Back Aa

Syria: the Desert and the Sown

<h4>CHAPTER VI</h4> My objective that day was the village of Umm Ruweik on the eastern edge of the Druze hills. Remembering the vagaries of the map, I took with me one of Muḥammad en Naṣṣār's nephews as a guide, Fāiz was his name, and he was brother to Ghishghāsh, the Sheikh of Umm Ruweik. I had singled him out the night before as being the pleasantest member of the pleasant circle in the maḳ'ad, and in a four days' acquaintance there was never an incident that caused me to regret my choice. He was a man with features all out of drawing, his nose was crooked, his mouth was crooked, you would not have staked anything upon the straight setting of his eyes; his manner was particularly gentle and obliging, his conversation intelligent, and he was full of good counsel and resource. We had not ridden very far along the lip of the hills, I gazing at the eastern plain as at a Promised Land that my feet would never tread, before Fāiz began to develop a plan for leaving the mules and tents behind at Umm Ruweik and making a dash across the Ṣafa to the Ruḥbeh, where lay the great ruin of which the accounts had fired my imagination. In a moment the world changed colour, and Success shone from the blue sky and hung in golden mists on that plain which had suddenly become accessible. <div class="figcenter"> <ANTIMG src="images/figure58.jpg" width-obs="400" alt="" /> THE WALLS OF ḲANAWĀT </div> Our path fell rapidly from Ṣāleh, and in half an hour we were out of the snow and ice that had plagued us for the last day and night; half an hour later when we reached the Wādi Buṣān, where the swift waters turned a mill wheel, we had left the winter country behind. Ṣāneh, the village on the north side of the Wādi Buṣān, looked a flourishing place and contained some good specimens of Ḥaurān architecture—I remember in particular a fine architrave carved with a [Pg 107] double scroll of grapes and vine leaves that fell on either side of a vase occupying the centre of the stone. It was at Ṣāneh that we came onto the very edge of the plateau and saw the great plain of the Ṣafa spread out like a sea beneath us. The strange feature of it was that its surface was as black as a black tent roof, owing to the sheets of lava and volcanic stone that were spread over it. At places there were patches of yellow, which I afterwards discovered to be the earth on which the lumps of tufa lay revealed by their occasional absence, and these the Arabs call the Beiḍa, the White Land, in contradistinction to the Ḥarra, the Burnt Land of lava and tufa. In the Ṣafa the White Land is almost as arid as the Burnt, though generally the word Beiḍa means arable, for I heard Fāiz shout to the muleteers: "Come off the Beiḍa!" when the mules had strayed into a field of winter wheat. The literary word for desert bears a puzzling resemblance to this other, as for instance in Mutanabbi's verse. "Al tail w'al khail w'al beida ta'rafuni: Night and my steed and the desert know me— And the lance thrust and battle, and parchment and the pen." <div class="figcenter"> <ANTIMG src="images/figure59.jpg" width-obs="500" alt="" /> ḲANAWĀT, THE BASILICA </div> The Ṣafa ran out to a dark mass of volcanoes, lying almost due north and south, but we were so high above them that their elevation was not perceptible. Beyond them again we could see a wide stretch of Beiḍa which was the Ruḥbeh plain. To the east and south on the immensely [Pg 108] distant horizon a few little volcanic cones marked the end of the Ḥaurān outcrop of lava and the beginning of the Ḥamād, the waterless desert that reaches to Baghdad. To the north were the hills round Dmer, and still further north the other range bounding the valley ten miles wide that leads to Palmyra, and these ran back to the slopes of Anti-Libanus, snowcapped, standing above the desert road to Ḥomṣ. We turned east to Shibbekeh, a curious place built above a valley the northern bank of which is honeycombed with caves, and north to Sheikhly and Rāmeh on the southern brink of a very deep gully, the Wādi esh Shām, down which are the most easterly of the inhabited villages, Fedhāmeh and Ej Jeita. The settlements on this side of the Mountain have an air of great antiquity. The cave villages may have existed long before Nabatæan times; possibly they go back to the prehistoric uncertainties of King Og, or the people whom his name covered, when whole towns were quarried out underground, the most famous example being Dera'a in the Ḥaurān plain south of Mezērib. We left Mushennef to the west, not without regrets on my part that I had not time