A Pilgrimage to Nejd Volume I Part 7

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 Ark from Tudmur, and that he was engaged to whichever of the two unmarried ones the old women had seemed to favour in their descriptions. 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 pa.s.sed 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 description 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 remarkable 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 should find a Roala camp not far upon our way, for the camels from it were watered from this very well. Formerly Kara, like Jof 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 Ras.h.i.+d's country now, where highway robbery is not allowed. The villagers were very hospitable in their offers of entertainment if we would remain at Kara, but there was nothing in the place sufficiently interesting to detain us, so we went on. It contains, like Jof 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 watering place for to-morrow. It argued well for the security 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 Ras.h.i.+d's government. After travelling on for 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 ourselves 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 under which the oasis stands, the range of Jebel Hammamiyeh too, all mere islands in the basin, which seems moreover to include Jof as well as the eastern villages in its main circuit. Wilfrid has little doubt now that Meskakeh and Jof are really only the tail as it were of the Wady Sirhan or rather its head, for the whole must be in shape something like a tadpole, and this point its nose.

The Hamad 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 sh.o.r.e of the great Nefd.

At half past three o'clock we saw a red streak on 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 unlike a stormy sea seen from the sh.o.r.e, for it rose up, as the sea seems to rise, when the waves are high, above the level of the land. Somebody called out "the Nefd," 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 hitherto seen, and nothing at all like what we had expected. Yet the Nefd 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 Nefd, which is interesting beyond our hopes, and charming into the bargain. It is, moreover, quite unlike the description I remember to have read of it by Mr. Palgrave, which affects one as a nightmare of impossible horror. It is true he pa.s.sed 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 Nefd is its colour. It is not white like the sand dunes we pa.s.sed yesterday, nor yellow as the sand is in parts of the Egyptian desert, but a really bright red, almost crimson in the morning when it is wet with the dew. The sand is rather coa.r.s.e, 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 Nefd, on the contrary, is better wooded and richer in pasture than any part of the desert we have pa.s.sed 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 (G.o.d'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 his 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 fruit. 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 gra.s.s. Both camels and mares are therefore pleased with the place, and we are delighted with the abundance of firewood for our camps. Wilfrid says that the Nefd 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 Nefd 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 water, for it contains but few wells; all along the edge, it is thickly inhabited, and Radi tells us that in the spring, when the gra.s.s is green after rain, the Bedouins care nothing for water, as their camels are in milk, and they go for weeks without it, wandering far into the interior of the sand desert.

We have been travelling through the Nefd slowly all day, and have occupied ourselves in studying its natural features. At first sight it seemed 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 Nefd are the great horse-hoof hollows which are scattered all over it (Radi calls them _fulj_). 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 an unshod 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-courses. The diameter of some of these fuljes 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 underneath the sand. 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 composing the sides and every part of the fuljes is of pure sand, and the immediate surface must be constantly s.h.i.+fting, 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. Moreover, our guide, who has travelled backwards and forwards over the Nefd for forty years, a.s.serts that it never changes. No sandstorm ever fills up the hollows, or carries away the ridges. He knows them all, and has known them ever since he was a boy. "They were made so by G.o.d." Wilfrid has been casting about, however, for some natural theory to account for their formation, 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 camel's 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. n.o.body 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 fuljes have again been the object of our attention. We find that they all point in the same direction, or nearly so, 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.

[Picture: The Nefd, or Great Red Sand Desert of Arabia]

At the edge, moreover, of 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 Nefd, 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 Jof. 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 very 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 under the 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. {162}

This notion is favoured by what we have observed of the bare places, where such occur, for they always slope down towards the west. Radi a.s.sures 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 Sirhan, 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 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 recognised these people as Howeysin directly, by their wretched tent. He then reminded us of how we had been deceived last year by the ghazu we had met in the Hamad the day we found Jedaan. It was very lucky, he declared, that nothing disagreeable had happened then, for he had found out since that the nine people Wilfrid had ridden up to talk to, were in reality a ghazu 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 corn, and had stayed two days in 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 Nefd. 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 Nefd, 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 are worn through with long usage of ropes in drawing water. There is, however, here, a little wooden pulley for the rope to pa.s.s over, a permanent arrangement very unusual in the desert, where everything removable is as a matter of course removed. 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 wondering whether we could make up enough, with all the odds and ends tied together, to reach to the water, a troop of camels came flouris.h.i.+ng down upon us, cantering with their heads out, and their heels in the air, and followed by some men on deluls. These proved to be Ibn Shaalan's people, and, to our great surprise and delight, one of them, a man named Ras.h.i.+d, recognized us as old acquaintances. 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 circ.u.mstance 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 miles from Shakik, as the crow flies. Ras.h.i.+d 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 a.s.sad, the elder a shy boorish youth, but the younger, nine years old, a nice little boy. To him we entrusted 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 Sirhan. 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 Nefd.

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 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 very little result, for the men had been celebrating our pa.s.sage of the Nefd, which began 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 effort. 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 Nefd 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 _sheykh of the water_, with orders to dole it out in rations every night, and allow n.o.body to drink during the day. The Arabs are very childish about meat and drink, eating and drinking all 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 Mohammed 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 fas.h.i.+on.

