallah, Hanna,
Ibrahim and the substitute — seven persons in all, but
the Tafazz people are to go the first two days' march
with us and help drive the camels.

We were glad to get clear of the dirt and noise
of the Suk, and leaving the Haj road, took a cross
track to the south-east, which is to lead us to Bozra.
All day long we have been passing through a well-
inhabited country, with plenty of villages and a
rich red soil, already ploughed, every acre of it, and
waiting only for rain. The road was full of people
travelling on donkeyback and on foot to Mezdrib,
singing as they went along. In all the numerous
villages we saw the effects of the late murrain in
the dead cattle strewed about. I counted seventy
carcasses in one small place, a terrible loss for the
poor villagers, as each working cow or bullock was
worth ten pounds. I asked what disease had killed
them, and was told it was "min Allah " (from God).
Mohammed, however, calls it ahu hadlan (father of
leanness).

This district is said to be the best corn-growing
country anywhere, and looks like it, but unless rain
falls soon, the year must be barren. The villages
depend almost entirely on rain for their water
supply. In each there is an old reservoir hollowed

48 A Pilgrimage to Nejd. [en. m.

out of the rock. It is difficult to understand how
these tanks get filled, for they seem to have no
drainage leading to them, being on the contrary
perched up generally on high ground. They are
now all dry, and the villagers have to send many
miles for their drinking water. All this country
belongs to the Hauran, and we are now in a Haurani
village called Ghizeh. The people are evidently
not pure Arabs, as many of them have light eyes.

We are being hospitably entertained by the
village Sheykh, who is an old acquaintance of
Mohanmied's father's, and insists on setting all he
has got before us, — coffee, a plate of rice, barley for
the mares, and, what is more precious just now,
water for them as well as for ourselves. Hassan,
for such is his name, has a very pretty wife, who
was among the crowd which gathered round us on
our arrival at the village. She, like the women of
all these villages, made no pretence of shyness, and
was running about unveiled as any peasant girl
might in Italy. She was evidently a spoilt child,
and required more than one command from Hassan
before she would go home. The Shej^kh has been
spending the evening with us. He is in great
distress about his village, which is in the last straits
for water. The cattle, as I have said, have all died,
and now even the beasts of burden which have to
go for the water are dying. The nearest spring is
at Bozra, twelve miles off; and if the donkejrs
break down the village must die too of thirst. He

CH. ixl] The Sheykh of GMzeh. 49

told us that a Frank passed this way two years ago,
and had told him that there must be an ancient
weU somewhere among the ruins of which the
^e is built, and he has been looking for it ever
since. He entreated us to tell him the most likely
spot either for finding the old well or digging a
new one. We are much distressed at not being
engineers enough to do this for him ; and I can't
help thinking how much a real refonner (not a
Midhat) might do in Turkey by attending to such
crying wants as these. Ghizeh is within fifty mUes
from Damascus as the crow flies, and there are
scores of villages in like condition throughout the
Hauran, which a Syrian governor might relieve at
the cost of sending round an engineer. But untU
tramways and i*ailroads and new bazaars have been
made, I suppose there is little chance for mere wells
under the present regime.

Besides meat and drink, Hassan has given us
useful advice. He has reminded Mohammed of
another old friend of his father's, who he thinks
might be of more service to us than anybody else
could be, and he advises us to go first to him. This
is Huseyn ibn Nejm el-Atrash, a powerful Druse
Sheykh, who lives somewhere beyond the Hauran
mountains. He must certainly have relations with
some of the Bedouin tribes beyond, for it appears
he lives in a little town quite on the extreme edge
of the inhabited country towards the Wady Sirhdn.
We have always heard of this Druse country as

TOU I. X

50 A Pilgrimage to Nejd. [ch. m.

unsafe, but what country is not called unsafe out-
side the regular Turkish authority? The Ghizeh
Sheykh's suggestion seems worth following, and we
shall make for the Druse town.

The little greyhound Shiekhah (so called fix>m a
plant of that name) is very docile and well-behaved.
She is a regular desert dog, and likes dates better
than anything else. I have made her a coat to
wear at night for she is chilly.

December 19. — Hassan with true hospitality
did not leave his house this morning, but let us
depart quietly. His coming to wish us good-bye
would have looked like asking for a present, and he
evidently did not wish for anything of the sort.
This is the first time we have received hospitality
absolutely gratis in a town, for even when staying
with Mohammed's father at Tudmur, the women of
the family had eagerly asked for money. In the
desert, Hassan's behaviour would not have needed
remark.

Before leaving Ghizeh we went to look at a house
where there is a mosaic floor of old Eoman work,
scrolls with orange trees and pomegranates, vines
with grapes on them, vases and baskets, all coloured
on a white ground. It speaks well for the quality
of the workmanship that it has so long stood the
weather and the wear, for it is out of doors, and
forms the pavement in the courtyard of a house.

Three and a half hours of steady marching brought
us to Bozra, where we now are. The entrance of

cH. in.] Bozra. 51

the town is rather striking, as the old Koman road,
which has mn in a straight line for miles, terminates
in a gateway of the regular classic style, beyond
which lie a mass of ruins and pillars, and to the right
a fine old castle. A raven was sitting on the gate-
way, and as we rode through solemnly said " caw/'
Bozra is, I have no doubt, described by Mr.
Murray, so I won't waste my time in writing about
the ruins, which indeed we have not yet examined.
They seem to be Koman, and in tolerable preserva-
tion. The castle is more modem, probably Saracenic,
a huge pile built up out of older fragments. It is
occupied by a small garrison of Turkish regulars,
the last^ I hope, we shall see for many a day, for
Bozra is the frontier town of the Hauran, and beyond
it the Sultan is not acknowledged. I believe that
its occupation is not of older date than fifteen to
twenty years ago, the time when Turkey made its last
flicker as a progressing state, and that before that
time the people of Bozra paid tribute to Ibn Shaalan,
as they once had to the Wahhabis of Nejd. The
Koala still keep up some connection with the town,
however, for a shepherd we met at the springs just
outside it assured us that Ibn Shaalan had watered
his camels at them not two months ago. It was
somewhere not far from Bozra that the forty days'
battle between the Mesenneh and the Koala, des-
cribed by Fatalla,* was fought. Though the

* This is a mistake, as the battle was fought on the banks of the
Orontee.

B 2

52 A Pilgrimage to Nejd. [ch. in.

details are no doubt exaggerated, Mohammed
knows of the battle by tradition. Wilirid asked
him particidarly about it to-day, and he fully
confirms the account given by Fatalla of the
downfall of the Mesenneh. He has added too
some interesting details of their recent history.
We are encamped outside the town at the
edge of a great square tank of ancient masonry,
now out of repair and dry. Here would be
another excellent occupation for Midhat and his
Circassians.

December 20. — We were disturbed all night by
the barking of dogs, and the strange echoes from
the ruined places round. I never heard anything
so unearthly— a cold night— and melancholy too,
as nights are when the moon rises late, and is
then mixed up in a haggard light with the
dawn.

The Tafazz relations are gone, very sorrowful to
wish us good-bye. Selim, the elder of the two,
told me that he has been thirty years now in the
Hauran, and has no idea of going back to Tudmur.
The land at Tafazz is so good that it will grow
anything, while at Tudmur there are only the few
gardens the stream waters. He is a fellah and
likes ploughing and sowing better than camel
driving. To Tafazz they are gone, Selim on his
chestnut mare, old, worn, and one-eyed, but asil ;
Aamar on his bay Kehileh from the Eoala, also
old and very lame. They went with tears in their

OH. m.] A sultan among camels. 53

eyes, wishing ns aU possible blessings for the
road.

The consequence is, we have to do more than our
share of work, and have had a hard day loading and
reloading the camels, for we were among the
hills, and the roads were bad. The beasts have not
yet become accustomed to each other, and the old
camel we bought at Mezdrib shows every sign of
wishing to return there. He is an artful old wretch,
and chose his moment for wandering off whenever
we were looking the other way, and wherever
a bit of uneven groimd favoured his escape. Once
or twice he very nearly gave us the slip. He
wants to get back to his family, Abdallah says, for
we bought him out of a herd where he was lord
and master, a sultan among camels. Our road
to-day has been very rough. We were told to
make our way to Salkhad, a point on the far
horizon, just on the ridge of the Hauran, and the
only road there was the old Koman one. This
went in an absolutely straight line over hill and dale,
and as two out of every three of the stones paving
it were missing, and the rest turned upside down,
it was a long stumble from beginning to end. We
had been warned to keep a good look-out for
robbers, so Wilfrid and I rode ahead, reconnoitering
every rock and heap. We passed one or two ruined
villages, but met nobody all day long, still following
the pointed hill of Salkhad, which, as we got nearer
it, wo could see was crowned by a huge fortress.

54 -^ Pilgrimage to Nejd. [ch. m.

The country had now become a mass of boulders,
which in places had been rolled into heaps, making
gigantic cairns, not recently, but perhaps in ancient
days, when there were giants in the land. The
soil thus uncovered was a rich red earth, and here
and there it had been cultivated. There was
now a little pasture, for on the hills rain had
fallen, and once we saw some goats in the distance.

As we approached Salkhad the road got so bad
that Mohammed made a vow of killing a sheep if
ever we got safe to Husejn el-AtrasL We were
amused at this and asked him what it meant ; and
he told us the story of the prophet Ibrahim who
made a vow to kill his son, and who was prevented
from doing so by the prophet Musa, who appeared
to him and stopped him, and showed him two rams
which he said would do instead. These vows the
Arabs make are very curious, and are certainly a
relic of the ancient sacrifices. Mohammed explained
them to us. " The Bedouins," he said, " always do
this when they are in difficulties," he could not say
why, but it was an old custom ; and when they go
back home they kill the sheep, and eat it with their
friends. He does not seem to consider it a religious
ceremony, only a custom, but it is very singular.

Nine and a half hours* march from seven o^clock
brought us to the foot of the conical hill, on which
the fortress of Salkhad stands. This is a very ancient
building, resembling not a little the fortress of
Aleppo, a cone partly artificial and surrounded by a

CH. in.] The Citadel of Salkhdd. 55

moat, cased with smooth stone and surmounted by
walls still nearly perfect. We remarked on some of
them the same device as at Aleppo, a rampant lion,
the emblem of the Persian Monarchy. The fortress
itself, however, is probably of much older date, and
may have existed at the time the children of Israel
conquered the country. Wilfrid and I, who had gone
on in front, agreed to separate here, and ride round
the citadel, he to the right, and I to the left, and I was
to wait on the top of the ridge till he gave me some
signal. This I did and waited so long, that at last
the camels came up. He in the meantime had found
a little town just under the fortress on the other side
and had ridden down into it. At first he saw
nobody, and thought the place deserted, but
preseutly people in white turbans began to appear
on the house-tops, very much astonished to see this
horseman come riding down upon them, for the road
was like a stair. He saluted them, and they saluted
politely in return, and answered his inquiry for
Huseyn el-Atrash, by pointing out a path which led
down across the hills to a town called Melakh, where
they said Huseyn lived. They asked where he was
going, and he said Bussora, Bussora of Bagdad, at
which they laughed, and showing him the Eoman
road, which from Salkhad still goes on in a straight
line about south-east, said that that would take him
to it This is curious, for it certainly is exactly the
direction, and yet it is impossible there can ever have
really been a road there. It probably goes to Ezrak

o

56 A Pilgrimage to NejcL [ch. m.

but we hope to find out all about this in a day or
two. At the bottom of the hill Wilfrid beckoned to
me, and I found him at a large artificial pool or
reservoir, still containing a fair supply of water, and
there, when the rest had joined us, we watered the
camels and horses. Mohammed in the meanwhile
had been also on a voyage of discovery, and came
back with the news that Husejn el-Atrash was
really at Melakh, and Melakh was only two hours
and a half further on.

Salkhad is a very picturesque town. It hangs
something like a honeycomb imder the old fortress
on an extremely steep slope, the houses looking
black from the colour of the volcanic stone of which
they are built. Many of them are very ancient,
and the rest are built up of ancient materials, and
there is a square tower like the belfry of a
church.* The tanks below are at least equally old
with the town, having a casing of hewn stone, now
much dilapidated, and large stone troughs for water-
ing cattle. Its inhabitants, the people in the white
turbans, are Druses, a colony sent I believe from the
Lebanon after the disturbances in 1860.

From Salkhad our road lay principally down hill,
for we had now crossed the watershed of the Jebel

* The Hauran was among the first districts oonquered by the
Caliph Omar. It shared for some centuries the prosperity of the
Arabian Empire, but suffered seyerely during the Crusades. There
is no reason, however, to doubt that it continued to be weU in-
habited until the conquest of Tamerlane in 1400, when aU the lands
on the desert frontier were depopulated.

cH. III.] A Druse chieftain. 57

Hanran, and became somewhat inlxicate, winding
about among small fields. The country on this side
the hills is divided into walled enclosures, formed
by the rolling away of boulders, which give it a more
European look than anything we have seen of late.
These date I should think from very early times,
for the stones have had time to get covered with a
grey lichen, so as to resemble natural rather than
artificial heaps, and in these dry climates lichen
forms slowly In some of the enclosures we found
cultivation, and even vines and fig-trees. It is
remarkable how much more prosperous the land
looks as soon as one gets away from Turkish
administration. The sun was setting as we first
caught sight of Melakh, another strange old medi-
SBval town of black stone, with walls and towers
much out of the perpendicular; so leaving the
camels to come on under Abdallah's charge and
that of a man who had volunteered to guide us, we
cantered on with Mohammed, and in the twilight
arrived at the house of Huseyn el-Atrash.

Huseyn is a fine specimen of a Druse sheykh. a
man of about forty, extremely dark and extremely
handsome, his eyes made darker and more brilliant
by bomg paiBtid with koU. This .eem. to b« .
general fashion here. He was very clean and well
dressed in jfbbeh and abba ; and, unlike most of
the Druses, he wore a kefiyeh of purple and gold,
though with the white turban over it in place of
the aghaL He was sitting with his friends and

• :r

58 A PUgrimage to NefcL [ch. hl

— ^ — — — — f

neighbours on a little terrace in front of his house^
enjoying the coolness of the evening, while we could
see that a fire had been lit indoors. He rose and
came to meet us as we dismounted, and begged us
to come in, and then the cofiee pots and mortar
were set at work and a dinner was ordered. The
Sheykh's manners were excellent, very ceremonious
but not cold, and though we conversed for an hour
about " the weather and the crops," he carefully
avoided asking questions as to who we were and
what we wanted. Neither did we say anything, as
we knew that the proper moment had not come.
At last our camels arrived, and dinner was served,
a most excellent one, chicken and burghul, horse-
radishes in vinegar and water, several sweet
dishes, one a puree of rice, spiced tea, cream
cheese, and the best water-melon ever tasted. The
cookery and the people remind us of the frontier
towns of the Sahara, everything good of its kind,
good food, good manners, and good welcome. Then,
when we had all eaten heartily down to the last
servant, he asked us who we were. Mohammed's
aiiswer that we were EngUsh persons of distmc-
tion, on our way to J6f, and that he was Mohammed,
the son of Abdallah of Tudmur, made quite a coup
de thedtre, and it is easy to see that we have at last
come to the right place. We have been, however,
glad to retire early, for we have had a hard day's
march, nearly twelve hours, and over exceedingly
bad ground.

CH. m.] Visit to a Druse harim. 59

December 21. — ^The shortest day of the year,
but still hot, though the night was cold.

We spent the morning with Huseyn. His house
has not long been built, but it looks old because it
is built of old stones. Its construction is simple
but good, the main room being divided into sections
with arches so as to suit the stone rafters with
which it is roofed. In front there is a pleasant
terrace overlooking an agreeable prospect of broken
ground, with glimpses of the desert beyond. While
Wilfrid was talking to Huseyn I went to see the
ladies of the establishment. Huseyn has only one
wife; her name is Wardi (a rose). She is the
mother of a nice little boy, Mohammed, about six
years old and very well behaved, whom we had seen
with the Sheykh ; and of a pretty Uttle girl of two,
named Amina. There are, besides, some older
children by a former husband. Wardi is rather fat,
with a brilliant complexion and well-kohled eyes
and eyebrows ; she has good manners, and re-
ceived me very cordially in a room opening on to a
terrace, with a beautiful view eastward of some
tells at the edge of the Hamad. She sat surrounded
by dependants and relations, among whom were
Huseyn's mother and her own. The former was
suflfering from cough and loss of voice, and another
member of the family complained of a rheumatic
arm ; both wanted me to advise them as to treat-
ment. The ladies would not uncover their faces
until Assad, the Sheykh's secretary, who accompanied

'^- >^

60 A Pilgrimage to Nejd. [ch. m.

me, had retired. Wardi's concealment of her features
was, however, a mere make-believe, only a comer of
her head veil pulled half across her face. She
talked a great deal about her chUdren of the former
marriage, Mustafa a son of eighteen, who is chief
of a neighbouring village, and a daughter of perhaps
twelve who was present This young girl seemed
particularly intelligent and had received some
education ; enough to read out a phrase fix)m my
Arabic exercise book, and to repeat the first chapter
of the Koran. The pleasure of my visit was some-
what marred by the quantity of sweetmeats and tea
and coffee served ; with the tea and cofiee I got on veiy
well, as the cups were of the usual small size, but
the sugar-plums were of so massive a kind that it
was impossible to swallow them. The two small
children fortimately came to my rescue; and by
their zeal in devouring everything I handed to
them, took ofi" their mother's attention fix)m my
shortcomings. At parting Wardi gave me a bunch
of feathers pulled then and there out of an ostrich
skin hanging up against the wall ; the skin, she
said, had been brought to her some months before,
from somewhere in the south.

The Druses of the Hauran say that they are
Arabs who came here with the immediate successors
of the prophet from the south ; that the Jebel was
at that time inhabited by Ei!bni (Greeks), whose
descendants still live here and are Christians. We
saw one of them in Huseju's house to-day, appa-

CH. Ill,] Politeness of the Druse women. 6i

rentJy on excellent terms with the other visitors.
He was dressed like an Arab, and was undis-
tinguishable from the ordinary felldhin Arabs one
sees in the desert towns. The Druse women,
except those of Huseyn's family, go about unveiled.
They are particularly well-mannered and civil, with
clean fresh complexions and bright coloured cheeks,
and always say "Salam aleykum" to travellers.
They all kohl their eyes carefully and broadly.

There has of course been much discussion about
our further journey. It is rather aggravating to
think that a whole week has passed since we left
Damascus, and yet we are not, as the crow flies,
more than eighty miles on our way. Still there
seems a chance now of our really getting forward, for
Huseyn promises to send some men with us to K4f,
an oasis in the Wady Sirhdn, with which there is
occasional communication on this side of the
Hauran, as there are salt beds to which the villagers
send camels to fetch salt. They say it is about five
days' journey from here. The principal difficulty
is that there are several Bedouin tribes on the
road, and nobody knows which. The Sirdieh are
friends of Huseyn's, and so are the Kreysheh, but
there are others whom he does not know, SheranLt
Sirhdn and Howeysin, the last mere thieves " worse
than the Sleb." Any or all of these may be met
with, though it is very possible we may meet
nobody. Huseyn has sent a man on horseback to
Ezrak, the first stage on our way, where there are

62 A Pilgrimage to Nefd. [ch. m.

wells and an old castle, to find out who is there.
The Kreysheh we have letters to, fix>ni Mohammed
Dukhi, and if we can find them there wfll be no
more difficulty, as they are strong enough to give
us protection from the rest. At any rate we go on
to-morrow. We are anxious to get away to the
desert, for life is very fatiguing in these towns ; there
are so many people to be civil to, and the children
make such a noise. They have been playing
hockey all day long just outside our tent, tiresome
little wretches. Wilfrid went out for an hour this
afternoon, and got some grouse, of which there are
immense flocks all about the fields, while I made a
picture of the town from behind a wall.

We have at last got a man to go with us as
servant, who looks promising. He is a Shammari
from Jebel Shammar who, for some reason or other,
has left his own tribe (probably for some crime
against Bedouin law), and has been settled for the
last few years at Salkhad, where he has married a
Druse woman. There is some mystery about
his profession and way of life, but he has an
attractive face, and in spite of very poor clothes
a certain air of distinction. We both like him,
and Huseyn seems to know something about
him. Besides, he has made the whole journey
from Nejd already, and has been backwards and
forwards between Salkhad and J6f more than once.
He wants now, he says, to go back to his own
country. Mohammed has also discovered a red-

CH. ni.] Historical Notice of the Hauran. 63

headed man, a native of Soklme and as such almost
a fellow countryman, who will come as camel
driver under Abdallab ; so that our complement
of hands is made up to its original number, eight.
To-morrow we may hope to sleep in the desert

SaU.—KiaA, sinc« this vaa written, tmx frienda at Uelakh hare
experienced sad rerersoB. In September, 16T9, Uidhat Pashe, to
mgnftliae Itis assumption of office at Damascus, and support that re-
patation of eaer^ which Europe has ^ven him, sent an armed
force to coerce the independent Bmsea. At first these, fighting for
their liberty, were successfal. They met and defeated the Turkish
boope advancing through the Leja, and the expeditioa returned
vith a loss of 400 men. A month later, however, Midhat retrieved
his fortunes. He bribed or persuaded Mohammed Dukhi to over-
nm the Eastern Hauran with his Bedouins, and while these were
blockading the towns, marched a second colmnn of regular troops
through the mountains, and so gained possession of SaUchad,
Melakh, and the rest, reducing all to submission. An Ottoman
Qovemor now replaces the native Sheykhs, and the blessings of
the Sultan's rule have been extended to every village of the
Bjtuian.

CHAPTER IV.

We rtart in eftmest— The HKnir— A Theory of IGnge— Ounp of Qie
Beni Sokklir — Wady er Bajel-^A Cluutma« Dinner in Ute
Deaert— Sand etoim — We leacii EAt.

December 22. — A white frost, and off at half-
past seven. Huseyn has sent two men with us,
Assad, his head man, and another. We have also
letters from him for AH el-Kreysheh, and the
Sheykh of KM.

Mohammed as we rode away was much elated
at the success of this visit, and related to me the
pretty things Huseyn had said about us. Huseyn
had seen other franjis but none who undeistood the
s}ioghl Arab, Arab ways, as we did. They had come
with an escort to see the ruins, but we had come
to see him. "Ah," said Mohammed, "now they
are sitting drinking coffee and talking about us.
They are saying to each other that the Beg and
I are brothers, and we are travelling togetiier, as
is right, in search of relations, and to make friends
all over the world. There is nothing so asil (noUe)
as to travel and make friends. Once upon a time

OT. IT.] We start in earnest. 65

there was an old man who had a son, but very
Httle other property, and when he came to die he
called his son and said to him, " my son, I am
about to die, and I have nothing to leave behind
me for your good but advice, and my advice is
this : ' Bmld to yourself houses in every part of
the world.' And the son, who was a child with-
out understanding, wondered how he was to do
this, seeing he had no money to build houses
with, and so set out on a journey in search of a
wise man who could explain to him his father's
last words. And he travelled for many years
and visited every part of the world, and made
friends in each town, and at last he found the
wise man who told him that he had already done
as his father had bidden him, "for," he said, "you
have friends everywhere, and is not your friend's
house your own ? "

"We too were in high spirits, as everything now
seemed to be going right. Our course lay nearly
south on the road to Ezrak, and we passed several
mined villages and some cultivated land. Every
now and then we put up immense packs of sand-
grouse, which Were busy feeding on the seeds of the
zueyti, a kind of thistle which grows abundantly on
the fallows. Wilfrid got eight of them at a shot,
and at one of the vUlagea we bought ten partridges
of a man who had been out with a matchlock, so
that we are well supplied with meat for a couple of
days. Assad has got a very handsome greyhound

"66 A Pilgrimage to Nejd. [cm. it.

with him, of the long-haired breed, which has a
wonderfal noae for _gt^e. His master declares he
sees the birds, forthe ^Siabs do not seem to under-
stand the theoiy of scent.

After two hours' f^ur travelUng, we stopped at a
village called Met^m, where Assad had friends, and
where we were obliged to go through the ceremony
of drinking coffee, losing much time thereby.
Then a new discussion arose as to oar road,
somebody having just come in from Ezrak, who
announced that the Sirhan were camped there, and
the Sirhan we knew were friendly with Huseyn el-
Atrash. Assad, and Sahnan his companion, refused
in consequence to go that way, and were for
stopping the night at Met^m to think over it ; but
this we would not bsten to. "We were determined
to go somewhere, and if not to Ezrak then by some
other route to KAf. Somebody suggested EI
Kreysheh, who was said to be in the Wady er-Rajel,
and others the Sirdfeh, who were camped a day's
journey towards the east. It was difficult to
decide ; but at the well of the village while we
were watering our animals, we met a man and his
wife, who told us they knew where to find the
Sirdieh, and were themselves on their way to join
them. So this decided us, and we determined on
the Sirdieh. The Sirdieh are friends of Huseyn's,
and our Druse guides made no objection to going
that way ; Awwad the Shamman declared also that
it was all right. Accordingly we left the Ezrak road.

«n. rr.i The Harra. 67

and striking off to tlie east, soon found ourselves out
of the range of cultivation. Met^m is to be the last
village we shall see, and the desert is now before us
all the way to Nejd.

We are encamped at the edge of a plateau, from
which there is an immense prospect of hill and
plain, and Wilfrid has been very busy making out
a rough chart of the different landmarks, as they
may be useful to-morrow if we should happen to
miss our way. The man and woman we met at the
■well are with us, and know the different points by
name. Awwad too, declares he knows every part of
tile desert between this and K^, and he hofi pointed
out a tell, south-east by south, beyond which
it lies. The Druses, like townsmen, are already
nervolw at the sight of the desert, and angry with
us for camping away from villages and tents. Our
camp is well concealed in an old volcanic crater,
■where also we are sheltered from the wind, which is
Tery cold. There is a spring just below called Ain
«l-Ghiaour (the infidel's spring); according to the
Druses, the scene of a great battle fought by the
Arabs of the first invasion, in which they routed the
Christians. At that time all the country we have
been passing through, and perhaps the broken
ground in front of us, was well inhabited ; and
there is a tell ■with a ruined convent on it not far
off to the north-weat, still known as Ed Deyr.
There is capital pasture here, rothi, which the
camels have been making the most of. We too

.:::r

68 A Pilgrimage to Nefd. [ch. it.

have dined, and now all is quiet, and the sky is full
of stars. We have been sitting on the edge of the
crater talking over plans for to-morrow. The
Sirdieh, it now appears, are at a khdbra or pool»
called Shubboitia, which we could see before the
sun set like a yellow line far away to the north-
east, too far out of our road for us to go there.
Awwad is in favour of going straight to KM, tmd
taking our chance of what Arabs we may meet. El
Kreysheh is somewhere in front of us, and so they
say is Ibn Majil, the Akid of the Roala^ whom we
met last year. At any rate, we must take a good
supply of water with us, and go forward at the first
streak of dawn.

December 23. — ^As soon as it was light we
climbed up to the top of the crater and looked
over the plain. It was a wonderful sight with
its broken tells and strange chaotic wadys, all
black with volcanic boulders, looking blacker still
against the yellow morning sky. There is always
something mysterious about a great plain, and
especially such a plain as this, where Europeans,
one may say, have never been, and which even the
people of the Hauran know little of. Besides^ it
seems to have had a history if only in the days of
Og, king of Basan. But it was not to look at the
view or for any romantic rea«,n that we had come
there ; only to examine the country before us and
see if we could discover traces of Arab encamp-
ments. After looking carefully all round we at

CH. n-.] In search of the Kr^sheh. 69

last made out a thin columD of smoke to the north-
east, ten or twelve miles away, and another nearly
due east The first must be the Sirdfeh, the second
perhaps the Kreysheh. Satisfied with this we returned
to our party, who were just setting the camels in
motion, and as the sun rose we began out march.

We have been stumbling about all day among
the boidders of the Harra, following little tracks
just wide enough for the camels to get along, and
making a great circuit in order to find ourselves at
last barely twelve miles from where we began. At
first we kept company with our new acquaintances,
the people going to the Sirdieh, but when we had
arrived at the foot of the hills we found them
turning away to the north, and so wished them
good-bye, much to the Druses' disgust, who did
not at ail relish our wild-goose chase of the Kreysheh,
and still less the idea of going straight to KAf.
They followed, however, when they found that we
■would listen, to no reason, and I must say good-
humouredly. One great charm of the Arab cha-
racter 13 that it bears no malice, even about trifles.
Sulkiness is very rare with them. They did not
pretend to know much of the country, so we made
Awwad lead the way. Going straight was out of
the question, for the B[arra is an impracticable
country, not only for camels but for horses, on
account of the boulders, except just where the paths
lead. We had a bleak desolate ride, for a cold
wind had sprung up in our faces with a decided

7o A Pilgrimage to Nejd. [ch. it.'

touch of winter. This country must be a furnace,
however, in summer with its polished black stones.
I noticed that these were very regularly weathered ;
one side, that towards the north, being grey with
a sort of lichen, so that as we rode past they
seemed to change colour continnally. There was
very little sign of life in this region, only a few
small birds, and no trace of inhabitants or of any
recent passers by. The tracks followed generally
the beds of wadys, and wandered on without any-
particular aim or direction. They looked like the
paths made by sheep or camels, only that the
stones were so big it seemed impossible that the
mere passage of animals could have ever made them.
On the whole I think they must be artificial, made
by shepherds in very ancient times for their flocks.
In the spring, we are told, the whole of this Harra is
excellent grazing ground. It is a c\mous thing that
every here and there in the hollows there is a space
free from stones where water lies after rain, fonning
a pool. AVhy are there no stones there ? The soil
is a dry clay with a highly glazed surface cracked
into very regular squares, so glazed indeed that even
close by it has the appearance of wat«r, reflecting
the light of the sky. This, no doubt, is the way
some of the curious mirage effects are produced in
the desert, for it is to be noticed that the most
perfect delusions are found just in places where one
would naturally expect to find water — that is, where
water has been.

CK. IT.] Camp of the Bent Sokkhr. jl

At half-paet twelve, we came suddenly on a
level bit of open ground, which we took at first for
one of these khabras, but found it to be part of a
Jong wady running north and south, with a very
distinct watercourse in the middle, with tamarisk
bushes, and patches of &esh grass, showing that
water had run down it not long ago. Both Awwad
and the Druses recognised this as the Wady-er-
Eajel, where the Kreysheh were reported to be
encamped, and the only question was, whether to
turn up or down it While we were debating,
however, a flock of sheep was sighted, and presently
a boy, who told us he was a Sirdieh, but that
the Kreysheh were only a couple of hours further
down the valley. This just suited, as it was exactly
in the right direction for us, and we are now at Ali
el-Kreysheh's camp, and being hospitably enter-
tained by a young relation in the Sheykh's absence.
AH is away at Mezdrib with fifty horsemen, to
escort the Jerdeh on their way to Maan.

We have had some singing to-night, and playing
of the rebab. Among the songs I was pleased to
recognise an old Shammar ballad about Abdul
Kerim and the man who had no mare.

December 24. — The Kreysheh, at whose camp
we now are, belong to the Beni Sokkhr, a large, but
not very warhke tribe, which occupies the whole
of the district from the pilgrim road eastwards to
the extreme edge of the Harra, throughout a
>rildemeB8 of stones. To this they are said to owe

7a A Pilgrimage to Nejd. [ch. it.

their name of Beni SokUhr, children of ^e rocks ;
and they assure us that thej have lived in the
Harra "from all time." They do not come £rom
Nejd, they say, like the Anazeh, but are Shimali or
Northern Arabs. We were told the names of ten
divisioDB into which the Beni Sokkhr have ramified,
each owning a separate Sheykh, though nominally
subject to Fendi el-Faiz, or rather his son S^ttan,
for Fendi is old and has given np practical
authority. These divisions are probably nothing
more than groups of the tribe, as their names are
those of their Sheykhs, the principal being S6ttan,
and next to him El Kreysheh, and next again Ed
Dreybi ibn Zebbed. The Kreysheh have camels as
well as sheep, and seem pretty well off; but they
have no great number of mares, and those not
of the best type. They keep hawks and grey-
hounds.

They have given us news of the Eoala. Ibn Majil,
whom we met last year at Sotamm Ibn Shaalan's,
and who took our side in the negociatioDS for peace
with the Sebaa, has now separated from Sotamm,
and is somewhere down by J6f, so perhaps we may
meet him ; while Sotamm has just marched north
again to attack the Welled Ali. The Kreysheh are
friends with Ibn Majil, but at war with Sotanun,
another curious instance of the inconsistencies of
Bedouin politics. These are, indeed, as changing
as the clouds in the sky, and transform themselves
so rapidly, that in Desert history, if it were written.

CH. IT.] AH el'Kreyshek! s Wife. 73

ten years would comprise as much incident as a
century in Europe.

While negotiations were going on about arrange-
ments for our further progress, I went to call on
Ali el-Elreysheh's wives. There are two of them,
Hazna and Fassal; but I only saw the latter,
who had the women's tent to herself with her
attendants and three children, two little boys and a
girl, remarkably dirty, and (what is rare among
Bedouins) sujQFering from sore eyes. Fassal was
plain and uninteresting but sensible, and I daresay
has the advantage over Hazna, who, poor thing, is
childless. She told me she was from a section of
the tribe further north, and took an interest in
Damascus, asking about the new Valy as well as
about Mohammed ibn Smeyr, who is the great
name in these parts. She seemed much pleased
with the box of sugar-plums I gave her, and
when I went away followed me as far as the
end of the tent ropes invoking blessings on my
head

I found our own tents down and everything
ready for a start; for an arrangement had been
come to with the young man representing our host,
that we were to have a zeUem (person) to go with
us as far as KM for the sum of ten mej idles (forty
shillings). Assad and Salman were just saying
good-bye, for they had to go back to Melakh. They
were made very happy with a Turkish pound apiece,
^nd Assad has left us his greyhoimd, the black and

74 A Pilgrimage to Nejd. [ch. rv.*

tan dog, who whined piteously when his master went
away. I like the dog for this.

As we left the Kreysheh camp a bitter wind
sprang up from the west-south-west, and continued
aU day long, chilling us, in spite of all the furs and
cloaks we could put on, to the bone. Our course
lay nearly across it south-south-east. We are out
of the hills now in a nearly level plain still covered
with the black stones. The only variety during
the day was when we came to a large khabra
(Khabra-el-Gurrthi), a dreary flat of dried up clay
and sand which we took two hours to cross, though
we went at the camels' best pace. The wind drove-
great clouds of sand across it, making it one of the
dreariest places I ever saw. We were all too cold
for much talking, and sat huddled up on our delula
with our backs to the wind, and our heads wrapped
up in our cloaks. We met no one all day long,
except one string of a dozen camels driven by two
very wild-looking Arabs who told us they were*
Sherarat, and nothing living except a hare wJiich.
got up among the stones, and which the dogs
coursed for some hundreds of yards, over ground
which would have broken every bone of an English*
greyhound, apparently without hurting themselves.
About two o'clock we came, to our great delight,
upon the Wady er-Rajel again, an angle of whose
course we had been cutting off. Here we foiind
beautiful soft ground and grass and pools of water,
for this wady had running water in it last months

cH. IV.] Wady er-Rajel. 7S-

and is not quite drunk up yet. The pasture was
too good to be passed, so here we remain for the
night. Just as we were unloading, a little troop of
gazelles looked over the edge of the wady, perhaps
come for water, and Mohammed set off in pursuit
with a Winchester rifle. We heard him fire all the
twelve shots one after the other, but he came back
empty-handed. Our tent is set under the lee of a
rough wall of loose stones, such as are set up by the
shepherds as a shelter for their flocks. The wind
still blows tempestuously, and it is cold as a
Christmas Eve need be. But Hanna has made us a
capital curry, which with soup and burghul and a
plum-pudding firom a tin, makes not a bad dinner,
while Abdallah has distinguished himself baking
bread, and Awwad roasting coffee.

Wednesday y December 25. — Christmas Day. We
are out of the Harra at last, and on open ground.
That black wilderness had become like a nightmare-
with its hoixible boulders and little tortuous paths,
which prevented the camels from doing more than
about two miles an hour. Now we are able to
push on at three, or three and a quarter.