to revisit it, for mirrored in its great tank is one of the most charming of all the temples of the Jebel Druze, not excepting the magnificent monuments of Ḳanawāt. El Ajlāt, north of the Wādi esh Shām, is perched on top of a tell high enough to touch the February snow line, and another valley leads down from it to the Ṣafa—I heard of a ruin and an inscription in its lower course but did not visit them. We got to Umm Ruweik about four o'clock, and pitched tents on the edge of the mountain shelf, where I could see through my open tent door the whole extent of the Ṣafa. Sheikh Ghishghāsh was all smiles. Certainly I could ride out to the Ruḥbeh if I would take him and his son Aḥmed and Fāiz with me. He scoffed at the idea of a larger escort. By the Face of the Truth, the Ghiāth were his servants and his bondmen, they would entertain us as the noble should be entertained and provide us with luxurious lodgings. I dined with Ghishghāsh (he would take no refusal), and concluded that [Pg 111] he was an easy tempered, boastful, and foolish man, extremely talkative, though all that he said was not worth one of Fāiz's sentences. Fāiz fell into comparative silence in his company, and Aḥmed too said little, but that little was sensible and worth hearing. Ghishghāsh told great tales of the Ṣafa and of what it contained, the upshot of which was that beyond the ruins already known there was nothing till you travelled a day's journey east of the Ruḥbeh; but that there you came to a quarry and a ruined castle like the famous White Ruin of the Ruḥbeh which we were going to see, but smaller and less well preserved. And beyond that stretched the Ḥamād, with no dwellings in it and no rujm—even the bravest of the Arabs were forced to desert it in the summer owing to the total lack of water. My heart went out to the mysterious castle east of the Ruḥbeh, unvisited, I believe, by any traveller; but it was too distant a journey to be accomplished on the spur of the moment without preparation. "When you next return, oh lady——." Yes, when I return. But I shall not on a future, occasion rely on the luxurious entertainment of the Ghiāth. <div class="figcenter"> <ANTIMG src="images/figure60.jpg" width-obs="500" alt="" /> ḲANAWĀT, DOORWAY OF THE BASILICA </div> <div class="figcenter"> <ANTIMG src="images/figure61.jpg" width-obs="400" alt="" /> ḲANAWĀT, A TEMPLE </div> After consultation I decided that Mikhāil and Ḥabīb should accompany us, the latter at his special request. He would ride his best mule, he said, and she could keep pace with any mare and carry besides the rugs and the five chickens which we took with us to supplement the hospitality of the Ghiāth. I had a fur coat strapped behind my saddle and, as usual, a camera and a note-book in my saddle-bags. We rode down the steep slopes of the hills for an hour, three other Druze horsemen joining us as we went. I presently discovered that the sheikhs had added them to the stipulated escort, but I made no comment. One of the three was a relative of Ghishghāsh, his name Khittāb; he had travelled with Oppenheim and proved to be an agreeable companion. We passed through the ploughland of Ghishghāsh's village and then down slopes almost barren, though they yielded enough pasturage for his flocks of sheep shepherded by Arabs, and at the foot of the hill we entered a shallow stony valley wherein was a tiny encampment surrounded by more herds that quarried their dinner among the boulders. After an hour of the valley, which wound between volcanic rocks, we came out onto the wide desolation of [Pg 112] the Ṣafa. It is almost, but not quite, flat. The surface breaks into low gentle billowings, just deep enough to shut out the landscape from the horseman in the depression, so that he may journey for an hour or more and see nothing but a sky-line of black stones a few feet above him on either side. The billowings have an ordered plan; they form continuous waterless valleys, each one of which the Arabs know by a name. Valley and ridge alike are covered with blocks of tufa, varying from six inches across to two feet or more, and where there is any space between them you can perceive the hard yellow soil, the colour of sea sand, on which they lie. An extremely scanty scrub pushes its way between the stones, ḥamād and shīḥ and ḥajeineh, and here and there a tiny geranium, the starry garlic and the leaves of the tulip, but generally there is no room even for the slenderest plants, so closely do the stones lie together. They are black, smooth and edgeless, as though they had been waterworn; when the sun shines the air dazzles above