Читать книгу The Desert World - Arthur Mangin - Страница 20

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THE traveller who starts from the southern extremity of the Dead Sea encounters a succession of deserts. To the east extend wide plains, covered with ruins, where upwards of thirty cities are to be traced in their decay, like Palmyra, by the trunks of shattered columns and the wrecks of desecrated temples. This is the once flourishing country of the Nabatheans, now haunted by some tribes of Idumean Arabs. One might not inappropriately call it the vestibule of Arabia Deserta; a name applicable to all the central and southern districts—that is to say, to nearly three-fourths of the Arabian peninsula. There the sea of sand reveals itself in all its nakedness, in all its horrors; with its implacable sky and fiery atmosphere, its sandy billows, its masses of salt, and, in certain places, with its hidden quicksands capable of devouring entire armies. The Desert of Akhaf, situated towards the extremity of the peninsula, conceals, it is said, several of these abysses, where the hapless traveller, if he set his foot upon them, would be instantly swallowed up. Thus even the Arabs regard it with an unconquerable dread. It owes its name to a Saffite king who would fain have traversed it with his troops, and who saw them perish therein even to the last man. The tradition does not inform us how he himself escaped this immense disaster.

CARAVAN IN THE DESERT.

A European traveller, Baron de Wrede, undertook nevertheless, some twenty-five years ago, to penetrate into this soul-appalling desert, and attempted to measure the extent and depth of one of these abysses. Starting in the morning from Saba, under the guidance of a few Bedouins, he reached, after six hours’ marching, the threshold of the desert of Akhaf.

“A sandy plain, extending as far as the eye could reach,” he says, “and upon which arose innumerable hills in the semblance of waves,—such was the scene presented to my gaze. Not the least trace of vegetation was perceptible; not a bird interrupted with its song the tomb-like silence which prevailed around the graves of the Sabean army. I remarked three tracts distinguished by a dazzling whiteness. ‘Yonder are the abysses,’ said the Bedouins; ‘they are inhabited by the spirits who have covered with this deceitful sand the treasures intrusted to their charge. He who dares approach them will assuredly be dragged down under the sand! Do not venture there!’

“Naturally, I paid no attention to this counsel; on the contrary, I demanded to be guided towards them, according to agreement. Two hours were consumed by our camels in reaching the bottom of the plateau, where we arrived at sunset, taking up our quarters for the night on the lee side of two enormous rocks. On the following day I insisted that the Bedouins should guide me over these tracts. My trouble was in vain; fear rendered them unable to utter a word. Furnished with a plumb-lead weighing about a pound and a quarter, to which was attached a rope nearly 350 yards in length, I accomplished this dangerous enterprise. I occupied thirty-six minutes in reaching the first abyss; it was thirty-six feet long by twenty-six feet broad, and formed an inclined plain towards the centre, about six feet deep, which I attributed to the action of the wind. I approached at first with the utmost precaution, in order to examine the sand, and found it to be almost impalpable. I cast my plumb-lead as far as I could; it disappeared immediately; however, the rapidity with which the rope shortened gradually diminished; in five minutes, it had wholly disappeared.”

Baron de Wrede has made no attempt to account for this strange phenomenon, which is not, I may add, peculiar to Arabia. The late Doctor Cloquet, who for many years acted as chief physician to the Shah of Persia, relates that he had seen similar gulfs in the great Salt Desert, which he considered to occupy the place of lakes suddenly vanished. This hypothesis is certainly admissible, and perhaps very probable; but while in some degree explaining the existence of these abysses of sand, it raises fresh questions which are by no means easily answered; for instance, why have these lakes disappeared, and why have they been replaced by this impalpable and incoherent dust in which heavy bodies sink as in a void?