After floundering down the wady for half an-
hour, we came to some splendid pools in a narrow
cleft of rock, where we stopped to take in water.
We have been very fortunate in such a season as
this to find the Wady er-Rajel full. The rain
which filled it must have been some isolated water-
spout on the eastern slope of Jebel Hauran, for not

76 A Pilgrimage to Nejd. [ch. nr.

a drop fell anywhere else ; and there is no autumn
grass except just along its edge. It is rapidly dry-
ing, or rather being drunk up, and the little vege-
tation is very closely eaten down. In the smaller
pools there is a very distinct flavour of sheep and
camels in the water ; but at the pools we came to
this morning it is still pure. The Kreysheh have
been all up this valley, eating and drinking their
way, and leaving not a blade they could help be-
hind them, and we have come upon numerous
tracks of their cattle. Every here and there we
have passed the traces of their camps, stones set in
line on three sides of a square ; one we saw had
been only just deserted, and we put up a Dumber
of vultures and ravens from the fresh carcase of a
camel lying by it There crossed it also the foot-
print of a horse, which brought on the usual talk
of ghaziis and marauders, in which our people
delight They, however, have settled it among
them to their satisfaction, that such accidents as
meeting robbers or people of a hostile tribe are
** min Allah " (from God), to be classed with the
rain and fine weather, and sickness and good health,
all which things the Bedouins consider fortuitoua

Having filled our goat skins, we left the Wady er-
Bajel for good, and are to come across no more
water now till we get to K4f. The valley takes a
turn here to the west before it reaches the Wady
Sirhdn, and would therefore be out of our road.
We have been crossing some rolling downs covered

CH. IT.] A Christmas dinner. 77

with light flinty gravel, a delightful change from
the Harra, and have had a gallop or two after
the gazelles, which now and then came in sight
We thought too of our Christmas dinner, and
how glad we should be to get some addition to the
rice, which was all we had ; but neither greyhounds
nor mares were in good enough condition to run
down their quarry. Once we made a rather
successful stalk, and a charge in among a small
herd, but the dogs could not get hold of anything,
and, though several shots were fired, nothing came
to bag. Then we had a long gallop after Sayad,
the black and tan greyhound, who went on after the
gazelles for a good two miles, so that we were afraid
of losing him ; and then another long gallop to get
back to our camels. This time, we had been three
quarters of an hour away from them, and we found
our people all much alarmed, Abdallah rather angry
at our going so far, for Mohammed was with us»
He was perfectly in the right, and we were to
blame, for we are on a serious journey not a
sporting tour ; and to say nothing of danger from
enemies, there is always a certain risk of miss-
ing one another in a country like this where camels
leave no track behind them. A turn to right or
left out of the direct line and a fold in the ground,
and they are lost. So we apologised, and promised
to do so again no more. We were, however, in a
most imexpected manner provided with dinner ; for
while we were still talking, behold a grazing camel

78 A Piigrimage to Nejd. [ch. it.

all aloue on tbe plain, Dot a mile away ; when with
ss. general shout of " a prize," the whole party on
horseback and on foot rushed in pursuit We were
naturally the first up, and drove the animal at a
cauter to the others. ITie camel was a young one
■of last spring, in good condition, aud at the sight
tears rushed into Hanna's eyes — tears of hunger,
not of pity. I am afraid indeed that none of the
party had much thought of pity, and the scene caused
me mised feelings of compassion for the poor victim,
and disgust at ourselves who were waiting to prey
upon it. No question was raised as to ownership ;
camels found astray in desert places were by accla-
mation declared the property of the first comer. We
were in fact a ghazi^, and this was our lawful prize.
So the poor little camel was driven on before us.

Dinner is thus secured, and I must see what else
can be arranged in honour of the occasion.

December 26. — Mohammed, Abdallah, A wwad, the
two Ibrahims and Hanna, all of them, spent the
evening in feasting and ate up the whole of the
camel except the short ribs, which were set before
us, and the shoulders which were kept for to-day.
They divided among them the labour of killing,
skinning and quartering, and cooking it, for tdl
were equally ready to lend a hand to the work.
People talk sometimes of camel meat, as if it were
something not only unpalatable, but offensive. But
it is in reality ver}' good ; when young it resembles
mutton, even when old it is only tough, and never

A Sandstorm. 79

■has any unpleasant taste as far as my experience
.goes; indeed if served up without the bones it
could hardly be distinguished from muttoa

The servants having thus feasted were all soon
sound asleep, and even when suddenly, between
two and three in the morning, the wind rose with
a. deafening noise, they did not wake, not till their
tent blew down upon them as ours did upon us.
"We were awake and might have kept our tent
standing had we not been too lazy to get up and
<irive in the pegs. It was too late when the tent
bad fallen on us to do anything but lie as well as
we could beneath the ruins and wait for daylight,
fortunately the main pegs had not drawn, and the
sand, for this hurricane was a sand storm, soon
covered over the edges of the fallen tent, and no
further damage was done. In the morning, the
servants proposed staying where we were ; but we
■would not hear of this, as we had water for only
two days, and it would have been folly to dawdle,
so after nibbing the sand out of or rather into our
eyes, we set to work packing and loading. The
wind continued violent and bitterly cold, and
carried a great deal of sand with it. It came from
the west-eouth-west. We had camped under shelter
at a small tell close to the Tell Guteyfi, which proved
to be the same as one pointed out to us by Awwad
from Ain el-Giaour, and once beyond it, we found
ourselves on a perfectly open bit of plain, exposed
to the fuU fiiry of the gale, now more violent than

8o A Pilgrimage to Nefd. [ch. rv.

ever. Sand storms are evidently common here, for
the Tell Guteyfi, which is of black volcanic boulders
like the Harra, is half smothered in sand. We saw
it looming near ua in the thick air, and soon after
were almost hidden from each other in the increas-
ing darkness. The sun shone feebly at intervals
through the driving sand, but it was all we could
do to keep the caravan together, and not lose sight
of each other. At one moment we had all to stop
and turn tail to the wind, covering our eyes and
heads with our cloaks, waiting till the burst was
over. Nothing could have faced it Still we
were far from having any idea of danger, for
there really is none in these storms, and had
plenty of time to notice how very picturesque the
situation was, the camels driven along at speed, all
huddled together for protection, with their long
necks stretched out, and heads low, tags and ropes
fiying, and the men's cloaks streaming in the wind,
all seen through the yellow haze of sand which
made them look as thoiigh walking in the air. The
beasts looked gigantic yet helpless, like antediluvian
creatures overwhelmed iu a flood. StiU, as I said,
there was no danger, for the wind was steady in its
direction, and our course was directly across it —
that we knew — and by patiently struggling on, we
managed to get over a deal of ground Suddenly
the sandy plain over which we were travelling,
seemed to sink away in front of us, and at the
bottom of a steep dip we could see clumps of

CH. rv.i The old camel escapes. 8i

tamariBk looming through the stonn. We knew
that a refuge was at hand.

Here then we are comfortably housed under one
of these bushes, where there is a delightful lull
The soil is all deep saod, white as snow, and the
tent which we have rigged up is already half buried
in it, so that we might imagine ourselves at home
snowed up on Boxing Day. "We have made a fire
of tarfa sticks inside the tent, and have been enjoy-
ing Hanna's delicious coffee. "Where is one ever so
much at home as in one's own tenti Awwad
surprised us very much to-day by objecting, when
we proposed to pitch the tent, that it would be im-
possible to do so in the sand. If Mohammed or any
of tiie townspeople had done so it would have been
natural, but Awwad is a Bedouin bom, and must
have pitched camp hundreds of times in the Nefdd.
Yet he had never heard of burying a tent peg.

One misfortune has happened in the storm. The
old rogue of a camel we bought at Mezdrib, who
has been trying all along to get back to his family,
has given lis the slip. Taking advantage of the
darkness, and knowing that the wind would oblite-
rate his track at once, he decamped as soon as im-
loaded, and is gone. Mohammed and Awwad, each
on a delul, are scoimng the coimtry, but without a
chance of finding him ; for at best they can only see
things a hundred yards off, and he was not missed
for the first half hour. Mohammed has vowed
to km a lamb, but I fear that will do no good.

82 A Pilgrimage to Nejd. [ch. iv.

DecetiCaer 27. — We have arrived at KM after a
long march, twenty-seven or twenty-eight miles.
Course about Bouth-east.

. In the night a little rain feU, and the wind
moderated. At eight o'clock we started, crossing a
wide plain of coarse sand interspersed with low
Bandstone tells. At noon we came upon a weU-
marked track, the road of the salt caravans between
Bozra and Kdf, which, after crossing a rather high
ridge, brought us to a very curious valley; an
oflshoot, we were told, of the "Wady Sirhdn. The
geological formation of this is singular ; the crest of
the ridge on either aide the valley is of black rock
with detached stones of the same — then yellow sand-
stone, then another black layer, then pure sand, then
Baud with isolated black stones, then a calcareous
deposit, and at the bottom chalk. The actual bed
of the wady is a fine white sand sprinkled over
with tamarisk and guttub bushes. As we were
crossing this our dogs started a jerboa, and, little
creature though it is, it gave them much trouble to
catch it Its bops were prodigious, and &om side
to side and backwards and forwards, so that the
dogs always ran over it, and snatching, always
missed it ; till at last, as if by accident, it jumped
into Shiekhah's mouth. AbdaUah and the rest were
very amdous to eat it, but it was so mauled as to
be beyond cooking. At three o'clock we crested
another ridge, and from it suddenly came in sight
of the great Wady Sirluln, the object of so many of

OIL IV.]

TVe recuh Kif.

83

our conjectures. It seems, however, to be no wady,
but the bed of an ancient sea. A little black dot
on the edge of a subbka or salt lake, now dry, and
just under a tall black tell, marked the oasis of KAf,
an infinitesimal village of sixteen houses, and a palm
garden of about an acre.

I have had the misfortune to sprain my knee,
an awkward accident, and very annoying in the
middle of a journey. My deltU, always a fidgety
animal, gave a bolt just as I was leaning over to
arrange something on the off side of the aheddd,
or saddle, and pitched me off. The pain is inde-
scribable, and I fear I shall be helplessly lame for
some time to come. But here we are at "KM.

CHAPTER V.

" Rafl mn •fUr h«r with his tword drawn, and waa Jnat aboot to strike
off htr haad, when aha oriad ' qoaxter."*— ABUiiVBnA.

Klf and Itheri — More relations — The Wady Sirh^ — Looost
hunting — Hanna aits down to die — ^Talee of robbery and tIo-
lenoe— We are euxprised by a ghazti and made prisoners —
SheraHlt statistics — JdH

December 28. — K&f is a pretty little village,
with a character of its own. quite distinct from any-
thing one sees in Syria. All is in miniature, the
aixteon little square houses, the little battlemented
towers and battlemented walls seven feet high —
Boventy or eighty palm trees in a garden watered
from wells, and some trees I took at first for
cyiiresses, but which turned out to be a very
dolicato kind of tamarisk.* Though so small a
place, K&f has a singularly flourishing look, all is
neat there and in good repair, not a battlement
broken or a door oflF its hinges, as would certainly
have been the case in Syria. There are also a good
many young palms planted in among the older ones,
and young fig trees and vines, things hardly ever
found in the North. The people are nice looking

* The liMy a tree grown in erery TiDa e of Central Arabia, but
aoty as &r as I know, found there wild.

CH. v.] Reception at Kdf. 85

and well behaved, though at first they startled us a
little by going about all of them with swords ia
their hands. These they hold either sloped over
their shoulders or grasped in both hands by the
scabbard, much as one sees in the old stone figures
of mediaeval martyrs, or in the effigies of crusaders.
Abdallah el-Kamis, Sheykh of the village, to whom
we had letters from Huseyn, received us with great
politeness ; and a room in his house was swept out
for our use. Like all the other rooms, it opened
on to the court-yard, in the middle of which was
tethered a two-year-old colt. Our room had been a
storing place for wood, and was without furniture
of any sort, but we were delighted to find also
without inhabitants. The architecture here is very
simple, plain mud walls with no windows or open-
ings of any kind except a few square holes near the
roof. The roof was of iihd beams with cross rafters
of palm, thatched in with palm branches. The
principal room is called the kahwah or cofiee room ;
and in it there is a square hearth at the side or in
the middle for cofiee-making. There is no chimney,
and the smoke escapes as it can ; but this is not so
uncomfortable as it sounds, for the wood burnt here
bums with a beautiful bright flame, giving out a
maximum of heat to a Tninini uT n of smoke. It is
the ratha or gkada* People sit round the hearth
while cofiee is being made, a solemn process occupy-
ing nearly half an hour,

* A VinH of tanuuisk.

86 A Pilgrimage to Nejd. [ch. t.

As soon as we azrlTed, a trencher of dates was
brought, dates of the last year's crop, all sticky and
maahed up, but good ; and later in the evening, we
had a more regular dinner of bui^hul and boiled
fowls. We are much struck with the politeness of
everybody. Abdallah, our host, asked us at least
twenty times after our health before he would go on
to anything else ; and it was not easy to find appro-
priate compliments in return. Everytiiing of course is
very poor and very simple, but one cannot help
feeling that one is among civilized people. They
have been making a great fuss with Mohammed, who
is treated as a sheykh. Tudmur is well known by
name, and at this distance is considered an important
town. Much surprise was expressed at finding a
man of his rank in the semi-menial position Mo-
hammed holds with us, and he was put to some
polite croas-questioning in the evening as to the
motive of his journey. No Franjis have ever been
seen at KM before, so the people say ; and they do
not understand the respect in which Europeans are
held elsewhere. Mohammed, however, has explained
his " brotherhood witii the Beg," and protested that
his journey is one of honour, not of profit ; so that
we are treated with as much courtesy as if we were
Arabs bom. Awwad the Shammar has been of
great use to us, as he is well known here, and he
serves as an introduction.

Eaf is quite independent of the Sultan, though it
has twice been sacked by Turkish soldiers, once

CH. v.] Itheri. 87

nnder Ibrahim Paaha in 1834, and again only a few
years ago, when the Government of Damaaciw sent
a military expedition down the Wady Sirhin. We
were shown the ruins of a castle, Kasr es-Siud, on a
hill above the town which the former destroyed, and
we heard much lamentation over the proceedings of
the latter. The inhabitants of E^ acknowledge
themselves subjects of Ibn Kashid, the Jebel Shammar
chief, some of whose people were here only a few
days since, taking the annual tribute, a very small
sum, twenty mejidies (£4), which they are glad to
pay in return for his protection. They are very
enthusiastic about "the Emir," as they call him,
and certainly have no reason to wish for annexation
to Syria. The little town of K&f and its neighbour
Itheri, where we now are, have commercially more
connection with the north than with the south, for
their principal wealth, such as it is, arises from the
salt trade with Bozra. Abdallah el-Eamis seems to
be well off, for he possesses several slaves, and has
•more than one wife. But the colt I have mentioned
is bis only four-footed possession ; he would have
come with us, he said, if he had owned a deltiL I
noticed a few camels and donkeys and goats about
the village.

Makbul, the Kreysheh, has gone back, and we
now want to find a Sherdri to take ua on to J6f.
"We have come on to Itheri, Kif a twin oasis, two
and a half hours east of it, also in the Wady
Sirhdu. This is not marked on many of the modem

88 A Pilgrimage to Nejd. [ch. t.

maps, though Chesney has it incorrectly placed
on hia We find by the barometer that they are
both on the same level, so that our conjecture seems
confirmed, about the Wady Sirhdn having no slope.
The Wady Sirhin is a curious chaotic depression,
probably the bed of some ancient sea like the Dead
Sea, and is here about twelve miles broad if we
can judge by the hills we see beyond it, and which
are no doubt the opposite diffis of the basin. There
are numerous wells both here and at Kaf, wide and
shallow, for the water is only eight feet below the
surface of the groimd. From these the palm gardens
are irrigated. There are wells too outside, all lying
low and at the same level The water is drinkable,
by no means excellent. We crossed a large salt lake,
now dry, where the salt is gathered for the caravans.

On our road Mohammed entertained us with tales
of his birth and ancestry. The people of Kaf have
heard of the Ibn Aruks, and have told Mohammed
that he will find relations in many parts of Arabia
besides J6£ They say there is somebody at
Bereydeh, and a certain Ibn Homeydi, whom
Mohammed has heard of as a cousin. Then here at
Itheri, the Sheykh's wife is a member of the J6f
fiEunily. Everything in fact seems going just as we
expected it.

Itheri is a still smaller place than K^, but it
boasts of an ancient building and miniature castle
inside the walls, something after the fashion of the
Hauran houses. This, instead of mud, the commoa

More relations. 89

Arab material, is built of black stones, well squared
and regularly placed On the lintel of the doorway
there is or rather has been, an inscription in some
ancient character, perhaps Himyaritic, which we
would have copied had it been legible, but the
weather has almost effaced it.* Here we are being
entertained by Jeruan, an untidy half-witted young
man, with long hair in plaits and a face like a Scotch
terrier, who is the son of Merzuga, Mohammed's
cousin, and consequently a cousin himself. Though
nothing much to be proud of as a relation, we find
him an attentive host. His mother is an intelligent
and well-bred woman, and it seems strange that
she should have so inferior a son. Her other three
sons, for Jeruan is the eldest of four, have their
wits like other people, but they are kept in the
background. Merzuga came to see me just now
with a large dish of dates in her hand, and stopped
to talk. Her face is still attractive, and she must
have once been extremely beautifuL I notice that
she wears a number of silver rings on her fingers
like wedding rings.

Merzuga tells us we shall find plenty of Ibn Arfik
relations at J6f. She hersdf left it young and talks
of it as an earthly paradise from which she has been
torn to live in this wretched Httle oasis. Itheri is
indeed a forlorn place, all except Jeruan's palm
garden. After a walk in the palm garden, in which

* W« wen told that this msoription related to hidden treuntet
A oommon &11C7 ioaong the Anbs who cannot read.

90 A Pilgrimage to Ngd. [ch. t.

my lamenese prevented me from joining, we all sat
down to a very good dinner of lamb and sopped
loead — ^the bread tasted like eicellent pastry —
served us by Jeruan in person, standing according
to Arab fashion when guests are eating. His
mother looks well after him, and tells him what to
do, and it is evident^ though he has the sense to say
very little, that he is looked upon as not quite
"accountable" in his family. "Wilfrid describes
the walk in the garden as ratiier amusing, Mo-
hammed and Abdallah making long speeches of
compliments about all they saw, and telling Jeruan's
head man extraordinary stories of the grandeur and
wealth of Tudmur. Jeruan's garden, the only one
at Itheri, contains four hundred palm trees, many
of them newly planted, and none more than twenty-
five years old. Amongst them was a young tree of
the hMlua variety, the sweet date of J6f, imported
from thence, and considered here a great rarity. At
this there was a chorus of admiration. The ithel
trees were also much admired. They are grown for
timber, and spring from the stub when cut down,
a six years' growth being already twenty feet
high.

Two men have arrived itaai J6f with the welcome
news that all is well between this and Jdf ; that is,
there are no Arabs yet in the Wady Sirhdn ; wel-
come because we have no introductions, and a
meeting might be disagreeable. The season is so
late and the pasture so bad, that the Wady has

CH.V.] The Wady Sirhdn. 91

been quite deserted since last spring. There will
be no road now, or track of any kind, and as it ia
at least two hundred miles to J6f, we must have a
guide to shew us the wells. Such a one we have
foimd in a funny looking little Bedouin, a Sherari>
who happens to be here and who will go with us for
ten mejidies.

December 29. — There was a bitter east wind
blowing when we started this morning, and I ob-
served a peewit, like a land bird at sea, flying hither
and thither under the lea of the palm trees, looking
hopeless and worn out with its long voyage. Poor
thing, it will die here, for there is nothing such
a bird can eat anywhere for hundreds of miles. It
must have been blown out of its reckoning, perhaps
from the Euphrates.

Our course to-day lay along the edge of the Wady^
sometimes crossing stony promontories from the
upper plain, sometimes sandy inlets from the Wady.
The heights of these were always pretty much the
same, 2250 feet above and 1850 below — so these
may be taken as the respective heights of the Ham&d
and of the Wady Sirhdn. There are besides, here
and there, isolated tells, three hundred to four hundred
feet higher than either. Rough broken ground all
day, principally of sand with slaty grit sprinkled
over it, the vegetation very scanty on the high
ground, but richer in the hollows. In one small
winding ravine leading into the Wady, we found
ghada trees, but otherwise nothing bigger than

^2 A Pilgrimage to Nejd. Ich. v.

slimbs. There Awwad told us that two years ago
he was robbed and stripped by a ghazd from the
Hauran. He had lost six camels and all he pos-
sessed. The Hanrani were eight in number, his own
party six, I asked him how it was the robbers got
the best of it. He said it was ** min Allah " (from
Ood). The Wady Sirhdn seems to be a favourite
place for robbers, and Awwad takes the occur-
rence as a matter of course. I asked him why
he had left his tribe, the Shammar, and come to
live so fax north as Salkhad He said it was
^^noLsnhl* a thing fated; that he had married a
Salkhad wife, and she would not go away from
her people. I asked him how he earned his living^
and he laughed. "I have got half a mare," he
said, ''and a delul, and I make ghaziis. There
are nine of us Shammar in the Hauran, and we
go out together towards Zerka^ or to the western
Leja and take cattle by night." He then showed us
some frightful scars of wounds, which he had got on
these occasions, and made Wilfrid feel a bullet which
was still sticking in his side. He is a curious
creature, but we like him, and, robber or no robber,
he has quite the air of a gentleman. He is besides
an agreeable companion, sings very well, recites
ballads, and is a great favourite everywhere. At
E&f and Itheri he was hugged and kissed by the
men, old and yoimg, and welcomed by the women
in every house.

We were nearly frozen all the morning, the wind

CH, v.] Locust hunting. 93

piercing tlirough our fur cloaks. At half-past
twelve, after four hours' marching, we came to some
wells called Kuraghir, six of them in a bare hollow,
with camel tracks leading from every point of the
compass towards them. It is clear that at some
time of the year the Wady is inhabited ; Awwad
says by the Eoala in winter, but this year there is
nobody. The water, like that of Kfif and Itheri, ia
slightly brackish. Near Kurdghir we saw some
gazelles and coursed them vainly. It is vexatious,
for I have forgotten to bring meat, and unless we
can catch or shoot something, we shall have none
till we get to J6f. I ought to have thought of it>
for, though provisions are by no means plentiful at
Itheri, we could probably have bought a sheep and
driven it on with us. The pain of my lameness
distracted my attention — a bad excuse, but the only
one. I suflfer less when riding than at any other
time.

We are now, since four o'clock, camped on the
sand under some ghada bushes, and the wind haa
dropped for the moment. It seems always to blow
here except for an hour about sunset and another
at dawn. We are to dine on beef tea, burghul with
curry sauce, and a water-melon, the last of our
Hauran store.

December 30. — On the high level all the morn-
ing over ground like the Harra with volcanic stones^
a fierce south-east wind in our faces, so that we
could not talk or hardly think. Our course lay

94 A Pilgrimage to Nejd. [ch. v.

towards an inhospitable looking range of hills called
El Mizmeh, and when we reached these, to the right
of them, for we travel in anything but a straight line.
Saw great numbers of red locusts which, as the sun
warmed the ground, began to fly about and were
pursued by the men and knocked down with sticks.
Enough have been secured to make a dish for dinner.
When flying, these insects look very like large May
flies, as they have the same helpless heavy flight,
drifting down the wind with hardly sufficient power
of direction to keep them clear of obstacles. Some-
times they fly right against the camels, and at others
drop heavily into the bushes where they are easily
caught When sitting on the ground, however,
they are hard to see, and they keep a good look-out
and jump up and drift away again as you come near
them. They seem to have more sense, than power
of moving.

At two we came to more wells, — Mahiyeh — ^most
of them choked up with sand, but one containing a
sufficient supply of brackish water. These wells lay
among clumps of tamarisk, out of which we started
several hares which the greyhounds could not catch,
as they always dodged back to cover. Wilfrid and
I waited behind for this fruitless hunting upon which
our dinner depended, and did not join the rest of the
party for more than a mile. Before we reached
them we came upon Hanna, sitting on the ground
on his hed4m (quilt and abba), and Ibrahim stand-
ing over him, both shouting, " Wah ! wah ! wah ! '*

en. v.] Hanna sits down to die. 95

We could not conceive what had happened and
could get no information from either of them,
except that they were going to remain where they
were. These two townspeople sitting on their beds
all alone in the Wady Sirhin were so absurd a
spectacle that, at the moment, we could not help
laughing ; but it was not an affair for laughter, and
of course it was impossible to leave them there.
We insisted on an explanation. There had been a
quarrel between Hanna and Abdallah, because the
latter had driven on Hanna's deliil fast with the
other camels, and refused to let it be made to kneel
down and get up again. Abdallah and Awwab
were in a great hurry to get as far from Mahiyeh
as possible, because Hamd^n the Sheriri says it is
a dangerous spot. But Hanna was angry, and in
his anger he dropped his cloak ; upon which he
jumped down, pulling his bed after him, and sat
down on the ground. There the others left him,
wailing and raving, and in this state we found him.
He proposed that he and Ibrahim should be left
behind to be eaten up by the hyaena whose tracks
we had seen. However, Ibrahim, who had only stayed
to keep him company, was quite ready to go on, and,
seeing this, Hanna was not long in getting up. and.
making his brother carry his bedding, he followed
us. It was no good inquiring who was right or
who was wrong ; wo stopped the camels, and,
driving back the deltil, insisted on Hanna's mount-
ing, which after some faces he did, and the episode

-i«

96 A Pilgrimage to Nejd. [ch. t.

ended. Mohammed has been commissioned to insist
with the Arabs on peace, and we have we think
prevailed with Hanna to bear no malice. It is
absolutely impossible for anybody to go back now
without losing his life, and I trust they will all be
reasonable ; it is disagreeable to think that there
has been discord in our small party, separated as it
is from all the rest of the world. We are camped
now in a side wady where the camel pasture is
good. We saw the place from a great distance,
for we are becoming skilful now at guessing likely
spots. Wherever you see rocky ground in lines
you may be sure pasture will be found. We have
seen no sign of recent habitation in the country
since leaving Itheri, neither footprint of camel nor
of man.

The locusts fried are fairly good to eat
Decefmhefi' 31. — ^Another long day's march, and
here we are at the end of the year in one of the
most desolate places in the world. It was so cold
last night, that all the locusts are dead. They are
lying about everywhere, and being eaten up by the
little desert birds, larks, and wheatears. We have
got down again into the main bed of the Wady
Sirhdn, which is still at the same level as before ; it
is here nearly flat, and covered with great bunches
of guttub and other shrubs, all very salt to the
taste; the soil crumbly and unsound, in places
white with saltpetre. Awwad and the Sheriri
declare that there are quicksands, haddda (literally^

CH. T.] A spring. 97

an abyss), somewhere in the neighbourhood, in which
everything that passes over sinks and disappears,
leaving no trace — men, camels, and gazelles ; but of
such we saw nothing. Coasting the edge of the
Wady, we came suddenly on some gazelles, which
led us to higher ground, where we found a stony
wilderness of the Harra type ; and amongst the
stones we saw a hy^na trotting leisurely. "We got
nothing, however ; neither him nor the gazelles, and
are still without meat. No other incident occurred
tUl we came to a palm tree standing by itself in
an open place ; near it, a charming little spring,
quite in among the roots of a thick clump of palm
bushes. The hole is about three feet across, and
two deep, with about a foot of water in it; the
■water rises again as fast as it is taken out, but
never overflows. There were traces of hysenas and
gazelles about, and this, I suppose, is where the
desert animals come to drink, for it is the only water
above ground we have yet seen. This spring is
called Maasreh (little by little) — a pleasant spot
where we should have liked to camp ; but it is
always dangerous to stop near water, lest people'
should come. Awwad says there is some tradition
of a town or village having formerly existed here ;
but no ruins are to be seen. The water is sweet
and good, as might be perceived by the insects
which were swimming about in it. The Arabs
always judge of the wholesomeness of water in this
way. There is nothing more suspicious in the

98 A Pilgrimage to Nejd. [ca. v.

desert than peifectly clear water, &ee &om animal
life.

We are now camped under a low cliff, hollowed
out into caves as if by water, capital dens for
hyeenas. There is a beautiful view looking back at
the Mizmeh hills. The eveoing is still and cold, but
we do not like to make much fire for fear of enemies.
Hamdfln, our Sherdri guide, an uncouth, savage
creature to look at, has been reciting a very pretty-
ballad, which he tells us he made himself. It is in
atanzas of four lines with alternate rhymes, and
relates to an episode in his own family. As he
recited it the rest of the Arabs chimed in, repeating
always the last word of the line with the rhyming
syllable ; it had a good effect. The story was
ample, and told how Hamddn's mother and sister
had a quarrel, and how they brought their grievances
before Obeyd ibn Rashid at H^ and how the old
Sheykh settled it by putting a rope round the
daughter's neck, and bidding the mother hold the
end of it, and do so for the rest of their days.
Whereupon the daughter had kissed her mother, and
Obeyd had sent them away with presents, a delul,
A cloak each, and a hundred measures of wheat, a
present he had continued giving them every year
till he died, and which is given still by his nephew,
Mohammed, the present ruler of Jebel Shammar.
Hamddn has also given us an interesting account of
the Hail politics, which agrees very closely with what
we remember of Mr. Palgrave's, carrying t^em on to

Hamddtis recitative.

99

a later date. The present Ibn Raahid is not by any
means so amiable a character as his brother Tellil ;
and Hamddn's account of his career is rather startling.
It appears that he has put to death something lilie a
dozen of his relations, and is more feared than loved
by the Shammar. This is very tiresome, as it may
be a reason for our not going on to Nejd after all.
But we shall hear more when we get to J6f.

Hamdiin's recitative was, as nearly as I coidd
write the musical part of it, like this : —

#=^^¥s

■1=^

tT=t=P

fe;^=i3^5^

atLjli^

/r\

^■^-^

■■^

^i^gt^J^t-^^

January 1, 1879. — A black frost, but still. We
have changed our course, and have been going all
day nearly due south — twenty-five miles, as near as
■we can calculate it — and down the middle of the
"Wady Sirhdn, a level plain of sand and grit, witJi
here and there mounds of pure white sand covered
■with ghada. Our plan is to get up and strike the
tents at the first glimpse of dawn, drink a cup
of cofiee, and eat a biscuit or a bit of rusk (k&k),
and then march on till three or four in the afternoon
without stopping for an instant, eating half-a-dozen
dates and some more rusk as we go. Then imme-
diately on stopping, and before the tents are pitched,
we light a fire and make cofi'ee, which carries us on

lOO A Pilgrimage to Nejd. [ch. v.

till dinner is ready, about sunset. It is wonderful
how little food one can do with while travelling.
We have had no meat now for the last four days till
to-day, only beef tea, and burghul, and dates, with
sometimes fried onions, or flour mixed with curry
powder and butter, and baked into a cake. This
last is very good, and easily made. To-day, how-
ever, we are in clover, as the dogs coursed a hare, and
we dug her out. The desert hare is very little bigger
than a large rabbit, and is literally too much for one,
and not enough for two ; but Mohammed magnani-
mously foregoes his portion, and says he can wait.

Mohammed has been improving the occasion of a
dispute which arose this evening on a choice of
camp, to tell us some stories of his own adventures
in the desert ; and we have been telling him ours.
He had a younger brother, whom his mother was
very fond of, a regular town boy wdth " a white
face like a girl," who knew how to read and write
and knew nothing of the desert (Mohammed himself,
like his great namesake, has always been a camel
driver). Now at Tudmur they have constantly had
fights and quarrels for the Sheykhat, and on one
such occasion his brother was sent away by his
parents to Sokhne, the neighbouring village, about
thirty miles from Tudmur ; and there he stayed for
some time with a relation. At last, however, he
got tired of being away from home, and wanted to
see his mother. He started off with another boy of
his own age (about fifteen) to walk back to Tudmur.

cH. T.] Tales of robbers. loi

It was in the middle of summer, and they lost their
way and wandered far down into the HamM where
they died of thirst. Mohammed had gone out to
look for them, and found them both dead close
together.

On another occasion Mohammed himself was
nearly meeting his death. He had gone alone with
his camels on the road to Karieteyn, and had fallen
in with a ghazii of robbers from the hills. These
stripped him of everything except his shirt and a
tarbush. His gun he had contrived to hide under
a bush, but they left him nothing else, neither food
nor water, and it was in the middle of summer.
Karieteyn, the nearest place, was about forty miles
off, and he was lame with a blow he had received.
However, when the robbers were gone, he set out in
that direction, and managed to walk on till night
and the next day, till he got to a ruin called Kasr
el Hayr where he fell down senseless under the
shade, and lay for twenty-four hours unable to move,
and suffering agonies from thirst. At last, when
he had said to himself, " now I shall have to die," a
party of camel men from Sokhne came by and found
him lying there. At first they took him for a slave,
for the sun had burnt him black, and his tongue
was dried so that he could not speak. Fortunately
one of the party recognised him, and then they gave
him water. He still could give no account of him-
self, but they put him on a donkey and brought him
with them to Tudmur.

I02 A Pilgrimage to Nejd. [ch. ▼.

Our own story was the one of our quarrel with
Abunjad and our rush from Akaba to Gaza, when
we so nearly perished of thirst.

The year would have begun prosperously, but for
a severe cold Wilfrid has caught. He has lost his
voice.

January 2. — A hard frost — ^water frozen in the
pail. Reached the wells of Shaybeh at half-past
eight and watered the camels — water very brackish
— level by aneroid 1950, depth to surface of water
twelve feet. Grot into a sort of track, part of the
morning, but one evidently not frequented. At one
o'clock came to another well, near a curious rock
which at first we took for a castle. We have now
crossed the wady and are on its western bank.
Passed a ruined house of no great antiquity called
Abu Kasr and another well near it, and at half-past
four have encamped under some sand hills, crowned
with ghada, a delightful spot not far from a fourth
well called Bir el-Jerawi — level by barometer 1840.
Wilfrid has recovered his voice but still has a bad
cold. I am as lame as ever, though in less pain. I
sometimes think I shall never be able to walk again.

Friday^ January 3. — We have had an adven-
ture at last and a disagreeable one ; a severe lesson
as to the danger of encamping near wells. We
started early, but were delayed a whole hour at
Jerawi taking water, and did not leave the wells till
nearly eight o'clock. Then we turned back nearly
due east across the wady. The soil of pure white

cH.v.] Surprised by a G/iazii. 103

sand was heavy going, and we went slowly, crossing
low undulations without other landmark thai;i the
tells we had left behind us. Here and there rose
little mounds tufted with ghada. To one of these
Wilfrid and I cantered on, leaving the camels behind
us, and dismounting; tied our mares to the bushes
that we might enjoy a few minutes' rest, and eat
our midday mouthful — the greyhounds meanwhile
played about and chaaed each other in the sand. We
had finished, and were talking of I know not what,
when the camels passed us. They were hardly a
couple of hundred yards in front when suddenly we
heard a thud, thud, thud on the sand, a sound of gal-
loping. Wilfrid jumped to his feet, looked round and,
called out, " Get on your mare. This is a ghazu.' ■
As I scrambled round the bush to my mare I saw a
troop of horsemen charging down at full gallop with
their lances, not two hundred yards off Wilfrid was
up as he spoke, and so should I have been, but for
my sprained knee and the deep sand, both of which
gave way as I was rising. I fell back. There was
no time to think and I had hardly struggled to
my feet, when the enemy was upon us, and I was
knocked down by a spear. Then they all turned on
Wilfrid, who had waited for me, some of them jump-
ing down on foot to get hold of his mare's halter. He
had my gun with him, which I had just before
handed to him, but unloaded ; his own gun and his
sword being on his deluL He fortunately had on very
thick clothes, two abbas one over the other, and

I04 A Pilgrimage to Nejd. [ch. ▼.