them as it dazzles above a sheet of molten metal, and in the summer the comparison must hold good in other respects, for the pitiless heat is said to be almost unendurable. It would be difficult to cross [Pg 115] the Ṣafa if it were not for the innumerable minute paths that intersect it. At first the rider is not aware of them, so small and faint they are, but presently as he begins to wonder why there is always just enough space before him for his horse to step in, he realises that he is following a road. Hundreds of generations of passing feet have pushed aside the tufa blocks ever so little and made it possible to travel through that wilderness of stones. <div class="figcenter"> <ANTIMG src="images/figure62.jpg" width-obs="500" alt="" /> THE TEMPLE, MASHENNEF </div> We rode by the depression called the Ghadir el Gharz, and at the end of two hours we met one in rags, whose name was Heart of God. He was extremely glad to see us, was Heart of God, having been a friend of the family for years (at least eighty years I should judge), and extremely surprised when he discovered me in the cavalcade. There his surprise ceased, for when he heard I was English it conveyed nothing further to him, his mind being unburdened with the names and genealogies of the foreigner. He told us there was water close at hand and that Arab tents were not more than two hours away, and bade Ghishghāsh go in peace, and might there be peace also upon the stranger with him. In the matter of the tents he lied, did Heart of God, or we misunderstood him; but we found the water, a muddy pool, and lunched by it, sharing it with a herd of camels. Water in the Ṣafa there is none fit to drink according to European canons, and for that matter there is none in the Jebel Druze. There are no springs in the hills; the water supply is contained in open tanks, and the traveller may consider himself fortunate if he be not asked to drink a liquid in which he has seen the mules and camels wallowing. Under the most favourable conditions it is sure to be heavily laden with foreign ingredients which boiling will not remove, though it renders them comparatively innocuous. The tea made with this fluid has a body and a flavour of its own; it is the colour of muddy coffee and leaves a sediment at the bottom of the cup. Mikhāil carried an earthenware jar of boiled water for me from camp to camp, and having brought him to use this precaution by refusing to drink of the pools and tanks we might meet by the way, I had no difficulty in continuing the system in the Ṣafa. He and the Druzes and the muleteers drank what [Pg 116] they found, whether in the Mountain or in the Ṣafa, and they did not appear to suffer from any ill effect. Probably the germs contained in their careless draughts were so numerous and so active that they had enough to do in destroying one another. We rode on and on over all the stones in the world, and even Ghishghāsh fell silent or spoke only to wonder where the tents of the Ghiāth might be. Khittāb opined that when we reached the Ḳantarah, the Arch, we should catch sight of them, and I pricked up my ears at a name that seemed to imply some sort of construction. But the Ḳantarah was nothing more than a rise in the ground, a little higher than the rest and no less stony. There are many such; leading up to the crest of most of them is a track by which the Arabs creep on their stomachs to look out for foes, hidden themselves behind the small black pile that has been erected as a permanent bastion on the summit. In summer the Ṣafa is swept with raiders. Big tribes like the 'Anazeh ride through to deal a sudden blow at some enemy to the south or north, harrying the Ghiāth as they pass, and since there are exceedingly few places where water is to be found in the unparalleled heat of the stony waste, the raiders and such men of the Ghiāth as are still in the plain have no choice but to frequent at dusk the same muddy holes, and the days and nights of the Ghiāth are dogged in consequence by constant terror till the great tribes go east again to the Ḥamād. There was no sign of tents to be seen from the Ḳantarah, and it began to seem probable that we should spend a waterless night among the stones under the clear frosty sky, when about an hour before sunset Khittāb exclaimed that he could see the smoke of camp fires to the north-west. We rode a good way back, making a semicircle of our course, and got to the tents at nightfall after a journey of nine hours. With the goats and camels who were returning home after a laborious day's feeding we stumbled in over the stones, and very miserable