Читать книгу Syria, the Desert & the Sown - Gertrude Lowthian Bell - Страница 7

MONASTERY OF KURUNTUL ABOVE JERICHO

The Jericho road is bare enough, but the valley of Jordan has an aspect of inhumanity that is almost evil. If the prophets of the Old Testament had fulminated their anathemas against it as they did against Babylon or Tyre, no better proof of their prescience would exist; but they were silent, and the imagination must travel back to flaming visions of Gomorrah and of Sodom, dim legends of iniquity that haunted our own childhood as they haunted the childhood of the Semitic races. A heavy stifling atmosphere weighed upon this lowest level of the earth's surface; the wind was racing across the hill tops above us in the regions where men breathed the natural air, but the valley was stagnant and lifeless like a deep sea bottom. We brushed through low thickets of prickly sidr trees, the Spina Christi of which the branches are said to have been twisted into the Crown of Thorns. They are of two kinds these sidr bushes, the Arabs call them zaḳūm and dōm. From the zaḳūm they extract a medicinal oil, the dōm bears a small fruit like a crab apple that ripens to a reddish brown not uninviting in appearance. It is a very Dead Sea Fruit, pleasant to look upon and leaving on the lips a taste of sandy bitterness. The sidrs dwindled and vanished, and before us lay a sheet of hard mud on which no green thing grows. It is of a yellow colour, blotched with a venomous grey white salt: almost unconsciously the eye appreciates its enmity to life. As we rode here a swirl of heavy rain swooped down upon us from the upper world. The muleteers looked grave, and even Mikhāil's face began to lengthen, for in front of us were the Slime Pits of Genesis, and no horse or mule can pass over them except they be dry. The rain lasted a very few minutes, but it was enough. The hard mud of the plain had assumed the consistency of butter, the horses' feet were shod in it up to the fetlocks, and my dog Kurt whined as he dragged his paws out of the yellow glue. So we came to the Slime Pits, the strangest feature of all that uncanny land. A quarter of a mile to the west of Jordan—the belt is much narrower to the east of the stream—the smooth plain resolves itself suddenly into a series of steep mud banks intersected by narrow gullies. The banks are not high, thirty or forty feet at the most, but the crests of them are so sharp and the sides so precipitous that the traveller must find his way across and round them with the utmost care. The shower had made these slopes as slippery as glass, even on foot it was almost impossible to keep upright. My horse fell as I was leading him; fortunately it was on a little ridge between mound and mound, and by the most astonishing gymnastics he managed to recover himself. I breathed a short thanksgiving when I saw my caravan emerge from the Slime Pits: we might, if the rain had lasted, have been imprisoned there for several hours, since if a horseman falls to the bottom of one of the sticky hollows he must wait there till it dries.

CROSSING THE GHŌR

Along the river bank there was life. The ground was carpeted with young grass and yellow daisies, the rusty liveries of the tamarisk bushes showed some faint signs of Spring. I cantered on to the great bridge with its trellised sides and roof of beams—the most inspiring piece of architecture in the world, since it is the Gate of the Desert. There was the open place as I remembered it, covered with short turf, sheltered by the high mud banks, and, Heaven be praised! empty. We had had cause for anxiety on this head. The Turkish Government was at that time sending all the troops that could be levied to quell the insurrection in Yemen. The regiments of southern Syria were marched down to the bridge, and so on to 'Ammān, where they were entrained and sent along the Mecca railway to what was then the terminus, Ma'ān near Petra. From Mā'an they had a horrible march across a sandy waste to the head of the Gulf of 'Aḳabah. Many hundreds of men and many thousands of camels perished before they reached the gulf, for the wells upon that road are three only (so said the Arabs), and one lies about two miles off the track, undiscoverable to those who are not familiar with the country.