Consider, moreover, the remarks made by Doctor Cloquet in a letter addressed in 1851 to the Academy of Medicine at Paris:—

“At fifteen parasangs from Teheran,[48] commences the Salt Desert, which, from east to west, extends to the very frontiers of India. This immense basin, eastward, has no other limits than the horizon; to the west, to the north, to the south, it is bounded by hills of sand which completely represent the Dunes of France. The soil, of a fawn-coloured yellow, is composed of clay and sand, exactly resembling the mud which occupies the bottom of a dried-up basin. It is said that at many points a man on horseback will disappear without his body being ever again discovered.[49] I have seen one of these places, near Sivas; the soil is everywhere impregnated with salt mingled with nitre, which crystallizes on the surface. For the rest, if you dig two or three inches deep, you find water, though very brackish in quality. The general opinion is that the desert was once occupied by a sea, which suddenly disappeared on the night that Mohammed was born. And it seems to me that there is no reason to doubt this sudden disappearance, since even in our own days, and only a few years ago, the salt lake of Ourmiah (Urumiyeh), in the province of Azerbaïdjan, vanished completely for twenty-four hours; it is true that the waters emerged again from their subterranean basin. I think it almost absolutely demonstrated, from inspection of these localities, that at a remote epoch this sea communicated with the Caspian, and formed one united basin of water. I am not sure but that in the south it also communicated with the Indian Sea, for I have not travelled in that direction. The apparition of the Elburz chain has cloven the two basins, and the sea, receiving only inconsiderable streams, insensibly receded, until the day when it was wholly dried up, leaving only two lakes: one, the lake of Sivas, which disappeared in the seventh century; the other, the lake of Seistan, which is still extant, and receives several of the important rivers of Afghanistan. At all events, the great sea itself had disappeared some generations prior to the epoch of Alexander.

“The great humidity of the soil,” adds Doctor Cloquet, “struck me vividly. Does not this humidity appear to indicate the presence of vast subterranean sheets of water, which sweat, so to speak (transsuderaient), through the porosities of the earth?”

The desert table-land of Nadjed, which fills all the central part of Asia, is bounded on the west and south by the more fertile and fortunate countries of the Hedjaz and the Hadramant, which skirt the Indian Ocean. To the north-east lies the desert of the Tih, whose deep sand-drifts lie between Palestine and the Isthmus of Suez, and which the Mediterranean washes on the north, on the south-west the Gulf of Suez, and on the south-east the Gulf of Akaba. This is the small triangular peninsula which was known to ancient geographers as Arabia the Stony. A group of ever-famous mountains, hallowed by the sublimest associations, Sinaï, Horeb, Jebel Mûsa, Jebel Bestîn (St. Epistème), raise their granitic summits on the southern point of this peninsula. “They are ‘the Alps’ of Arabia; but the Alps planted in the desert, and therefore stripped of all the clothing which goes to make up our notions of Swiss or English mountains; stripped of the variegated drapery of oak, and birch, and pine and fir, of moss, and grass, and fern; which to landscapes of European hills are almost as essential as the rocks and peaks themselves.” Sinaï, or St. Catherine, the loftiest peak in the range, reaches an elevation of 8160 feet. It is so closely connected with Mount Horeb, to the north, that the two mountains really seem but one. Ravines, and narrow valleys planted with palm-trees, thorny acacias, tamarisks, and some other shrubs, wind between the abrupt trunks of this grand chain. In one of these valleys stands the Monastery of the Transfiguration, and on Mount Horeb rises the Church of St. Catherine, a shrine held in great esteem by devout Greeks. The pilgrims ascend on their knees a large staircase laboriously constructed by the monks.

I have no space to recapitulate the sublime historic memories which invest these solemn heights with an interest of their own. The presence of the Almighty has clothed their summits with a glory that might not be borne; the thunders of the Most High have echoed through their deep dark valleys. At their base the people of Israel watched and waited while Moses received from Heaven the code which thenceforth determined their religious and civil polity. Down the side of yonder mighty peak came their Prophet and Leader, his face bright with a radiance such as was never before on the face of mortal man. They were the scene of a singularly unique history; by which, as Dean Stanley remarks, “the fate of the three surrounding nations—Egypt, Arabia, Palestine—and through them the fate of the whole world, has been determined.”

Mount Sinai.