the little encampment looked, though it had been so eagerly desired. A couple of hundred pounds would be a handsome price for all the worldly goods of all the Ghiāth; they have nothing [Pg 119] but the black tents and a few camels and the coffee-pots, and if they had more it would be taken from them in a midsummer ghazu. They live by bread alone—shirāk, the thin flaps that are like brown paper—and for the whole length of their days they wander among the stones in fear of their lives, save for the month or two when they come up to the Jebel Druze for the pasturage. We scattered, being a large party, and Ghishghāsh, my servants and I went to the house of the sheikh, whose name was Understanding. His two sons, Muḥammad and Ḥamdān, lighted a fire of thorn and camel dung that smoked abominably, and we sat round and watched the coffee making. Muḥammad, being the eldest, officiated. He was skilful in the song of the pestle, and beat out a cheerful tattoo upon the mortar. His face was dark and thin and his white teeth shone when he smiled; he was dressed airily in dirty white cotton garments, a cotton kerchief fell from the camel's hair rope on his head down on to his bare breast, and he spoke in a guttural speech which was hard to follow. Our dinner was of shirāk and dibs; the Ghiāth are too poor to kill a sheep for their guest, even when he is a personage so important as Ghishghāsh. He, foolish man, was in his element. He preened himself and swelled with pride, combed out his long moustache before the admiring gaze of his hosts and talked without ceasing until far into the night, silly talk, thought I, who longed to be allowed to sleep. I had a rug to cover me and my saddle for a pillow, and I lay in a corner by the sāḥah, the division against the women's quarter, and at times I listened to a conversation which was not particularly edifying, and at times I cursed the acrid, pungent smoke. Towards the middle of the night I was awakened by the moon that shone with a frosty brilliance into the tent. The fire had burnt down and the smoke had blown out; the Arabs and the Druzes were lying asleep round the cold hearth; a couple of mares stood peacefully by the tent pole and gazed with wise eyes upon their masters within, and beyond them a camel lay chumping among the black stones. The strange and silent beauty of a scene as old as the world caught at the heart and spurred the fancy even after sleep had fallen upon it again. [Pg 120] Before dawn Mikhāil had succeeded in making me a cup of tea over the fitful blaze of the thorns, and as the sun rose we got into the saddle, for we had far to go. "God's bright and intricate device" had clothed the black plain in exquisite loveliness. The level sun towards which we were riding cast a halo of gold round every stone, the eastern ranges of volcanoes stood in clear cut outline against the cloudless sky, and to the north-west the snows of Anti-Libanus and Hermon gleamed incredibly bright above the glittering blackness of the foreground. One of the Arabs was added to our party as a guide; 'Awād was his name. He rode a camel, and from that point of vantage conversed with us in a raucous shout, as though to bridge the immense distance between rākib and fāris, a camel rider and one who rides a mare. We were all shivering as we set out in the chill dawn, but 'Awād turned the matter into a jest by calling out from his camel: "Lady, lady! do you know why I am cold? It is because I have four wives in the house!" And the others laughed, for he had the reputation of being a bit of a Don Juan, and such funds as he possessed went to replenishing his harem rather than his wardrobe. I think we must speedily have re-entered the Ghadīr el Gharz. After two hours' riding we crossed some rising ground to the south-west of the Tulūl es Ṣafa, the line of volcanoes, and cantered across a considerable stretch of stoneless yellow ground, Beiḍa, till we came to the southern end of the lava bed. The lava lay on our left hand like a horrible black nightmare sea, not so much frozen as curdled, as though some hideous terror had arrested the flow of it and petrified the lines of shrinking fear upon its surface. But it was long long ago that a mighty hand had lifted the Gorgon's head before the waves of the Tulūl es Ṣafa. Sun and frost and æons of time had splintered the original forms of the volcanoes, rent the lava beds, shattered the precipices and obliterated the features of the hills. One or two terebinths had found a foothold in the crevices, but when I passed they were still bare and grey and did nothing to destroy the general sense of lifelessness. As we rode round these frontiers of death I became aware that we were [Pg 121] following a track almost as old as the hills themselves, a little thread of human history leading us straight through that forbidding land. 