English clothes underneath, so the lances did him no
hann. At last his assailants managed to get his
gmi fix)m him and broke it over his head, hitting
him three times and smashing the stock. Resist-
ance seemed to me useless, and I shouted to the
nearest horseman, ^^ ana dahilak" (I am imder
your protection), the usual form of surrender.
Wilfrid hearing this, and thinking he had had
enough of this unequal contest, one against twelve,
threw himself off his mare. The khayal (horse-
men) having seized both the mares, paused, and
as soon as they had gathered breath, began to ask
us who we were and where we came from. *' English,
and we have come from Damascus," we replied,
" and our camels are close by. Come with us, and
you shall hear about it'* Our caravan, while all
this had happened, and it only lasted about five
minutes, had formed itself into a square and the
camels were kneeling down, as we could plainly
see from where we were. I hardly expected the
horsemen to do as we asked, but the man who
seemed to be their leader at once let us walk on
(a process causing me acute pain), and followed
with the others to the caravan. We found Moham-
med and the rest of our party entrenched behind
the camels with their guns pointed, and as we
approached, Mohammed stepped out and came
forward. " Min entum ? " (who are you ? ) was the .
first question. " Koala min Ibn Debaa." " Wallah ?
will you swear by God?" "WaUahl we swear.**

cH. v.] Released. 105

'' And you ? " '' Mohammed ibn Ar{ik of Tudmur."
" WaUah ? '' '' Wallah 1 " " And these axe Franjis
travelling with you?'' "Wallah! Franjis, friends
of Ibn Shaalan."

It was all right, we had fallen into the hands of
friends. Ibn Shaalan, our host of last year, was
bound to protect us, even so far away in the desert,
and none of his people dared meddle with us,
knowing this. Besides, Mohammed was a Tudmuri,
and as such could not be molested by Koala, for
Tudmur pays tribute to Ibn Shaalan, and the
Tudmuris have a right to his protection. So, as
soon as the circumstances were made clear, orders
were given by the chief of the party to his foUowers
to bring back our mares, and the gun, and every-
thing which had been dropped in the scuffle. Even
to Wilfrid's tobacco bag, all was restored. The
young fellows who had taken the mares made rather
wry faces, bitterly lamenting their bad fortune in
finding us friends. " Ah the beautiful mares," they
said, "and the beautiful gun." But Arabs axe
always good-humoured, whatever else their faults,
and presently we were all on very good terms, sitting
in a circle on the sand, eating dates and passing round
the pipe of peace. They were now our guests.

What struck us as strange in all this was, the
ready good faith with which they believed every word
we said. We had spoken the truth, but why did
they trust us ? They knew neither us nor Moham-
med ; yet they had taken our word that we were

io6 A Pilgrimage to Nejd. [ch. v^

fiiends, when they might so easily have ridden off
without question with our property. Nobody would
ever have heard of it, or known who they were.

It appears that Ibn Debaa (hyaena), the Sheykhy
and his Mends were a smaU party in advance of the
main body of the Eoala. They had come on to see
what pasturage there might be in the wady, and had
there camped only a few miles from the wells of El
Jerawi near which we slept last night They had
come in the morning for water, and had seen our
tracks in the sand, and so had foUowed, riding in hot
hkaste to overtake us. It was a mere accident their
finding us separated from the rest of the caravan,
and they had charged down as soon as they saw us.
Everjrthing depends on rapidity in these attacks,
and this had been quite successful The least
hesitation on their part, and we should have been safe
with our camels. There they could not have molested
us, for though they were twelve to our eighty they had
only lances, while we carried firearms. We liked the
look of these young Eoala. In spite of their rough
behaviour, we could see that they were gentlemen*
They were very much ashamed of having used their
spears against me, and made profuse apologies ; they
only saw a person wearing a cloak, and never
suspected but that it belonged to a man. Indeed
their mistake is not a matter for surprise, for
they were so out of breath and excited with
their gallop, that they looked at nothing except
the object of their desire — the mares. The loss of

CH, v.] Casualties. 107

these, however, I feax, was to them a cause of greater
sorrow than the rough handling to which we had
been treated, when, after explanations given and
regrets interchanged, they rode away. Mohammed
was anxious not to detain them, prudently con-
sidering that our acquaintance with them had gone
far enough, and it was plain that Awwad was in a
terrible fidget, I fancy he has a good many debts of
blood owing him, and is somewhat shy of strangers*
The others, too, were rather subdued and silent ; so
we wished Ibn Debaa farewell and let him go.

The mares belonging to this ghazd were small,
compact, and active, with especially good shoulders
and fine heads, but they were of a more poneyish
type than our own Anazeh mares. Most of them
were bay. One I saw was ridden in a bit.

When the RoaJa were gone we compared notes.
In the first place, Wilfrid's hurts were examined, but
they are only contusions. The thick rope he wears
round his head had received all the blows, and though
the stock of the gun is clean broken, steel and all,
his head is still sound. The lances could not get
through his clothes. As regards myself the only
injury I have received is the renewal of my sprain.
But I could almost forget the pain of it in my anger
at it, as being the cause of our being caught. But
for this we might have galloped away to our camels
and received the enemy in quite another fashion. I
was asked if I was not frightened, but in fact there
was at first no time, and afterwards rage swallowed

io8 A Pilgrimage to Nejd. [ch. v.

up every other feeling. Wilfrid says, but I do not
believe him, that he felt frightened, and was veiy
near running away and leaving me, but on reflec-
tion stayed. The affair seems more alarming now
it is over, which is perhaps natural

As to the others, Mohammed is terribly
crestfallen at the not very heroic part he took in
the action. The purely defensive attitude of the
caravan was no doubt prudent ; but it seemed
hardly up to the ideal of chivalry Mohammed has
always professed. He keeps on reproachmg him-
self, but we tell him that he did quite right.
It was certainly our own faidt that we were sur-
prised in this way, and if the enemy, as they
might have been, had really been robbers and out-
laws, our safety depended on our having the caravan
intact as a fortress to return to after being robbed.
To have rushed forward in disorder to help us would
have exposed the whole caravan to a defeat, which
in so desolate a region as this would mean nothing
less than dying of cold and starvation.

We may indeed be very thankful that matters
were no worse. I shall never again dismount while
I remain crippled, and never as long as I live, wiU I
tie my horse to a bush.

Many vows of sheep, it appears, were made by
all the party of spectators during the action, so we
are to have a feast at J6f — if ever we get there.

Now all is quiet, and Hamddn the Sherfiri is
singing the loves of a young man and maiden who

cH. v.] Sherarat statistics. 109

were separated from one another by mischief-makers,
and afterwards managed to carry on a corre-
spondence by tying their letters to their goats when
these went out to pasture

January 4. — ^There was no dawdling this morn-
ing, for everybody has become serious, and we were
oflF by seven, and have marched steadily on for
quite thirty miles without stopping, at the rate of
three-and-a-half miles an hour. We have left the
Wady Sirh4n for good, and are making a straight
cut across the Hamad for J6f. There is no water
this way, but less chance of ghazfis. The soil has
been a light hard gravel, with hardly a plant or an
inequality to interfere with the camels' pace. At
one o'clock we came to some hills of sandstone
faced with iron, the beginning of the broken ground
in which, they say, Jof stands. We had been
gradually ascending all day, and as we reached
that, the highest point of our route, the barometer
marked 2660 feet. Here we found a number of
little pits, used, so Hamddn explained, for collecting
and winnowing sem\ a little red grain which
grows wild in this part of the desert, and is used
by the J6f people for food.

A little later we sighted two men on a deliil, the
first people we have seen, except the ghazil, since
leaving Kaf. Wilfrid and Mohammed galloped up
to see what they were, and Mohammed, to atone I
suppose for his inertness on a recent occasion, fired
several shot^, and succeeded in frightening them

/I lo A Pilgrimage to Nejd. [ch. v.

put of their wits. They were quite poor people,
dressed only in old shirts, and they had a skin of
dates on one side the camel and a skin of water on
the other. They were out, they said, to look for a
man who had been lost in the Wady Sirhdn, one of
the men sent by Ibn Rashid to ELaf for the tribute.
He had been taken ill, and had stopped behind his
companions, and nobody had seen him since. ITiey
had been sent out by the governor of J6f to look for
him. They said that we were only a few hours
from the town.

Meanwhile, I had remained with our camels,
listening to the remarks of Awwad and Hamd^,
both dying with curiosity about the two zellems
from J6f. At last Awwad could wait no longer,
and begged Hamddn to go with him. They both
jumped down from the camels they were riding,
and set oflF as hard as they coidd run to meet the
J6fi, who by this time had proceeded on their way,
while Wilfrid and Mohammed were returning.
"Wilfrid on arriving held out to me a handful of the
best dates I have ever eaten, which the men had
given him. The Sherari and Awwad presently came
back with no dates, but a great deal of J6f gossip.

We are encamped this evening near some curious
tells of red, yellow, and purple sandstone, a forma-
tion exactly similar to parts of the Sinai penin-
sida. There is a splendid view to the south, and
we can see far away a blue line of hills * which,

* Jebd el Tawll.

cH. v.] Castle of Marid. 1 1 1

they tell us, are beyond J6f, at tlie edge of the
Nef ud 1

We have been questioning Hamdan about his tribe,
the SheraiAt, and he gives the following as their
principal sections : —

El Hueymreh . ... Sheykh El Hawi.
El Helesseh ... „ Ibn Heday^ja.

El Khay&li .... „ Zeyd el Werdi.

Shemalat .... „ Fathal el Dendeh.

. The Sherarllt have no horses, but breed the finest
dromedaries in Arabia. Their best breed is called
Senat Udeyhan, (daughters of Udeyhan). With a
Bint Udeyhan, he says^ that if you started from
where we now are at sunset, you would be to-moiv
row at sunrise at ELAf, a distance of a hundred and
eighty miles. A thief not long ago stole a Sherflxi
deliil at Mez&rib, and rode it aU the way to Hail in
seven days and nights I

January 5. — A long wearisome ride of twenty-
two miles, always expecting to see J6f, and always
disappointed. The ground broken up into fantastic
hills and ridges, but on a lower level than yesterday,
descending in fact all day. Every now and then we
caught sight of the Wady Sirhdn far away to the
right, with blue hills beyond it, but in front of us
there seemed aa endless succession of rocky ridges.
At last from the top of one of these there became
visible a black outline, stauding darkly out against
the yellow confusion of sandstone hills and barren
wadys, which we knew must be the castle of Marid*

112 A Pilgrimage to Nejd. [ch. v.

It looked a really imposing fortress, though dreary
enough in the middle of this desolation. Towards
this we pushed on, eager for a nearer view. Then
■we came to a natural causeway of w^hite rock, which
Awwad and Hamdan both affirmed to be a continu-
ation of the RomaQ road from Salkhad. We should
have liked to beUeve this, but it was too clear that
the road was one made by nature. Along this we
travelled for some miles till it disappeared. All of
a sudden we came as it were to the edge of a basin,
and there, close under us, lay a large oasis of palms,
surrounded by a wall with towers at intervals, and a
little town clustering round the black castle. We
were at Jd£

THE CABTLZ

CHAPTER NI.

l!be Jot oasia — We are entertained by Ibn Basbid'a lieutenant — A
haancb of wild cov — Dancing ia the ooatle— Prayers— We go
on to Ueekaketi,

Jop is not at all what we expected. We thought
we should find it a large cultivated distiict, and
it turns out to be merely a small town. There is
nothing at all outside the walls except a few square
patches, half au acre or so each, green with young
com. These are watered from wells, and irrigated
just like the gardens inside the walls, with little
water-courses carefully traced in pattema, like a
jam tart The whole basin of J6f is indeed barely
three miles across at its widest, and looks, what
it no doubt is, the empty basin of a little inland
sea. How, or when, or why, it was originally
dried up, is beyond me to guess (one can only say
with Mohammed, it is " min Allah ") ; but the
proofs of its pelagic origin are apparent everywhere.
It looks lower than the rest of the Wady Sirhdn,
with which it probably communicates; and we
thought at first that it might have been the last

114 ^ Pilgrimage to Nejd. [ch. vr.

water-hole, as it were, of the sea when it dried up.
But this is not really the case, as its lowest part is
exactly on a level with all the hollows of the wady.
Its wells are between 1800 and 1900 feet above the
sea. They are shallow, only a few feet from the
surface, and the water is drawn by camels pulling a
long rope with a bucket, which empties itself as it
reaches the surface into a kind of trough. The
town, with its gardens, all encircled by a mud wall
ten feet high, is about two miles long from north to
south, and half a mile across. The rest of the plain
is nearly a dead flat of sand, with here and there a
patch of hard ground, sandy clay, where the water
collects when it rains, and salt is left when it
dries up.

Wherever a well has been sunk, a little garden
has been made, fenced in with a wall, and planted
with palms. There are perhaps a dozen of these
outlying farms occupying two or tliree acres each.
In one place there are four or five houses with their
gardens together, which have the look of a village.
The whole of the basin, except these oases, is
dazzlingly white, showing the palm groves as black
patches on its surface. Jof itself contains not more
than six hundred houses, square boxes of mud, clus-
tering, most of them, round the ruin of Marid, but
not all, for there are half a dozen separate clusters
in different parts of the grove. ]\Iany of these houses
have a kind of tower, or upper storey, and there are
small towers at irregular intervals all round the

r.B.vi.] TJte new castle. 115

outer wall The chief feature of the town, besides
Marid, is a new castle just outside the anceinie,
inhabited by Ibn Rashid's lieutenant. It stands on
rising ground, and is an imposing building, square,
with battlemented walls forty feet high, flanked
with round and square towers tapering upwards
twenty feet higher than the rest. It has no
windows, only holes to shoot from ; and each tower
has several excrescences like hoods (machicoulis)
for the same purpose.

There is nothing like a bazaar in J6f, nor even
streets, as one generally understands the word, only
a number of narrow tortuous lanes, with mud walla
on either side. As we rode into the town, -we found
the lanes crowded with armed men, all carrying
swords in the way we had seen at Kaf, dark-visaged
and, we thought, not very pleased to see us. They
answered our " salaam aleykum " simply, without
moving, and let us pass on without any particular
demonstration of hospitality. To suppose them in-
different, however, was a mistake ; their apparent
coldness was only Arab formality, and when Mo-
hammed began to inquire after the house of his rela-
tions, they very civilly pointed out the way, and one
or two of them came with us. We were led down a
number of narrow byways, and through the palm-
gardeos to the other side of the town, and then out
by another gate beyond to one of the isohtted farms
wc had seen from the chff. It was close by, not a
quarter of a mile, and in a few minutes more we

1 16 A Pilgrimage to Nejd. [ch. vu

liad dismounted, and were being hospitably enter-
tained in the tidy kahwah of Huseyn's house.

What Huseyn's exact relationship is to Moham-^
med, I have not yet been able to discover — Moham-
med himself hardly knows — ^but here it is evident
that any consanguinity, however slight, is considered
of high importance. We were no sooner seated by
Huseyn's fire, watching the coflFee roasting, than
another relation arrived, attracted by the newa
of our arrival, and then another, both loud in their
expostulations at our having accepted Huseyn's
hospitality, not theirs. Mohammed was kissed and
hugged, and it was all he could do to pacify these
injured relatives by promising to stay a week with
each, as Soon as our visit to Huseyn should be over..
Blood here is indeed thicker than water. The
sudden appearance of a twentieth cousin is enough
to set everybody by the ears.

A lamb has been killed, and we have each had
the luxury of a bath in our own tent, and a
thorough change of raiment. The tent is pitched
in a little palm garden behind the house, and we
are quite at peace, and able to think over all that
has happened, and make our plans for the future.

January 6. — Last night, while we were sitting
drinking coflFee for the ninth or tenth time since our
arrival, two young men came into the kahwah and
sat down. They were very gaily dressed in silk
jibbehs, and embroidered shirts under tlicir drab
woollen abbas. They wore red cotton kefij^ehs on

CH. VI.] Tfie garrison. 117

their heads, bound with white rope, and their
swords were silver-hilted. Everyone in the kahwah
stood up as they entered, and we both thought
them to be the sons of the Sheykh, or some great
personage at J6f. Wilfrid whispered a question
about them to Huseyn, who laughed and said they
were not sons of sheykhs, but "zellemet Ibn Rashid,**
Ibn Rashid's men, in fact, his soldiers. The red
kefiyeh, and the silver hiltcd sword, was a kind of
uniform. They had come, as it presently appeared,
from Dowass, the acting governor of J6f, to invite
us to the castle, and though we were sorry to leave
Huseyn's quiet garden and his kind hospitality, we
have thought it prudent to comply. Neither Huseyn
nor anyone else seemed to think it possible we coidd
refuse, for Ibn Rashid's government is absolute at
J6f, and his lieutenant's wishes are treated as com-
mands, not that there seems to be ill-feeling between
the garrison and the town ; the soldiers we saw
appear to be on good terms with everybody, and are
indeed so good-humoured, that it would be difficult
to quarrel with them. But J6f is a conquered
place, held permanently in a state of siege, apd the
discipline maintained is very strict. We have
moved accordingly with all our camp to the precincts
of the official residence, and are encamped just
under its walls. The kasr^ which, as I have said, is
outside the town, was built about twelve years ago
by Metaab ibn Rashid, brother of the Emir Telldl
<Mr. Palgrave's friend), and though so modem a

1 1 8 A Pilgrimage to Nejd. [ch. vr.

construction, has a perfectly mediaeval look, for
architecture never changes in Arabia. It is a very-
picturesque building with its four high towers at
the corners, pierced with loopholes, but without
windows. There is one only door, and that a
small one in an angle of the wall, and it is
always kept locked. Inside it the entrance turns
and twists about, and then there is a small
court-yard surrounded by the high walls, and a
kahwah, besides a few other small rooms, all dark
and gloomy like dungeons. Here the deputy
governor lives with six soldiers, young men from
Hail, who, between them, govern and garrison and
do the police work of J6f. The governor himself is
away just now at Meskakeh, the other small town
included in the J6f district, about twenty miles from
here. He is a negro slave, we are told, but a person
of great consequence, and a personal friend of the
Emir.

J6f, as far as we have been able to learn through
Mohammed, for we don't like to ask too many
questions ourselves, was formally an appanage of the
Ibn ShaaJans, Sheykhs of the Koala, and it still pays
tribute to Sotamm; but about twenty years ago
Metaab ibn Rashid conquered it, and it has ever
since been treated as part of Nejd. There have
been one or two insurrections, but they have been
vigorously put down, and the J6fi are now afraid of
stirring a finger against the Emir. On the occasion
of one of these revolts, Metaab cut down a great

^' VI] /6n Rashid and t/ie Sultan. 119

many palm trees, and half ruined the town, so they
are obliged to wait and make the best of it In
truth, the government can hardly be very oppressive*
These six soldiers with the best will in the world
cannot do much bullying in a town of four or five
thousand inhabitants. They are all strong, active,
good-humoured young fellows, serving here for a
year at a time, and then being relieved. They are
volunteers, and do not get pay, but have, I suppose,
some advantages when they have done their service.
They seem quite devoted to the Emir. .

Four years ago, they tell us, the Turkish Governor
of Damascus sent a military expedition against
J6f (the same we heard of at Kaf ), and held it for a
a few months ; but Ibn Eashid complained to the
Sultan of this, and threatened to turn them out and
to discontinue the tribute he pays to the Sherlf of
Medina if the troops were not withdrawn, so they
had to go back. This tribute is paid by the Emir
on account of his outlying possessions, such as K&f,
Teyma, and Jof, which the Turks have on various
occasions attempted to meddle with. He is, however,
quite independent of the Sultan, and acknowledges
no suzerain anywhere. The greatness of Ibn Saoud
and the Wahhabis is now a thing of the past, and
Mohammed ibn Rashid is the most powerful ruler
in Arabia. We hear a charming account of Nejd,
at least of the northern part of it. You may travel
anywhere, they say, from J6f to Kasim without
escort. The roads are safe everywhere. A robbery

1 20 A Pilgrimage to Nejd. [ch. ti

has not been known on the Emir's highway for
many years, and people fomid loafing about near
the roads have their heads cut ofi*. Ibn Baahid
allows no ghaziis against travellers, and when he
makes war it is with his enemies. The Ibn Haddal
and Ibn MajU are his friends, but he is on bad
terms with Sotamm and the Sebaa Sheykhs.

There arc two twelve pounder cannons of English
make in the castle. They are ancient pieces of no
value, but were used, it appears, in the siege of J6f
by Metaab.

The J6fi are of a diflferent race from the Shammar
of Nejd, being as mixed in their origin almost as the
Tudmuri or the villagers of the Euphrates. Huseyn
el-Kelb, our first host here, tells us he belongs to
the Tai, and that others of his neighbours arc
Sirhdn or Beni Laam. He is not really a cousin of
Mohammed's, but a cousin's cousin ; the real cousins
living at MeskakeL Though we were very comfort-
able with him, we are not less well oflF here ; and
it is more interesting being at the kasr. Dowass,
the deputy governor, is a ver}'- amiable man, and
all his soldiers are exceedingly civil and obliging.
They are a cheerful set of people, talking openly
about everything with us, politics and all. They
assure us Ibn Eashid will be delighted to see us,
but we must see Johar, the black governor, first.
There are several real slaves in the fort, but no
women. The soldiers leave their wives behind at Hail
when they go away on service. There are no horses

Wild cow.

itt J6f, except one two-year-old colt belonging to
Dubejeh, one of the Boldiers, wlio all admire our
shagra (chestnut mare) amazingly, saying that there
is nothing in Nejd so beautiful Neither are there
any beasts of burden, not even asses. The few
camels there are in the town are kept for drawing
■water ; and the only other four-footed creatures I
have seen are a few goats and three half-atarved
cows at the kasr. There is not an atom of vegeta-
tion within miles of J6f, and the camels and these
cows have to eat chopped straw and refuse dates.

Our dinner to-day consisted of a lamb and three
other dishes— one a sort of paste like the paste used
for pasting paper, another merely rancid butter with
chopped onions, and the third, bread sopped in
water — aU nasty except the lamb. There was,
however, afterwards an extra course brought to us
as a surprise, a fillet of " wild cow " (probably an
antelope) from the Neffid, baked in the ashes, one
of the best meats I ever tasted.

In the evening we had an entertainment of
dancing and singing, in which DowaM, as well as
the soldiers, took part They performed a kind of
flword dance, one performer beating on a drum
made of palm wood and horse hide, while the rest
lield their swords over their shoulders and chaunted
in solemn measure, dancing as solemnly. Occasionally
the swords were brandished, and then there was a
scream very like what may be heard in liie hunting-
field at home. Once or twice there was a distinct

122 A Pilgrimage to Nejd. [en. tl*

who-whoop, exactly in the proper key, and with the
proper emphasis. The tunes were many of them
striking, after the manner of Arabian music. One
of them ran thus : —

The dancing ended, a huge bowl of date molasses
(dibs) and juice from treiigs (a gigantic sort of
lemon) was mixed ; and surprising quantities of
this temperance liquid drunk. Now we are quiet;
outside the castle, which is locked up for the night,
and are at liberty to write or make sketches by
moonlight, things we dare not do in the daytime.

January 7. — Hamddn, our Sherdri guide, who
had disappeared, returned this morning furtively
for the balance of pay due to him. He says he
is a&aid of the people at the castle, and cannot stay
with us.

A messenger has come from Meskakeh with an
invitation from J6har for us, so we are going on
there to-morrow. We are not, however, to stay
with J6har, as he has no house of his own there,
but with our relations, the Ibn Aruks, who have at
last been really discovered. Nassr ibn Aruk, the
head of the family, hearing of our arrival, has sent
his son with every sort of polite message, and it is
to his house we shall go. The young man is
modest, and well-mannered, without pretension,
honest and straightforward, if one can read any*

S^-^'i-} Morning calls. 12-^

o

thing in faces ; and evidently mucli impressed with
the honour done him by our intended visit.

We have been making calls all the morning, first
on our former host, Huseyn el-Kelb, and the other*
relatives, and then on one or two notables of the
town. Huseyn says that the Beyt Habiib, mentioned
by Mr. Palgrave, exists, but that the noblest of all
the families is that of Mehsin ibn Dirra, formerly
Sheykh of J6f, but now reduced to the condition
of one of the Emir's subjects. Ibn Dirra is not
(Mohammed tells us) by any means pleased at the
political changes in J6f ; but he is afraid to show
more than a half-smothered discontent, for Mo-
hammed ibn Eashid keeps a hostage for his good
conduct in the person of his eldest son. This youth
resides at Hail, where he is not exactly a prisoner,
but cannot return to his friends. At all the houses
we were fed and entertained, having to drink end-
less cups of cofiee flavoured with cloves (heyl), and
eat innumerable dates, the helwet el Jdfy which they
say here are the best in Arabia ; they are of excellent
flavour, but too sweet and too sticky for general
use. The people of J6f live almost entirely on
dates ; not, however, on the helwet y which are not
by any means the common sort. There are as
many varieties here of dates as of apples in our
orchards, and quite as different from each other.
The kind we prefer for ordinary eating is light
coloured, crisp, and rounder than the helwet ; while
these are sliapeless, and of the colour of a horse

124 A Pilgrimage to Ncjd. [ch. vi.

chestnut It is a great mistake to suppose that
dates are better for being freshly gathered; on
the contrary, they mellow with keeping. The
sweeter kinds contain so much sugar, that when
placed in an open dish they half dissolve into a
syrup, in which the sugar forms in large lumps. I
have no doubt that regular sugai- could be manu-
fioctured from them.

The coffee making is much the same process here
as among the Bedouins of the north, except that it
is more tedious. First, there is an interminable
sorting of the beans, which are smaller and lighter
in colour than what one gets in Europe ; then, after
roasting, a long pounding in a mortar, though the
coffee is never pounded quite fine ; then an extra-
ordinaiy amount of washing and rinsing of coffee-
pots, five or six of them ; and lastly, the actual
boiling, which is done three times. The J6f mortars
are very handsome, of red sandstone, the common
stone of the country, and are, I believe, an article
of export. I should like to take one away with me
but they are too heavy, a quarter of a camel load
each. The design on them is simple but handsome,
and I should not be surprised if it were very
ancient The only other manufactures of J6f that
I heard of, are cartridge belts and woollen abbas.
The former are showy and tipped with silver, and
all the servants have purchased them ; the latter
are made of wool brought from Bagdad. Aw wad
bought one for six and a half mejidies.

CH- VI.] Prayers. 125

We next had a look at the castle of Marid, the
only building of stone in J6f. Its construction
dates, I should say, from mediaeval times, certainly
it is not classic, and it has no particular feature to
make it interesting. It looks best at a distance. I
find the map places it a long way from J6f, but in
reality it is within the waJls of the town, on the
western edge. It stands about 2000 feet above
the sea.

While sitting in Ibn Dirra's house, we saw an
instance of Ibn Eashid's paternal government, and
the first sign of Wahhabism. The midday prayer
was called from the roof of the mosque close by, for
there is no minaret in J6f, but for some time
nobody seemed inclined to move, taking our visit
as an excuse. Then an old man with a sour face
began lecturing the younger ones, and telling them
to get up and go to pray, and finding precept of no
avail, at last gave them the example. Still the
main body of the guests sat on, till suddenly up
jumped the two young soldiers who had come with
us, and shouting " kum, kum,'' get up, get up, set
to with the flats of their swords on the rest and so
drove them to the mosque, all but our host, whose
position as such made him sacred from assault. It
is very evident that religion is not appreciated here,
and except the sour looking old man nobody seemed
to take the praying seriously, for the soldiers when
they had done their duty of driving in the others,
came back without ceremony from the mosque.

126 A Pilgrimage to Ncjd. [ch. vi.

The outward show of religion does not seem natural
among the Arabs.

Another sword dance to-night, and another
carouse on lemonade.

January 8. — A cloudy, almost foggy morning,
and a shower of rain. We wished Dowass and his
soldiers good-bye, and they really seemed sorry to
part with us. They are extraordinarily good-
tempered, honest people, and have treated us with
great kindness. Dowass's last attention to me was
the present of an enormous treng as big as a large
cocoanut. The trengs are sour not sweet lemons,
but they have a rind an inch thick, sweet enough
to be eaten though very woolly.

Meskakeh, where we have come to-day, is about
twenty miles from Jdf, and there is a well-beaten
track between the two places. We were a rather
numerous party, as several Jofi came with us for
company, and we have Areybi ibn Ariik, Nassr's
son, and another Aruk, a cousin of his, and a man
with a gun who is by way of going on with us to
HaiL All the party but ourselves were on foot,
for the J6fi never ride, having neither horses nor
camels nor even donkeys. One of the men had
with him an ostrich eggshell slung in a sort of
network, and used like a gourd to hold wat^r. Ho
told me that ostriches are common in the Nefud,
which is now close by. The scenery all the way
was fantastic, sometimes picturesque. First we
crossed the punchbowl of J6f to the other side.

cH. VI. J Inscriptions. 127

.passing several ruined farnas, the ground absolutely
barren, and the lowest part of it covered with salt.
The whole of this depression is but a mile across.
.Then our road rose suddenly a hundred feet up a
steep bank of sand, and then again a hundred and
sixty feet over some stony ridges, descending again
to cross a subbkha with a fringe of tamarisks just
now in flower, then tracts of fine ironstone gravel,
undistinguishable from sheep's droppings. About
two hours from Jof is a large water-hole, which the
Jofi call a spring, the water about eight feet below
ground. In the wadys where water had flowed (for
it rained here about a month ago), there were bright
green bulbous plants with crocus flowers, giving a
false look of fertility. In other places there were
curious mushroom rocks of pink sandstone topped
with iron, and in the distance northwards several
fine masses of hill, Jebel Hammamiyeh or the
pigeon mountains • being the most remarkable.
These may have been a thousand feet higher than
J6f. Far beyond, to the north-east and east, there
ran a level line of horizon at about an equal height,
the edge of the Hamdd, for all the country we have
been crossing is within the area of the ancient sea,
which, we suppose, must have included the Wady
Sirhdn, J6f, and Meskakeh.

On one of the rocks I noticed an inscription, or
rather pictures of camels and horses, cut on a flat
surface about five feet across. We could not, how-
ever, under the circumstances, copy it.

*mim

128 A Pilgrimage to Nejd. [en. vr.

Meskakeh, though not the seat of J6har's govern-
ment, ia a larger town than J6f, — seven hundred
houses they say, and palm gardens at least twice as
extensive as the other's. The position of the two
towns is much the same, a broad hollow surrounded
by cliffs of sandstone, but the Meskakeh basin is less
regular, and is broken up with sandhills and outlying
tells of rock Meskakeh, like J6f, has an ancient
citadel perched on a cliff about a hundred feet high,
and dominating the town. The town itself is
irregularly built, and has no continuous wall round
its gardens. There are many detached gardens and
groups of houses, and these have not been ruined as
those of J6f have been by recent wars. Altogether,
it has an exceedingly flourishing look, not an acre
of irrigable land left unplanted. Everything is neat
and clean, the walls fresh battlemented, and every
house trim as if newly built. The little square plots
of barley are surrounded each by its hedge of wattled
palm branches, and the streets and lanes are scrupu-
lously tidy. Through these we rode without stopping,
and on two miles beyond, to Nassr's farm. We are
now in the bosom of the Ibn ArAk family, after all no
myth, but a hospitable reality, receiving us with open
arms, as if they had been expecting us every day for
the last hundred years. They know the Ibn Aruk
ballad and Mohammed's genealogy far better than he
knows it himself, so for the time at least we may hope
to be in clover, and if after all we get no further, we
may feel that we have travelled not quite in vain.

CHAPTER VII.

" And Lwh wM tendsr ejM hut Baolu] wu beftnlUal.'— Book oy Qunau.

The Ibn Arfiks of Jdf — Molkaitmieil oonttsota a m&trimoiiial aUuutcs
— Leah aod Boohel — We cheapen the bride's dower — A nogio
gorenior ud hia snite — A thnnder-Btorm.

We stayed three days with Nasar and his sons,
and his sons' wives and their children, in tiieir quiet
farm house. It was a rest which we much needed,
and proved besides to be an interesting experience,
and an excellent opportunity of learning more of
Arab domestic life than we had done on ourpreviomi
journeys. Not that the Ibn Aruks of Meskakeh are
in themselves of any particular interest. Like their
relations of Tudmur, they have been too long settled
down as mere townspeople, marrying the daughters
of the land, and adopting many of the sordid town
notions, but they were honest and kind-hearted, and
the traditions of their origin, still religiously pre-'
served, cost an occasional gleam of something like
romance on their otherwise matter of fact lives.
Nassr, the best of the elder generation, resembled
some small Scottish laird, poor and penurious, but
aware of having better blood in his veins than his

130 A Pilgrimage to Nejd. [ch. vn.

neighbours — one whose thought, every day in the
year but one, is of how to save sixpence, but who on
that one day shows himself to be a gentleman, and
the head of a house. His sons were quiet, modesty
and unpretending, and, like most young Arabs,
more romantically inclined than their father. They
even had a certain appreciation of chivalrous ideas ;
especially Turki, the elder, in whom the Bedouin
blood and Bedouin traditions predominated almost
to the exclusion of commercial instincts, while in
his brother Areybi, these latter more than counter-
balanced the former. We liked both the brothers,
of course preferring Turki, with whom Wilfrid made
great friends.

Mohammed is less distantly related to these
people than I had supposed. His ancestor, Ali ibn
ArAk, was one of the three brothers who, in con-
sequence of a blood feud, or, as Wilfrid thinks more
likely, to escape the Wahhabi tyranny of a hundred
years ago, left Aared in Nejd, and came north as
far as Tudmur, where Ali married and remained.
Another brother, Abd el-Kader ibn Aruk, had
stopped at J6f, settled there, and became Nassr's
grandfather. As to the third, Mutlakh, the descend-
ants of the two former know nothing of his fate,
except that, liking neither Tudmur nor J6f, he
returned towards Nejd. Some vague report of his
death reached them, but nobody can tell when or
how he died. Nassr came from J6f to Meskakeh
not many years aga

CH.TI1.] The Lady Shentma.- 131

. Kassr is now the head of the family, at least of
that branch of it which inhabits the Meskalceh oasis.
But there lives in an adjoining house to his, his fiist
cousin, Jazi ibn Anik, brother to our friend Mer-
2uga, and father to two pretty daughters. These,
with a few other relations, make up a pleasant
little family party, all living in their outlying farm
together.

Of course our first thought on coming amongst
them was for a wife for Mohammed, at whose
request I took an early opportunity of making
acquaintance with the women of the family. I
found them all very friendly and amiable, and some
of them intelligent Most of the younger ones were
good looking. The most important peraou in the
barim was Nassr's wife, a little old lady named
Shemma (candle), thin and wizened, and wrinkled,
with long grey locks, and the weak eyes of extreme
old age ; and, though she can have been hardly
more than sixty, she seemed to be completely worn
out She was the mother of Turki and Areybi ;
and I had heard from Mohammed that Nassr had
never taken another wife but her. In this, however,
be was mistaken, for on my very first visit, she
called in a younger wife from the adjoining room,
and introduced her at once to me. The second
wife came in with two little boys of two and three
years old, the eldest of whom (for they all have
extraordinary names) is called Mattrak, " stick ; "
in spite of which he seemed an amiable, good-

132 A Pilgrimage to Nejd. [ch. tii.

tempered child. In this he resembled his mother,
whose respectful mamier towards her elder, Shemma,
impressed me favourably ; she had, besides, a really
beautiful face. The little boy, Mattrak, I recognised
as a boy I had seen in the morning with old Nassr
in our garden, and supposed to be his grandson.
Nassr was doing his best to spoil the child, after the
fashion of old men among the Arabs. I had then
given Mattrak a little red frock, one I had bought
for Sotamm's boy, Mansur, when we thought we
were going to the Eoala, and in this the child was
now strutting about, showing off his finery to two
very pretty little girls, his sisters. These two ran
in and out during my visit, helping to bring bowls
of dates, and to eat the dates when brought. Next
appeared Turki's two wives, a pretty one and a
plain one, and Areybi's one wife, pretty, and lately
married. All these seemed to be on better terms
with one another than is usually the case among
mixed wives and daughters-in-law. They were
extremely anxious to please me, and I, of course,
did my best to satisfy their hospitable wishes about
eating. They offered me dates of countless kinds,
—dry ones and sticky ones, sweet and less sweet,
long dried ones, and newer ones, a mass of pulp ;
it was impossible for one person to do justice to
them alL

Shemma treated all the young people with the
air of one in authority, though her tone with them
was kind. She, however, spoke little, while the

CH.VII.] Three beauties. 133

others talked incessantly and asked all sorts of
questions, requiring more knowledge of Arabic
than I possessed to answer. In the middle of the
visit, Nazzch, Nassr's married daughter, own sister
to Tnrki and Areybi, arrived with her daughter,
and an immense bowl of dates. She had walked
aU the way from the town of Meskakeh, about three
miles, carrying this child, a fat heavy creature of
four, as weU as the dates, and came in, panting and
laughing, to see me. She was pleasant and lively,
very like her brother Turki in face, that is to say,
good-tempered rather than good-looking. Any one
of these young ladies, seen on my first visit, might
have done for Mohammed's project of marriage,
but, unfortunately, they were all either married or
too young. I asked if there were no young ladies
already *' out," and was told that there were none
in Nassr's house, but that his cousin Jazi had two
grown-up daughters, not yet married ; so I held
my peace till there should be an opportunity of
seeing them.