The locality, consecrated by such glorious associations, is also rich in geological interest. It exhibits indubitable traces of the great volcanic convulsions which have so profoundly shaken the shores of the Dead Sea, and which still growl sullenly under the accumulated rocks. In the time of Procopius, the legend runs that men fled from Sinaï on account of the gruesome noises which haunted it; and modern travellers, notably Stutzen and Gray, declare that they have heard at intervals a sound comparable to the dull heavy throbbing of a Cyclops’ pulse. It might be said that one of the vast arteries which provide for the circulation of the ever boiling and seething flood of lava of our globe passes in this direction at an insignificant depth below the surface. The springs of thermal waters which well out at the mountain-base, the masses of bitumen and lava scattered over the soil, the gigantic rocks which bristle over the whole desert of El-Tîh, and whose hue, to adopt the expression of a modern traveller, is that of calcined and fire-scathed matter, are sufficient evidence that this country has been the theatre of dreadful volcanic phenomena.

Messrs. Bida and Hachette describe a place named Wâdy-Nassoub, situated a short distance from Sarabit-el-Kadim, on the road from Sinaï to Suez. It is gained after traversing Ramleh (“the sandy”), a sandy ravine which serves as a retreat for horrible black serpents, both big and little, and for enormous lizards, and which is followed by a narrow valley. “Wâdy-Nassoub,” according to these travellers, “is one of the most magnificent spectacles we have ever seen. It is a circus of twenty to twenty-five leagues in extent, surrounded by huge rocks arranged in successive terraces, and of incomparable beauty of form and colour. Its arena is an immense sheet of black basalt, furrowed here and there by torrents of yellow sand. A dazzling sun kindles up this landscape, which is one of incredible splendour.”

LAKE BAUDOUIN (A SALT LAKE).

As you approach the Isthmus of Suez—which will soon be annihilated, so to speak, by M. de Lesseps’ great ship-canal—the desert resumes the character which we have seen it bear in Persia and Central Arabia. The rocks, much rarer and less lofty, gradually give place to mountains of sand. Salt lakes and fields of salt re-appear. Near the shores of the Mediterranean lies a pool of salt, still known by that name of Lake Baudouin (Baldwin), which the Crusaders imposed upon it. There the salt forms a firm and tenacious crust, on which the camel safely plants its foot. Sometimes the iron hoof of a horse breaks through, but beneath this first frail stratum it meets with another of astonishing hardness. “You might think yourself,” says a traveller, “on the Mer de Glace of Mont Blanc. Our camel-drivers collected some large pieces from the surface. Nothing can be more brilliant or more transparent than these crystals. It is by tasting them only that you can distinguish them from rock crystal. As we advance, the impression grows overpowering. A plain of dazzling whiteness surrounds us, and is prolonged far beyond our ken. Dimly on the left may be perceived, like an indigo-coloured ribbon, the line of the distant sea. The sky itself appears jet black. The reverberation of sound is unendurable.” Still further, between Suez and Cairo, the same traveller speaks admiringly of a natural amphitheatre, enclosed between two mountain-spurs, and strewn with débris of rock, and especially with petrified wood. It might be compared to a forest-clearing which the woodmen had just quitted. The splinters are quite fresh, the cloven fragments still expose the notches made by the axe. Great trees, divided into beams, resemble long serpents which have been slain by blows from a hatchet. The division is so clear that each gash reveals the concentric tissues perfectly preserved by this mineral embalming, this natural silification. Similar petrifactions may be seen in abundance on the plateaux of the Makattam, and the amphitheatre now described is not far from the hill, visited by every tourist, which has received the name of the Petrified Forest.

Thus it appears that the Land Deserts, despite the proverbial monotony of their aspect, do not fail to offer to the artist as well as the savant, the philosopher no less than the historian, objects worthy of patient study. Everywhere the handiwork of God and the evidences of Almighty design awaken the admiration of the thoughtful. Whether the picture be sombre or beautiful, grand or appalling, we see that it was conceived and filled up by superhuman power. But we are now in Egypt, on the threshold of the world’s vast deserts. Egypt, kept alive by the fertilizing and genial Nile, is but an island in the great ocean of sand which encircles it, and which, far more truly than the Red Sea or the Mediterranean, isolates it from the rest of the globe.