'Awāḍ kept talking of a stone which he called El 'Ablā, a word that denotes a white rock visible from afar, but I was so much used to names signifying nothing that I paid no attention until he stopped his camel and shouted: "Oh lady! here it is. By the Face of God, this is El 'Ablā." It was no more nor less than a well stone. It bore the groove of the rope worn a couple of inches deep into it, and must have served a respectable time, since this black rock is extremely hard, but there was no modern well within miles of it. Close at hand was a big heap of stones and then another and another, two or three in every quarter of a mile, and when I looked closely I perceived that they were built, not thrown together. Some of them had been opened by Arabs seeking for treasure, and where the topmost layers had been thus removed a square shallow space lay revealed in the centre of the mound, carefully constructed of half-dressed blocks. 'Awāḍ said that as far as he knew nothing had ever been found in these places, whatever they might have contained formerly. Clearly the mounds were made to mark the line of that ancient road through the wilderness. 'Awāḍ stopped again a few hundred yards further at some black rocks almost flush with the ground, and they were like the open pages of a book in which all the races that had passed that way had written their names, in the queer script that the learned call Safaitic, in Greek, in Cufic, and in Arabic. Last of all the unlettered Bedouin had scrawled their tribe marks there. "By Shuraik son of Naghafat son of Na'fis (?) son of Nu'mān," so ran one of them; and another: "By Būkhālih son of Ṭhann son of An'am son of Rawāḳ son of Būkhālih. He found the inscription of his uncle and he longed after him and . . . ." And there was another in a label which I did not copy sufficiently well to admit of its being deciphered with certainty. Probably it contains two names connected by "ibn," "son of." [Pg 122] Above the names are seven straight lines which, according to Dussaud's ingenious suggestion, may represent the seven planets.[7] The Greek letters spelt the word Hanelos, which is John, a Semitic name written possibly by its owner in the foreign script that he had learnt while he served under the Roman eagles; the Cufic sentences were pious ejaculations calling down a blessing on the traveller who had paused to inscribe them. So each man according to his kind had left his record and departed into the mists of time, and beyond these scratches on the black rocks we know nothing of his race, nor of his history, nor of the errand that brought him into the inhospitable Ghadīr el Gharz. As I copied the phrases they seemed like the murmur of faint voices from out the limbo of the forgotten past, and Orpheus with his lute could not have charmed the rocks to speak more clearly of the generations of the dead. All the Ṣafa is full of these whisperings; shadows that are nothing but a name quiver in the quivering air above the stones, and call upon their God in divers tongues. <div class="figcenter"> <ANTIMG src="images/figure63.jpg" width-obs="400" alt="" /> ḲAL'AT EL BEIḌA </div> I copied in haste, for there was no time to lose that day. The Druzes stood round me impatiently, and 'Awāḍ shouted, "Yallah, yallah! ya sitt," which being interpreted means, "Hurry up!" We rode on to the eastern limit of the Ṣafa, turned the corner of the lava bed, and saw the yellow plain of the Ruḥbeh before us. I know, because I have observed it from the Jebel Druze, that it stretches for a great distance to the east; but, when we reached it, it seemed no wider than half a mile, and beyond it lay a wonderful lake of bluish misty water. The little volcanoes far away to the east rose like islands out of the sea, and were mirrored in the water at their feet; yet as we rode towards that inland flood, its shores retreated before us, for it was but a phantom sea whereat the phantom hosts of the Ṣafa may fitly assuage their thirst. Then on the brink of the lava hills we caught sight of a grey tower, and in the plain below it we saw a domed and whitewashed shrine, and these were the Khirbet el Beiḍa and the Mazār of Sheikh [Pg 123] Serāk. Sheikh Serāk inherits his position as guardian of the Ruḥbeh from Zeus Saphathenos, who is in turn the direct heir to the god El, the earliest divinity of the Ṣafa. His business is