THE BRIDGE OVER JORDAN

We pitched tents, picketed the horses, and lighted a huge bonfire of tamarisk and willow. The night was grey and still; there was rain on the hills, but none with us—a few inches represents the annual fall in the valley of Jordan. We were not quite alone. The Turkish Government levies a small toll on all who pass backwards and forwards across the bridge, and keeps an agent there for that purpose. He lives in a wattle hut by the gate of the bridge, and one or two ragged Arabs of the Ghōr share his solitude. Among these was a grey-haired negro, who gathered wood for our fire, and on the strength of his services spent the night with us. He was a cheery soul, was Mabūḳ. He danced with pleasure, round the camp fire, untroubled by the consideration that he was one of the most preposterously misshapen of human beings. He told us tales of the soldiery, how they came down in rags, their boots dropping from their feet though it was but the first day's march, half starved too, poor wretches. A Ṭābūr (900 men) had passed through that morning, another was expected to-morrow—we had just missed them. "Māsha-'llah!" said Mikhāil, "your Excellency is fortunate. First you escape from the mud hills and then from the Redīfs." "Praise be to God!" murmured Mabūḳ, and from that day my star was recognised as a lucky one. From Mabūḳ we heard the first gossip of the desert. His talk was for ever of Ibn er Rashīd, the young chief of the Shammār, whose powerful uncle Muḥammad left him so uneasy a legacy of dominion in central Arabia. For two years I had heard no news of Nejd—what of Ibn Sā'oud, the ruler of Riāḍ and Ibn er Rashīd's rival? How went the war between them? Mabūḳ had heard many rumours; men did say that Ibn er Rashīd was in great straits, perhaps the Redīfs were bound for Nejd and not for Yemen, who knew? and had we heard that a sheikh of the Ṣukhūr had been murdered by the 'Ajārmeh, and as soon as the tribe came back from the eastern pasturages. . . . So the tale ran on through the familiar stages of blood feud and camel lifting, the gossip of the desert—I could have wept for joy at listening to it again. There was a Babel of Arabic tongues round my camp fire that evening, for Mikhāil spoke the vulgar cockney of Jerusalem, a language bereft of dignity, and Ḥabīb a dialect of the Lebanon at immense speed, and Muḥammad had the Beyrouti drawl with its slow expressionless swing, while from the negro's lips fell something approaching to the virile and splendid speech of the Bedouin. The men themselves were struck by the variations of accent, and once they turned to me and asked which was right. I could only reply, "God knows! for He is omniscient," and the answer received a laughing acceptance, though I confess I proffered it with some misgiving.

THE MONASTERY OF MAR SABA, WILDERNESS OF JUDÆA

The dawn broke windless and grey. An hour and a half from the moment I was awakened till the mules were ready to start was the appointed rule, but sometimes we were off ten minutes earlier, and sometimes, alas! later. I spent the time in conversing with the guardian of the bridge, a native of Jerusalem. To my sympathetic ears did he confide his sorrows, the mean tricks that the Ottoman government was accustomed to play on him, and the hideous burden of existence during the summer heats. And then the remuneration! a mere nothing! His gains were larger, however, than he thought fit to name, for I subsequently discovered that he had charged me three piastres instead of two for each of my seven animals. It is easy to be on excellent terms with Orientals, and if their friendship has a price it is usually a small one. We crossed the Rubicon at three piastres a head and took the northern road which leads to Salt. The middle road goes to Ḥeshbān, where lives the great Sheikh of all the Arabs of the Belḳa, Sulṭān ibn 'Ali iḍ Ḍiāb ul 'Adwān, a proper rogue, and the southern to Mādeba in Moab. The eastern side of the Ghōr is much more fertile than the western. Enough water flows from the beautiful hills of Ajlūn to turn the plain into a garden, but the supply is not stored, and the Arabs of the 'Adwān tribes content themselves with the sowing of a little corn. The time of flowers was not yet. At the end of March the eastern Ghōr is a carpet of varied and lovely bloom, which lasts but a month in the fierce heat of the valley, indeed a month sees the plants through bud and bloom and ripened seed. A ragged Arab showed us the path. He had gone down to join the Redīfs, having been bought as a substitute at the price of fifty napoleons by a well-to-do inhabitant of Salt. When he reached the bridge he found he was too late, his regiment having passed through two days before. He was sorry, he would have liked to march forth to the war (moreover, I imagine the fifty liras would have to be refunded), but his daughter would be glad, for she had wept to see him go. He stopped to extricate one of his leather slippers from the mud.

THE WALL OF LAMENTATION, JERUSALEM

"Next year," quoth he, catching me up again, "please God I shall go to America."

I stared in amazement at the half-naked figure, the shoes dropping from the bare feet, the torn cloak slipping from the shoulders, the desert head-dress of kerchief and camel's hair rope.

"Can you speak any English?" I asked.

"No," he replied calmly, "but I shall have saved the price of the journey, and, by God! here there is no advancement."

I inquired what he would do when he reached the States.

"Buy and sell," he replied; "and when I have saved 200 liras I shall return."

JEWS OF BOKHARA

The same story can be heard all over Syria. Hundreds go out every year, finding wherever they land some of their compatriots to give them a helping hand. They hawk the streets with cheap wares, sleep under bridges, live on fare that no freeborn citizen would look at, and when they have saved 200 liras, more or less, they return, rich men in the estimation of their village. East of Jordan the exodus is not so great, yet once in the mountains of the Haurān I stopped to ask my way of a Druze, and he answered me in the purest Yankee. I drew rein while he told me his tale, and at the end of it I asked him if he were going back. He looked round at the stone hovels of the village, knee deep in mud and melting snow: "You bet!" he replied, and as I turned away he threw a cheerful "So long!" after me.