Mohammed, in the meantime, had already begun
to make inquiries on his own account, and the first
day of our visit was not over before he came to me
with a wonderful account of these very daughters
of Jazi. There were three of them, he declared,
and all more beautiful each than the others, Asr
(afternoon), Hamu, and Muttra — the first two un-
fortunately betrothed already, but Muttra still
obtainable. I could see that already he was

134 -^ Pilgrimage to Nejd. [ch. m.

terribly in love, for with the Arabs, a very little
goes a long way ; and never being allowed to see
young ladies, they fall in love merely through
talking about them. He was very pressing that I
should lose no time about making my visit to their
mother, and seemed to think that I had been
wasting my time sadly on the married cousin.
Mohammed has all along declared that he must be
guided by my opinion. I shall know, he pretends^
at once, not only whether Muttra is pretty, but
whether good-tempered, likely to make a good
wife. He had been calculating, he said, and thought
forty pounds would be asked as her dower. It is a
great deal to be sure, but then she was really " asil,'*
and the occasion was a unique one — a daughter of
Jazi ! — a niece of Merzuga ! — a girl of such excellent
family ! — an Ibn Aruk ! and Ibn Aruks were not to
be had every day ! — forty pounds would hardly be
too much. He trusted aU to my judgment — I had
so much discernment^ and had seen the wives and
daughters of all the Anazeh Sheykhs ; I should
know what was what, and should not make a mis-
take. Still, he would like Abdallah to go with me,
just to spy out things. Abdallah, as a relation,
might be admitted to the door on such an occasion,
though he, Mohammed, of course could not; he
might, perhaps, even be allowed to see the girl, as
it were, by accident. With us, the Ibn Aruks, the
wives and daughters are always veiled, a custom
we brought with us from Nejd, for we are not

CH. Til.] Marriage plans. 135

like the Bedouins; yet on so important an oc-
casion as this, of arranging a marriage, a man
of a certain age, a dependant, or a poor relation,
is sometimes permitted to see aad report. I
promised that I would do all I could to expedite
the matter.

Accordingly, the next day Turki was sent for,
and a word dropped to him of the matter in hand,
and he was forthwith dispatched to announce my
visit to the mother of the daughters of Jasi-^
Mohammed explaining, that it was etiquette that
the mother should be made acquainted with the
object of my visit, though not necessarily the
daughters. Then we went to Jazi's house, Turki,
Abdallah, and I.

Jazi's house is close to Nassr's, only the garden
wall dividing them, and is still smaller than his, a
poor place, I thought, to which to come for a
princess ; but in Arabia one must never judge by
externals. At the door, among several women, stood
Saad, Jazi's eldest son, who showed us through the
courtyard to an inner room, absolutely dark, except
for what light might come in at the doorway. It is
in Arabia that the expression "to darken one's door,'*
must have been invented, for windows there are
none in any of the smaller houses. There was a
smell of goats about the place, and it looked more
like a stable than a parlour for reception. At first
I could see nothing, but I could hear Saad, who
had plunged into the darkness, shaking something

136 A Pilgrimage to NejcL [ch-to.

in a comer, and as my eyes got accustomed to
the twilight^ this proved to be a young lady, one
of the three that I had come to visit It was Asr
the second, a great, good-looking girl, very like her
cousin Areybi, with his short aquiline nose and
dark eyes. She came out to the light with a great
show of shyness and confusion, hiding her fece in
her l,an<U.1d «ndng .wa, even lorn me ; ™,
would she answer anything to my attempts at
conversation. Then, all of a sudden, she. broke
away from us, and rushed across the yard to
another little den, where we found her with her
mother and her sister Muttra. I hardly knew
what to make of all this, as besides the shyness, I
thought I could see that Asr really meant to be rude,
and the polite manners of her mother Haliyeh and
her little sister Muttra confirmed me in this ide •
I liked Muttra s face at once ; she has a particidarly
open, honest look, staring straight at one with her
great dark eyes like a fawn, and she has, too,
a very bright fresh colour, and a pleasant cheer-
ful voice. I paid, then, little attention to Asr s
rudeness, and asked the little girl to walk with
me round their garden, which she did, showing me
the few things there were to be seen, and explaining
about the well, and the way they drew the water.
The garden, besides the palm trees, contained
figs, apricots, and vines, and there was a little
plot of green barley, on which some kids were
grazing. Muttra told me that in summer they

CH.T1I.] , Muttra. 137

live on fruit, but that they never preserve the
apricots or figs, only the datea I noticed several
young palm trees, always a sign of prosperity. The
well was about ten feet square at the top, and
carefully faced with stone, the. water being only a
few feet below the siirfece of the ground. Water,
she told me, could be found anywhere at Meskakeh
by digging, and always at the same depth. I was
pleased with the intelligence Muttra showed in this
conversation, and pleased with her pretty ways and
honest face, and decided in my own mind without
difficulty that Mohammed would be most fortunate
if he obtained her in marriage. It was promising,
too, for their future happiness, to remark that
Haliyeh, the mother, seemed to be a sensible
woman ; only 1 could not understand the strange
behaviour of the elder sister Asr. Abdallah, in
the meanwhile, standing at the door, had made
his notes, and come to much the same conclusion
as myself; so we returned with an excellent
report to give to the impatient suitor waiting
outside.

Mohammed's eagerness was now very nearly
spoiling the negociation, for he at once began to
talk of his intended marriage ; and the same thing
happened to him in consequence, which happened
long ago to Jacob, the son of Isaac. Jazi, imitating
the conduct of Laban, and counting upon his
cousin's anxiety to be married, first of all increased
the dower from forty pounds to sixty, and then

1 38 A Pilgrimage to Ncjd. £ch. vn.

endeavoured to substitute Leah for Eachel, the
ill-tempered Asr for the pretty Muttra.

This was a severe blow to Mohammed's hopes^
and a general council was called of all the family to
discuss it and decide. The council met in our tent,
Wilfrid presiding ; on one side sat Mohammed, with
Nassr as head of the house ; on the other, Jazi and
Saad, representing the bride, while between them»
a little shrivelled man knelt humbly on his knees»
who was no member of the family, but, we after-
wards learned, a professional go-between. Outside,
the friends and more distant relations assembled,
Abdallah and Ibrahim Kasir, and half a dozen of
the Ibn Aruks. These began by sitting at a
respectful distance, but as the discussion warmed,
edged closer and closer in, till every one of them
had delivered himself of an opinion.

Mohammed himself was quite in a flutter, and
very pale ; and Wilfrid conducted his case for him.
It would be too long a story to mention all the
dispute, which sometimes was so warmly pressed,
that negociations seemed on the point of being
broken off. Jazi contended that it was impossible
he should give his younger daughter, while the
elder ones remained unmarried. " Hamii, it was true,
was engaged, and of her there was no question, but
Asr, though engaged too, was really free ; Jeruan,
the shock-headed son of Merzuga, to whom she was
betrothed, was not the husband for her. He was an
imbecile, and Asr would never marry him. K a girl

CH. Til.] Rival Sisters. 1 39

declares that she will not marry her betrothed, slie is
not engaged, and has still to seek a husband she likes.
But this would not do. We cited the instance of
Jedaan's marriage with an engaged girl, and the un-
fortunate sequel, as proving that Jeruan's consent was
necessary for Asr, and Mohammed chimed in, *' Ya
ibn ammi, ya Jazi, Jazi ! son of my uncle how
could I do this thing, and sin against my cousin \
How could I take his bride ? Surely this would be
a shame to us aU." In fine, we insisted that
Muttra it should be or nobody, and Asr's claim was
withdrawn. Still it was pleaded, Muttra was but a
child, hardly fifteen, and unfit for so great a
journey as that to Tudmur. Where indeed was
Tudmur ? who of all the J6fi had ever been so far \
Mohammed, however, replied that if youth were an
obstacle, a year or two would mend that. He was
content to wait for a year, or two, or even for three
years, if need were. He was an Ibn ArAk, and
trained to patience. As to Tudmur, it was far, but
had we not just come thence, and could wo not go
back ? He would send one of his brothers at the
proper time, with twenty men, thirty, fifty, to escort
her. So argued, the marriage project was at last
adopted, as far as Muttra was concerned. But the
question of " settlements" was not as easily got over.
Here it was very nearly being wrecked for good and
all. Wilfrid had all along intended to pay tlic dower
for Mohammed, but he woidd not say so till the
tldng was settled, and left Mohammed to figlit out

140 A Pilgrimage to NejcL [cH-rn.

the question of jointiire to as good a bargain as thej
could make. This Mohammed was very capable of
doing, despite the infirmity of his heart, and
strengthened by Abdallah, who took a strictly
commercial view of the whole transaction, a
middle sum was agreed on, and the conference
broke up.

Things, however, were not yet to go off quite
smoothly. On the day following, when I went
with some little presents for the bride to Jazi's
house, I was met at the door by Jazi himself, who
received me, as I at once perceived, with an em-
barrassed air, as also did Haliyeh, for both she and a
strange relation were sitting in the kahwak To my
questions about Muttra short answers were given ;
and the conversation was at once turned on ** the
weather and the crops," or rather on that Arabian
substitute for it^ a discussion about locusta We
had had a heavy thunderstorm in the morning, for
which all were thankful. It would bring grass in
the NefAd, but the locusts there, never were so nume-
rous as this year. Again I asked about the girls, but
again got no reply ; and at last, tired of their idle
talk, and quite out of patience, I exclaimed, "O
Jazi, what is this? I trust that you — and you,
Haliyeh, — are pleased at this connection with
Mohammed." To which he replied, in a sing-song
voice, " Inshallah, inshallah," and Haliyeh repeated
"Inshallah," and the stranger. I saw that some-
thing must be wrong, for it was no answer to my

CH. vij.] AST's temper. 141

question, and rose to go. Then Haliyeh went out
with me into the yard, and explained what had
happened, Asr, it appeared, witii her violent temper,
was frightening them all out of their wits. She
would not hear of her sister being manied before
herself, or making so much better a matcL Jeruan
she despised, though he was Sheykh of K&f \ and
she wanted to marry the Sheykh of Tudmur her-
self. She had tormented old Jazi into withdrawing
his consent ', and Muttra was a&aid of her. What
was to be done ? I said it was no use arguing
about this over again ; that if she and her husband
were really not able to manage their daughters, we
must look out elsewhere for Mohammed ; that I
hoped and trusted Asr would not be so foolish as to
stand in the way of her sister's happiness, for it
would not profit her. This bad temper of hera
made it more than ever certain that she could not
marry Mohammed, and, in fine, that the family
must make up their minds, yes or no, about
Muttra, and at once, for we were leaving Meskakeh
presently, and must have the matter settled. I then
saw the two girls, and spoke to them in the same
strain, and with such effect that a few hours later,
Mohammed, who had faUen into low spirits about
the affair, now came with a joyful countenance to
say that the marriage contract would be signed that
evening.

Signed, therefore, it was, though to the last
moment difficulty on difficulty was raised, and a

142 A Pilgrimage to I^ejd. [cm. til

lamentably haggling spirit displayed by all except
Turki in the matter of the dover. Rfty Toikiah
pounds was, however, the sum ultimately fixed on ;
and Wilfrid refused curtly to advance a besUik
beyond it, even to buy oflf a cousin who unaccomit-
ably appeared on the scene and claimed his right to
Muttra or an equivalent for her in coin. It was
not very dignified this chaffering about price ; and
people do better in England, leaving such things to
be settled by their lawyers.

Everything, however, was at last arranged, the
marriage contract written out and signed, and
everybody made happy. Then the rest of the
evening was spent in jubilation. A kid was
killed and eaten, songs sung, and stories told, nor
was, as might be expected, the Aruk ballad left out
of the programme. Nassr is a poet, and recited an
ode impromptu for the occasion. Among the guests
were two pilgrims from Mecca — so at least they
called themselves — and some men who had run
away from the Turkish conscription in Syria. These
feasted with the rest, as though they too had been
relations. And so ended Mohammed's marriage
negociations. He is to come back next year or send
for Muttra ; but for the present he is to be content
and wait.

While this family arrangement was in progress,
we had also on hand a more important negociation
of our own, and that was to get the governor's
permission for our journey on to HaiiL The first

oLTiL] An affabU Negro. 143

thing to be done was to make friends with
Johar, for all in this despotic country depends
upon his good will and pleasure; and if he had
chosen to send us back to Kflf by the Wady
Sirhdn, I do not know that we could have offered
any resistance. J6f is not an easy place to get
away from. It is more than three hundred miles
from the nearest point on the Euphrates, and
without the governor's leave no one would have
dared to travel a mile with us. Accordingly, the
day after our arrival at Meskakeh, we called on
J6har, who had been warned of our visit, and
received us in state.

J6har is a perfectly black negro, with repulsive
African features ; tall, and very fat, and very vain.
He had put on his finest clothes to receive us, a
number of gaudy silk jibbehs one over the other, a
pair of sky-blue trousers — things new to us in
Arabia — a black and gold abba, and a purple ko-
fiyeh. His shirt was stifi* with starch, and cnicklod
every time he moved. He carried a handsome gold-
hilted sword, and looked altogether as barbaric a
despot as one need wish to see. He kept us wait-
ing nearly ten minutes in the kahwah, to add, I
suppose, to his importance, and then came in behind
a procession of armed men, all of them well got up
with silver hilted swords^ silver ornamented lielt«^
and blue and red kefiyehs bound with thick wbita
aghals. He affected the affable, rather languid air
of a royal personage^ passing from one subjci^t ot

144 -^ Pilgrimage to Nejd. [ch. tu.

conversation to another without transitioii, and
occasionally asking explanations of our remarks or
questions from one or other of his attendants. It
struck me as eminently absurd to see this negro,
who is still a slave, the centre of an adulous group
of white courtiers, for all these Arabs, noble as
many of them are in blood, were bowing down
before him, ready to obey his slightest wink and
laugh at his poorest joke. After the first few
moments of dignified silence, J6har, as I have
said, became afiable, and began asking the news.
We had come from the north, and could tell him all
about the war. What was Sotamm doing and what
was Ibn Smeyr, — the latter evidently a hero with
the J6fi or rather with the Hail people, for they are
not friends with Sotamm, and old Mohammed
Dukhi is considered Sotamm's great rival. We
were glad to be able to say that we had seen Ibn
Smeyr himself at Damascus not a month ago.
J6har told us in return of a report recently brought
in to Meskakeh by some Sleb that the Roala had
been beaten in a fight with Mohammed Dukhi, and
that Sotamm was killed — a report we were sorry to
hear.

Then, but in a tone of minor interest, we were
questioned about the Sultan. He had made peace
with the Muscov, J6har was glad to hear it
Peace was a good thing, and now "inshallah es Sultan
mabsutin," " the Sultan, let us hope, was pleased ; '*
this with a mock sentimental, patronising accent and

CH. vii-l jfdhar on the house-top. 145

a nasal twang in the voice, which was extremely
comic. A little whispering then took place between
Mohammed and one of the suite, which resulted
in their going out together, to hand over to J6har
the presents we had brought for him. Mohammed
was, I believe, cross- questioned as to our position
and the objects of our journey, and answered, as it
had been agreed beforehand he should do, that
we were going to Bussora to meet friends, and that
we had come by way of J6f to avoid the sea-voyage.
This, though of course not by any means the whole
truth, was true as far as it went, and was a story
easily understood and accepted by those to whom it
was told. Mohammed added, moreover, that as we
had happened to pass through the Emir's dominions,
the English Beg was anxious to pay his respects to
Ibn Rashid at Hail before going any further, and
begged J6har to give us the necessary guides. This,
after some discussion, and some coyness on the
governor's part, he consented to do. His heart had
been softened by the handsome clothes we had given
him, and I believe a small present in money was also
talked of between him and Mohammed.

When we were summoned again to J6har*»
presence, this time on the house-top, we found the
negro's face wreathed in smiles, and our journey
being discussed as a settled matter. Carpets were
then spread, and we all sat down on the roof and
had breakfast, boiled meat on rice, with a sharp
eauce to pour over the rice, and then after the usual-

VOL. I. I.

146 A Pilgrimage to Nejd. [ch. -m.

washings and el hamdu liUahs we retired, extremely
pleased to get away from the flies and the hot sun
of Johars roof; and not a little thankful for the
good turn things had taken with us. As Wilfrid
remarked, when we were well on our mares again
and riding home, J6har was just the picture of a
capricious despot, and one who, if he had been in a
bad humour, might have ordered our heads ofi", with
no more ceremony than he had ordered breakfast.
Our last day at Meskakeh was a quiet one.

January 11. — Every morning since we have been
here there has been a fog, and to-day (Saturday), as
I have already said, it has rained heavily. The rain
came with thunder and lightning, as I believe is
almost always the case in this part of the world- I
am much surprised to learn, in talking of the light-
ning, that nobody at Meskakeh has heard of people
being killed by it, and IMohammed confirms the
statement made here, by saying that the same is the
case at Tudmur. He seemed astonished when I
asked him, at lightning being thought dangerous, and
says that accidents from it never occur in the desert.
This is strange. The surface soil of Meskakeh is
very nearly pure sand, and the rain runs through
it as quickly as it falls, remaining only in a few
hollows, where there is a kind of sediment hard
enough to hold it.

In the afternoon the weather cleared, and we made
a little expedition to the top of the low tell just out-
ride Nassr's farm. The tell is of sandstone rocky

^ ^^m yw^m^^ ^v^^v^ivh

An inscription, 147

orange coloured below, but weathered black on the
upper surface. It is not more than a hundred feet
high, but standing alone, it commands a very exten-
sive view, curious as all views in the J6f district are,
and very pretty besides. In the fore-ground just
below lay the farm, a square walled endoaure of
three or four acres, with its palms and ithel trees,
and its two low mud houses, and its wella, looking
snug and trim and well to do. Beyond, looking
westwards, three other farms were visible, spots of
dark green in the broken wilderness of sand and
sandstone rock, and then behind them Meskakeh,
only its palm-tops in sight, and the dark mass of its
citadel rising over them in fantastic outline. The
long line of the palm grove stretched far away to the
south, disappearing at last in a confused mass of
sand-hills. These specially attracted our notice, for
they marked the commencement of the Neffld, not
indeed the great Neffid, but an outlying group of
dunes tufted with ghada, and not at all unlike those
passed through by the Calais and Boulogne railway.
Our route, we know, lies across them, and we are to
start to-morrow.

'While I sat sketching this curious view, "Wilfrid,
who had climbed to the top of a tall stone, crowning
the hill, came back with the news that he had dis-
covered an inscription. We have been looking out,
ever since our arrival in the sandstone district, for
traces of ancient writing, but have hitherto found
nothing except some doubtful scratches, and a few

148 A Pilgrimage to Nejd. [ch. m.

of those simple designs one finds everywhere on
the sandstone, representing camels and gazelles.
Here however, were three distinctly formed letters,
n H, O, two of them belonging to the Greek
alphabet.

It was evident, too, by the colour of the incisions^
that they had been there for very many years. On
these we have built a number of historical conjec-
tures relating to Meskakeh, and its condition in
classical times.

When we came home again, we found that Mo-
hammed had been to make the last arrangements
with J6har for our journey. The great man had
raised objections at one point of the negociations,
but these had been settled by a dahab or gold piece,
and he has now agreed to send a man with us, a
professional guide for crossing the Neflid. It seems
that there are two lines by which Hail may be
reached, one of thirteen and the other of ten days*
journey. The first is better suited, they say, for
heavy laden camels, as the sand is less deep, but we
shall probably choose the shorter route, if only for
the sake of seeing the NefAd at its worst. For the
Nefftd has been the object of our dreams all through
this journey, as the ne plus ultra of desert in the
world. We hear wonderful accounts of it here, and
of the people who have been lost in it This ten
days' journey represents something like two hundred
miles, and there are only two wells on the way, one
on the second, and another on the eighth day. The

Ready to start.

149

guide will bring his own camel, aad carry a couple
of waterekins, aad we have bought four more, making
up the whole number to eight. This will have to
suffice for our mares aa well as for ourselves, and we
shall have to be very careful. Wo have laid in a
sufficient stock of datea and bread, and have still
got one of the kids left to start with in the way of
meat, the other has just been devoured as I have
said, and cannot be replaced. Provisions of every
kind are difficult to procure at Meskakeh ; it was
only by the exercise of a little almost Turkish bully-
ing that J6har has been able to get us a camel load
of com.

The rain is over and the moon shining. All our
preparations are made for crossing the Neffid, and
in a few hours we shall be on our way. We shall
want all our strength for the next t«n days.

A HMD IIHRn>.

.■ 1

J

■ I

i

'i

CHAPTER VIII.

" We were now travereinff an immenM ocean of looee reddish sand, vm-
limited to the eye, and heaped up in enonnoos ridges running p^ra^Vtl to
each other from north to soath, nndulation after undulation, each swell two
or three hundred feet in average height, with slant sides and rounded c reals
furmwotl in every direction by the capricious gales of the desert. In the
depths between the traveller finds himself as it were imprisoned in » soffo-
oating Mand pit, hemmed in by burning walls on every side ; while at other
times, while labouring up the slope, he overlooks what seems a vast sea of
fire, swelling under a heavy monsoon wind, and ruffled by a cross blast into
little red hot waves."— Palosavi.

Mohammed in love— We enter the red sand desert— Geology of the
Nef6d — Bodi — ^The great well of Shakik — Old acqaaintaQoe —
Tales of the Neffid— The soldiers who perished of thirst — ^The
lovers — ^We nearly remain in the sand — Land at last.

January 12. — We left the farm this morning
in a thick fog, amoDg the benedictions of the Ibn
ArAks. They have treated us kindly, and we were
sorry to say good-bye to them, especially to Turki
and Areybi, although we are a little disappointed in
our expectations of the family in general In spite
of their noble birth and their Nejdean traditions,
they have the failings of town Arabs in regard to
money, and it was a shock to our feelings that
Nassr, our host, expected a small present in money
at parting, nominally for the women, but in reality,
no doubt, for himself. No desert sheykh, however
: I poor, would have pocketed the mejidies. The boys

too asked for gifts, the elder wanted a cloak, because

CH. VIII.] Farewells. 151

one had been given to his brother, the younger, a
jibbeh, because he already had a cloak ; and other
members of the household came with little skins
full of dates or semneh in their hands, in the guise
of farewell offerings, and lingered behind for some-
thing in return. All this of course was perfectly
fair, and we were pleased to make them happy with
our money ; but it hardly tallied with the fine
sentiments they had been in the habit of expressing,
in season and out of season, about the duties of
hospitality. Such small disappointments, however,
must be borne, and borne cheerfully, for people
are not perfect anywhere, and a traveller has
no right to expect more abroad than he would find
at home. In England we might perhaps not have
been received at all, while here our welcome had
been perfectly honest at starting, whatever the
afterthought may have been. So Wilfrid solemnly
kissed the relations all round, and exchanged
promises of mutual good- will and hopes of meeting ;
I went in to the harim to say good-bye to the rest
of the family, and fortunately was not expected to
kiss them all round ; and then we set out on our
way.

Our course lay due south over the sand hills we saw
yesterday, and presently these shut out Meskakeh
and its palm groves from our view, and we were
once more reduced to our own travelling party of
eight souls, with Kadi our new guide, and fairly on
the road to HaiL These sand dunes are not really

152 A Pilgrimage to Ncjd. [ch. vm.

the NefAd, and are much like what may be seen
elsewhere in the desert, in the Sahara for instance,
or in certain parts of the peninsula of Sinai. They
axe very picturesque, being of pure white sand,
from fifty to a hundred feet high, with intervening
spaces of harder ground, and are covered with
vegetation. The ghada here grows quite into a
tree, with fine gnarled trunks, nearly white, and
feathery grey foliage. We met several shepherds
• with their flocks, sent here to graze from the town,
and parties of women gathering firewood. Mo-
hanuned amused us very much all the morning,
talking with these wood gatherers. He had managed
to get a glimpse of his bride elect and her sister
before starting, and fancies himself desperately in
love, though he cannot make up his mind which of
the two he prefers. Sometimes it is Muttra, as it
ought to be, and sometimes the other, for no better
reason, as far as we can learn, than that she is taller
and older, for he did not see their facea His con-
versations to-day with the wood gatherers shewed
a naivete of mind neither of us suspected. He
would ride on whenever he saw a party of these
women, and when we came up was generally to be
foimd in earnest discussion with the oldest and
ugliest of them on the subject of his heart He
would begin by asking them whether they were
from Meskakeh, and lead round the conversation
to the Ibn Aruk family, and if he found that the
women knew them, he would vaguely ask how

CH. VIII.] Kara. 153

mauy daughters there were in Jazi's house, and
whether married or unmarried. Then he would
hint that he had heard that the eldest one was very-
beautiful, and ask cautiously after the youngest,
ending always by the disclosure that he himself was
an Ibn Aruk from Tudmur, and that he was en-
gaged to whichever of the two unmarried ones the
old women had seemed to favour in their descrip-
tions. By this process he had quite lost his head
about both sisters, sometimes fancying that he was
the happiest of men, and sometimes that Jazi had
passed off the less valuable of his daughters upon
him. On such occasions he would turn to me and
beg me to repeat for the hundredth time my des-
cription of Muttra's merits, which consoled him
until he met somebody else to raise new doubts in
his mind.

After about eight miles of travelling through
the sand dunes, we came out rather suddenly on
the village of Kara, the last that we shall see for
many a day. It is commanded by a rocky mound,
with a ruin on it, and contains seventy or eighty
houses ; the palm grove surrounding it is remark-
able for the palms and ithel trees. The fog had
cleared off, and the sun was hot enough to make
us glad to sit down for a few minutes under
the mud wall which encloses the oasis. Some
villagers came out, and we had a little chat about
Kara and its sheykh, while our mares were being
watered from a well close by. They told us we

1 54 ^ Pilgrimage to Nejd. [ch. nn.

should find a Roala camp not far upon our waj»
for the camels from it were watered from this very
well. Formerly Kara, like Jdf and Meskakeh, was
a fief of the Ibn Shaalans, and they still pay a small
tribute to Sotamm, but in return they make the
Bedouins pay for the water they use. There is no
danger of being attacked by the Roala or anyone
else, for we are in Ibn Rashid's country now, where
highway robbery is not allowed The villagers
were ver}' hospitable in their offers of entertainment
if we would remain at Kara, but there was nothin<^
in the place sufficiently interesting to detain us, sa
we went on. It contains, like J6f and Meskakeh^
a ruined castle on a low tell, but the ruins are now
not much more than the foundations of old stone
walls made without cement.

Not long after leaving the village, we came upon
a party of Roala, with several hundred camels
coming in to Kara for water. They were unarmed,
and travelling as peaceably as peasants would in
Italy. They told us their camp was out of our
way, and too far off for us to reach to-night, but
that we should find Beneyeh ibn Shaalan, a cousin
of Sotamm's, near the well of Shakik our waterinsr
place for to-morrow. It argued well for the
securit}' of the country, to find parties of villagers,
as we presently did, out in the sand dunes many-
miles beyond Kara, with all these Bedouins about.
But really there seem to be law and order in Ibn
Rashid's government. After travelling on for

CH. viH.j Level of the Hamdd. 155

another two hours and a half in broken ground, we
came at last to a steep acclivity which proved, when
we had mounted it, to be the further edge of the
Meskakeh depression, and above it we found our-
selves on a gravelly plain. The view from this,
edge, looking back, was very interesting, and gave,
us at once an idea of the geography of the whole
country, the great basin of Meskakeh with its tells
and sand hills, the long ridge of hill imder which
the oasis stands, the range of Jebel Hammamiyeh
too, all mere islands in the basin, which seema
moreover to include J6f as well as the eastern
villages in its main circuit. Wilfrid has little
doubt now that Meskakeh and J6f are really
only the tail as it were of the Wady Sirhdn or
rather its head, for the whole must be in shape
somethinji; like a tadpole, and this point its nose.

The Hamdd or plain where we now were, is three
hundred and fifty feet higher than Kara and
Meskakeh, or 2220 feet above the sea. It is
absolutely level and bare of vegetation, a flat black
expanse of gravelly soil covered with small round
pebbles, extending southwards to the horizon, and
quite unlike anything in the basin below. We
were much surprised to find such an open plain in
front of us, for we had expected nothing now but
sand, but the sand, though we could not see it, was
not far off*, and this was only as it were the shore
of the great Neffid.

At half past three o'clock we saw a red streak on

156 A Pilgrimage to Nejd. [ch. vm.

the horizon before us, which rose and gathered as
we approached it, stretching out east and west in an
unbroken line. It might at first have been taken
for an effect of mirage, but on coming nearer we
found it broken into billows, and but for its red
colour not imlike a stormy sea seen from the shore,
for it rose up, as the sea seems to rise, when the
waves are high, above the level of the land. Some-
body called out "the Nefud," and though for a
while we were incredulous, we were soon convinced.
What surprised us was its colour, that of rhubarb
and magnesia, nothing at all like the sand we had
bitherto seen, and nothing at all like what we had
expected. Yet the Nefud it was, the great red
desert of central Arabia. In a few minutes we had
cantered up to it, and our mares were standing with
their feet in its first waves.

January 13. — We have been all day in the
Nefud, which is interesting beyond our hopes, and
charming into the bargain. It is, moreover, quite
unlike tlie description I remember to have read of
it by Mr. Palgrave, which affects one as a nightmare
of impossible horror. It is tixic he passed it in
summer, and we are now in mid-winter, but the
physical features cannot be much changed by the
change of seasons, and I cannot understand how
he overlooked its main characteristics. The thing
that strikes one first about the NefM is its colour.
It is not white like the sand dunes we passed
yesterday, nor yeUow as the sand is in parts of the

cu. VIII.] Tlie Ne/iid, 157

Egyptian desert, but a really bright red, almost
crimson in the morning when it is wet with the dew.
The sand is rather coarse, but absolutely pure,
without admixture of any foreign substance, pebble,
grit, or earth, and exactly the same in tint and
texture everywhere. It is, however, a great mistake
to suppose it barren. The Nefiid, on the contrary,
is better wooded and richer in pasture than any
part of the desert we have parsed since leaving
Damascus. It is tufted all over with ghada bushes,
and bushes of another kind called yerta, which at
this time of the year when there are no leaves, is.
exactly like a thickly matted vine. Its long knotted
stems and fibrous trunk give it so much that
appearance, that there is a story about its having^
originally been a vine. The rasul Allah (God's
prophet), Radi says, came one day to a place where
there was a vineyard, and found some peasants
pruning. He asked them what they were doing,
and what the trees were, and they, fearing hia
displeasure or to make fun of him, answered, these
are " yerta " trees, yerta being the first name that
came into their heads. " Yerta inshallah, yerta let
them be then," rejoined the prophet, and from that
day forth they ceased to be vines and bore no fruits
There are, besides, several kinds of camel pasture,
especially one new to us called adr, on which they
say sheep can feed for a month without wanting
water, and more than one kind of grass. Both
camels and mares are therefore pleased with the

158 A Pilgrimage to Nejd, [en. vni.

place, and we are delighted with the abundance of
firewood for our camps. "Wilfrid says that the
NefAd has solved for him at last the mystery of
horse-breeding in Central Arabia. In the hard desert
there is nothing a horse can eat, but here there
is plenty. The NefAd accounts for everything.
Instead of being the terrible place it has been
described by the few travellers who have seen
it, it is in reality the home of the Bedouins during
a great part of the year. Its only want is wat^r,
for it contains but few wells ; all along the edge,
it is thickly inhabited, and Radi tells us that in
the spring, when the grass is green after rain, the
Bedouins care nothing for water, as their camels are
in milk, and they go for weeks without it, wander-
ing far into the interior of the sand desert.

We have been travelling through the Nef6d
elowly all day, and have occupied oui-selves in
studying its natural features. At first sight it
eeemed to us an absolute chaos, and heaped up here
and hollowed out there, ridges and cross ridges, and
knots of hillocks all in utter confusion, but after
some hours* marching we began to detect a uniformity
in the disorder, which we are occupied in trying
to account for. The most striking features of the
NefAd are the great horse-hoof hollows which are
scattered all over it (Radi calls them/?t(;). These,
though varying in size from an acre to a couple of
hundred acres, are all precisely alike in shape and
direction. They resemble very exactly the track of

fjK. VIII.] Fttljes. 159

an xinshod horse, that is to say, the toe is sharply
cut and perpendicular, while the rim of the hoof
tapers gradually to nothing at the heel, the frog
■even being roughly but fairly represented by broken
ground in the centre, made up of converging
water-coursea. The diameter of some of these
fuljea must be at least a quarter of a mile, and
the depth of the deepest of them, which we
measured to-day, proved to be 230 feet, bringing
it down very nearly exactly to the level of the
gravelly plain which we crossed yesterday, and
which, there can be little doubt, is continued under-
neath the aand. This is all the more probable, as we
found at the bottom of this deepest fulj, and nowhere
else, a bit of hard ground. The next deepest fulj we
measured was only a hundred and forty feet, and was
still sandy at the lowest point, that is to say, just
below the point of the frog. Though the soil com-
posing the sides and every part of the fuljes is of pure
sand, and the immediate surface must be constantly
shifting, it is quite evident that the general outline of
each has remained unchanged for years, possibly for
centuries. The vegetation proves this ; for it is not
a growth of yesterday, and it clothes the fuljes like
all the rest, filoreover, our guide, who has travelled
backwards and forwards over the Nefud for forty
years, asserts that it never changes. No sand-
storm ever fills up the hollows, or carries away the
ridges. He knows them all, and has known thena
ever since he was a boy. " They were made so by

i6o A Pilgrimage to Nej'ci. [ch. rm.

God." Wilfrid has been casting about, however^
for some natural theory to account for their forma-
tion, but has not yet been able to decide whether
they are owing to the action of wind or water, or to
inequalities of the solid ground below. But at
present he inclines to the theory of water. We
shall be able perhaps to say more of them hereafter,
when we have seen more of them, and I therefore
reserve my remarks. We have had a long day's
journey, plodding up to the camePs fetlocks in
sand, and now it is time to look after Hanna, who
is busy cooking. Height of our camp 2440 feet ;
but the highest level crossed during the day was
2560 feet Nobody seen all day but one Roala on
a delul, who told us there was a camp to our left.
We looked for it, but only made out camels at a
great distance.