to watch over the crops, which in good years the Arabs sow round his soul's dwelling place; he is respected by Moslem and by Druze alike, and he holds a well-attended yearly festival which had fallen about a fortnight before I came. The shrine itself is a building of the Ḥaurān type, with a stone roof supported on transverse arches. Over the doors there is a carved lintel taken from the ruins of the White Castle. <div class="figcenter"> <ANTIMG src="images/figure64.jpg" width-obs="200" alt="" /> ḲAL'AT EL BEIḌA </div> But I could scarcely stay while my men assembled here, so eager was I to see the Ḳal'at el Beiḍa—Khirbeh or Ḳal'ah, ruin or castle, the Arabs call it either indifferently. I left the Druzes to pay such respects as were due to Zeus Saphathenos or whoever he might be, and cantered off to the edge of the lava plateau. A deep ditch lay before the lava, so full of water that I had to cross it by a little bridge of planks; Ḥabīb was there watering his mule, that admirable mule which walked as fast as the mares, and, entrusting my horse to him, I hastened on over the broken lava and into the fortress court. There were one or two Arabs sauntering through it, but they paid as little attention to me [Pg 124] as I did to them. This was it, the famous citadel that guards a dead land from an unpeopled, the Ṣafa from the Ḥamād. Grey white on the black platform rose the walls of smoothly dressed stones, the ghostly stronghold of a world of ghosts. Whose hands reared it, whose art fashioned the flowing scrolls on door-post and lintel, whose eyes kept vigil from the tower, cannot yet be decided with any certainty. Hanelos and Shuraik and Būkhālih may have looked for it as they rounded the corner of the Wādi el Gharz, and perhaps the god El took it under his protection, and perhaps the prayers of the watchman were turned to some distant temple, and offered to the deities of Greece and Rome. A thousand unanswered, unanswerable, questions spring to your mind as you cross the threshold. De Vogüé and Oppenheim and Dussaud have described the Khirbet el Beiḍa, and any one who cares to read their words may know that it is a square enclosure with a round tower at each corner, a round bastion between the towers and a rectangular keep against the south wall; that its doorways are carved with wonderful flowing patterns, scrolls and leaves and flowers, with animals striding through them; and that it is [Pg 125] probably an outlying fortress of Rome, built between the second and fourth centuries. The fact remains that we are not certain of its origin, any more than we are certain of the origin of the ruins near it at Jebel Sēs, or of Mshitta, or of any of the buildings in the western desert. There are resemblances between them all, and there are marked differences, just as there are resemblances between Ḳal'at el Beiḍa and the architecture of the Ḥaurān, and yet what stonecutter of the Mountain would have let his imagination so outstrip the classic rule as did the man who set the images of the animals of the desert about the doors of the White Castle? There is a breath of something that is strange to neighbouring art, a wilder, freer fancy, not so skilled as that which created the tracery of Mshitta, cruder, and probably older. It is all guess work; the desert may give up its secrets, the history of the Ṣafa and the Ruḥbeh may be pieced together from the lettered rocks, but much travel must be accomplished first and much excavation on the Syrian frontiers, in Hira perhaps, or in Yemen. I would only remark that the buildings at Ḳal'at el Beiḍa cannot as they stand belong to one and the same period. The keep is certainly a later work than the curtain walls of the fort. While these are built with mortar, like the Roman camp at Ḳasṭal and the fortress at Muwaḳḳar, the keep is of dry masonry resembling that which is universal in the Ḥaurān, and in its walls are set carved stones which were assuredly not executed for the positions they occupy. Even the decoration about the main door of the keep is of borrowed stones; the two superimposed carved blocks of the lintel do not fit each other, and neither fits the doorway. But the only conclusion I venture to draw is, that the two suggestions of origin that have been made by archaeologists, the one that the place was a Roman camp, the other that it was the Ghassānid fortress, may both be true. The edge of the lava plateau lies a few feet above the plain. Along this natural redoubt are other buildings besides the White Castle, but none of them are of the same architectural interest. Their walls are roughly made of