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 driftwood of the Nefd. He has his delul 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 carrying with him on his camel one of the red sand-stone mortars of the Jof for a relation of Ibn Ras.h.i.+d'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," Radi calls them, and if anybody 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 Roala who had crossed the Nefd to make a raid upon the Shammar, and had not been able to reach Shakik on their way back. The bones were white, but there were bits of skin still clinging to them, though Radi 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 which had been lifting camels in the Wady Sirhan, was overtaken by their owner, a Sirhan 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 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. Radi took us first in a nearly southerly direction, till he hit a line of landmarks, invisible to us but well known to him, running-south-south-east. This he calls _the road_, 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 Radi, there was a famine in Nejd, and the Beni h.e.l.lal were without bread. Then Abu Zeyd, sheykh of the tribe, spoke to his kinsmen 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 prison. Now Znati had a daughter who was very beautiful, named Sferi, and when she saw Merrey in the dungeon, 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 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 n.o.ble 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 they 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 n.o.ble 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 pa.s.s over it. And you shall see that whichever is the slave amongst them will gather up his clothes about him carefully, while the n.o.bly born 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 pa.s.s through a muddy stream. And Abu Zeyd, being warned by Sferi, put his abba on his head, and lifted up his s.h.i.+rt to the waist, while Merry and Yunis walked through without precaution. So Abu Zeyd was set free and returned to Nejd, and gathering all his people together there, he led them across the Nefd 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 besieged 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 Radi'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 camels have marched bravely, and we have got over about twenty-one miles to-day.

Our camp this evening, though in a fulj, is five 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 Nefd, 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 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 suns.h.i.+ne after the rain had brought them out. We have been inquiring of Radi after the more dangerous species, and he describes very accurately the horned 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 Nefd, but we crossed the quite fresh track of two "wild cows" (antelope). This animal, Radi a.s.sures us, never leaves the Nefd 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 a.s.sure 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 b.u.t.terflies. There is a much better sort of gra.s.s in the Nefd and more of it than on the outskirts, which I suppose is from the absence of camels.

I find that Radi makes out his course almost entirely by landmarks. On every high sand-hill he gets down from his delul, 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 footway. 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 Mohammed, 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, {174} who many years ago were treacherously abandoned in the Nefd. They had occupied Hal in the days of the first Ibn Ras.h.i.+d, 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 Hal, 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 Hal on horseback and followed their Shammar guides to this place, who to all questions as to where they should find wells, answered, a little further, a little further 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 atasha nahnu askar ma benrid moyeh." "We are not thirsty, we soldiers want no water." But at noon that day they must have lost heart, and lain down under the bushes to get a sort of shade, and so they were afterwards found scattered about in the different 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 Jof, 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 peaks of Aalem, two conical 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 sagacity of our guide on account of the tortuous line we followed, 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 Nefd, 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. "Mount Nebo must have been like this." But people who die in the Nefd 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 b.u.t.terfly sunning itself in a sheltered spot. If, as is probable, there is no vegetation suited for the caterpillar of this b.u.t.terfly nearer than Hebron, this little insect must have travelled 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, 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 Nefd, and the little tell is his son.

At some miles distance to the north-east there is a cl.u.s.ter of white sand-hills, Aalem's "harim." The rocks of Aalem are sandstone 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 Nefd, the uniformity of the ocean of sand streaked with the long lines of its fuljes, 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-gla.s.s with at home.

_January_ 17.-A white frost, some of which was packed up with the tents and carried with us all day.

It is curious that now we have pa.s.sed 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 gra.s.s called _na.s.si_ for the camels, and of the hamar, a whitish-blue p.r.i.c.kly plant which the mares are very fond of, while the _adr_, 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, Mohammed 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 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-tawil (the tall as contrasted with Ibrahim el-kasir, or the short), who has. .h.i.therto been the b.u.t.t of the party, being sent down on fools' errands to fetch water from fuljes, and up to the tops of sand-hills, to see imaginary mountains, has proved himself to-day most valiant. He, although a Christian, is a match for any Moslem of the party, and gives as 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-staff 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 f.a.gged, 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 delul, 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 bought at Mezarib. 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, seems 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 beginning to show its head above the sand. Fresh gra.s.s there is none, and last year's crop stands white and withered still without sign of life.

We met a man to-day, a Roala, 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 account of himself. He was perfectly harmless and unarmed, and had been three nights out already in the Nefd by himself. He had a skin of water and a skin of dates, and was going 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 compa.s.s, 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 Nefd, or perhaps a doubt about reaching Jobba, might well make them serious; perhaps, however, they merely want to get into training for Nejd, where Wahhabism prevails and prayers are in fas.h.i.+on. 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 tonight, Radi informs us that the Nefd 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 Jof, where there is a wonderful well, the best in Arabia. We asked him about sandstorms, and whether caravans were ever buried by them. He said they were not. The sand never buries any object deeply, as we can judge by the sticks and bones and camel-dung which always remain on the surface. The only danger for caravans is that a storm may last so long 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 Nefd 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, h.o.a.r frost 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 ghazu, but afterwards recognised Radi's voice, and knew we must be travellers going to Ibn Ras.h.i.+d. He came in the morning and told us this; and that he was out on a scouting expedition to look for gra.s.s in the Nefd. He seemed rather frightened, and very anxious to please; and a.s.sured us over and over again that Mohammed Ibn Ras.h.i.+d would be delighted to see us.

It has been another hard day for the camels. Shenuan has broken down and cannot carry his load; and Hanna, like the rest of the men, has had to walk, for his delul is giving in. The sand seems 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_, _January_ 19.-A terrible day for camels and men. Hanna's delul, Shenuan, and the tall camel they call "Amud," or the "Pillar,"

refused their aliek last night, being too thirsty to eat; and to-day they could carry no loads. Shakran, too, who has. .h.i.therto 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 Hatheran, 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 Nefd, adding a new chapter to old Radi's tales of horror. And now that we have escaped such a fate and have reached Jobba, we can see how fortunate we have been. But for the perfect travelling weather throughout our pa.s.sage of the Nefd, and the extraordinary luck of that thunderstorm, we should not now be at Jobba.