January 14. — Another bright clear morning, but
with a cold wind from the south-east. Nothing can
be more bright and sparkling than the winter's sun
reflected from these red sands. The fulje^ have
again been the object of our attention. We find
that they all point in the same direction, or nearly
80, that is to say, with the toe of the horse-hoof
towards the west, though the steepest part of the
declivity varies a little, sometimes the southerly and
sometimes the northerly aspect being more abrupt
than that facing east. This would seem to point
rather to wind than water as being the original
cause of the depressions. At the edge, moreover, of

CH. VIII.] Features of the NefM. i6i

the large fuljes there is generally a tallish mound of
sand with a ridge, such as one sees on the top of a
snow peak, and evidently caused by the wind, the
lee side being steep and the weather side rounded.
These seem to change with a change of wind and
are generally bare of vegetation, and what is singular,
of a lighter coloured sand than the rest. One can
guess the existence of a deep fulj from a long way
off, by the presence of one of these snowy looking
mounds on the horizon. It is seldom that one can
see very far in the Nefiid, as one is always toiling up
or down sandslopes, or creeping like a fly round the
edges of these great basins. The ground is generally
pretty even, just round the edges, and one goes from
one fulj to another so as to take this advantage of
level. We rode up to the top of one or two of the
highest sand peaks, and from one of them made out
a line of hills about fifteen miles off to the west-
south-west, with an isolated headland beyond, which
we recognized as the Ras el Tawil pointed out to
us the day we arrived at J6f. From these heights
too we could observe the lay of the fuljes, and
make out that they followed each other in strings,
not always in a straight line, but as a wady would
go, winding gently about. This made us speculate
on the water theory again. Wilfrid thinks that
there may be a veiy gradual slope in the plain
beneath the sand, and that whenever rain falls,
as of course it must do here sometimes, it sinks
through to the hard ground and flows imder the

VOL. I. IC

1 62 A Pilgrimage to Nejd, [ch. vm.

sand along shallow winding wadys, and that the
sand in this way is constantly slipping very gradually
down the incline, and wherever there is a slope in
the plain below, there the fulj occurs above it.*

This notion is favoured by what wc have observed
of the bare places, where such occur, for they always
slope down towards the west Radi assures us that
no water ever collects in the fuljes even after rain.
It runs into them and disappears. While we were
discussing these points of natural history, we
suddenly perceived camels grazing at the edge of a
fulj not half a mile below us, and jumped on to our
mares in a great hurry. I have contrived a bandage
which enables me to mount quickly, and ever since
the ghazu in the Wady Sirhdn, we keep a good
look-out for enemies. We then rode down to see
what was to be seen, and presently found half a dozen
people, men and women, in a fulj, and several more
camels grazing near a tent. The tent was a mere
awning with a back to it, and as soon as they saw us
the women ran and pulled it down, while the men
rushed off to the nearest camels, and made them kneel.
They were evidently in a fright, and so quickly was it
all done that by the time we had ridden up, the tent
and tent furniture, such as there was, were loaded
and ready to go. The Arabs take pride in being
able to strike camp and march at almost a moment's
notice, and in this case I think it hardly took three

* A diagram, shewing what a section of the Nefdd would be like,
is given *in the geographical notes, Yol. ii., page 248.

CH. VIII.] The Howeysin. 163

minutes. They seemed much surprised and puzzled
at our appearance when we rode up, and at first
said they were Roala, but when our people joined us
they confessed that they were of the Howeysin, a
very poor tribe despised by the rest of the Bedouins
and holding much the same position as the Sleb.
They were, however, to our eyes undistinguishable
from other Bedouins.

I asked Mohammed after this, how it was that
in the desert each tribe seemed so readily recognized
by their fellows, and he told me that each has
certain peculiarities of dress or features well known
to all. Thus the Shammar are in general tall, and
the Sebaa very short but with long spears. The
Roala spears are shorter, and their horses smaller.
The Shammar of Nejd wear brown abbas, the Harb
are black in face, almost like slaves, and Mohammed
told me many more details as to other tribes which
I do not remember. He said that Radi had recog-
nised these people as Howeysin directly, by their
wretched tent. He then reminded us of how we
had been deceived last year by the ghazii we had
met in the Ham&d the day we found Jedaan. It
was very lucky, he declared, that nothing disagree-
able had happened then, for he had found out since
that the nine people Wilfrid had ridden up to talk
to, were in reality a ghazii of Amarrat, headed by
Reja himself, Sheykh of the Erfuddi section of that
tribe. Reja had come in not many weeks later to
Palmyra to buy com, and had stayed two days in

x2

1 64 A Pilgrimage to Nejd. [ch. vm.

Abdallah's house, and had recognized him as the
man who was with the Beg that day. These Amarrat
had been in the act of discussing how they should
attack our caravan when Wilfrid rode up, and the
fact of his doing so alone made them imagine that
our caravan was a very strong one, so they had
decided on leaving us alone. Mohammed and Reja
were now friends, Reja having given Mohammed a
falcon on going away, and Mohammed the strange
present of a winding-sheet. Winding-sheets he
explains are much esteemed by the Bedouins, and
this one had been made by Mohammed's mother.

Soon after this we came upon a real Roala camp,
at least a camp of their slaves. The men were not
negroes, though very dark and ill-looking. They
explained that they belonged to Beneyeh ibn
Shaalan, a cousin of Sotamm's, and the head of the
tribe now in the NefM. They gave us some fresh
camel's milk, the first we have tasted this year.
We then began to descend into a long valley, which
here intersects the NefAd, and in which stand the
wells of Shakik. Close to one of these we now are,
camped on a bit of hard ground, under the first
wave of sand beyond the wells. There are four
wells known as Shakik ; the one where we now are
and another near it, and two others, three or four
miles distant, up and down the valley. They are
all, we hear, of the same depth, two hundred and
twenty-five feet, and are apparently very ancient,
for this one is lined with cut stones, and the edges

CH. viii.] Skaktk. 165

are worn through with long usage of ropes in draw-
ing water. There is, however, here, a little wooden
pulley for the rope to pass over, a permanent
arrangement very unusual in the desert, where
everything removable is as a matter of course re-
moved. A rope or a bucket would have no chance
of remaining a week at any well. There was a dead
camel near the well, on which a pair of vultures and
a dog were at work, but nothing else living.

While we were looking over our ropes, and won-
dering whether we could make up enough, with all
the odds and ends tied together, to reach to the
water, a troop of camels came flourishing down
upon us, cantering with their heads out, and their
heels in the air, and followed by some men on
deliils. These proved to be Ibn Shaalan's people,
and, to our great surprise and delight, one of them,
a man named Rashid, recognized us as old acquaint-
ances. We had met him the year before at the
Roala camp at Saikal far away north. He had
come, he said, with Abu Giddeli to our tent, and
we remember the circumstance perfectly. It is
pleasant to think of finding friends in such a place
as this, and it shows how far the tribes wander
during the year. Saikal is five hundred mUes from
Shakik, as the crow flies. Ra3hid at once offered to
draw us all the water we wanted, for he had a long
rope with him, and coffee was drunk and dates were
eaten by all the party. Amongst them are two
sons of Beneyeh's, Mohammed and Assad, the

1 66 A Pilgrimage to Nejd, [ch. vni.

elder a shy boorish youth, but the younger, nine
years old, a nice little boy. To him we en-
trusted our complimentary message to his father.
Beneyeh ibn Heneyfi ibn Shaalan is the Sheykh of
a large section of the Roala, the very one we heard
of last year as having stayed in Nejd. He is on ill
terms with Sotamm on account of a chestnut mare
Sotamm took from him by force, some years ago.
The children had never seen a European in their
lives, or been further north than the Wady Sirhdn.
We should like to pay Beneyeh a visit, but his
tents are many miles out of our way, and we dare
not trifle with the Nef Ad.

A camel foal was born to-day by the well. I
went to look at the little creature which was left
behind with its mother, when the rest were driven
home. I noticed that it had none of those bare
places (callosities) which the older camels get on
their knees and chest from kneeling down, and that
its knees were bruised by its struggles to rise. We
helped it up, and in three hours' time it was able to
trot away with its mother.

•

January 15. — This morning, as I looked out of
of the tent, I saw a halo round the moon, and thought
there would be rain ; but no such luck has come,
though the sky was overcast and the day sultry.
We made a great effort to get off early, and there
was a great deal of " yalla, yalla " from Mohammed
with verv little result, for the men had been cele-
brating our passage of the NefAd, which began

CH. Till.] Sheykh of the water. 167

seriously to-day, with a final feast on kid, and were
dull and slow in consequence. Wilfrid made them
a short speech last night, about the serious nature
of the journey we were undertaking, the hundred
miles of deep sand we have to cross, and the
necessity of husbanding all our strength for the
eflFort. With the best despatch we can hardly hope
to reach Jobba under five days, and it may be six
or seven. No heavily laden caravan such as ours
is, has ever, if we may believe Radi, crossed the
Nef Ad at this point, and if the camels break down,
there will be no means of getting help, nor is there
any well after Shakik. Abdallah has accordingly
been made sheyTck of the water ^ with orders to dole
it out in rations every night, and allow nobody to
drink during the day. The Arabs are very childish
about meatLd dri/k, eatbg and drinking aU day
long if they get the chance, and keeping nothing for
the morrow. But here improvidence can only bring
disaster, and we think Abdallah as well as Moham-
med are impressed with the situation. There is
something sobering and solemn in these great tracts
of sand, even for the wildest spirits, and we have
begun our march to-day in very orderly fashion.

Radi, the little guide (his name signifies willing)^
has proved a great acquisition to our party, willing
to give every sort of information when asked, and
not impertinently talkative. He is a curious little
old man, as dry and black and withered as the dead
stumps of the yerta bushes one sees here, the drift-

1 68 A Pilgrimage to Nejd, [ch. vm.

wood of the Nef Ad. He has his deliil with him, an
ancient bag of bones which looks as if it would
never last through the journey, and on which he
sits perched hour after hour in silence, pointing
now and then with his shrivelled hand towards the
road we are to take. He is canying with him on
his camel one of the red sand-stone mortars of the
J6f for a relation of Ibn Rashid's, and this seems to
balance the water-skin hanging on the other side.
From time to time, however, he speaks, and he has
told us more than one interesting tale of those who
have perished here in former days. In almost every
hollow there are bones, generally those of camels,
" Huseyn's camels," Kadi calls them, and if any-
body asks who Huseyn was, there is a laugh. At
the bottom, however, of one fulj there are bones of
another sort. Here a ghazu perished, deluls and
men. They were Koala who had crossed the Nefud
to make a raid upon the Shammar, and had not
b6en able to reach Shakik on their way back. The
bones were white, but there were bits of skin still
clinging to them, though Kadi says it happened ten
years ago. In another place, he shewed us two
heaps of wood, thirty yards apart, which mark
the spot where a Shammar ghazii, which had been
lifting camels in the Wady Sirhdn, was overtaken
by their owner, a Sirhdn sheykh, who had thrown
his lance these thirty yards at the akid of the
Shammar and transfixed him, mare and all. Again,
he pointed out the remains of forty Suelmat camel

cB. VIII.] Lizards. 1 69

riders, who had lost their way, and perished of
thirst

The sand, for several miles after leaving the wells,
was covered with camel tracks, Roala camels no
doubt, and here and there we came across the track
of a horse, but the further one gets into Arabia, the
rarer horses seem to be. After these first few miles,
however, there appeared no trace of living creatures
except lizards. Eadi took us first in a nearly
southerly direction, till he hit a line of landmarks,
invisible to us but weU known to him, running
south-south-east. This he calls the roady the road
of Abu Zeyd, and told us the following legend in
connection with it (there was no more trace of a
road than there might have been on the sea). Many
years ago, says Eadi, there was a famine in Nejd,
and the Beni Hellal were without bread. Then
Abu Zeyd, sheykh of the tribe, spoke to his kins-
men Merrey and Yunis, and said, " Let us go out
towards the west, and seek new pastures for our
people," and they travelled until they came to Tunis
el-Gharb, which was at that time ruled by an Emir
named Znati, and they looked at the land and liked
it, and were about to return to their tribe with the
news, when Znati put them all into piison. Now
Znati had a daughter who was very beautiful,
named Sferi, and when she saw Merrey in the dun-
geon, she fell in love with him, and proposed that
he should marry her, and promised that his life
and all their lives should be spared. But Merrey did

1 70 A Pilgrimage to Nejd. [ch. vm.

not care for her and would not at first consent. Still
she persisted in her love, and sought to do them good,
and interceded with her father to spare their lives.
Now Znati began to be perplexed with his prisoners,
hearing from his daughter that they were of Doble
birth, and not knowing what to do with them. And
when she told them this, they proposed that one of
them should be released, and sent home to bring a
ransom for his fellows, but in their hearts tliey were
determined that Abu Zeyd should be the one sent,
and that he should return, not with a ransom, but
with all his people to Tunis, and so set them free.
And Sferi carried the proposal to her father, and
said, " Two of these men are of noble birth, but the
third is a slave, but I know not which it is. Let
then the slave go and get ransom for his masters."
And Znati said, " How shall we discover the slave
amongst them, and distinguish him from the others ?"
and she said, " By this. Take them to a muddy
place, where there is water, and bid them pass over
it. And you shall see that whichever is the slave
amongst them will gather up his clothes about him
carefully, while the nobly bom will let their clothes
be soiled.'' And her father agreed, and it happened
so that on the following day the three men were
brought out of their dungeon, and made to pass
through a muddy stream. And Abu Zeyd, being
warned by Sferi, put his abba on his head, and lifted
up his shirt to the waist, while Merry and Yunis
walked through without precaution. So Abu Zeyd

cH. Till.] RadVs story. 171

was set free and returned to Nejd, and gathering all
his people together there, he led them across the
Nef(id by this very way, making the road we had
just seen, to enable them to come in safety. He
then marched on to Tunis, and laid siege to the town.

Abu Zeyd beseiged Tunis for a year but could not
enter, and he never would have taken it, but for Sferi
who was plotting for his success outside. Sferi was
a wise woman. She could read and write, and knew
magic and could interpret prophecies. And there
was a prophecy concerning Znati that he could be
killed by no one in battle but by a certain Dib
ibn Ghanim, a robber in the neighbouring desert
And Sferi sent word of this to Abu Zeyd, who took
this robber into his service, and on the next occasion
sent him against Znati when he came out to fight.
And the Emir was slain.

Then Abu Zeyd became Emir of Tunis and Merrey
married Sferi.

Such is Kadi's story, which it may be hoped is not
exactly true as to Sferi's betrayal of her father. As
to the road legend, it is impossible to say that the
road is there "to witness if he lies." Road or no
road we have been wandering about in zigzags all
day long, sometimes toiling up steep slopes, at others
making a long circuit to avoid a fulj, and sometimes
meandering for no particular reason yet always on a
perfectly untrodden surface of yielding sand. The
ground is more broken than ever, the fuljes bigger
and the travelling harder. But both mares and

172 A Pilgrimage to Nejd. [ch. vm.

camels have marched bravely, and we have got over
about twenty-one miles to-day. Our camp this
evening, though in a fulj, is j&ve hundred and sixty
feet higher than the wells of Shakik

January 16. — A thunderstorm in the night which
has turned the sand crimson. Radi congratulates
us upon this, as he says now we shall get to Jobba,
inshallah ! He seems to have been a little doubtful
before. But the heavy rain has hardened the ground,
and we have been able to push on at almost as good
a rate as if we had been travelling on gravel. As
we get deeper into the Nefiid, the fuljes are further
apart and the cross ridges lower. The fuljes seem
to run in pretty regular strings from east to west,
or rather from east by south to west by north.
It is interesting to observe the footmarks of
wild animals on the sand, for they are now
clearly marked as on fresh fallen snow. The most
common are those of hares answering in size to our
rabbits at home, and to-day the greyhounds have
put up and coursed several of them, though quite
in vain, for the ghada trees and bushes soon screen
them from the dogs. We have had a gallop or
two, and there is no danger of losing ourselves,
for we only have to go back on our footsteps
to find the caravan. Besides the hares there are
several sorts of small birds, linnets, wrens, desert
larks, wheatears, and occasionally crows. I also saw
a pair of kestrels evidently quite at home. Reptiles
are still much more numerous, the whole surface of

k

CH. VIII.] Animals of the NefAd. 173

the desert being marked with lizard tracks, while here
and there was the trail of a snake. Our people killed
two to-day of the sort called suliman, common in
most parts of the desert, a long, slim, silvery snake,
with a little head, and quite harmless. The warm
sunshine after the rain had brought them out.
We have been inquiring of Kadi after the more
dangerous species, and he describes very accurately
the homed viper and the cobra. I was surprised to
hear of the latter, but it is impossible to mistake his
description of a snake which stands on its tail, and
swells out its neck like wings. These, he says, are
only seen in the summer. Gazelles there seem to be
none in the Neffld, but we crossed the quite fresh
track of two " wild cows " (antelope). This animal,
Kadi assures us, never leaves the Nefftd and never
drinks. Indeed there is no water here above ground
anywhere nearer than Jebel Aja, and it must be
able to do without. The slot was about the size
of a red deer fully grown. We are very anxious to
see the beast itself, which they assure us is a real cow,
though that can hardly be. We have also kept a
good look-out for ostriches but without result. In
the way of insects, we have seen a few flies like
houseflies, and some dragonflies and small butterflies.
There is a much better sort of grass in the Nef Ad and
more of it than on the outskirts, which I suppose is
from the absence of camels.

I find that Kadi makes out his coui*se almost
entirely by landmarks. On every high sand-hill he

k

1 74 A Pilgrimage to Nejd. [ch. vm.

gets down from his deliil, and pulls some ghada
branches, which are very brittle, and adds them to
piles of wood he has formerly made. These can be
seen a good way off. We have learned, too, to make
out a sort of road after all, of an intermittent kind,
marked by the dung of camels, and occasionally on
the side of a steep slope there is a distinct footvvay.
Along this line our guide feels his way, here and
there making a cast, as hounds do when they are
off the scent. Neither he nor Mohanmied, nor any
of the Arabs with us, have the least notion of steering
by the sun, and when Wilfrid asked Mohammed if he
thought he could find his way back to Shakik, he
answered, '* How could I do so ? Every one of these
sand-hills is like the last."

We have been entertained by Radi with more
blood and bones stories, the most terrible of which
is that of some Turkish soldiers,* who many years
ago were treacherously abandoned in the Nefud.
They had occupied Hail in the days of the first Ibn
Rashid, and had been left there as a garrison. But
either the Sultan could not communicate with them
or forgot them, and after a certain time they wished
to go home. Many of them had died at Hail, and
the remainder of them, about five hundred, easily
agreed to set out for Damascus under the escort of
Obeyd, the Emir's brother, who had resolved to
destroy them. They left Hail on horseback and

* These were no doubt the Egyptians of Ibrahim Pasha's anny,
left behind at Aneyzeh.

cH. Till.] A ghastly tale. 1 75

followed their Sliammar guides to this place, who to
all questions as to where they should find wells,
answered, a little further, a little farther on. At
last the Bedouins left them. They seem to have
been brave fellows, for the last that was heard of
them was a sort of song or chorus which they sang
as they struggled on, " Nahnu askar ma nahnu at^-
sha nahnu askar ma benrfd moyeh." ** We are not
thirsty, we soldiers want no water." But at noon
that day they must have lost heart, and lain down
imder the bushes to get a sort of shade, and so they
were afterwards found scattered about in the diflFerent
fuljes. Some of their horses made their way back
to Jobba, and became the property of any who could
seize them. They were sold by these lucky people
for a few sheep or goats each. It is a ghastly tale.

A pleasanter one is that of two young lovers who
eloped from Jdf, and were pursued by their relations.
Suspecting that they would be tracked, and to avoid
scandal, they had agreed that instead of walking
together, they would keep parallel lines about a
hundred yards apart and so set out on their journey,
and when they came to a certain fulj, which Radi
pointed out to us, they were too tired and lay down
to die each under his bush. Thus they were found
and fortunately in time, and their discretion so
pleased the relations on both sides, that consent was
given to their marriage, and the nuptials celebrated
with rejoicings.

At half-past ten we suddenly caught sight of the

176 A Pilgrimage to Nejd. [ch. vm.

peaks of Aalem, two coDical rocks which jut out of
the sand, and make a conspicuous landmark for
travellers on their way to Jobba. It was an
immense relief to see them, for we had begun to
distrust the sagaicty of our guide on account of the
tortuous line we foDowed, and now we knew that
the worst was over, and that if need were, we could
find our way on across the other half of the NefAd,
with some prospect at least of success. We left
our camels to follow, and rode on towards the hills.
It still took us several hours to reach them, but we
were by three o'clock touching the stones with our
hands to feel that they were real It was as if we
had been lost at sea and had found a desert island.
We had some time to wait while the caravan
laboured slowly on to join us. I remained with
the mares and kept a look-out while Wilfrid climbed
to the top of the smaller rock. " What a place to
be buried in," he exclaimed. " Moimt Nebo must
have been like this." But people who die in the
NefAd have seldom anyone to bury them. As he
clambered round the pile of loose stones near the
top of the tell, he found to his great delight a
painted lady butterfly sunning itself in a sheltered
spot. If, as is probable, there is no vegetation
suited for the caterpillar of this butterfly nearer
than Hebron, this little insect must have traveUed
at least four hundred miles. Here it seemed happy
in the sun. This smaller rock, or rocky hill, was
just a hundred feet from the level of the plain,

cH. VIII.] Geographical observations. 177

and rose sheer out of it bare and naked as a rock
does at sea. The barometer at the top of it shewed
3220 feet. The taller Aalem is perhaps three times
its height.

Aalem, Radi says, is Sheykh of the NefAd, and
the little tell is his son. At some miles distance to
the north-eaat there is a cluster of white sand-hills,
Aalem's "harim." The rocks of Aalem are sand-
stone weathered black, not granite as we had hoped,
and this no doubt is the material from which in the
lapse of years the great red sand heaps have been
formed. They are not of solid rock but resemble
heaps of stones. On the top of the one Wilfrid
ascended was a cairn with the remains of some old
letters scratched on the stones, of the same kind as
those to be seen on Sinai, or rather in the Wady
Mokattib. The view was, by Wilfrid's report,
stupendous, but one impossible to draw or even
attempt to draw. Here could be seen spread out
as on a map the general features of the NefAd, the
uniformity of the ocean of sand streaked with the
long lines of its fulges, Aalem itself rising in
their midst like a rock out of a sea streaked with
foam.

We are now encamped about two miles beyond
Aalem. I have filled a bottle with sand to make
an hour-glass with at home.

January 1 7. — ^A white frost, some of which was
packed up with the tents and carried with us all
day.

VOL. I. N

1 78 A Pilgrimage to Nejd, [ch. vth.

It is curious that now we have passed Aalem the
vegetation has changed. Up to that point the ghada
reigned supreme, and I could not have believed it
could so suddenly disappear, yet such is the case.
Now not a bush of ghada is to be seen, and its
place is taken by the yerta which before was rare.
It seems impossible to account for this, as there is
no material change of level, and absolutely no
change in the character of the soil. The bushes by
which we camped last night were quite the last
southwards. We are sorry to lose them, as ghada is
the finest firewood in the world. Charcoal made
from it, which one finds here and there where there
has been a camp fire, is finer than the finest charcoal
used for drawing. The yerta is inferior. On the
other hand there is more of the grass called nos^S
for the camels, and of the hainary a whitish-blue
prickly plant which the mares are very fond of,
while the advy a shrub with stiff green leaves and
brownish yellow flowers, is still the commonest
plant.

The sand has dried again since yesterday, and as
the day grew warmer became very heavy for the
camels. The labour of trudging through the
yielding surface is beginning to tell on them, and
to-day most of our men have walked, Mohanamed
giving the example. Every one was cheerful, in
spite of the hard work, and all showed wonderful
strength in running on and playing pranks in the
sand. Wilfrid, who is in fair training, was quite

cH. viir.] Floundering in the sand. 1 79

unable to keep up with them, and I fared still

worse as may be imagined, being as yet very

lame ; we both, however, felt bound to try and

walk at intervals for the sake of our mares.

Ibrahim el-tawU (the tall as contrasted with

Ibrahim el-kasir, or the short), who has hitherto

been the butt of the party, being sent down on

fools' errands to fetch water from fuljes, and up to

the top, of ,aod-hilH to see imaging mountTm,.

has proved hmiself to-day most valiant. He,

although a Christian, is a match for any Moslem

of the party, and gives a^ much as he takes in

the rough games the Arabs indulge in to keep up

their spirits. At one moment he got hold of the

servants' tent pole, a very heavy one, and played at

quarter-staiF with it among them to such effect, that

I thought there would have been bones broken.

Abdallah, too, when there is any particularly hard

piece of climbing to do and the rest seem fagged,

generally runs on and stands on his head till they

come up. We encourage this mirth as it makes the

work lighter.

Our water is now running rather short, for we

have had to divide a skin among the mares each

day, but this lightens the loads. Two of the camels

are beginning to flag, Hanna's deliil, which has

hardly had fair play, as he and Ibrahim have been

constantly changing places on its back, and making

a camel kneel and get up repeatedly tires it more

than any weight ; also the beautiful camel we

N 2

i8o A Pilgrimage to Nejd. [ch. viii.

bought at Mezdrib. This last, in spite of his good
looks, seems to be weakly. His legs are a trifle
long, and his neck a trifle short, two bad points for
endurance, and then he is only a three year old and
has not had the distemper, at least so Abdallah says.
A camel can never be depended on till he has had
it. The ugly camel, too, which they call Shenuan,
Beams distressed. He has certainly got the mange,
and I wish we had insisted on this point when we
suspected the camels at Damascus, but it is too late
now. The rest are still in fine order, in spite of the
long journey and the absence of fresh pasture, which
at this time of year they require. Nothing green,
has yet appeared, except a diminutive plant like a
nemophila, with a purple flower which is beginmng
to show its head above the sand. Fresh grass
there is none, and last year's crop stands white and
withered still without sign of life.

We met a man to-day, a Eoala, alone with
twelve camels, yearlings and two year olds, which
he had bought from the Shammar and was driving
home. He had paid twenty-five to thirty-five
mejidies apiece for them, but they were scraggy
beasts. The Nejd camels are nearly all black, and
very inferior in size and strength to those of the
north. When we came upon the man we at first
supposed he might be an enemy, for anybody here
is likely to be that, and Awwad rushed valiantly at
him with a gun, frightening him out of his wits and
summoning him in a terrible voice to give an

CH. VIII.] Magnetic bearings, i8i

account of himself. He was perfectly harmless and
unarmed, and had been three nights out already in
the Nef Ad by himself. He had a skin of water and
a skin of dates, and was goiug to Shakik, a lonely
walk

At half-past three (level 3040 feet) we caught
sight of the hills of Jobba, and from the same point
could just see Aalem. It was a good occasion for
correcting our reckoning, so we took the directions
accurately with the compass, and made out our
course to be exactly south by east.

To-day all our Mahometans have begun to say
their prayers, for the first time during the journey.
The solemnity of the NefAd, or perhaps a doubt
about reaching Jobba, might weU make them
serious ; perhaps, however, they merely want to
get into training for Nejd, where Wahhabism prevails
and prayers are in fashion. Whatever be the cause,
Mohammed on the top of a sand-hill was bowing and
kneeling towards Mecca with great appearance of
earnestness, and Awwad recited prayers in a still
more impressive manner, raising his voice almost to
a chant.

Talking by the camp fire to night, Radi informs
us that the NefAd extends twelve days' journey to
the east of where we now are, and eleven days'
journey to the west. At the edge of it westwards,
lies Teyma, an oasis like Jdf, where there is a wonder-
ful well, the best in Arabia. We asked him about
eand- storms, and whether caravans were ever buried

l82 A Pilgrimage to Nejd. [ch. vnr.

by thenL He said they were not The sand never
buries any object deeply, as we can judge by the
eticks and bones and cameWung which always
remain on the surface. The only danger for
caravans is that a storm may last so loDg that their
provision of water fails them, for they cannot travel
when it is severe. Of the simum, or poisonous wind
spoken of by travellers, he has never heard, though
he has been travelling to and fro in the NefM for
forty years. Abdallah, however, says he has heard
of it at Tudmur, as of a thing occurring now and
again. None of them have ever experienced it.

January 18. — ^A calm night with slight fog, hoar
firost in the morning.

It appears that there was a scout or spy about
our camp in the night from the Shammar. We had
been sighted in the afternoon, and he had crept up
in the dark to find out who we were. At first he
thought we were a ghazti, but afterwards recognised
Badi's voice, and knew we must be traveUers going
to Ibn Rashid. He came in the morning and told
us this ; and that he was out on a scouting expedi-
tion to look for grass in the NefM. He seemed
lather frightened, and very anxious to please ; and
assured us over and over again that Mohammed
Ibn Rashid would be deUghted to see us.

It has been another hard day for the camels.
Shenuai. has broken down and cannot carry his
load ; and Hanna, like the rest of the men, has had
to walk, for his deliil is giving in. The sand seems

cH.vni.] Too thirsty to eat. 183

to get deeper and deeper ; and though we have been
at work from dawn to dusk, we are still ten or
fifteen miles from Jobba. But for the hills which
we see before us every time we rise to the crest of
a wave, it would be very hopeless work. Every one
is serious to-night.

Sunday y January 19. — ^A terrible day for camels
and men. Hanna's delul, Bhenuan, and the tall
camel they call " Amud," or the " PiUar," refused
their aliek last night, being too thirsty to eat ; and
to-day they could carry no loads. Shakran, too,
who has hitherto been one of our best walkers,
lagged behind ; and the whole pace of the caravan
has been little over a mile an hour. But for the
extraordinary strength of Hatherdn, the gigantic
camel which leads the procession, and on whom
most of the extra loads have been piled, we should
have had to abandon a great part of our property ;
and, indeed, at one moment it seemed as if we
should remain altogether in the Nefiid, adding a
new chapter to old Badi's tales of horror. And
now that we have escaped such a fate and have
reached Jobba, we can see how fortunate wo have
been. But for the perfect travelling weather
throughout our passage of the NefAd, and the
extraordinary luck of that thunderstorm, we should
not now be at Jobba. The sand to tired camels is
like a prison, and in the sand we should have
remained. Mohammed, Abdallah, and the rest all
behaved like heroes ; even old Hanna, with stray

1 84 A Pilgrimage to Nejd. [ch. ▼iii.

locks of grey hair hanging fix)m under his kefiyeh,
for he has grown grey on the journey, and his feet
bare, for it is impossible to walk in shoes, trudged
on as valiantly as the most robust of the party. All
were cheerful and uncomplaining, though the usual
songs had ceased, and they talked but little.

Wilfrid and I were the only ones who rode at
all, except Hanna, whdm Wilfrid forced to ride his
mare from time to time, and we were the gloomiest
of the party. We felt annoyed at being unable to
do our work on foot with the others ; though from
time to time we walked or rather waded through
the sand, until obliged to remount for lack of breath
and strength. Neither of us could have kept up on
foot ; but a European is no match for even a town
Arab in the matter of walking.

To-day the l^ll Abu Zeyd (Abu Zeyd's road)
was distinctly traceable, and we begin to think that
it may not have been altogether a romance. There
are regular cuttings in some places, and the track is
often well marked for half a mile together. Radi
assures us that there is a road of stone under the
sand ; of stone brought from Jebel Shammar at, I
' am afraid to say, what expense of camels and men,

who died in the work. I noticed to-day a buzzard
and a grey shrike ; and a couple of wolves had run
along the road, as one could see by their footmarks
and the scratchings on the sand.

The level of the Neflid had been rising all day,
and at one o'clock we were 3300 feet above the

I

cH. VIII.] First sight of Nejd. 185

sea. From this point we had a large view south-
wards, sand, all sand still for many a mile ; but
close before us the group of islands we had so long
been steering for, the rocks of Jobba. The nearest
was not two miles off. We could see nothing of
the oasis, for it was on the other side of the hills ;
but we could make out a wide space bare of sand,
which looked like a subbkha, and beyond this a
further group of rocks of exceedingly fantastic out-
line, rising out of the sand. It was like a scene
on some great glacier in the Alps. Beyond again,
lay a faint blue line of hills. " Jebel Shammar.
Those are the hills of Nejd," said RadL They were
what we have come so far to see.

We made haste now to get to the rocks, and
reached them at half-past three. They were of the
same character as Aalem, sand and ironstone. There
Wilfrid took a map, and I a sketch, and we waited
tiU the camels came up ; a doleful string they were
as we looked down from the top of our rocky hill at
them passing below. Shenuan and AmM toiled on
with only their saddles, and the poor black deltil,
absolutely bare and hardly able to walk, was fifty
yards behind, urged along by AbdallaL We still
had some miles to go to get to Jobba, but on harder
ground and all down hill ; and Mohammed proposed
that we three should ride on, and prepare a place for
the camels in the village. On our way we saw what
we thought was a cloud of smoke moving from west
to east, and the tail of it passed over us. We found

I86

A Pilgrimage to Nejd.

it was a flight of locusts in the red stage of their
existence, which the people here prefer for eating,
but we did not care to stop now to gather them,
and rode on. It was nearly sunset when we first
saw Jobba itself, below us at the edge of the subbkha,
with dark green palms cutting the pale blue of the
dry lake, and beyond that a group of red rocks
rising out of the pink Neflld ; in the foreground
yellow sand tufted with adr ; the whole scene trans-
figured by the evening light, and beautiful beyond
description.

CHAPTEE IX.

" They went till they came to tho Delectable Mountains, which monntalna
belong to the Lord of that hill of which we have spoken."

PlLemiM*S PBOfiBXSi.

Jobba — An unpleasant dream — ^We hear strange tales of Ibn
Basbid— Bomping in the NefM — A last nigbt there— The
Zodiacal light — ^We enter Nejd — ^The granite range of Jebel
Shammar.

JoBBA is one of the most curious places in the
world, and to my mind one of the most beautiful.
Its name Jobba, or rather Jubbeh, meaning a well,
explains its position, for it lies in a hole or well in
the NefAd ; not indeed in a fulj, for the basin of
Jobba is on quite another scale, and has nothing in
common with the horse-hoof depressions I have
hitherto described. It is, all the same, extremely
singular, and quite as difficult to account for geo-
logically as the fuljes. It is a great bare space in
the ocean of sand, from four hundred to five hundred
feet below its average level, and about three miles
wide ; a hoUow, in fact, not imlike that of Jdf, but
with the NefM round it instead of sandstone cliffs.
That it has once been a lake is pretty evident, for
there are distinct water marks on the rocks which

1 88 A Pilgrimage to Nejd. [ch. ix.

crop up out of its bed just above the town ; and,
strange to say, there is a tradition still extant of
there having formerly been water there. The wonder
is how this space is kept clear of sand. What force
is it that walls out the NefAd and prevents encroach-
ment ? As you look across the subbkha or dry Led
of the lake, the Nefdd seems like a wall of water
which must overwhelm it, and yet no sand shifts
down into the hollow, and its limits are accurately
maintained.

The town itself (or village, for it has only eighty
houses) is built on the edge of the subbkha, 2860 feet
above the sea, and has the same sort of palm gardens
we saw at J6f, only on a very small scale. The
wells from which these are watered are seventy-five
feet deep, and are worked, like aU the wells in
Arabia, by camels. The village is extremely pic-
turesque, with its little battlemented walls and its
gardens. At the entrance stand half a dozen fine old
ithel-trees with gnarled trunks and feathery branchea
The rocks towering above are very grand, being of
purple sandstone streaked and veined with yellow,
and having an upper facing of black. They are
from seven hundred to eight hundred feet high, and
their bases are scored with old water marks. Wilfiid
found several inscriptions in the Sinaitic character
upon them. Jobba is backed by these hills, and by
a strip of yellow sand, like the dunes of Ithery, on
which just now there are brilliantly green tufts of
adr in full leaf. Beyond the subbkha the rocks of

OH. IX.] Weak government, 189

Ghota rising out of the NefM remind one of the
Aletsch Glacier, as seen from the Simplon Road.

So much for the outer face of Jobba. The interior
is less attractive. The houses are very poor, and
less smartly kept than those of Kaf and Ithery. I
can hardly caU them dirty, for dirt in this region of
sand is almost an impossibility. It is one of the
luxuries of the Nef Ad that no noxious insects are
found within its circuit. The NefAd and, indeed,
Nejd, which lies beyond it, are free from those
creatures which make life a torment in other
districts of the East. Even the fleas on our grey-
hounds died as soon as they entered the enchanted
circle of red sand. But Jobba would be dirty if it
could ; and its inhabitants are the least well-man-
nered of all the Arabs we saw in Nejd. The fact is,
the people are very poor and have no communication
with the outer world, except when the rare travellers
between Hail and J6f stop a night among them.
At the time of our passage through Jobba, the
Sheykh had lately died, and his office was being
held by a young man of two or three and twenty,
who had no authority with his fellow-youths, a
noisy, good-for-nothing set. Ibn Rashid has no
special lieutenant at Jobba, and the young Sheykh
Naif was unsupported by any representative of the
central government, even a policeman. The con-
sequence was that though entertained hospitably
enough by Naif, we were considerably pestered by
his Mends, and made to feel not a little uncomfort-

I

'I

190 A Pilgrimage to Nej'd. [ch. ix.

able. I quote this aa a single instance of incivility
in a country where politeness is very much the rule.