squared tufa blocks laid dry, whereas the castle is of a grey [Pg 126] stone, and part of it is constructed with mortar. The only building of any importance that I visited lay a little to the north and had been roofed after the Ḥaurān manner with stone slabs laid on transverse arches. At intervals along the lava bed there were small towers like sentry boxes guarding the approach to the castle, and these, too, were of dry masonry. <div class="figcenter"> <ANTIMG src="images/figure65.jpg" width-obs="200" alt="" /> ḲAL'AT EL BEIḌA, DOOR OF KEEP </div> A couple of hours' halt was all that we could allow ourselves, for we had to be in sight of our encampment before the dusk closed in at the risk of passing the night in the open Ṣafa. So after devouring hastily the remains of the five chickens we had brought from Umm Ruweik, flavoured by stalks of wild onions that 'Awāḍ had found in the lava, we set off homewards. We just accomplished the ride of 4 3/4 hours in time, that is we saw the smoke of the camp fires before night fell, and got our direction thereby. A series of spaces cleared of stones led us to the camp. These open places are the marāḥ (tent marks) of the 'Anazeh, who used to camp in the Ṣafa before the Druzes established themselves in the Mountain over a hundred years ago. The marāḥ, therefore, have remained visible after at least a century, and will remain, probably, for many centuries more. There was a strong cold wind that evening, and the main wall of the tent had been shifted round to [Pg 127] shelter us the better; but for all that we passed a comfortless night, and the cold woke me several times to an uneasy sense of having fallen asleep on an ant hill. How the Arabs contrive to collect so many fleas among so few possessions is an insoluble mystery. There was hardly a suitable place for them to lodge in, except the tent walls themselves, and when those walls are taken down they must show skill and agility beyond the common wont of fleas in order to get themselves packed up and carried off to the next camping ground, but that they are equal to the task every one knows who has spent a night in a house of hair. After two nights with the Ghiāth our own tents seemed a paradise of luxury when we returned to them the next afternoon, and a bath the utmost height to which a Sybaritic life could attain, even when taken in a temperature some degrees below freezing point. During our ride homewards an incident occurred which is worth recording, as it bears on Druze customs. The sect, as has been remarked before, is divided into initiated and uninitiated. To the stranger the main difference between the two is that the initiated abstain from the use of tobacco, and I had noticed in the evening I spent at Ṣāleh that none of Muḥammad en Naṣṣār's family smoked. I was therefore surprised when Fāiz, finding himself alone with Mikhāil and me, begged the former for a cigarette, and I apologised for having omitted to offer him one before, saying that I had understood smoking to be forbidden to him. Fāiz blinked his crooked eyes, and replied that it was as I had said, and that he would not have accepted a cigarette if another Druze had been in sight, but that since none of his co-religionists were present he felt himself at liberty to do as he pleased. He begged me, however, not to mention to his brother this lapse from virtue. That night in the maḳ'ad of Umm Ruweik the three sheikhs and I laid many plans for a further exploration of the Ṣafa, settled the number of camels I was to take with me, and even the presents which were to reward the escort at the end of the journey. Fāiz and Aḥmed and Khittāb shall certainly be of the expedition if the selecting of it lies in my hands. [Pg 128] <div class="figcenter"> <ANTIMG src="images/figure66.jpg" width-obs="500" alt="" /> MOULDINGS FROM ḲAL'AT EL BEIḌA AND FROM PALMYRA </div> [Pg 129] Next morning at 8.30 we started on our three days' ride to Damascus. Of Umm Ruweik I need only add that it took exactly four days to scrape together sufficient money among the inhabitants for the changing of a gold piece. We had brought a bag of silver and copper coins with us from Jerusalem, but when it was exhausted we had the utmost difficulty in paying our debts—this is also one of the Hints to Travellers that Mikhāil urged me to embody in the book I was to write. We rode by enchanting slopes, covered where the snow had melted with the sky-blue Iris Histrio, and spent an hour or two at Shakka, which was one of the principal scenes of de Vogüé's archæological work. The basilica which figures as almost perfect in his book