A Pilgrimage to Nejd Volume I Part 5

"And these are Franjis travelling with you?" "Wallah! Franjis, friends of Ibn Shaalan."

[Picture: Ghazu in the Wady Sirhan]

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 Roala, for Tudmur pays tribute to Ibn Shaalan, and the Tudmuris have a right to his protection. So, as soon as the circ.u.mstances were made clear, orders were given by the chief of the party to his followers to bring back our mares, and the gun, and everything 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 are 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 pa.s.sing 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 Mohammed; yet they had taken our word that we were friends, when they might so easily have ridden off without question with our property. n.o.body would ever have heard of it, or known who they were.

It appears that Ibn Debaa (hyaena), the Sheykh, and his friends were a small party in advance of the main body of the Roala. 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 followed, riding in hot haste 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. Everything 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 eight, they had only lances, while we carried firearms. We liked the look of these young Roala. 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 these, however, I fear, 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 considering 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 ghazu 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 Roala 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 up every other feeling. Wilfrid says, but I do not believe him, that he felt frightened, and was very near running away and leaving me, but on reflection 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 att.i.tude of the caravan was no doubt prudent; but it seemed hardly up to the ideal of chivalry Mohammed has always professed. He keeps on reproaching himself, but we tell him that he did quite right. It was certainly our own fault that we were surprised in this way, and if the enemy, as they might have been, had really been robbers and outlaws, 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, will 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 Jof-if ever we get there.

Now all is quiet, and Hamdan the Sherari is singing the loves of a young man and maiden who were separated from one another by mischief-makers, and afterwards managed to carry on a correspondence by tying their letters to their goats when these went out to pasture

_January_ 4.-There was no dawdling this morning, for everybody has become serious, and we were off 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 Sirhan for good, and are making a straight cut across the Hamad for Jof. There is no water this way, but less chance of ghazus. 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 Hamdan explained, for collecting and winnowing _semh_, a little red grain which grows wild in this part of the desert, and is used by the Jof people for food.

A little later we sighted two men on a delul, the first people we have seen, except the ghazu, 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 shots, and succeeded in frightening them out 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 Sirhan, one of the men sent by Ibn Rashid to Kaf for the tribute. He had been taken ill, and had stopped behind his companions, and n.o.body had seen him since. They had been sent out by the governor of Jof 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 Hamdan, both dying with curiosity about the two zellems from Jof. At last Awwad could wait no longer, and begged Hamdan to go with him. They both jumped down from the camels they were riding, and set off as hard as they could run to meet the Jofi, 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 Jof gossip.

We are encamped this evening near some curious tells of red, yellow, and purple sandstone, a formation exactly similar to parts of the Sinai peninsula. There is a splendid view to the south, and we can see far away a blue line of hills {110} which, they tell us, are beyond Jof at the edge of the Nefud!

We have been questioning Hamdan about his tribe, the Sherarat, and he gives the following as their princ.i.p.al sections:-

El Hueymreh Sheykh El Hawi.

El Helesseh ,, Ibn Hedayaja.

El Khayali ,, Zeyd el Werdi.

Shemalat ,, Fathal el Dendeh.

The Sherarat have no horses, but breed the finest dromedaries in Arabia.

Their best breed is called _Benat 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-morrow at sunrise at Kaf, a distance of a hundred and eighty miles. A thief not long ago stole a Sherari delul at Mezarib, and rode it all the way to Hal in seven days and nights!

_January_ 5.-A long wearisome ride of twenty-two miles, always expecting to see Jof, 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 Sirhan far away to the right, with blue hills beyond it, but in front of us there seemed an endless succession of rocky ridges. At last from the top of one of these there became visible a black outline, standing darkly out against the yellow confusion of sandstone hills and barren wadys, which we knew must be the castle of Marid. 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 white rock, which Awwad and Hamdan both affirmed to be a continuation of the Roman road from Salkhad. We should have liked to believe 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 cl.u.s.tering round the black castle. We were at Jof.

[Picture: The castle of Jof]

CHAPTER VI.

And Laban said to him, "Surely thou art my bone and my flesh." And he abode with him the s.p.a.ce of a month.-BOOK OF GENESIS.

The Jof oasis-We are entertained by Ibn Rashid's lieutenant-A haunch of wild cow-Dancing in the castle-Prayers-We go on to Meskakeh.

JoF is not at all what we expected. We thought we should find it a large cultivated district, and it turns out to be merely a small town. There is nothing at all outside the walls except a few square patches, half an acre or so each, green with young corn. These are watered from wells, and irrigated just like the gardens inside the walls, with little water-courses carefully traced in patterns, like a jam tart. The whole basin of Jof 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 Sirhan, with which it probably communicates; and we thought at first that it might have been the last 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 three 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, cl.u.s.tering, most of them, round the ruin of Marid, but not all, for there are half a dozen separate cl.u.s.ters in different parts of the grove. Many of these houses have a kind of tower, or upper storey, and there are small towers at irregular intervals all round the outer wall. The chief feature of the town, besides Marid, is a new castle just outside the _enceinte_, 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 Jof, nor even streets, as one generally understands the word, only a number of narrow tortuous lanes, with mud walls 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 aleyk.u.m" simply, without moving, and let us pa.s.s on without any particular demonstration of hospitality. To suppose them indifferent, however, was a mistake; their apparent coldness was only Arab formality, and when Mohammed began to inquire after the house of his relations, 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-gardens to the other side of the town, and then out by another gate beyond to one of the isolated farms we had seen from the cliff. It was close by, not a quarter of a mile, and in a few minutes more we had dismounted, and were being hospitably entertained in the tidy kahwah of Huseyn's house.