The style of our entertainment at Naif 's house
requires no special mention, as it differed in no
respect from what we had already received else-
where. There was a great deal of coffee drinking,
and a great deal of talk. Wherever one goes in
Arabia one only has to march into any house one
pleases, and one is sure to be welcome. The kahwah
stands open all day long, and the arrival of a guest
is the signal for these two forms of indulgence,
coffee and conversation, the only ones known to the
Arabs. A fire is instantly lighted, and the coffee
cups in due course are handed round. One curious
incident, however, of our stay at Jobba must be
related.

For some days before our arrival there Mohammed,
who was usually careless enough about the dangers
of the road, had betrayed considerable uneasiness
whenever there was a question of meeting Arabs on
the way or making new acquaintances. He had
dissuaded us more than once from looking about for
tents ; and when we had met the solitary man with
the camels and the man we called the spy, he had
given very short answers to their inquiries of who
we were, and where we were going. It was not till
the evening of our arrival at Jobba that he explained
the cause of his anxiety. It then appeared that
Badi in the course of conversation bad mentioned
the name of a certain Shammar Sheykh, one Ibn

CH, IX.] The blood feud cancelled. 191

Ermal, as being in the neighbourhood, and Mo-
hammed had remembered that many years ago a
Sheykh of that name had made a raid against
Tudmur. There had been some fighting, and a
man or two killed on the Shammar side ; and this
was enough to make it extremely probable that a
blood-feud might be still unsettled between his
family and the Ibn Ermals. He therefore begged
us not to mention his name in Jobba, or the fact
that he and Abdallah were Tudmur men. He had
the more reason for this because he had discovered
that Naif, our host, was himself related to the Ibn
Ermals ; and it was fortunate that Tudmur had not
yet been mentioned by any one in conversation.
Later on in the evening he came to us very radiant,
with the news that we need no longer be under any
apprehension. He had managed ingeniously to lead
the conversation with Naif to the subject he had at
heart, and had just learned that the blood-feud was
considered at an end. Mohammed ibn Rashid,
before he came to the Sheykhat of Jebel Shammar,
was Emir el-Haj, or Prince of the pilgrimage to
Mecca, a position of honour and profit, under his
brother Telldl, and in that capacity had made
acquaintance with several Tudmuri at the holy
cities, and when he succeeded to the Sheykhat he
had good-naturedly composed their difierence with
his people. He had either paid the blood-money
himself, or had used pressure on Ibn Ermal to forego
his revenge, and the blood-feud had been declared

192 A Pilgrimage to Nejd. [ch. ix.

cancelled. Whatever the Emir's reason for acting
thus as peace maker, it was a very fortunate circum-
stance for us, and now Mohammed and Naif were
the best of frienda On the morning, however, of our
departure from Jobba (we stayed there two nights),
N^, in wishing Mohammed good bye, narrated that
he had had a curious dream that night. He had gone
to sleep, he said, thinking of this old feud ; and in
his sleep he thought he heard a voice reproaching
him with having neglected his duty of taking just
revenge on the man who was his guest, and he had
been much distressed between the conflicting duties
of vengeance and hospitality, so that he had got up
in his sleep to feel about for his sword, and had
found himself doing this when he woke. Then he
had remembered that the feud was at an end, and
said El hamdu lillah, and went to sleep again.
''What a dreadful thing it would have been,'* he
said to Mohammed at the end of this story, '' if I
had been obliged to kill you, you, my guest ! '*
Mohammed, however, maintained to us that even if
the blood-feud had not been settled, Naif would not
have been boimd to do anything, once he had eaten
and drunk with him in his house. Such, at least,
would be the rule at Tudmur, though morals might
be stricter in Nejd.

We only stayed, as I have said, two nights with
Naif The young people of the village were in-
quisitive and obtrusive, and we were obliged to
make a sort of scene with our host about it, a thing

cH. Txj Crossing the Rubicon. 193

which is disagreeable, but sometimes necessary. I
dare say they meant no harm, but their manners
were bad, and there was something almost hostile in
their tone about Nasrani (Nazarenes or Christians),
which it was advisable to check. I am glad to say
that this is the only instance we have had in Arabia
of unpleasant allusions to religion. The Arabs are
by nature tolerant to the last degree on this point,
and national or religious prejudices are exceedingly
rare.

This little episode, however, made us rather
anxious about our possible reception at HaiL No
European nor Christian of any sort had penetrated
as such before us to Jebel Shammar, and all we
knew of the people and country was the recollection
of Mr. Palgrave^s account of his visit there in disguise
sixteen years before. Ibn Rashid, for all we knew,
might be as ill-disposed towards us as thene Jobbites
here, and it was clear that, without his countenance
and protection, we should be running considerable
risk in entering Hail. Still, the die was cast We
had crossed our Rubicon, the Red Desert, and there
was no turning back. There was nothing to be
done but to put a good face on things and proceed
on our way. We cross questioned Radi as to the
state of aflfairs at Hail, and I may as well give here
the whole of the information he gave us, corroborated
and amplified by subsequent narrators. The main
facts we learned from him.

Radi, in the first place, confirmed in general

VOL. I. O

194 A Pilgrimage to Nejd. [ch. ix.

terms the account we had already heard of the

history of the Ibn Rashid family. About fifty years

ago, Abdallah ibn Eashid, at that time '' a mere

zdleml^ individual, of the Abde section of the

Shanmiar tribe, took service with the Ibn Saouds of

Upper Nejd, and was appointed lieutenant of Jebel

Shammar, by the Wahhabi Emir. He was a great

warrior, and reduced the whole country to order with

the help of his brother Obeyd, the principal hero of

Shammar tradition. Of Obeyd we heard nothing

to confirm the evil tales mentioned by Mr. PaJgrave.

On the contrary, he has left a great reputation

among the Arabs for his hospitality, generosity, and

courage, the three cardinal virtues of their creed.

He was never actually Emir of Jebel Shammar, but

after his brother's death he virtually ruled the

country. It was he that counselled the destruction

of the Turkish soldiers in the Neffid. He lived to

a great age, and died only nine years ago, having

been paralysed from the waist downwards for some

months before his death. It is related of him that

he left no property behind him, having given away

everything during his lifetime — no property but his

sword, his mare, and his young wife. These he left

to his nephew Mohammed, ibn Rashid, the reigning

Emir, with the request that his sword should remain

undrawn, his mare unridden, and his wife unmarried

for ever afterwards. Ibn Rashid has respected his

tmcle's first two wishes, but he has taken the wife

into his own harim.

CH. IX.] The Emir's crimes. 195

Abdallah ibn Rashid died in 1843, and was suc-
ceeded in the Sheykhat of the Shammar and the
lieutenancy of Hail, by his son TellAl, who took the
title of Emir, and made himself nearly independent
of the Wahhabi government. There is not much
talk at Hail now about Tell^l. He has left behind
him little of the reputation one would expect from
Mr. Palgrave*s account of him. In his time, his
second brother and successor, Metaab, conquered J6f
and Ithery, and MetaaVs name is much more
frequently mentioned than Telldl's. About twelve
years ago Telldl went out of his mind and committed
suicide. He stabbed himself at Hail with lis own
dagger. He left behind him several sons, the eldest
of whom was Bender, and two brothers, Metaab and
Mohammed, besides his uncle Obeyd, then a very
old man, and several cousins. Bender was quite a
boy at the time, and Metaab succeeded Telldl with
the approval of all the family. Metaab, however,
only ruled for three years, and dying rather suddenly,
a dispute arose as to the succession. Mohammed,
who for some years had been acting aa Emir el-Haj,
or leader of the pilgrims, was away from Hail,
settling a matter connected with his office with Ibn
Saoud at Riad, and Bender, being now twenty years
old, was proclaimed Emir. He was supported by
all the family except Mohammed and Hamtid,
Obeyd's eldest son, who had been brought up with
Mohammed as a brother. Mohammed, when he

heard of this, was very angry, and for many days, so

of

.1

196 A Pilgrimage to Nejd. [ch. ix.

Racli told us, sat with his kefiyeh over his face like
one in grief, and refused to speak with anyone. He
remained at Riad, rejecting all Benders advances
and invitations until Obeyd was dead, when he con-
sented to return to Hail, and resume his post with
the Haj. This post brought him in much money,
and he was fond of money. But he plotted all the
while for the Sheykhat, intriguing with the SherarAt
and other Bedouins under Bender s rule. It was in
this way that he ultimately gratified his ambition,
for it happened one day that a caravan of Sherarat
came to Hail to buy dates, and placed themselves
mider Mohammed's protection instead of the Emir^s.
This made Bender very angry, and he sent for
Mohammed, and asked him the meaning of this in-
solence. " Are you Sheykh," he asked, " or am I ? "
He then moimted his mare and rode out, threaten-
ing to confiscate the Sherarat camels, for they were
encamped under the walls of Hail. But Mohammed
followed him, and riding with him, a violent
dispute arose, in which Mohammed drew his
shabriyeh (a crooked dagger they all wear in Nejd),
and stabbed his nephew, who fell dead on the spot.
Then Mohammed galloped back to the castle, and,
finding Hamiid there, got his help and took pos-
session of the place. He then seized the younger
sons of Tellil, Bender's brothers, all but one child,
Naif, and Bedr, who was away from Hail, and had
their heads cut off* by his slaves in the courtyard of
the castle. They say, however, that Hamud pro-

CH. IX.] More murders. 197

tested against this. But Mohammed was recklessf^
or wished to strike terror, and not satisfied with
what he had already done, went on destroying his
relations. He had some cousins, sons of Jabar, a
younger brother of Abdaliah and Obeyd ; and these
he sent for. They came in some alarm to the
castle, each with his slave. They were all young
men, beautiful to look at, and of the highest
distinction ; and their slaves had been brought up
with them, as the custom is, more like brothers than
servants. They were shown into the kahwah of the
castle, and received with great formality, Mohammed's
servants coming forward to invite them in. It is
the custom at Hail, whenever a person pays a visit,
that before sitting down, he should hang up his
sword on one of the wooden pegs fixed into the wall,
and this the sons of Jabar did, and their slaves
likewise. Then they sat down, and waited and
waited, but still no coffee was served to them. At
last Mohammed appeared surrounded by his guard,
but there was no ** salaam aleykum," and instantly
he gave orders that his cousins should be seized and
bound. They made a rush for their swords, but
were intercepted by the slaves of the castle, and
made prisoners. Mohammed then, with horrible
barbarity, ordered their hands and their feet to be
cut off, and the hands and the feet of their slaves,
and had them, still living, dragged out into the
courtyard of the palace, where they lay till they
died. These ghastly crimes, more ghastly than ever

198 A Pilgrimage to Nejd., [ch. ix.

in a country where wilful bloodshed is so unusual,
seem to have struck terror far and wide, and no one
has since dared to raise a hand against Mohammed.
Now he is said to have repented of his crimes, and
to be ** angry with himself" for what he has done.
But Radi is of opinion that Heaven is at least as
angry, for though Mohammed has married over and
over again, he has never been blessed with a son,
nor even with a daughter. His rule, however, apart
from its evil commencement, though firm, has been
beneficent The only other persons, with one excep-
tion, who have suffered death during his reign, have
been highway robbers, and these are now extirpated
within three hundred miles of Hail. A traveller
may go about securely in any part of the desert with
.all his gold in his hand, and he will not be molested.
Neither are there thieves in the towns. He has
made Jebel Shammar definitely independent of
Riad, and has resisted one or two attempted
encroachments by the Turks. He is munificent to
all, and exercises unbounded hospitality. No man,
rich or poor, is ever sent away from his gate unfed,
and seldom without a present of clothes or money ;
and hospitality in Arabia covers a multitude of sins.
Besides, the Arabs easily forget, and Mohammed is
already half forgiven. " Allah yetowil omrahu,'' God
grant him long life, exclaimed Radi, after giving
us these particulars.

The one exception I have alluded to was thia
About two years after Mohammed had gained the

OH. EL] Lex Talionis. 199

Sheykhat, Bcdr, the second son of Telldl, who had
escaped the massacre of his brothers, began to grow
a beard, and in Arab opinion was come of age ; and
being a youth of high spirit and high principle,
resolved to avenge his brothers' deaths. This was
clearly his duty according to Arab law. He was
alone and unaided, except by some former slaves of
his father's, to whose house at Hail he returned
secretly. With their assistance, he made a plan
of falling upon Mohammed one day when he was
paying a visit to Hamiid in Hamud's house next the
castle. He went with one slave to the house, and
asking admittance was shown into the kahwah,
where, if he had found the Emir, he would have
drawn his sword and killed him ; but, as it
happened, Mohammed had just gone out into the
garden, and only Hamud was present. Hamtid
asked him what he wanted, and he said he wished
to speak to the Emir, but Hamiid suspecting
something, detained him and gave Mohammed
warning. When arrested and recognised, Bedr was
cross-questioned again, and then declared his inten-
tion of avenging his brother Bender's death, nor
would he desist from this. Mohammed, it is said,
besought him to hear reason, and oflfered to release
him if he would be content to let matters alone.
" I do not wish to shed more blood," he said, " but
you must promise to leave HjulI." Still the yoimg
man refused, and at last in despair, Mohammed
ordered his execution. The slave, who accompanied

200 A Pilgrimage to Nejd. [ch. ul

Bedr, was not ill-used. Indeed, Mohammed sent
him away with gifts, and he now resides very com-
fortably at Samawa on the Euphrates.

After this, Mohammed, who seems to have really
felt remorse for his wickedness, sent for Naif, the
remaining son of Telldl, who was still a boy, and
took him to live with him, and treated him
as his own son. Only a year ago, seeing the boy
growing up, he exhorted him to marry, offering
him one of his nieces and a fitting establishment.
But the boy, they say, himg back. " What I '* he
said, '* you would treat me as you treat a lamb or a
kid which you fatten before you kill it ? '* Mo-
hammed wept and entreated, and swore that he
would be as a father to Naif ; and the youth still
lives honourably treated in the Emir's house.
Opinion at HjulI, however, is very decided that as
soon as Naif is old enough, either he or his unde
must die. It will be his duty to follow Bedr in his
attempt, and if need be, to end like him.

All this, as may be supposed, was anything but
agreeable intelligence to us, as we travelled on to
Hail. We felt as though we were going towards a
wild beast's den. In the meantime, however, there
were four days before us, four days of respite, and
of that tranquillity which the desert only gives, and
we agreed to enjoy it to the utmost. There is some-
thing in the air of Nejd, which would exhilarate evea
a condemned man, and we were far from being con-
demned. It is impossible to feel really distressed or

_ •

cH. IX. Nejd sheep, 201

really anxious, with such a bright sun and such
pure delicious air. We might feel that there was
danger, but we could not feel nervous.

Our last three nights in the NefM were devoted
to merriment, large bonfires of yerta, round which
we sat in the clear starlight, feasting on dates bought
at Jobba, and feats of strength and games among the
servants. I wiU give the journal for one day, the
22nd of January : " We have been floundering
along in the deep sand all day leisurely, and with
much singing and nonsense among the men, for we
are in no hurry now ; it is only one day on to Igneh,
the first village of Jebel Shammar. The camels,
though tired, are not now in any danger of breaking
down, and they have capital no^si grass to eat ; the
tufts of grass are beginning to get their new shoots.
The Nefdd here is as big as ever, and the fuljes as deep ;
and we crossed the track of a bakar wahash or wild
cow, not an hour before we stopped. At half past
three, we came upon a shepherd driving forty sheep
to market at Hail. He is a Shammar from Ibn
Rahls, a sheykh, whose tents we saw to-day a long
way oflF to the north-east, and he intends selling his
flock to the Persian pilgrims who are expected at
Hail to-day. The pilgrims, he says, are on their
way from Mecca, and will stay a week at HaiL
Who knows if we may not travel on with them ?
The sheep, which I took at first for goats, are gaunt,
long legged creatures, with long silky hair, not wool,
growing down to their fetlocks, sleek pendulous ears

202 A PilgHmage to I^ejd. [ch. n.

and smooth faces. They are jet black with white
heads, spots of black round the eyes and noses,
which look as if they had been drinking ink. Thejr
are as unlike sheep as it is possible to conceive, all
legs, and tail, and face. But they have the merit of
being able to live on adr for a month at a time with-
out needing water. They are, I fancy, quite peculiar
to Nejd. This meeting was the signal for a halt,
and behold a delightful little fulj, just big enough
to hold us, in the middle of a bed of nassi. We
slid our horses down the sand-slope, the camels
followed, Mohammed, the while, bargaining with
the shepherd for the fattest of his flock. Here we
unloaded, and the camels in another ten minutes
were scattered all over the hill-side, for there is a
sand-hill at least a hundred feet high, close by above
us. Ibrahim, the short, was set to watch them while
the rest were busy with the camp. There is an
enormous supply of fire-wood, beautiful white logs
which bum like match wood. We climbed to the
top of the hill to take the bearings of the country,
for there is a splendid view now of Jebel Shammar,
i no isolated peak, as Dr. Colvill would have it last

i year, but a long range of fantastic mountains,

stretching far away east and west, reminding one
somewhat of the Sierra Guadarama in Spain. There
are also several outlying peaks distinct from the
main chain. Behind us, to the north-west, the
Jobba group, with continuations to the west and
south-west. Eastwards, there is a single point.

cH. IX.] Patience of Hanna. 203

Jebel Atwa. Hail lies nearly south-east, its position
marked by an abrupt cliff near the eastern extremity
of the Jebel Aja range. The northern horizon only is
unbroken. This done, we both went down to measure
a fulj half a mile off, and found it two hundred and
seventy feet deep, with hard ground below. It is
marked very regularly on its steep side with sheep
tracks, showing how permanent the surface of the
Nefdd remains, for the little paths are evidently of
old date.* By the time of our return, Hanna's good
coffee was ready with a dish of flour and curry, to
stay hunger until the sheep is boiled. Awwad,
who delights in butcher's work, has killed the sheep
in the middle of our camp, for it is the custom to
slaughter at the tent door, and has been smearing
the camels with gore. When asked why, he says,
" it will look as if we had been invited to a feast.
It always looks well to have one's camels sprinkled.'*
He has rigged up three tent poles, as a stand to
hang the sheep from, and is dismembering in a truly
artistic fashion. Ibrahim el-tawU and Abdallah
are collecting an immense pile of wood for the night.
Hanna is preparing to cook. Poor Hanna has been
having a hard time of it since Meskakeh, for now
that everybody has to walk, he insists upon walking
too, "to prevent trouble," he says, and probably
he is right. A regular Aleppin Christian like

* Query. — ^May not these be tlie spiral markings noticed by Mr.
Palgraye, and attributed by him to the wind, in his description of
a certain maelstrom in the Nefftd P

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204 A Pilgrimage to Nejd. [ch. dl

Hanna^ in such a country as this, does best by
effacing himself and disarming envy, unless indeed
he can fraternize, and at the same time inspire
respect, as Ibrahim seems to have done. TT5>.nn5i. is
patient, and does not complain, endeavouring
though with a rueful countenance, to be cheerful
when the rest tease him. I do my best to protect
him, but he dares not take his own part Lastly,
Mohanmied is sitting darning his shirt, against
making his appearance at Court, and talking to two
Jobbites, who are travelling with us, about the
virtues of Ibn Rashid, and the grandeur of the Ibn
Aruks. The Ibn Aruk legend, like a snowball, is
gathering as it rolls, and we fully expect Mohammed
to appear in the character of a Prince at HaiL He
talks already of Nejd as his personal property, and
affects a certain air of protection towards us> as that
of a host doing the honours to his guests. His
scare about Ibn Ermal is quite forgotten. Prince or
peasant, however, Mohammed has the great merit
of always being good-tempered, and this evening he
is very amusing. He has been telling us the whole
history of his relations with Huseyn Pasha at Deyr.
which we never quite understood before (and which
I dare not repeat in detail for fear of bringing him
into trouble). He has been two or three times in
prison, but poor Huseyn seems to have been made a
sad fool of. Mohammed also gave us a full, true, and
particular account of Ahmed Beg Moali's death-
and then we had a long discussion about the exact

CH. IX.] Braving a despot 205

form in which we are to introduce ourselves at
Hail. Mohammed will have it that WiL&id ought
to represent himself as a merchant travelling to
Bussorah to recover a debt, but this we will not
listen to. We think it much more agreeable and
quite as prudent to be straightforward, and we
intend to tell Ibn Rashid that we are persons of
distinction in search of other persons of distinc-
tion; that we have already made acquaintance
with Ibn Smeyr and Ibn Shaalan, and all the
sheykhs of the north, and that each time we have
seen a great man, we have been told that these were
nothing in point of splendour to the Emir of Hail,
and that hearing this, and being on our way to
Bussorah, we have crossed the NefAd to visit him,
as in former days people went to see Suliman ibn
Daoud, and then we are to produce our presents and
wish him a long life. Mohammed has been obUged
to admit that this will be a better plan ; and so it is
settled. Kadi, whom we have taken more or less
into our confidence, thinks that the Emir will be
pleased, and promises to sing our praises " below
stairs," and he talks of a Franji having already been
at Hail, and having gone away with money and
clothes from Ibn Rashid. Who this can be, we
cannot imagine, for Mr. Palgrave was not known there
as a European. So we whiled away the time till
dinner was ready, and when all had well feasted,
Mohammed came to invite us to the servants' fire,
where feats of strength were going on. First,

2o6 A Pilgrimage to N^ejd. [ch. n.

Abdallah lies flat on the sand, a camel saddle is put
upon his back, and then two gigantic khurjes^ weigh-
ing each of them about a hundredweight. With these
he struggles to his knees, and then by a prodigioos
effort to his feet, staggers a pace, and topples over.
IMohammed, not to be outdone, lifts Ibrahim kasir,
who weighs at least twelve stone, on the palm of his
hand off his legs. Then they make wheels, such as
are seen at a circus, and play at a sort of leap-frog,
which consists of standing in a row one close behind
the other, when the last jumps on their shoulders
and runs along till he comes to the end, where he
has to turn a somersault and alight as he can on his
head or his heels. This is very amusing, and in the
deep sand hurts nobody All, except Hanna^ join
in these athletic sports, but Awwad, who is a
Bedouin bom, goes through the performance with a
rather ^vry face. Bedouins never play at games
as the town Arabs do, and they have not the
i! physical strength of the others. Awwad revengea

!] himself, however, by malignantly hiding bits of hot

coal in the ground, and every now and then some-
body steps on these traps with his bare feet, and
i there is a scream. Great amusement, too, is caused

[ by Wilfrid showing them the old game of turning

three times round with the head resting on a short
; stick, and then trying to walk straight This is

I considered very funny, and they generally manage

to tumble over Hanna, and when they make him try
it, arrange that he shall run into the fire. The best

<?H. IX.] The happy mountains. 207

game, to my mind, is something like one sometimes
played by sailors on board ship. They all put their
cloaks together in one heap, and one man has to
guard it Then the rest dance round him, and try
to steal the clothes away without getting touched.
Ibrahim tawil is great at this sport, and defends
the heap with his huge hands and feet, dealing
tremendous blows on the unwary, and paying oflF, I
fancy, not a few old scores. Abdallah especially,
who is disliked by the rest on account of his bad
temper, gets shot clean off his legs by a straight
kick almost like a football, and a fight very nearly
ensues. But a diversion is made by the ingenious
Awwad, who steals away with a gun and fires it
suddenly from the top of the fulj, and then comes
tumbling head over heels down the sand to represent
a ghazu. So the evening passes, and as we go back
to our private lair, we see for the first time the
zodiacal light in the western sky.''

This was our last night in the Nefdd, and the re-
collection of it long stood as our standard of happi-
ness, when imprisoned within walls at Hail, or
travelling in less congenial lands. The next day we
reached Igneh, the first village of Jebel Shammar,
and the day after the mountains themselves, the
" Happy Mountains," which had so long been the
goal of our Pilgrim's progress.

January 23. — It is like a dream to be sitting here,
writing a journal on a rock in Jebel Shammar. When
I remember how, years ago, I read that romantic

k.

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208 A Pilgrimage to Nejd. [ch. n.

account by Mr. Palgrave, which nobody believed, of an
ideal State in the heart of Arabia, and a happy land
which nobody but he had seen^and how impossiblyre-
mote and unreal it all appeared; and how, later daring
our travels, we heard of Nejd and Hail and thisveiy
Jebel Shammar, spoken of with a kind of awe by all
who knew the name, even by the Bedouins, from the
day when at Aleppo Mr. S. first answered our vague
questions about it by saying, " It is possible to go
there. Why do you not go ? " I feel that we have
achieved something which it is not given to every
one to do. Wilfrid declares that he shall die bappy
now, even if we have our heads cut off at HaiL It
is with him a favourite maxim, that every place is
exactly like every other place, but Jebel Shammar is
not like anything else, at least that I have seen in
this world, unless it be Mount Sinai, and it is more
beautiful than that All our journey to-day has
been a romance. We passed through Igneh in the
early morning, stopping only to water our animals. It
is a pretty little village, something like Jobba, on the
edge of the sand, but it has what Jobba has not,
square fields of green barley unwalled outside it.
These are of course due to irrigation, which while
waiting we saw at work from a large well, but they
give it a more agricultural look than the walled
palm-groves we have hitherto seen. Immediately
after Igneh we came upon hard ground, and in our
delight indulged our tired mares in a fantasia, which
unstifiened their legs and did them good. The soil

CH. IX.] Granite boulders. 209

was beautifully crisp and firm, being composed of
fine ground granite, quite diflferent from the sand-
stone formation of Jobba and J6f. The vegetation,
too, was changed. The yerta and adr and other
NefM pla'hts had disappeared, and in their place were
shrubs, which I remember having seen in the wadys
of Mount Sinai, with occasionally small trees of the
acacia tribe known to pilgrims as the " burning bush'*
— ^in Arabic " talkh " — also a plant with thick green
leaves and no stalks called " gheyseh," which they
say is good for the eyes. Every now and then a
solitary boulder, all of red granite, rose out of the
plain, or here and there little groups of rounded rocks>
out of which we started several hares. The view in
front of us was beautiful beyond description, a per-
fectly even plain, sloping gradually upwards, out of
which these rocks and tells cropped up like islands,
and beyond it the violet^oloured mountains now
close before us, with a precipitous cliflF which has
been our landmark for several days towering over
all. The outline of Jebel Shammar is strangely
fantastic, running up into spires and domes and pin-
nacles, with here and there a loop-hole through which
you can see the sky, or a wonderful boulder perched
like a rocking stone on the sky line. One rock was
in shape just like a camel, and would deceive any
person who did not know that a camel could not
have climbed up there. At half-past one we passed
the first detached masses of rock which stand like
forts outside a citadel, and, bearing away gradually

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2IO A Pilgrimage to Ncjd. [ch. ix.

to the left, reached the buttresses of the main body
of hills. These all rise abruptly from the smooth
sloping surface of the plain, and, unlike the moun-
tains of most countries, with no interval of broken
ground. Moimt Sinai is the only mountain I have
seen like this. In both cases you can stand on a
plain, and touch the mountain with your hand. Only
at intervals from clefts in the hills little wadys issue,
showing that it sometimes rains in Jebel Shammar.
Indeed to-night, we shall probably have a proof of
this, for a great black cloud is rising behind the peaks
westwards, and every now and then it thunders.
All is tight and secure in our tent against rain.
There is a small ravine in the rock close to where
we are encamped, with a deep natural tank full of
the clearest water. We should never have discovered
it but for the shepherd who came on with us to-day,
for it is hidden away under some gigantic granite
boulders, and to get at it you have to creep through
a hole in the rock. A number of bright green plants
grow in among the crevices (capers ?), and we have
seen a pair of partridges, little dove-coloured birds
with yellow bills.

We passed a small party of Bedouin Shammar,
moving camp to-day. One of them had a young
goshawk* on his deluL They had no horses with
them, and we have not crossed the track of a horse
since leaving Shakik. I forgot to say that yester-
day we saw a Harb Bedouin, an ugly little black

* More probably a lanner.

cH. IX.] A thunderstorm, 211

faced man, who told us he was keeping sheep for
the Emir. The Harb are the tribe which hold the
neighbourhood of Medina, and have such an evil
reputation among pilgrims.

January 24. — Thunderstorm in the night. We
sent on Radi early this morning, for we had only a
few miles to go, with our letters to HaiL It was . a
lovely morning after the rain, birds singing sweetly
from the bushes, but we all felt anxious. Even Mo-
hammed was silent and preoccupied, for none knew
now what any moment might bring forth. We put
on our best clothes, however, and tried to make our
mares look smart. We had expected to j&nd HjulI
the other side of the hills, but this was a mistake.
Instead of crossing them, we kept along their edge,
turning gradually round to the right, the ground still
rising. The barometer at the camp was 3370, and
now it marks an ascent of two hundred feet.

We passed two villages about a mile away to our

left, El Akeyt and El Uta ; and from one of them

we were joined by some peasants riding in to H^

on donkeys. This looked more like civilisation than

anything we had seen since leaving Syria. We were

beginning to get rather nervous about the result of

our message, when Radi appeared and announced that

the Emir had read our letters, and would be delighted

to see us. He had ordered two houses to be made

ready for us, and nothing more remained for us to do,

than to ride into the town, and present ourselves at

the kasr. It was not fax off, for on coming to the

p 2

A Pilgrimage to Nejd.

top of the low ridge which had been in firont of ui
for some time, we suddenly saw Hail at our feet noi
half a mile distant The town is not particularly
imposing, most of the Houses being hidden in palm
groves, and the wall surrounding it little more than
ten feet high. The only important building visible,
was a large castle close to the entrance, and this
Radi told us was the kasr, Ibn Rashid's palace.

In spite of preoccupations, I shall never forget
the vivid impression made on me, as we entered
the town, by the extraordinary spick and span
neatness of the walls and streets, giving ahnost an
air of unreality.

BCCBFnOH AT BilL.

«

CHAPTER X.

There's daggers in men's smOes."— Ssazbspijlbi.

Hail— The Emir Mohammed Ibn Bashid — His menagerie— His
horses — ^His ooortiers — ^His wives — Amusements of the ladies
of Hail — ^Their domestic life — An evening at the oastle— The
telephone.

As we stayed some time at Hail, I will not give
the detail of every day. It would be tedious, and
would involve endless repetitions, and not a few
corrections, for it was only by degrees that we
learned to understand all we saw and all we
heard.

Our reception was everything that we could have
wished. As we rode into the courtyard of the
kasr, we were met by some twenty well-dressed
men, each one of whom made a handsomer appear-
ance than any Arabs we had previously seen in our
lives. " The sons of Sheykhs/' whispered Moham-
med, who was rather pale, and evidently much
impressed by the solemnity of the occasion. In
their midst stood a magnificent old man, clothed in
scarlet, whose tall figure and snow-white beard
gave us a notion of what Solomon might have been
in all his glory. He carried a long wand in his
hand — it looked like a sceptre — and came solemnly
forward to greet us. " The Emir," whispered Mo-

214 ^ Pilgrimage to Ncjd. [en. x

hammed, as wc all alighted. Wilfrid then gave the
usual " salam aleykum," to which every one replied
" aleykum salam," in a loud cheerful tone, with
a cordiality of manner that was very reassuring. 1
thought 1 had never seen so many agreeable &cefl
collected together, or people with so excellent a
demeanour. The old man, smiling, motioned to
us to enter, and others led the way. We were
then informed that these ^verc the servants of the
Emir, and the old man his chamberlain. They
showed us first through a dark tortuous entrance,
constructed evidently for purposes of defence, and
then down a dark corridor, one side of which wac
composed of pillars, reminding one a little of the
entrance to some ancient Egyptian temple. Then
one of the servants tapi>ed at a low door, and ex-
changed signals with somebody else inside, and the
door was opened, and wc found ourselves in a large
kahwah, or reception room. It was handsome from
its size, seventy feet by thirty, and from the row oi
five pillars, which stood in the middle, supporting
the roof. The columns wore about four feet ii
diameter, and were quite plain, with square capitals
on which the ends of the rafters rested. The roon:
was lighted by small square air-holes near the roof
and by the door, which was now left open. The
whole of the inside was white, or rather, brown-
washed, and there was no furniture of any sort, oi
fittings, except wooden pegs for hanging swords to
a raised platform opposite the door where th(

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CH. X.] The Emir. 215

mortar stood for coflFee-pounding, and a square
hearth in one comer, where a fire was burning.
It was very dark, but we could make out some
slaves, busy with coffee-pots round the fire. Close
to this we were invited to sit down, and then
an immense number of polite speeches were ex-
changed, our healths being asked after at least
twenty times, and always with some mention of the
name of God, for this is required by politeness in
Nejd. Coffee was soon served, and after this the
conversation became general between our servants
and the servants of the Emir, and then there was a
stir, and a general rising, and the word was passed
round, "yiji el Emir," the Emir is coming. We,
too, got up, and this time it really was the Emir.
He came in at the head of a group of still more
smartly-dressed people than those we had seen
before, and held out his hand to Wilfrid, to me,
and to Mohammed, exchanging salutations with
each of us in turn, and smiling graciously. Then
we all sat down, and Wilfrid made a short speech
of the sort we had already agreed upon, which the
Emir answered very amiably, saying that he was
much pleased to see us, and that he hoped w^
should make his house our house. He then asked
Mohammed for news of the road ; of J6har and
Meskakeh, and especially about the war going on
between Sotamm and Ibn Smejr. So far so good,
and it was plain that we had nothing now to fear ;
yet I could not help looking now and then at those

2i6 A Pilgrimage to Nejd. [cb. i

pegs on the wall, and thinking of the story of thi
young Ibn Jabats and their slaves, who had beei
BO treacheroudy murdered in this reiy hall, and bj
this very man, our host

The Emir's face is a strange one. It may b(
mere fancy, prompted by our knowledge of Ibi
Rashid's past life, but his countenance recalled to ui
the portraits of Richard the Third, lean, sallow cheeks
much sunken, thin lips, with an expression of pun
except when smiling, a thin black beard, well
iefined black knitted eyebrows, and remarkabk
eyes, — eyes deep sunk and piercing, like the eye(
of a hawk, but ever turning restlessly from one (ri
our faces to the other, and then to those beside him
It was the very type of a conscience-stricken foce,
or of one which fears an assassin. His hands, too,
were long and claw-like, and never quiet for an
instant, incessantly playing, while he talked, with
his beads, or with the hem of his abba. With all
this, the Emir is very distinguished in appearance,
with a tall figure, and, clothed as he was in purple
and fine linen, he looked every inch a king. His
dress was magnificent ; at first we fancied it put on
only in our honour, but this we found to be a mis-
take, and Ibn Kashld never wears anything leaa
gorgeous. His costume consisted of several jibbeha
of brocaded Indian silk, a black abba, interwoven
with gold, and at least tliree kefiyehs, one over the
other, of the kind made at Bagdad. His aghal,
also, was of the Bagdad t}'pe, which I had hitherto

VH. X.] The court of justice. 217

supposed were only worn by women, bound up with
silk and gold thread, and set high on the fore-
head, so as to look like a crown. In the way of
arms he wore several golden-hilted daggers and a
handsome golden-hilted sword, ornamented with
turquoises and rubies, Hail work, as we afterwards
found. His immediate attendants, though less
splendid, were also magnificently clothed.

After about a quarter of an hour's conversation,
Mohammed ibn Eashid rose and went out, and we
were then shown upstairs by ourselves to a corridor,
where dates and bread and butter were served to
us. Then a message came from the Emir, begging
that we would attend his mejlis, the court of justice
which he holds daily in the yard of the palace. We
were not at all prepared for this, and when the
castle gate was opened, and we were ushered out
into the sunshine, we were quite dazzled by the
spectacle which met our eyes.