is now fallen completely into ruin, only the façade remaining, but the Ḳaisarīeh still stands, and the monastery which he believes to be one of the oldest monastic buildings in existence. We rode by Ḥīt, an interesting village containing a fine pre-Arabic house in which the sheikh lives, and camped at Bathaniyyeh in a frost that sent me shivering to bed. It was here that a running stream was completely frozen. Next day I made a circuit to visit Ḥayāt, where there is a lovely Kalybeh, published by de Vogüé, and a castle, that I might fill up some gaps in my former [Pg 131] journey and see what sort of buildings are to be found on the northern slopes of the mountain, if I could do no more. The old villages are rapidly filling up, and in a few years little trace of their monuments will remain. So we came down into the plain, joined the Lejā road from Shaḥbah to Damascus at Lahiteh, and pursued our mules to Brāk, the furthest village of the Ḥaurān. There is a military post at Brāk held by a score of soldiers; just before we reached it we met a little Druze girl who cowered by the roadside and wept with fear at the sight of us. "I am a maid!" she cried, "I am a maid!" Her words threw an ominous shadow upon the Turkish regime under which we were now to find ourselves again. Almost opposite the fort we passed two Druzes returning from Damascus. They gave me a friendly greeting, and I said: <div class="figcenter"> <ANTIMG src="images/figure67.jpg" width-obs="200" alt="" /> A GATEWAY, SHAKKA </div> "Are you facing to the Mountain?" They said: "By God! may God keep you!" I said: "I come from thence—salute it for me," and they answered: "May God salute you! go in peace!" It is never without a pang that the traveller leaves the Druze country behind, and never without registering a vow to return to it as soon as may be. <div class="figcenter"> <ANTIMG src="images/figure68.jpg" width-obs="400" alt="" /> THE SHEIKH'S HOUSE, ḤAYĀT </div> Having passed under the protection of the Sultan, I found that my road next day lay across a really dangerous bit of country. The Circassians and Turks of Brāk (the Turks were charming people from the northern parts of Asia Minor) dissuaded me strongly from taking the short cut across the hills to Damascus, so strongly that I had almost abandoned the idea. They said the hills were infested by robbers and probably empty of Arab encampments at this time of year, so that the robbers had it all their own way. Fortunately next morning we heard of a company of soldiers who were said to be riding to Damascus across the hills, and the report encouraged us to take the same path. We never saw them, and I do not believe that they had any real existence; on the other hand, we did see some black tents which gave us confidence at the worst bit of the road, and the robbers must have been otherwise engaged for they did [Pg 132] not appear. But I noted with interest, firstly, that desert life comes to within an hour or two of Damascus, a fact I had not been able to observe before when I went by the high road, and secondly that the Sultan's peace, if peace it can be called, ceases almost at the walls of the chief city of Syria. We crossed the Nahr el 'Awāj, which is the Pharpar, and reached soon after midday the Circassian village of Nejhā, where I stopped to lunch under a few poplars, the first grove of trees I had seen since we left Salt. Whether you ride to Damascus by a short cut or by a high road, from the Ḥaurān or from Palmyra, it is always further away than any known place. Perhaps it is because the traveller is so eager to reach it, the great and splendid Arab city set in a girdle of fruit trees and filled with the murmur of running water. But if he have only patience there is no road that will not end at last; and we, too, at the last came to the edge of the apricot gardens and then to the Bawābet Ullaḥ, the Gates of God, and so passed into the Meidān, the long quarter of shops and khāns stretching out like the handle to a great spoon, in the bowl of which lie the minarets and domes of the rich quarters. By four o'clock I was lodged in the Hotel Victoria, and had a month's post of letters and papers in my hands. <div class="footnote"> [7]Dussaud, "Mission Scientific," p. 64. The translation of the inscriptions I owe to the kindness of Dr. Littmann, who will include the original copies in his "Semitic Inscriptions." </div> [Pg 133] <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

1 of 2

2 of 2

Update Required To play the media you will need to either update your browser to a recent version or update your Flash plugin.