What Huseyn's exact relationship is to Mohammed, I have not yet been able to discover-Mohammed 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 coffee roasting, than another relation arrived, attracted by the news 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 coffee 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 their drab woollen abbas. They wore red cotton kefiyehs on 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 Jof. 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 hilted sword, was a kind of uniform. They had come, as it presently appeared, from Dowa.s.s, the acting governor of Jof, 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 could refuse, for Ibn Rashid's government is absolute at Jof, and his lieutenant's wishes are treated as commands, 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 Jof is a conquered place, held permanently in a state of siege, and 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 Tellal (Mr. Palgrave's friend), and though so modern a 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 Hal, who, between them, govern and garrison and do the police work of Jof. The governor himself is away just now at Meskakeh, the other small town included in the Jof 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.

Jof, 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 Shaalans, Sheykhs of the Roala, 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 Jofi are now afraid of stirring a finger against the Emir. On the occasion of one of these revolts, Metaab cut down a great 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 Jof (the same we heard of at Kaf), and held it for a few months; but Ibn Rashid complained to the Sultan of this, and threatened to turn them out and to discontinue the tribute he pays to the Sherif 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 Kaf, 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 Jof to Kasim without escort. The roads are safe everywhere. A robbery has not been known on the Emir's highway for many years, and people found loafing about near the roads have their heads cut off. Ibn Rashid allows no ghazus against travellers, and when he makes war it is with his enemies. The Ibn Haddal and Ibn Majil are his friends, but he is on bad terms with Sotamm and the Sebaa Sheykhs.

There are 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 Jof by Metaab.

The Jofi are of a different race from the Shammar of Nejd, being as mixed in their origin almost as the Tudmuri or the villagers of the Euphrates.

Huseyn our first host here, tells us he belongs to the Ta, and that others of his neighbours are Sirhan or Beni Laam. He is not really a cousin of Mohammed's, but a cousin's cousin; the real cousins living at Meskakeh. Though we were very comfortable with him, we are not less well off here; and it is more interesting being at the kasr. Dowa.s.s, the deputy governor, is a very 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 a.s.sure us Ibn Rashid 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 Hal when they go away on service. There are no horses in Jof, except one two-year-old colt belonging to Dubejeh, one of the soldiers, who all admire our _s.h.a.gra_ (chestnut mare) amazingly, saying that there is nothing in Nejd so beautiful. Neither are there any beasts of burden, not even a.s.ses. 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-starved cows at the kasr. There is not an atom of vegetation within miles of Jof, and the camels and these cows have to eat chopped straw and refuse dates.

[Picture: The Oasis of Jof]

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 b.u.t.ter with chopped onions, and the third, bread sopped in water-all 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 Nefd, 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 Dowa.s.s, as well as the soldiers, took part. They performed a kind of sword dance, one performer beating on a drum made of palm wood and horse hide, while the rest held 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 the hunting-field at home. Once or twice there was a distinct 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:-

[Picture: A line of musical notes]

The dancing ended, a huge bowl of date mola.s.ses (dibs) and juice from _trengs_ (a gigantic sort of lemon) was mixed; and surprising quant.i.ties 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.-Hamdan, our Sherari guide, who had disappeared, returned this morning furtively for the balance of pay due to him. He says he is afraid of the people at the castle, and cannot stay with us.

A messenger has come from Meskakeh with an invitation from Johar for us, so we are going on there to-morrow. We are not, however, to stay with Johar, as he has no house of his own there, but with our relations, the Ibn Arks, who have at last been really discovered. Na.s.sr ibn Ark, 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 anything in faces; and evidently much 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 Habb, mentioned by Mr. Palgrave, exists, but that the n.o.blest of all the families is that of Mehsin ibn Dirra, formerly Sheykh of Jof, 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 Jof; but he is afraid to show more than a half-smothered discontent, for Mohammed ibn Rashid keeps a hostage for his good conduct in the person of his eldest son. This youth resides at Hal, 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 endless cups of coffee flavoured with cloves (heyl), and eat innumerable dates, the _helwet el Jof_, 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 Jof live almost entirely on dates; not, however, on the _helwet_, 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 shapeless, and of the colour of a horse 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 sugar could be manufactured 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 extraordinary amount of washing and rinsing of coffee-pots, five or six of them; and lastly, the actual boiling, which is done three times.

The Jof 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 Jof 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. Awwad bought one for six and a half mejidies.

We next had a look at the castle of Marid, the only building of stone in Jof. Its construction dates, I should say, from mediaeval times, certainly it is not cla.s.sic, 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 Jof, but in reality it is within the walls of the town, on the western edge. It stands about 2000 feet above the sea.