The courtyard, which is about a hundred yards
long by fifty broad, was completely lined with
soldiers, not soldiers such a^ we are accustomed to
in Europe, but still soldiers. They were, to a cer-
tain extent, in uniform, that is to say, they all wore
brown cloaks and blue or red kefiyehs on their
heads. Each, moreover, carried a silver-hilted
sword. I counted up to eight himdred of them
forming the square, and they were sitting in a
double row under the walls, one row on a sort of
raised bench, which runs round the yard, and the

2i8 A Pilgrimage to Nejd. [ch. x.

other squatted on the ground in front of them.
The Emir had a raised seat under the main wall,
and he was surrounded by his friends, notably
his cousin Hamiid, who attends him everywhere,
and his favourite slave, Mubarek, whose duty it i&
to guard him constantly from assassins.* In front
of the Emir stood half-a-dozen suppliants, and out-
side the square of soldiers, a mob of citizens and
pilgrims, for the pilgrimage had arrived at Hail.
We had to walk across the square escorted by a
slave, and the Emir motioned us to take places at
his side, which we accordingly did ; he then went
on with his work. People came with petitions,
which were read to him by HamiSd, and to which
he generally put his seal without discussion, and
then there was a quarrel to settle, the rights ot
which I confess I did not understand, for the Arabic
spoken at Hail is diflferent from any we had hither-
to heard. I noticed, however, that though the
courtiers addressed Mohammed as Emir, the poorer
people, probably Bedouins, called him " ya Sheykh,**
or simply " ya Mohammed." One, who was pro-
bably a small Shammar Sheykh, he kissed on the
cheek. Some pilgrims, who had a grievance, also
presented themselves, and had their case very sum-
marily decided ; they were then turned out by the
soldiers. No case occupied more than three minutes^

* The danger to Mohammed is a personal one on aoooimt of th&
blood he has shed, not an official one, for, as Emir, he is adored hj
Ids subjects.

Ou}' house at HaXl.

and the whole thing was over in half-an-hour. At
last the Emix rose, bowed to us, and went into the
palace, while we, very glad to stretch our legs,
which were cramped with squatting on the bench
barely a foot wide, were escorted to our lodgings by
the chamberlain and two of the soldiers.

We found a double house provided for us in the
main street of Hail, and not two hundred yards
from the kasr— a house without pretence, but suffi-
cient for our wants, and secure from all intruders,
for the street door could be locked, and the walla
were high. It consisted of two separate houses, as
I believe most dwellings in Arabia do, one for men
and the other for women. In the former there waa
a kahwah and a couple of smaller rooms, and this
we gave over to Mohammed and the servants^
keeping the harim for ourselves. This last had a
small open court, just large enough for the three
mares to stand in, an open vestibule of the sort
they call liwam. at Damascus, and two little dens.
In one of these dens we stored our luggage, and in
the other, spread our beds. The doors of these
inner rooms could be locked up when we went out,
with curious wooden locks and wooden keys ; the
doors were of ithel wood. All was exceedingly
simple, but in decent repair and clean, the only
ornaments being certain patterns, scratched out in
white from the brown wash which covered the walls.
Here we soon made ourselves comfortable, and were
not sorry to rest at last, after our long journey.

220 A Pilgrimage to Nejd. [ch. r.

Our rest, however, was not to come yet. It was
only one o'clock when we arrived at our house, and
before two, the Emir sent for us again. This time
the reception was a private one in the upper rooms
of the kasr, and we found the Emir alone with
Hamiid. He received us with even more cordiality
than before, and with less ceremony. We had
brought presents with us, the duty of displaying
which we left to Mohammed, who expatiated on
their value and nature with all the art of a bazaar
merchant. As for us, we were a little ashamed of
their insignificance, for we had had no conception
of Ibn Raahid's true position when we left Damascus,
and the scarlet cloth jibbeh we had considered the
ne 'plus ultra of splendour for him, looked shabby
among the gorgeous dresses worn at HaiL We
had added to the cloak and other clothes, which
are the usual gifts of ceremony, a revolver in a
handsome embroidered case, a good telescope, and a
Winchester rifle, any one of which would have
made Jedaan or Ibn Shaalan open his eyes with
pleasure ; but Ibn Rashid, though far too well-bred
not to admire and approve, cared evidently little
for these things, having seen them all before. Even
the rifle was no novelty, for he had an exactly
similar one in his armoury. Poor Mohammed,
however, went on quite naively with his descrip-
tions, while the Emir looked out of window through
the telescope, pretending to be examining the wall
opposite, for there was no view. Hamud, his cousin.

CH. X.] A visit to the Emir. 221

whose acquaintance we now made, is more sympa--
thique than the Emir, though they are ridiculously
like each other in face, but Hamud has the advan-
tage of a good conscience, and has no vengeance ta
fear. They were dressed also alike, so that it was
diflScult at first to know them apart ; perhaps there
is a motive in this, as with the Richmonds of
Shakespeare. The Emir's room was on the same
plan as the kahwah, but smaller, and boaating only
two columns, the coffee place in the right-hand corner
as you enter, and the Emir's fireplace, with a fire
burning in it, on an iron plate in front. Persian
carpets were spread, and there were plenty of
cushions to lean against by the wall. We were
invited to sit down to the left of the Emir and
Hamud, who never seems to leave his side. Mo-
hammed had a place on the right, between them
and the door. Coffee, and a very sweet tea, were
handed round in thimblefuls, and a good deal of
conversation ensued. We had brought a letter
from our old friend the Nawab Ikbal ed-Dowlah,
who had been at Hail about forty years ago, in the
time of Abdallah ibn Rashid.* The Emir remem-
bered his coming, though he must have been a child
at the time, and said some pretty things in compli-
ment of him. He then asked Mohammed about
his Aruk relations in J6f, and said that they had

* The Nawab was in fact detained a prisoner at Hafl for about
two months. But this we did not at the time know ; nor was any
allusion made by Ibn Baslud to the circumstance.

222 A Pilgrimage to Nejd. [ch. x.

always been faithful to him. They had taken the
Emir's part, it would seem, in some revolt which
took place there a few years ago. There was also
an Ibn Aruk in Harik, a Bedouin sheykh, who the
Emir said was a friend of his ; at least, he was on
bad terms with Ibn Saoud and the Wahhabis, and
this is a title to favour at Hail. Ibn Rashid is very-
jealous of Ibn Saoud, and now that the Wahhabi
empire is broken up, fosters any discontent there
may be in Aared. I believe many of the Bedouin
sheykhs of Upper Nejd have come over to him.
Mohammed, thus encouraged, launched out into his
favourite tales, and repeated the Ibn Aruk legend,
which, I confess, I am beginning to get a little tired
of, and then went on to describe the wonders of
Tudmur, of which he now implied, without exactly-
stating it in words, that he was actual Sheykh.
The house he lived in at home, he said, had
columns of marble, each sixty feet in height, and
had been built originally by Suliman ibn Daoud.
There were two hundred of these columns in and
around it, and the walls were twenty feet thick.
The Emir, who seemed rather perplexed by this,
appealed to us for confirmation, and we told him
that all this really existed at Tudmur ; indeed, there
was no gainsaying the fact that Mohammed's father's
house had some of the objects named on the pre-
mises, though the house itself is but a little square
box of mud. The city wall, in fact, makes one
side of the stable, and a colunm or two have been

€H. X.] T/ie Emir's gardens. 223

worked into the modem building ; but this we did
not think it necessary to explain. Mohammed's
reputation rose in consequence, and I already began
to fear that the Emir's civilities had turned his
head. I heard him whisper to Hamiid that the silver-
tilted sword he is wearing, and which is the one
"Wilfrid gave him at Damascus, was an ancestral
relic ; it had been, he said, *' min zeman,'' from
time immemorial, in the Aruk family. He had
also established a fiction, in which he privately
entreated us to join, that we started from home
with a hawk (for all the best falcons come from
Tudmur), and lost it on the journey.*

While we were discussing these important
matters, the call to prayer was heard, and the two
Ibn Rashids, begging us to remain seated, rose and
went out.

They were absent a few minutes, and on their
return the Emir, to our great delight, proposed to
show us his gardens, and immediately led the way
down tortuous passages and thi'ough courts and
doors into a palm grove surrounded by a high wall.
Here we were joined by numerous slaves, some
black, some white, for there are both sorts at Hail.
A number of gazelles were running about, and came
up quite familiarly as we entered. These were of
two varieties, one browner than the other, answer-
ing, I believe, to what are called the " gazelle des

* To travel witli a hawk is a sign of nobility.

224 ^ Pilgrimage to Ngd. [ch. x.

bois," and the "gazelle des plaines," in Algeria.
There were also a couple of ibexes with immense
heads, tame like the gazelles, and allowing them-
selves to be stroked. The gazelles seemed especi-
ally at home, and we were told that they breed here
in captivity. The most interesting, however, of all
the animals in this garden were three of the wild
cows (bakar wahhash), from the Nefild, which we
had so much wished to see. They proved to be, as
we had supposed, a kind of antelope,* though their
likeness to cows was quite close enough to account
for their name. They stood about as high as an
Aldemey calf six months old, and had humps on
their shoulders like the Indian cattle. In colour
they were a yellowish white, with reddish legs
turning to black towards the feet. The face was
parti-coloured, and the horns, which were black,
were quite straight and slanted backwards, and fully
three feet long, with spiral markings. These wild
cows were less tame than the rest of the animals, and
the slaves were rather afraid of them, for they seemed
ready to use their horns, which were as sharp
as needles. The animals, though fat, evidently
suffered from confinement, for all were lame, one
with an enlarged knee, and the rest with overgrown
hoofs. When we had seen and admired the mena-
gerie, and fed the antelopes with dates, we went on
through a low door, which we had almost to creep
through, into another garden, where there were

* Oryxbeatriz.

CH. X.] The Entires stud. 225

lemon trees (treng), bitter oranges (hdmud), and
pomegranates (roman). The Emir, who was very
polite and attentive to me, had some of the fruit
picked and gave me a bunch of a kind of thyme,
the only flower growing there. We saw some
camels at work drawing Water from a large well, a
hundred to a hundred and fifty feet deep, to judge
by the rope. The Emir then crept through another
low door and we after him, and then to our great
satisfaction we found ourselves in a stable-yard full
of mares, tethered in rows each to a manger. I was
almost too excited to look, for it was principally to
see these that we had come so far.

This yard contained about twenty mares, and be-
yond it was another with a nearly equal number.
Then there was a third with eight horses, tethered
in like manner ; and beyond it again a fourth with
thirty or forty foals. I will not now describe all we
saw, for the Emir's stud will require a chapter to
itself. Sufl&ce it to say, that Wilfrid's first im-
pression and mine were alike. The animals we saw
before us were not comparable for beauty of form or
for quality with the best we had seen among the
Gomussa. The Emir, however, gave us little time
for reflectioQ, for with a magnificent wave of his
hand, and explaining with mock humility, "The
horses of my slaves," he dragged us on from one
yard to another, allowing us barely time to ask a few
questions as to breed, for the answers to which he
referred us to Hamtid. We had seen enough, how-

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226 A Pilgrimage to Nejd. [ch. x.

ever, to make us very happy, and Hamild had pro-
mised that we should see them again. There was
no doubt whatever that, in spite of the Emir's dis-
claimer, these were Ibn Kashid's celebrated mares,
the representatives of that stud of Feysul ibn Saoud,
about which such a romance had been made.

An equally interesting spectacle, the Emir thought

for us, was his kitchen, to which he now showed the

way. Here, with unconcealed pride, he displayed

his pots and pans, especially seven monstrous

cauldrons, capable each, he declared, of boiling

three whole camels. Several of them were actually

at work, for Ibn Rashid entertains nearly two

hundred guests daily, besides his own household.

Forty sheep or seven camels are his daily bill of

fare. As we came out, we found the hungry

multitude already assembling. Every stranger

in Hail has his place at Ibn Bashid's table,

and towards sunset the courtyard begins to filL

The Emir does not himself preside at these feasts.

He always dines alone, or in his harim ; but the

slaves and attendants are extraordinarily well-drilled,

and behave with perfect civility to all comers, rich

and poor alike. Our own dinner was brought to us at

our house. Thus ended our first day at Hail, a day of

wonderful interest, but not a little fatiguing, " Ya

akhi," (oh my brother), said Mohanmied ibn Aruk

to Wilfrid that evening, as they sat smoking and

drinking their coflFee, " did I not promise you that

you should see Nejd, and Ibn Eashid, and the mares

cH. X.] Daily life at Hatl. 227

of Hail, and have you not seen them ? " We both
thanked him, and, indeed, we both felt very grate-
fuL Not that the favours were all on one side ;
for brotherly offices had been very evenly balanced,
and Mohammed had been quite as eager to make
this journey as we had. But, alas! our pleasant
intercourse with Mohammed was very near its end.
The next few days of our life at Hail may be
briefly described. Wilfrid and Mohammed went
every morning to the mejlis, and then paid visits,
sometimes to Hamiid, sometimes to Mubarek, some-
times to the Emir. A slave brought us our break-
fast daily from the kasr, and a soldier came to
escort us through the streets. Mohammed had now
made acquaintances of his own, and was generally
out all day long. I stayed very much in doors, and
avoided passing through the streets, except when
invited to come to the castle, for we had agreed
that discretion was the better part of valour with
us. That there was some reason for this prudence
I think probable, for though we never experienced
anything but politeness from the Hail people, we
heard afterwards that some among them were not
best pleased at the reception given us by the Emir.
Europeans had never before been seen in Nejd ; and
it is possible that a fanatical feeling might have
arisen if we had done anything to excite it.
Wahhabism is on the decline, but not yet extinct at
Hail ; and the Wahhabis would of course have been
our enemies. In the Emir's house, or even imder

228 A Pilgrimage to NejcL [ch.

■ ;l

1

charge of one of his officers, we were perfectly safe,
but wandering about alone would have been rash.
The object, too, would have been insufficient,
for away from the Court there is little to see at
Hail.

With Hamiid and his family we made great
friends. He was a man who at once inspired con-
fidence, and we had no cause to regret having acted
on our first impression of his character. He has
always, they say, refused to take presents from, the
Emir; and has never approved of his conduct,
though he has sided with him politically, and serves
him faithfully as a brother. His manners are cer-
tainly as distinguished as can be found anywhere in
the world, and he is besides intelligent and weU
informed. The Emir is different ; with him there
was always a certain gene. It was impossible to
forget the horrible story of his usm-pation ; and
there was something, too, about him which made it
impossible to feel quite at ease in his presence.
Though he knows how to behave with dignity, he
does not always do so. It is difficult to reconcile
his almost childish manner, at times, with the
ability he has given proofs of. He has something
of the spoiled child in his way of wandering on
from one subject to another ; and, like J6har, of
asking questions which he does not always wait to
hear answered, a piece of ill-manners not altogether
unroyal, and so, perhaps, the effect of his condition
as a sovereign prince. He is also very naively

CH. X] Hamiid ibn Raskid. 229

vain, as most people become who are fed constantly
on flattery ; and he is continually on the look-out
for compliments, about his power, and his wisdom,
and his possessions. His jealousy of other great
Sheykhs whom we have seen is often childishly
displayed. Hamud has none of this. I fancy he
stands to his cousin Mohammed somewhat in the
position in which Momy is supposed to have stood
to Louis Napoleon, only that Momy was neither so
good a' man nor even so fine a gentleman as Hanaud.
He gives the Emir advice, and in private speaks his
mind, only appearing to the outer world as the
obsequious follower of his prince. Hamiid has
several sons, the eldest of whom, Majid, has all his
father's charm of manner, and has, besides, the
attraction of perfectly candid youth, and a quite
ideal beauty. He is about sixteen, and he and his
brother and a young uncle came to see us the morn-
ing after our arrival, sent by their father to pay
their compliments. He talked very much and
openly about everything, and gave us a quantity of
information about the various mares at the Emir's
stable, and about his father's mares and his own.
He then went on to tell us of an expedition he had
made with the Emir to the neighbourhood of Queyt,
and of how he had seen the sea. They had made a
ghazii on the felUhin of the sea-coast, and had then
returned. He asked me how I rode on horseback,
and I showed him my side-saddle, which, however,
did not surprise him. '' It is a shedad," he said ;

^30 A Pilgrimage to Nejd. [«. x.

" you ride as one rides a delul." This young Majid,
though he looks quite a boy, is married ; and we
were informed that here no one of good family puts
off marriage after the age of sixteen. I made
acquaintance with his wife Urgheyeh, \?rho is very
pretty, very small in stature, and very young ; she
is one of Metaab's daughters, and her aister is
married to Hamild, so that father and son are
brothers-in-law.

Mubarek, the Emir's chief slave, was one of our
particular acquaintances. He inhabits a very hand-
some house, as houses go in Hail ; and there
Wilfrid paid him more than one visit. His house
is curiously decorated with designs in plaster of
birds and beasts — ostriches, antelopes, and camels.
Though a slave, Mubarek has not in appearance the
least trace of negro blood ; and it is stiU a mystery
to us how he happens to be one. He is a well-bred
person, and has done everything in his power to
make things pleasant for us.

On the second day after our arrival, after the
usual compliments and some conversation, I asked
the Emir's permission to pay a visit to the harim.
Mohammed ibn Rashid appeared gratified by my
request, which he immediately granted, saying ihaX
he would send to the khawatin (ladies) to inform
them, and desire them to prepare for my reception.
He accordingly despatched a messenger, but we sat
,on talking for a long time before anything came of
. the message ; I had grown quite tired of waiting.

cH. X.] The Emif^s hartm. '231

and was already wondering how soon we should be
at liberty to return home, where I might write my
journal in secret, when the servant re-appeared,
and brought us word that Amusheh, the Emir's chief
wife, was ready to receive me. I fancy that ladies
here seldom dress with any care imless they want to
display their silks and jewels to some visitor ; and
pn such special occasions their toilet is a most elabo-
rate one, with kohl and fresh paint, and takes a long
time. The Emir at once put me in charge of a black
slave woman, who led the way to the harim.
Hamiid's wives as well as Mohammed's live in the
palace, but in separate dwellings. The kasr is al-
most a town in itself, and I and my black guide
walked swiftly through so many alleys and courts,
and turned so many comers to the right and to the
left, that if I had been asked to find my way back
unassisted, I certainly could not have done it. At
last, however, after crossing a very large courtyard,
we stopped at a small low door. This was open,
and through it I could see a number of people sit-
ting round a fire within, for it was the entrance to
Amusheh's kahwah. This room had two columns
supporting the ceiling, like all other rooms I had
seen in the palace, except the great kahwah, which
has five. The fire-place, aB usual, an oblong hole in
the ground, was on the left as one entered, in the
comer near the door ; in it stood a brazier contain-
ing the fire, and between it and the wall handsome
Qarpets had been spread. All the persons present

4

I

I''
I

232 A Pilgrimage to I^efd. [ctx.

rose to their feet as I arrived. Amnsheh could easQj
be singled out from among the cio\irdy even before she
advanced to do the honours. She possesses a certain
distinction of appearance and manner ^vrhich would
be recognised anywhere, and completely edipsed
the rest of the company. But she, the daughter of
Obeyd and sister of Hamud, has every right to out-
shine friends, relatives, and fellow wives. Her fcce,
though altogether less regularly shaped than ha
brother's, is sufficiently good-looking, with a well-
cut nose and mouth, and something singularly
sparkling and brilliant. Hedusheh and Lulya, the
two next wives, who were present, had gold brocade
as rich as hers, and lips and cheeks smeared as red
as hers with carmine, and eyes with borders kohled
as black as hers, but lacked her charm. Amusheh
is besides clever and amusing, and managed to keep
up a continual flow of conversation, in which the
other two hardly ventured to join. They sat look-
ing pretty and agreeable, but were evidently
kept in a subordinate position. Lulya shares with
Amusheh, as the latter informed me, what they con-
sider the great privilege of never leaving town, thus
taking precedence of Hedusheh, on whom devolves
the duty of following the Emir's fortunes in the
desert, where he always spends a part of the year in
tents. The obligation of such foreign service is
accoimted derogator}% and accordingly objected to
by these Hail ladies. They have no idea of amuse-
ment, if I may judge from what they said to me,*

OH. X.] Otium cum Digntiate. . 233

but a firm conviction that- perfect happiness and
dignity consist in sitting stiU.

Tb^ happiness Amusheh and I enjoyed for some
time. We sat together on one carpet spread over a
mattress, cushions being ranged along the wall
behind us for us to lean against, and the fire in
front scorching our faces while we talked. On my
right sat Hedusheh ; beyond her Lulya and the rest
of the company, making a circle round the fireplace.
Before long, Atwa, a pretty little girl, who was
introduced to me as the fourth wife, came in and
took her place beyond Lulya. She looked more
like a future wife than one actually married, being
very young ; and indeed it presently appeared that
she had merely been brought to be looked at and
considered about, and that the Emir had decided to
reject her as too childish and insignificant.* He
was, in fact, casting about in his mind for some
suitable alliance which should bring him poHticaL
support, as well as an increase of domestic comfort
That these were the objects of his new matrimonial
projects I soon learned from his own mouth, from
the questions he asked me about the marriageable
daughters of Bedouin Sheyks. What could, indeed,
be more suitable for his purpose than some daughter
of a great desert sheykh, whose family should be valu-
able allies in war, while she herself, the ideal fourth
wife, imlike these ladies of the town, should be

* I heard noUiing of the fate of Obeyd's widow, and ooald not
inquire. #*

I

;

■

■ d

1

}

it

I.

234 A Pilgrimage to N^ejcL [ck. x.

always ready to accompany her husband to the
desert, and should indeed prefer the desert to the
town?

Among other persons present were several oldish
women, relatives, whose names and exact relation*
ship have slipped my memory ; also a few friends
and a vast number of attendants and slaves, these
last mostly black. They all squatted round the fire,
each trying to get into the front rank, and to
seize every opportunity of wedging in a remark, by
way of joining in the conversation of their betters.
None of these outsiders were otherwise than plainly
dressed in the dark blue or black cotton or woollen
stufis, used by ordinary Bedouin women in this part
of Arabia, often bordered with a very narrow red
edge, like a cord or binding, which looks well. The
rich clothes worn by Amusheh and her companion
wives are somewhat difficult to describe, presenting
as they did an appearance of splendid shapelessnesa.
Each lady had a garment cut like an abba, bat
closed up the front, so that it must have been put
on over the head ; and as it was worn without any
belt or fastening at the waist, it had the effect of a
^ack. These sacks or bags were of magnificent
material, gold interwoven with silk, but neither
convenient nor becoming, effectually hiding any
grace of figure. Amusheh wore crimson and gold,
and round her neck a mass of gold chains studded
with turquoises and pearls. Her hair hirng down
in four long plaits, plastered smooth with .some

cH. X.] . Tyranny of Jashion. 235

reddish stuff, and on the top of her head stuck a
gold and turquoise ornament, like a small plate,
about four inches in diameter. This was placed
forward at the edge of the forehead, and fastened
back with gold and pearl chains to another orna-
ment resembling a lappet, also of gold and turquoise,
hooked on behind the head, and having flaps which
fell on each side of the head and neck, ending in
long strings of pearls with bell- shaped gold and
pearl tassels. The pearls were all irregularly shaped
and iinsorted as to size, the turquoises very unequal
in shape, size, and quality, the coral generally in
beads. The gold work was mostly good, some of it
said to be from Persia, but the greater part of Hail
workmanship. I had nearly forgotten to mention
the nose-ring, here much larger than I have
seen it at Bagdad and elsewhere, measuring an
inch and a half to two inches across. It consists
of a thin ""circle of gold, with a knot of gold and
turquoises attached by a chain to the cap or lappet
before described. It is worn in the left nostril, but
taken out and left dangling while the wearer eats
and drinks. A most inconvenient ornament, I
thought and said, and when removed it leaves an
unsightly hole, badly pierced, in the nostril, and
more uncomfortable-looking than the holes in
European ears. But fashion rules the ladies at
Hail as in other places, and my new acquaintances
only laughed at such criticisms. They find these
trinkets useful toys^ and amuse themselves while

236 A Pilgrimage to Nejd. [ch.x.

talking by continually pulling them out and putting
tbem in again. The larger size of ring seemed
besides to be a mark of high position, bo that the
diameter of the circle might be considered the
measure of the owner's rank, for the rings of all iu-
feriora were kept within the inch.

Amusheh was very commimicative, but told me
so many new names, that I could not remember all
the information she volunteered about the Iba
Rashid family and relationships. She remarked
that neither she nor any of Mohammed's wives had
any children, a fact which I already knew, and not
from Radi alone ; for it is the talk of the town and
tribe that this is a judgment for the Emir's crimes.
She spoke with great affection of her nephew Majid
and of her brother Hamud, and with veneration of
her father Obeyd, but I cannot recollect that she
told me anything new about any of them. She
spoke too of Tellil, but of course made no mention
of Bender. Indeed, anxious as I was for any infor-
mation she might give, I knew too much of the
family history and secrets to venture on asking
many questions ; besides, any show of curiosi^
might have made her suspect me of some unavowed
motive. I therefore felt more at ease when the
conversation wandered from dangerous topics to safe
and trivial ones, such as the manners and customs
of different coimtries. " Why do you not wear your
hair like mine % " said she, holding out one of her
long auburn plaits for me to admire; and I had

CH. X.] AmusJieKs breakfast. 237

to explain that such short locks as mine were not
sufficient for the purpose. " Then why did I not
dress in gold brocade?'' "How unsuitable/' I replied,
" would such beautiful stuffs be for the rough work
of travelling, hunting, and riding in the desert/'
When we talked of riding, Amusheh seemed for a
moment doubtful whether to be completely satisfied
about her own lot in life — she would like, she said
to see me on my mare ; and I promised she should,
if possible, be gratified ; but the opportunity never
occurred, and perhaps the supreme authority did not
care that it should. Even she might become dis-
contented. Thus conversing, time slipped away,
and the midday call to prayer sounded. My hostess
then begged me to excuse her, and added, '' I wish
to pray." She and the rest then got up and went
to say their prayers in the middle of the room.
After this she returned and continued the conversa-
tion where we had left it off.

Some slaves now brought a tray, which they
placed before me. On it was a regular solid break-
fast : a large dish of rice in the middle, set round
with small bowls of various sorts of rich and greasy
sauces to be eaten with the rice. I excused myself
as well as I could for my want of appetite, and said
that I had this very morning eaten one of the hares
sent to us by the Emir. Of course I was only
exhorted all the more to eat, and obliged to go
through the form of trying ; but fortunately there
were other hungry mouths at hand, and eager eyes

238 A Pilgrimage to Nej'd. • [oe. x.

watching till the dishes should be passed on to them,
80 I got off pretty easily.

Amusheh afterwards invited me to go upstairs,
that she might show me her own private apart-'
ment, on the floor above the kahwah. I followed
her up a steep staircase, of which each step was
at least eighteen inches in height It led no-
where, except to a single room, the same size as
the one below, and built in the same way, with two
columns supporting the roof, and with a window in
a recess corresponding to the door beneath. This
apartment was well carpeted, and contained for other
furniture a large bed, or couch, composed of a pile
of mattresses, with a velvet and gold counterpane
spread over it ; also a kind of press or cupboard, a
box (sonduk) rather clumsily made of dark wood,
ornamented by coarse, thin plaques of silver stuck
on it here and there. The press stood against the
wall, and might be five feet long and two to three
feet high, opening with two doors, and raised about
two feet from the floor on four thin legs. Under-
neath and in front of it were three or four rows of
china and crockery of a common sort, and a few
Indian bowla, all arranged on the carpet like articles
for sale in the streets. Amusheh asked what I
thought of her house, was it nice ? And after satia-
fj-ing herself of my approbation, she conducted me
down again, and we sat as before on the mattress
between the brazier and the wall.

During my stay, the Emir paid two visita to the

cH. X.], The Entires curiosity. 239

kahwah, and each time that he appeared at the
door the crowd and the wives, except Amusheh,
rose and remained standing until he left. Amusheh
only made a slight how or movement, as if about to
rise, and kept her place by me while her husband
Btood opposite to us talking. He addressed himself
ahnost entirely to me, and spoke chiefly in the
frivolous, ahnost puerile, mLer he sometimes
affects. He inquired my opinion of his wives,
whether they were more beautiful and charming
than Ibn Shaalan's wife, Ghiowseh, the sister of El
Homeydi ibn Meshur, or than his former wife,
Turkya, Jedaan's daughter, who had left him and
returned to her fathers tent. In the forty-eight
hours since my arrival at Hail, the Emir had already
asked me many questions about these two ladies,
and I now answered for the hundredth time that
Turkya was pretty and nice, and that Ghiowseh was
still prettier, but very domineering. He was, how-
ever, determined on a comparison of the two
families, and it was fortunate that now, having
seen Amusheh, Hedusheh, and Lulya and Atwa, I
could say with truth they were handsomer, even
the poor little despised Atwa, than their rivals. He
was rather impatient of Atwa being classed with
the others, and said, " Oh, Atwa, I don't want
her; she is worth nothing.'' His character is, as
I have abeady said, a strange mixture of remark-
able ability and political insight on the one hand,
and on the other a tendency to waste time and

A Pilgrimage to Nejd.

thought on the most foolish trifles, if they touch
his personal vanity. Of his ability I judge by his
extremely interesting remarks on serious subjects,
as well as by the position he has been able to seize
and to keep. Of his energy no one can doubt, for he
has shown it, alas, by his crimes ; but he is so eaten
up with petty personal jealousies, that I sometimes
wonder whether these would influence his conduct
at an important poUtical crisis. I think, however,
that at such a moment all little vanities would be
forgotten, for he is above all things ambitious, and
his vanity is, as it were, a part and parcel of his
ambition. He is personally jealous of all other
renowned chiefs, because here in Arabia personal
heroism is, perhaps more than anywhere else in the
world since the age of chivalry, an eng^e of
political power. He would, I doubt not, make
aUiance with Sotamm, if necessary to gain his ends ;
nevertheless, he could not resist talking to me about
Ibn Shaalan at this most inappropriate moment,
evidently hoping to hear something disparaging of
his rival. I confess I found it embarrassing to
undergo an examination 'as to the merits of
Ghiowseh and Turkya in the presence of Mo-
hammed's own wives, who all listened with uide
open eyes, breathless with attention. My embar^
rassmcnt only increased when, after the Emir was
gone, Amusheh, on her part, immediately attacked
me with a volley of questions. While he remained
he had persisted in his inquiries, especially about

CM. X.] Questioning. 241

Turkya, till I, being driven into a comer, at last
lost patience, and exclaimed, " But why do you ask
me these questions] Why do you want to hear
about Turkya ? What is it to you whether she is
fair or kind ? You never have seen her, nor is it
likely you ever will see her ! " " No," he replied, " I
have never seen her. Yet I want to know some-
thing about her, and to hear your opinion of her.
Perhaps some day I may like to marry her. I
might take her instead of this little girl," pointing
to Atwa, " who will never do for me, and whom I
will not have. She is worthless,'' he repeated,
" worthless." Poor little Atwa stood listening, but
I think with stolid indiflFerence, for I watched her
countenance, and could not detect even a passing
shade of regret or disappointment. Indeed, of all
the wives, Amusheh alone seemed to me to have any
personal feeling of affection for the Emir. She, the
moment he had left, fell upon me with questions.
'* Who is Turkya ? " she asked, almost gasping for
breath. It surprised me that she did not know, for
she knew who El-Homeydi ibn Meshur was. I had
to explain that his sister Ghiowseh had married
Sotamm ibn Shaalan, and to tell her the story of
Sotamm's second marriage ; and of how Ghiowseh
had determined to get rid of her rival, and succeeded
in making the latter so uncomfortable, that she had
left, and had since refused to return. Amusheh
certainly cares about Ibn Eashid, and I thought she
feared lest a new element of discord ehould bd

TOIk I.

242 A Pilgrimage to Nejd. [oh. x.

brought into the family. As to her own poaitioii,
it could hardly be affected by the arrival of a new
wife ; she, as Hamiid's sister, must be secure of her
rank and influence, and the Emir, with his guilty
conscience, would never dare, if he ever wished, to
slight her or Hamtid, to whose support he owes so
much.

From Amusheh's house I went with a black
slave girl to another house also within .the kasr,
that of Hamiid's wife, Beneyeh, a daughter of
Metaab. There I saw Urgheyeh, her sister, married
to Majid, son of Hami^d ; also another wife of
Hamud's. This last person I found was not con-
sidered as an equal, and on asking about her birth
and parentage, was told, " She is the daughter of a
Shammar." " Who 1 " I inquired. " Ahad " (one).
" But «jAo is he ? " " Ahad, — fulan min Hail min
el belad " (some one, a person of the town). She
was hardly considered as belonging to (fee family.
The third and fourth wives, whom I afterwards saw,
are, like the first, relations, one a daughter of TeUiSl,
and the other of Suleyman, Hamiid's uncle on the
mother's side (khal). These four are young ;
Majid's mother, whose name I never heard, died, I
believe, several years ago. Hamfld, like the Emir,
keeps up the number of his wives to the exact
figure permitted by the law of the Koran, any one
who dies or fails to please being replaced as we
replace a servant.

Beneyeh met me at her door, and we went

cH. X.] Goldsmithi work. 243

through a little ante-room or vestibule iuto her
kahwah. Here we remained only a few moments
till, to my surprise, three arm-chairs were brought
and placed in the ante-room. On these I and
Beneyeh and the second class wife sat, drinking tea
out of tea-cups, with saucers and tea-spoons. The
cups were filled to the brim, and the tea in them
then filled to overflowing with lumps of sugar.
It was, however, good. A pUe of sweet limes
was then brought; slaves peeled the fruits, and
divided them into quarters, which they handed
round. After these refreshments Beneyeh wished
to show me her room upstairs. It was reached, like
Amusheh's private apartment, by a rugged staircase
from the kahwah, and was built in the same style,
with two columns supporting the rafters, only it
had no outlook, being lighted only by two small
openings high up in the wall. It was, however,
more interesting than Amusheh's room, for its walls
were decorated with arms. There were eighteen or
twenty swords, and several guns and daggers,
arranged with some care and taste as ornaments.
The guns were all very old-fashioned things, with
long barrels, but most of them beautifully inlaid
with silver. Two of the daggers we had already
seen in the evening, when the Emir sent for them to
show us as specimens of the excellence of Hail gold-
smiths' work. The swords, or sword-hilts, were of
various degrees of richness, the blades I did not see.
Unfortunately at the moment I did not think of

244 ^ Pilgrimage to Nejd. Ioh. x.

Obeyd and Lis three wishes, and so forgot to ask
Beneyeh whether Obeyd's sword was among these ;
it would not have done t« inquire about the widow,
but there would have been no impropriety in asking
about the sword, and I afterwards the more regretted
having omitted to do so, because this proved to be
my only opportunity. It would have been curious
to ascertain whether Obeyd wore a plain unjewelled
weapon in keeping with Wahhabi austerity. He
would surely have disapproved, could he have fore-
seen it, of the gold and jewels, not to mention sUka
and brocaded stuffs now worn by his descendants ;
for his own children have none of the severe
asceticism attributed to him, although they inherit
his love of prayer.

HamM came upstairs while I was there with
Beneyeh, but he only stayed a few minutes. They
seemed to be on very good terms, and after he left
she talked a great deal about him, and seemed very
proud of him. " This is Hamdd's, and this, and
this," said she, " and here is his bed," pointing to a
pile of mattresses with a fine coverlid. There were
several European articles of furniture in the room,
an iron bedstead with mattresses, several common
looking-glasses, with badly gilt frames, and a clock
with weights. Urgheyeh now joined us, and
Beneyeh particularly showed me a handsome neck-
lace her sister wore of gold and coral, elaborately
worked. "This was my fether's," she told me,
adding that the ornament came from Peraa.

cfl. X.] TelldVs daughter. 245

Beneyeh is immensely proud of her son, AbdaUah,
a fine boy of four months old. She and her sister
were so amiable and anxious to please, that I could
willingly have spent the rest of the afternoon with
them. But it was now time to pay my next visit.
After many good-byes and good wishes from both
sisters, my black guide seized hold of my hand, and
we proceeded to the apartments of another wife of
Hamud, Zehowa, daughter of Telldl. She is sjonpa-
thetic and intelligent, extremely small and slight,
with the tiniest of hands. Like the other ladies,
she wore rings on her fingers, with big, irregular
turquoises. We sat by the fire and ate sweet limes
and trengs and drank tea. Zehowa sent for her
daughter, a baby only nine months old, to show me,
and I told her I had a daughter of my own, and
that girls were better than boys, which pleased her,
and she answered, "Yes, the daughter is the mother's,
but the son belongs to the father.*'

Presently one of the guards, a tall black fellow,
all in scarlet, came with a message for me, a request
from the Beg that I would join him in the Emir's
kahwah, where he was waiting for me. Zehowa,
like her cousins, begged hard that I would stay, or
at least promise to visit her again as soon as possible,
and I, bidding her farewell, followed the scarlet and
black swordsman through courts, aUeys, and pas-
sages to the kahwah, where I found Wilfrid. He
was being entertained by an elderly man with coffee
and conyersation. This personage was Mubarck,

246 A Pilgrimage to Nejd. [oh. x.

already mentioned as the chief of the elaves, and he
had been giving "Wilfrid a vast deal of interesting
information about horses, especially the dispersion
of Feysul ibn Saoud's stud, and the chief sources
from which that celebrated collection was obtained.
It had been originally got together, he said, entirely
fi^in the Bedouins, both of Nejd and of the north,
by purchase and in war.

I never saw Zehowa, Beneyeh, or Amusheh again,
for the next few days were fully occupied, and
afterwards, owing to our finding ourselves involved
in a network of mystery, and subject to an adverse
influence, the pressure of which made itself felt
without our being able at firat to lay hold of any-
thing tangible, or even to conjecture the cause, it
became more than ever an object to us to remain
quiet and unobserved. But I am anticipating cir-
cumstances to be detailed further on.

About three days later I paid a visit to the harim
of Hamiid's uncle. This gentleman, Suleyman,
we were already acquainted with, from seeing hun
at Court on several occasions. He had sent me
an invitation to visit his fanuly, and two black
slaves came to escort me to their house, one of the
dependencies of the palace. In a kahwah opening
out of a small yard, I found the old man waiting
to receive me. He dyes his beard red, and loves
books, amidst a pile of which he was sitting. I
was in hopes that his conversation would be in-
structive, and we had just begun to talk when.

CH. X.] A stupid wife. 247

alas, his wife came in with a rush, followed by a
crowd of other women, upon which he hastily
gathered up all his books and some manuscripts
which were Ijring about, and putting some of them
away in a cupboard, carried off the rest and made
his escape.

Ghut, his wife, was the stupidest person I had
seen at Hail, but very talkative, and hospitable
with dates, fresh butter floating in its own butter-
milk, and sugar-plums. The many-coloured crowd
of white, brown, and black attendants, slaves, and
children, were not in much awe of her, and chattered
away without a check to their hearts' content. All
were, however, respectful and attentive to me. Ghut's
daughter, another Zehowa, presently arrived with a
slave carrying her son, Abderrahman, a child about
a year old. This Zehowa was good-looking, but
nearly as stupid and tiresome as her mother. She
was very much taken up with showing me her box
of trinkets, which she sent for on purpose to display
before me its contents. These were of the usual
sort, gold ornaments for head and arms and
ankles, set with turquoises and strings of pearls.
The furniture of the room, which she and her mother
specially pointed out for my admiration, was also
like what I had already seen — ^presses or boxes on
legs, and ornamented with rude silver plaques.

The conversation was dull Here is a sample :
/. " What do you do all day long \ Zeh. "We live
in the kasr.'' ./. " Don't you go out at all ? " Zeh

248 A Pilgrime^e to Nejd. fcH. x.

" No ; we alwaya stay in the kasr." /. " Then you
never ride " (I always ask if they ride, to see the
effect) " as we do ? " Zeh. " No, we have no marea
to ride." /. " What a pity ! and don't you ever go
into the country outside Hail, the desert 1 " Zeh.
"Oh, no, of course not" /. "But, to pass the time,
what do you do ? " Zeh. " We do nothing." Here
a sharp black boy interrupted us, " O, khatOn,
these are daughters of sheykhs, they have no work
— ^no work at all to do, don't you understand ? "
/. "Of course, I understand perfectly; but they
might amuse themselves without doing work," and
turning to Zehowa I added, "Don't you even look
at the horses?" Zeh. "No, we do nothing." I. " I
^ould die if I did nothing. When I am at home
I always walk round the first thing in the morning
to look at my horses. How do you manage to
spend your lives?" Zeh. "We sit." Thus supremo
contentment in the harim here is to sit in absolute
idleness. It seems odd, where the men are so active
and adventurous, that the women should be satisfied
to be bored ; but such, I suppose, is the tyranny of
fashion.

Every evening after dinner we used to receive a
message from the Emir, inviting us to spend the
evening with him. This was always the pleasantest
part of the day, for we generally found one or two
interesting visitors sitting with him. As a sample
of these I give an extract fit>m my journal :

" We found the Emir this evening in high good

I cH. X.] News of a battle. 249

[ liumour. News had just come from El-Homeydi
\ ibn Meshur, a Koala sheykh of the faction opposed
\ to Sotamm, that a battle was fought about a month
ago between the Koala and the Welled All, and that
Sotamm has been worsted. Sotamm, at the head
of a ghazd numbering six hundred horsemen, had
marched against Ibn Smeyr at Jerud, but the latter
refused to come out and fight him, and so Sotamm
retired. On his way back home, however, he fell in
with an outlying camp of Welled Ali, somewhere to
the east of the Hauran, and summoned it to surrender.
These, numbering only a hundred and fifty horse-
men, at first entered into negotiation, and, it is said,
offered to give up their camp and camels if they
were permitted to retire with their mares (the
women and children would of course not have been
molested in any case), and to this Sotamm wished
to agree. But the younger men of his party, and
especially the Ibn Jendal family, who had a death
to avenge, would not hear of compromise, and a
battle ensued. It ended, strangely enough, in
favour of the weaker side, who succeeded in killing
four of the Koala, and among them Tellal ibn
Shaalan, Sotamm's cousin and heir presumptive.
Sotamm himself is said to have been saved only by
the speed of his mare. Though the forces engaged
were so disproportionate, nobody here seems sur-
prised at the result, for victory and defeat are " min
Allah," " in the hand of God ; " but everybody is
lughly delighted, and the Emir can hardly contain

250 A Pilgrimage to Nejd. {pa. x.

himself for joy. " What do you think now of
Sotamm % " he said ; " has he head, or hae he no
head 1 " " Not much, I am afraid," I answered,
" but I am sorry for him. He is weak, and does
not know how to manage bis people, but he has a
good heart." " And Ibn Smeyr, what do you say
to Ibn Smeyr \ " " He baa more head than heart,"
I said. This delighted the Emir. "Ah," he
replied, "it is you, khatAu, that have the head.
Now what do you say to me ? have I head, or not
head ? " " You have head," I answered. " And
Hamiid ? " " You all of you have plenty of head
here, more of course than the Bedouins, who are
most of them like childreo." "But wc are Bedouins
too," he said, hoping to be contradicted. " I like
the Bedouins best," I replied ; " it is better to have
heart than head." Then he went on to cross-
question me about all the other sheykhs whose
names he knew. " Which," he asked, *' is the beat
of all you have met with 1 " " Mohammed Dukhi,"
I said, "is the cleverest, Ferhan ibn Hedeb the best-
mamiered, but the one I like best is your relation
in the Jezireh, Faris Jerba." I don't think he was
quite pleased at this. He had never heard, he said,
good or bad of Ibn Hedeb, who belonged to the
Bisshr. He was not on terms with any of the
Bisshr except Meahur ibn Mershid, who had paid
him a visit two years ago. We told >iim that both
Meshur and Faris were Wilfrid's " brothers." Meahur
he liked, but Faris Jerba was evidently no &vourite

uo. X.] The Emir's jealousy. 251

of his. I fancy the Emir has taken Ferhan's part
in the family quarrel It is certain that when
Amsheh, Sfuk's widow and Abdul Kerim's mother,
came with her son Faris to Nejd, he would see
neither of them. They stayed in the desert all the
time they were here, and never came to Hail.
Eashid ibn Ali, too, is Faris's friend, and of course in
no favour at this court.* He then asked about
Jedaan, touched rather unfeelingly on the idiotcy of
Turki, Jedaan's only son, and then cut some jokes
at the expense of our old acquaintance, Smeyr ibn
Zeydan. "An old fool," the Emir exclaimed,
" why did they send him here ? They might as
well have sent a camel ! " This is the Smeyr who
came to Nejd a year and a half ago to try and get
Ibn Eashid's assistance for Sotamm, and arrange a
coalition against Jedaan and the Sebaa. We knew
his mission had failed, but the fact is Ibn Rashid is
eaten up with jealousy of anyone who has the least
reputation in the desert. We are surprised, how-
ever, to find him so well informed about everything
and everybody in the far north, and we are much
interested, as he has solved for us one of the problems
about Nejd which used to puzzle us, namely, the
relations maintained by the tribes of Jebel Shanmiar
with those of the north. The Emir has told us that
the Shammar of the Jezireh and his own Shammar
Btill count each other as near relations. "Our

* The Ibn Alia were f onnerly Sheykhs of the Shammar, but were
displaced by the Ibn Baahida fifty years ago.

252 A Pilgrimage to Nejd. [ch. x.

horses," he said, "are of the same blood." With
the Roala he has made peace, and with Ibn Haddal;
but the Sebaa and the rest of the Bisshr clan are
out of his way. They never come anywhere near
Nejd, except on ghaztis, and that very rarely.
Once, however, a ghazii, of Fedaan, had got as far
as Kasf m, and he had gone out against them, and
captured a Seglawi Jedran mare of the Ibn Sbeni
strain. He promised to show it to us. We then
talked a good deal about horses, and our knowledge
on this head caused general astonishment Indeed,
I think we could pass a better examination in the
breeds than most of the Ibn Rashids. £7 long
residence in town they have lost many of the
Bedouin traditions. Hamud, however, who takes
more interest in horses than the Emir, has told us
a number of interesting facts relating to the stud
here, and that of the late Emir of Riad, Feysul ihn
Saoud, solving another problem, that of the fsibulous
Nejd breed ; but we are taking separate notes about
these things.

We had not been talking long with the Emir
and Hamtid, when a fat vulgar-looking fellow was
introduced and made to sit down by us. It was
evident that he was no Hail man, for his features
were coarse, and his manners rude. He talked
with a strong Bagdadi accent, and was addressed
by everyone as " ya Hajji." It was clear that he
belonged to the Haj, but why was he here % The
mystery was soon cleared up, for after a whif^red

CH. X.] Nassr ibn Hezam. 253

conversation with Hamud, the new visitor turned
to Wilfrid, and began addressing him in what we at
first took to be gibberish, until seeing that we made
no answer, he exclaimed in Arabic, " There, I told
you he was no Englishman ! » Wilfrid then cross-
questioned him, and elicited the fact that he had been
a stoker on board one of the British India Company's
steamers on the Persian Gulf, and that the language
he had been talking was English. Only two
phrases, however, we succeeded in distinguishing,
" werry good," and "chief engineer "—and having
recognised them and given their Arabic equivalents,
our identity was admitted. The fellow was then
sent about his business, and a very small, very
polite old man took his place. He was conspicuous
among these well-dressed Shammar by the plainest
possible dress, a dark brown abba without hem or
ornament, and a cotton kefiyeh on his head, un-
bound by any aghal whatsoever. He was treated
with great respect, however, by all, and it was easy
to see that he was a man of condition. He entered
freely into conversation with us, and talked to
Mohammed about his relations in Aared, and it
presently appeared that he was from Southern
Nejd. This fact explained the severity of his
costume, for among the Wahhabis, no silk or gold
ornaments are tolerated. He was, in fact, the
Sheykh of Harik, the last town of Nejd towards
the south, and close to the Dahna, or great southern
desert This he described to us as exactly like the

254 -^ Pilgrimage to NejcL [cil x.

Nefud we have just crossed, only with more vegeta-
tion. The ghada is the principal wood, bat tiieie
are palms in places.

It is not the custom of Hail to smoke, either firom
Wahhabi prejudice, or, as I am more inclined to
think, because tobacco has never penetrated so far
inland in quantities sufficient to make the habit
general No objection, however, has been made
to Wilfrid's pipe, which he smokes when and where
he chooses, and this evening when the call to prayer
sounded, and the Emir and Hamiid had gone out to
perform their devotions, the old man I have just
mentioned, Nassr ibn Hezani, hinted without more
ceremony that he should like a whiff He has
quarrelled with Ibn Saoud, and probably hates all
the Wahhabi practices, and was very glad to take
the opportunity of committing this act of wicked-
ness. He was careftd, however, to return the pipe
before the rest came back He, at any rate, if a
Wahhabi, is not one of the disagreeable sort described
by ]Mr. Palgrave, for he invited us very cordially
to go back home with him to Hank. The Emir,
however, made rather a face at this suggestion, and
gave such an alarming accoimt of what would
happen to us if we went to Riad, that I don't
think it would be wise to attempt to go there now.
We could not go in fact without the Emir's permis-
sion. I do not much care, for town life is wearisome ;
we have had enough of it, and I have not much
curiosity to see more of Nejd, unless we can go

CH. X.] A Foreign toy. 255

among the Bedouins there. If Ibn Saoud still had
his collection of mares the sight of them would be
worth some risk, but his stud has long since been
scattered, and Nassr ibn Hezani assures us that
there is nothing now in Arabia to compare with Ibn
Bashid's stud. Ibn Hezani, like everybody else, laughs
at the story of a Nejd breed, and says, as everybody
else does, that the mares at Kiad were a collection
made by Feysul ibn Saoud in quite recent times.

Later in the evening, a native goldsmith was
introduced, with a number of articles worked by
him at Hail. They were pretty, but not specially
interesting, or very unlike what may be seen
elsewhere, dagger hilts and sheaths, and a few
ornaments. It was this man, however, who had
made the gold hilts which all the princely family
here wear to their swords. These we examined,
and found the work really good.

The most amusing incident of the evening,
however, and one which we were not at all prepared
for, was the sudden production by the Emir of one
of those toys called telephones, which were the
fashion last year in Europe. This the Emir caused
two of his slaves to perform with, one going into
the courtyard outside, and the other listening.
The message was successfully delivered, the slave
outside, to make things doubly sure, shouting at
the top of his voice, *'Ya Abdallah weyn entel
yeridak el Emir." " Abdallah, where are you ?
the Emir wants you,'* and other such phrases. We

256

A Pilgrimage to Nejd.

expressed great surprise, oa in duty bound ; indeed,
it was the first time we had actually seen the toy,
and it is singular to find so very modem an
invention already at HmI.

At about ten o'clock, the Emir began to yawn,
and we all got up and wished him good-night He
very kindly sent for, and gave me, a number of
trengs and oranges, which he gave orders should
be conveyed to our house, together with a new-laid
ostrich's egg, the " first of the season," which had
just been brought to him from the Neflid.

CHAPTER XI.

*'l8hBUdowel1:
The people love me, and the Desert *» mine ;
liy power 's a crescent, and my augoring hope
Says it will come to the full."

Bkakbcpsabi.

Political and historical— Shepherd role in Arabia — An hereditary
policy — The army — The law— Taxation— The finances of Jebel
Shammar — ^Ibn Bashid's ambition.

The following is the result of our inquiries made
while at Hail into the political condition and re-
sources of the country. It has no pretension to
rigid accuracy, especially in the figures given, but it
will serve to convey an idea of the kind of govern-
ment found in Arabia, and of the capacity for self-
rule of the Arab race.

The political constitution of Jebel Shammar is
exceedingly curious ; not only is it unlike anything
we are accustomed to in Europe, but it is probably
unique, even in Asia. It would seem, in fact, to
represent some ancient form of government indi-
genous to the coimtry, and to have sprung
naturally from the physical necessities of the land,
and the character of its inhabitants. I look upon
Ibn Rashid's government as in all likelihood
identical with that of the Kings of Arabia, who
came to visit Solomon, and of the Shepherd Kings»

TOL. I. 8

258 A Pilgrimage to Nejd. [oh. xi.

who, at a still earlier date, held Egypt an<2
Babylonia ; and I have little doubt that it owes its.
success to the fact of its being thus in harmony
with Arab ideas and Arab tradition. To under-
stand it rightly, one ought to consider what Arabia,
is, and what the Arab character and mode of life.
The whole of the peninsula, with the exception,,
perhaps, of Yemen, and certain districts of Hadra-
mant within the influence of the monsoon winds, is
a rainless, waterless region, in every sense of the
word a desert. The soil is a poor one, mainly of
gravel or of sand, and except in a few favoured
spots, unsuited for cultivation ; indeed, no cultiva-
tion is possible at all in Nejd, except with the help
of irrigation, and, as there is no water above ground,
of irrigation from wells. Even wells are rare.
The general character of the central plateaux, and of
the peninsula, is that of vast uplands of gravel, as
nearly destitute of vegetation as any in the world,
and incapable of retaining water, even at a great
depth. It ia only in certain depressions of the
plain, several hundred feet lower than the general
level, that wells as a rule are found, and wherever
these occur with a sufficient supply of water, towns
and villages with gardens round them, have sprung-
up. These, however, are often widely apart, showing-
as mere spots on the map of Arabia, and uncon-
nected with each other by any intervening district
of agricultural land. Indeed, it is not too much to
Bay, that Nejd contains no agricultural region, as

CH. XL] Desert towns. 259

we understand agriculture, and that all its pro-
duction is garden produce. From this state of
things, it happens that there is also no rural class,
and that each town is isolated from its neighbours
to a degree impossible with us. The desert surrounds
them like a sea, and they have no point of contact
one with the other in the shape of intervening fields
or villages, or even intervening pastures. They are
isolated in the most literal sense, and from this fact
has sprung the political individuality it has always
been their care to maintain. Each city is an
independent state.

Meanwhile the desert outside, though untenanted
by any settled population, is roamed over by the
Bedouin tribes, who form the bulk of the Arab race.
These occupy for the most part the Nefftds, where
alone pasture in any abundance is found ; but they
frequent also every part of the upland districts, and
being both more warlike and more numerous than
the townsmen, hold every road leading from town
to town, so that it depends upon their good will
and pleasure, to cut off communication for tho
citizens entirely from the world.

The towns, as I have said, are for the most part
self-supporting; but their production is limit^?(l to
garden produce, and the date. They grow no
wheat and rear no stock, so that for bn^iul iiimI
meat they are dependent on without, 'J'litjy
require also a market for their iiMlu»lrl«i«, iIm;
weaving of cloth, the manufacture of WJiw «ii4

26o A Pilgrimage to Nejd. [c«. xl

utensils, and it is necessary, at least in Jebel Shammar,
to send yearly caravans to the Euphrates for cool
Thus security of travelling outside their walls is
essential to the life of every town in Arabia, and (xi
this necessity the whole political structure of their
government is built The towns put themselves
each under the protection of the principal Bedouin
Shcykh of its district, who, on the consideration of
a yearly tribute, guarantees the citizens' safety
outside the city walls, enabling them to travel
unmolested as far as his jurisdiction extends, and
this, in the case of a powerful tribe, may be many
hundred miles, and embrace many cities. Tbc
towns are then said to " belong " to such and such a
tribe, and the Bedouin Sheykh becomes thdr
suzerain, or Lord Protector, until, from their
common vassalage, and the freedom of intercourse
it secures them with each other, the germs of
federation spring up, and develop sometimes into
nationality.

This has, I believe, been always the condition of
Arabia.

A farther development then ensues. The Bedouin
Sheykh, grown rich with the tribute of a score of
tovnis, builds himself a castle dose to one of them,
and lives there during the summer months. Then
with the prestige of his rank (for Bedouin blood is
still accounted the purest), and backed by his power
in the desert, he speedily becomes the practical
iiJer of the town, and from protector of the citizens

CH. XL] Bedouin Princes. 261

becomes their sovereign. He is now dignified by
them with the title of Emir or prince, and though
still their Sheykh to the Bedouins, becomes king of
all the towns which pay him tribute.

This form of government, resting as it does on a
natural basis, has always been reverted to in Arabia,
whenever the country has, after an interval of
foreign or domestic tjnranny, succeeded in eman-
cipating itself. Of very early Arabia little is
known; neither the Persian nor the Macedonian
nor the Roman Empires embraced it, and it is
probable that Nejd at least existed till the time of
Mahomet exclusively uiider the system of govern-
ment I have described. Then for a short time it
became part of the Mussulman Empire, and shared
in the centralised or semi-centralised administration
of the Caliphs, which substituted a theocratic rule
for the simpler forms preceding it. But though
the birthplace of Islam, no part of the Arabian
Empire was sooner in revolt than Arabia itsel£ In
the second century of the Mahometan era, nearly
all the peninsula had reverted to its ancient inde-
pendence, nor, except temporarily, has Nejd itself
ever been since included in the imperial system of a
foreign king or potentate. In the middle of last
century, however, just as Mahomet had asserted his
spiritual authority over the peninsula, the Wahhabi
Emir of Aared once more established a centralized
and theocratic government in Arabia. The Bedouin
Princes were one after another dispossessed, and

362 A Pilgrimage to Nejd. (ch. n.

a new Arabian Empire was established. This
included not only the whole of Nejd, but at one
time Yemen, Hejaz, and Hasa, with the northem
desert as far north as the latitude of Damascus.
For nearly sixty years the independence of the
towns and tribes of the interior was crushed, and a
system of imperial rule substituted for that of old
Arabia. The Ibn Saouds, "ImAms of Nejd,"
governed neither more nor less than had the first
Caliphs, and with the same divine pretensions.
But their rule came to an end in 1818, when Nejd
was conquered by the Turks, and the reigning Iba
Saoud made prisoner and beheaded at Constan-
tinople. Then, on the retirement of the Turks, (for
they were unable long to retain their conquest,)
shepherd government again asserted itself, and
the principality of Jebel Shaminar was founded.

The Sharomar tribe is the most powerful of
Northem Nejd, and the towns of Hail, Kefar,
Bckaa, and the rest, put themselves under the
protection of Abdallah ibn Rashid, who had suc-
ceeded in gaining the Shammar Sheykhat for
himself. He seems to have been a man of great
ability, and to him is due the policy of rule which
Ms descendants have ever since pursued. He took
lip his residence in Hail, and built the castle there,
and caused himself to be recognized as Emir, first
in vassalage to the Ibn Saonds, who had reappeared
in Aared, but later on his own account. His policy
seems to have been hist to conciliate or subdue the

CH. XL] Abdullah ibn Rashid. 263

other Bedouin tribes of Nejd, forcing them to
become tributary to his own tribe, the Shammar,
^nd secondly to establish his protectorate over all
the northern towns. This was a simple plan «
enough, and one which any Bedouin Sheykh might
have devised ; but Abdallah's merit consists in the
method of its application. He saw that in order to
gain his object, he must appeal to national ideas
and national prejudices. The tribute which he
extracted from the towns, he spent liberally in the
desert, exercising boundless hospitality to every
sheykh who might chance to visit him. To all he
gave presents, and dazzled them with his magnifi-
cence, sending them back to the tribes impressed
with his wealth and power. Thus he made nume-
rous friends, with whose aid he was able to coerce
the rest, his enemies or rivals. In treating with
these he seems always to have tried conciliation
first, and, if forced to arms, to have been satisfied
with a single victory, making friends at once with
the vanquished, and even restoring to them their
property, an act of generosity which met full
appreciation in the desert. By this means his
power and reputation increased rapidly, as did that
of his brother and right-hand man Obeyd, who is
now a legendary hero in Nejd.

Another matter to which the founder of the Ibn
Rashid dynasty paid much attention was finance.
Though spending large sums yearly on presents and
entertainments, he took care that these should not

264 A Pilgrimage to U'ejd. [cxil

exceed his revenue, and at his death he left»
according to common report, a house fall of sQTer
pieces to his son. Nor have anjr of his saccesscHS
been otherwise than thrifty. It is imposBible of
course to guess the precise amount of treasure thus
saved, but that it represents a fabulous fortune in
Arabia is certain ; the possession of this^ with the
prestige which in a poor country wealth gives, is an
immense source of power.

Lastly Abdallah, and all the Ibn Rashid &mily,
have been endowed with a large share of caution. No
important enterprise has been embarked on in a
hurry ; and certainly at the present day afiairs of
state are discussed in family council, before any
action is taken. It seems to have been always a
rule with the Ibn Rashids to think twice^ ihrice,
or a dozen times before acting, for even Mohanuned's
violent deeds towards his nephews were pre-
meditated, and thought over for many months
beforehand. In their conduct with the Ibn Saouds
and the Turkish Sultans, they have always waited
their opportunity, and avoided an open rupture.
It is very remarkable that so many members of this
feunily should be superior men, for it is difficult to
say who has been the ablest man of them, Abdallah^
Obeyd, Telldl, Mohammed, or his cousin Hamud.
Nor is the rising generation less promising.

Having united into a sort of confederation all the
Bedouin tribes of Northern Nejd, Abdallah became
naturally supreme over the towns ; but he was not

cH. XL] The Body Guard. 265

satisfied merely with power, he aimed at making
his rule popular. It is much to his credit, and to
that of his successors, that none of them seem to
have abused their position. Liberality and con-
ciliation, combined with an occasional display of
power, have been no less their policy with the
townsmen than with the Bedouins, and they have
thus placed their rule on its only secure basis,
popularity. In early days the Ibn Rashids had to
fight for their position at Hsai, and later in J6f and
at Meskakeh. But their rule is now acknowledged
freely everywhere, enthusiastically in Jebel Sham-
mar. It strikes a traveller fresh from Turkey as
surpassingly strange to hear the comments passed
by the townspeople of Hail on their government,
for it is impossible to converse ten minutes with
any one of them without being assured that the
government of the Emir is the best government in
the world. " El hamdu lillah, ours is a fortunate
country. It is not with us as with the Turks and
Persians, whose government is no government. Here
we are happy and prosperous. El hamdu lillah.''
I have often been amused at this chauvinism.

In the town of Hail the Emir lives in state,
having a body-guard of 800 or 1000 men dressed in a
kind of uniform, that is to say, in brown cloaks and
red or blue kefiyehs, and armed with silver-hilted
swords. These are recruited from among the young
men of the towns and villages by voluntary enlist-
ment, those who wish to serve inscribing their

^66 A Pilgrimage to JN'ejd. [ci.il

names at the castle, and being called out is
occasion requires. Their duties are light, and th^
live most of them with their families, leceiving
neither pay nor rations, except Tirhen emjJoyed
away from home on garrison duty in outlying forts
and at J6£ Their expense, therefore^ to the Emir is
little more than that of their clothes and arms. To
them is entrusted any police work that may be
necessary in the towns, but it is very seldom that
the authority of the Emir requires other suppcat
than that of public opinion. The Arabs of Kejd
are a singularly temperate race, and hardly ever
indulge in brawling or breaches of the peace. K
disputes arise between citizens they are almost
always settled on the spot by the interference of
neighbours; and the rowdyism and violence of
European towns are unknown at HaiL Where,
however, quarrels are not to be settled by the inter-
vention of friends, the disputants bring their cases
to the Emir, who settles them in open court, the
mejlis, and whose word is final The law of tiie
Koran, though often referred to, is not, 1 fancy, the
main rule of the Emir's decision, but rather Arabian
custom, an authority far older than the Mussulman
code. I doubt if it is often necessary for the soldiers
to support such decisions by force. Thieving, I have
been repeatedly assured, is almost unknown at Hail ;
but robbers or thieves taken redhanded, lose for
the first ofience a hand, for the second their head.
In the desert, and everywhere outside the precincts

CM. XL] The Revenue. 267

of the town, order is kept by the Bedouins,
with whom the Emir lives a portion of each year.
He is then neither more nor less himself than
a Bedouin, throws off his shoes and town finery,
arms himself with a lance, and leads a wandering
life in the Nefdd. He commonly does this at the
commencement of spring, and spring is the season
of his wars. Then with the extreme heat of summer
he returns to Hail. The tribute paid by each \jo\tcl
and village to the Emir is assessed according to its
wealth in date palms, and the sheep kept by its citizens
with the Bedouins. Four khrush for each tree is, I
believe, the amount, trees under seven years old being
exempt. At Hail this is levied by the Emir's officers,
but elsewhere by the local sheykhs, who are responsi-
ble for its due collection. At J6f and Meskakeh, which
are still in the position of territory newly annexed,
Ibn Rashid is represented by a vakil, or lieutenant,
who levies the tax in coin, Turkish money being
the recognised medium of exchange everywhere.
Without pretending to anything at all like accuracy
we made a calculation that the Emir's revenue from
all sources of tribute and tax may amount to
£60,000 yearly, and that the annual passage of the
pilgrimage through his dominions may bring
£20,000 to £30,000 more to his exchequer.

With regard to his expenditure, it is perhaps
easier to calculate. He pays a small sum yearly in
tribute to the Sherif of Medina, partly as a religious
offering, partly to insure immunity for his outlying

268 A Pilgrimage to Nejd. [ch. xi.

possessions, Kheybar, Kaf and the rest, from Turkish
aggression. I should guess this tribute to be £3,000
to £5,000, but could not ascertain the amounts
The Emir's expenditure on his army can hardly
be more, and with his civil list and every expense of
Government, should be included within £10,000*
On his household he may spend £5,000, and on his
stable £1,000. By far the largest item in his
budget must be described as entertainment. Mo-
hammed ibn Eashid, in imitation of his predecessors,
feeds daily two to three hundred guests at the
palace ; the poor are there clothed, and presents of
camels and clothes made to richer strangers from a
distance. The meal consists of rice and camel
meat, sometimes mutton, and there is besides a
constant "coulage'' in dates and coflfee, which I
cannot estimate at less than £50 a day, say £20,000
yearly, or with presents, £25,000. Thus we have
our budget made up to about £45,000 expenditure,
as against £80,000 to £90,000 revenue — ^which
leaves a handsome margin for wars and other
accidents, and for that amassing of treasure which
is traditional with the Ibn Rashids. I must say,
however, once more, that I am merely guessing my
figures, and nobody, perhaps, in Jebel Shanmiar,
except the Emir himself and Hamtid, could do
more.

It will be seen from all this that Jebel Shammar
is, financially, in a very flourishing state. The curse of
money-lending has not yet invaded it, and neither

CH. XI.] Good government. 269

prince nor people are able to spend sixpence more
than they have got. No public works, requiring
public expenditure and public loans, have yet been
undertaken, and it is difficult to imagine in what
they would consist. The digging of new wells is
indeed the only duty a *' company " could find to
execute, for roads are unnecessary in a country all
like a macadamised highway; there are no rivers to
make canals with, or suburban populations to
supply with tramways. One might predict with
confidence, that the secret of steam locomotion will
have been forgotten before ever a railway reaches
Jebel Shammar.

With regard to the form of government, it is
good mainly because it is efi*ective. It is no doubt
discordant to European ideas of political propriety,
that the supreme power in a country should be
vested in Bedouin hands. But in Arabia they are
the only hands that can wield it. The town cannot
coerce the desert ; therefore, if they are to live at
peace, the desert must coerce the town. The Turks,
with all their machinery of administration, and
their power of wealth and military force, have
never been able to secure life and property to
travellers in the desert, and in Arabia have been
powerless to hold more than the towns. Even the
pilgrim road from Damascus, though nominaUy in
their keeping, can only be traversed by them with
an army, and at considerable risk. Ibn Bashid, on
the other hand, by the mere efiect of his will, keeps

270 A Pilgrimage to Nejd. [ch. xr.

all the desert in an absolute peace. In the whole
district of Jebel Shammar, embracing, as it does^
some of the wildest deserts, inhabited by some of
the wildest people in the world, a traveller may go
imarmed and unescorted, without more let or
hindrance than if he were following a highway in
England. On every road of Jebel Shammar, towns*
men may be found jogging on donkey-back, alone,
or on foot, carrying neither gun nor lance, and with
all their w^ealth about them. If you ask about the
dangers of the road, they will return the question,
" Are we not here in Ibn Rashid's country ? " No
system, however perfect, of patrols and forts and
escorts, could produce a result like this.

In the town, on the other hand, the Bedouin prince,
despotic though he may be, is still under close
restraint from public opinion. The citizens of Jebel
Shammar have not what wc should call constitutional
rights ; there is no machinery among them for the
assertion of their power ; but there is probably no
community in the old world, where popular feeling
exercises a more powerful influence on government
than it does at Hafl. The Emir, irresponsible as
he is in individual acts, knows well that he cannot
transgress the traditional unwritten law of Arabia
with impunity. An unpopular sheykh would cease,
ipsofactOj to be sheykh, for, though dethroned by no
public ceremony, and subjected to no personal ill-
treatment, he would find himself Abandoned in
favour of a more acceptable member of his family.

ASH. XI.] Heirs to the Throne. 271

The citizen soldiers would not support a recognised
tyrant in the town, nor would the Bedouins outside.
Princes in Arabia have, therefore, to consider public
opinion before all else.

The flaw in the system, for in every system there
will be found one, lies in the uncertainty of succession
to the Sheykhat or Bedouin throne. On the death
of an Emir, if he have no son of full age and ac-
knowledged capacity to take up the reins of govern-
ment, rival claimants, brothers, uncles, or cousins
of the dead man, dispute his succession in arms, and
many and bitter have been the wars in consequence.
Such, quite lately, was the quarrel which convulsed
Aared on the death of Feysul ibn Saoud, and led to
the disintegration of the Wahhabi monarchy, and
such, one cannot help fearing, may be the fate of
Jebel Shammar, on Mohammed's. He has no
children, and the sons of TeMl, the next heirs to
the throne, have a formidable rival in Hamiid.
The Emir, however, is a young man, forty-five, and
may live long ; and if he should do so, seems to
have the succession of the Wahhabi monarchy in
his hands. He has efiected, he and his predecessors,
the union of all the Bedouin sheykhs, from Meshhed
Ali to Medina, under his leadership, and is in close
connection with those of Kasim and Aared. His
authority is established as far north as Kdf, and he
has his eye already on the towns still further north,
if ever they fe^'s)uld shake ofi* the Turkish bondage.
I look forward^ the day when the Roala too.

272 A Pilgrimage to Nejd. [ch. xi.

and the Welled Ali, Bhall have entered into his
nUiance, possibly even the Sebaa and Ibn Haddal ;
and though it is neither likely nor desirable that
the old Wahhabi Empire should be re-established
on its centralised basis, a confederation of the tribes
of the north may continue its best traditions. Hauran
and the Leja, and the Euphrates towns, were once
tributary to the Ibn Saouds, and may be again one
day to the Ibn Eashids. This is looking far afield,
but not farther than Mohammed himself looks.

Note. — That Mohammed ibn Bashid does not limit his ambition
to Nejd has been very recently proved. In the month of April
last, 1880, he marched with an army of 6000 men from HaA, passed
up the Wady Sirh&n, surprised Mohammed Dukhi ibn Smeyr in the
Harra and sacked his camp, and then went on to the Hauran. The
citizens of Damascus were not a little startled at l^^rnn^g one
morning that the Emir was at Bozra not 60 miles from the capital
of Syria, and there was much speculation as to his object in
coming so far northwards, no army from Nejd having been seen in
the PashaJik since the days of the Wahhabi Empire. Then it was
whispered that he had made iriends with Ibn Smeyr, that the
quan*el between them had been a mistake, and that a Shersxi
guide, held responsible for the blunder, had been beheaded ; lastly,
that an enormous feast of reconciliation had been given by Ibn
Bashid to the Northern tribes, at which 75 camels and 600 sheep
had been slaughtered, and that after a stay of some weeks at
Melakh the Emir had returned to Nejd.

Without pretending to know precisely what was in Mohammed's
mind in making this ghazti, or all that really happened, it seems
to me not difficult to guess its main object. Ibn Smeyr's sucoess
over Ibn Shaalan, already alluded to, had placed him in a leadings
position with the tribes of the North ; and his raid against the
Druses of the Hauran, a district once tributary to the Emirs of
Nejd, pointed him out for Mohammed's resentment It is part of
the Ibn Bashid policy to strike a blow and then jn^lgspeaoe ; and
by thus humbling their most successful chief, an^\>ecoming after-
wards his host, Mohammed achieved exacj^l^Qy «( sort of repatatioix

*-^

».]

Ihn Raskids ambition.

273

moat valued with the NorUkam bibee. He has asserted himself
niin^me, where he ohooeee to be ao, ia the deaert, and has more-
r romiiided the frontier population in Syria of the old Wahhabi
tensions to Eastern Syria. It is conceiTable that having ooerced
MTBuadedthe Anazeh tojoin his league, he may, in the ooming
ak-np of the Ottoman ^npire, sucoeed to that part of ita in-
itanoe, and be recognised u aorereign in all the lands beyond

OUIt HOOSE AT saIl.

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