When we had ridden two hours we entered the hills by a winding valley which my friend called Wād el Ḥassanīyyeh, after the tribe of that name. It was full of anemones and white broom (rattam the Arabs call it), cyclamen, starch hyacinths, and wild almond trees. For plants without a use, however lovely they may be, there is no name in Arabic; they are all hashīsh, grass; whereas the smallest vegetable that can be of service is known and distinguished in their speech. The path—it was a mere bridle track—rose gradually. Just before we entered the mist that covered the top of the hill we saw the Dead Sea below us to the south, lying under the grey sky like a great sheet of clouded glass. We reached Salt at four o'clock in real mountain weather, a wet and driving mist. Moreover, the ground near the village was a swamp, owing to the rain that, passing over us the night before, had fallen here. I hesitated to camp unless I could find no drier lodging. The first thing was to seek out the house of Ḥabīb Effendi Fāris, whom I had come to Salt to see, though I did not know him. My claim upon him (for I relied entirely upon his help for the prosecution of my journey) was in this wise: he was married to the daughter of a native preacher in Haifa, a worthy old man and a close friend of mine. Urfa on the Euphrates was the Stammplatz of the family, but Abu Namrūd had lived long at Salt and he knew the desert. The greater part of the hours during which he was supposed to teach me grammar were spent in listening to tales of the Arabs and of his son, Namrūd, who worked with Ḥabīb Fāris, and whose name was known to every Arab of the Belḳa.

"If ever you wish to enter there," said Abu Namrūd, "go to Namrūd." And to Namrūd accordingly I had come.

A very short inquiry revealed the dwelling of Ḥabīb Fāris. I was received warmly, Ḥabīb was out, Namrūd away (was my luck forsaking me?), but would I not come in and rest? The house was small and the children many: while I debated whether the soaked ground outside would not prove a better bed, there appeared a magnificent old man in full Arab dress, who took my horse by the bridle, declared that he and no other should lodge me, and so led me away. I left my horse at the khān, climbed a long and muddy stair, and entered a stone paved courtyard. Yūsef Effendi hurried forward and threw open the door of his guest-chamber. The floor and the divan were covered with thick carpets, the windows glazed (though many of the panes were broken), a European cheffonier stood against the wall: this was more than good enough. In a moment I was established, drinking Yūsef's coffee, and eating my own cake.

ABYSSINIAN PRIESTS

Yūsef Effendi Sukkar (upon him be peace!) is a Christian and one of the richest of the inhabitants of Salt. He is a laconic man, but as a host he has not his equal. He prepared me an excellent supper, and when I had eaten, the remains were set before Mikhāil. Having satisfied my physical needs he could not or would not do anything to allay my mental anxieties as to the further course. Fortunately at this moment Ḥabīb Fāris arrived, and his sister-in-law, Paulina, an old acquaintance, and several other worthies, all hastening to "honour themselves" at the prospect of an evening's talk. ("God forbid! the honour is mine!") We settled down to coffee, the bitter black coffee of the Arabs, which is better than any nectar. The cup is handed with a "Deign to accept," you pass it back empty, murmuring "May you live!" As you sip some one ejaculates, "A double health," and you reply, "Upon your heart!" When the cups had gone round once or twice and all necessary phrases of politeness had been exchanged I entered upon the business of the evening. How was I to reach the Druze mountains? the Government would probably refuse me permission, at 'Ammān there was a military post on the entrance of the desert road; at Boṣrā they knew me, I had slipped through their fingers five years before, a trick that would be difficult to play a second time from the same place. Ḥabīb Fāris considered, and finally we hammered out a plan between us. He would send me to-morrow to Ṭneib, his corn land on the edge of the desert; there I should find Namrūd who would despatch word to one of the big tribes, and with an escort from them I could ride up in safety to the hills. Yūsef's two small sons sat listening open-eyed, and at the end of the talk one of them brought me a scrap of an advertisement with the map of America upon it. Thereat I showed them my maps, and told them how big the world was and how fine a place, till at ten the party broke up and Yūsef began spreading quilts for my bed. Then and not till then did I see my hostess. She was a woman of exceptional beauty, tall and pale, her face a full oval, her great eyes like stars. She wore Arab dress, a narrow dark blue robe that caught round her bare ankles as she walked, a dark blue cotton veil bound about her forehead with a red handkerchief and falling down her back almost to the ground. Her chin and neck were tattooed in delicate patterns with indigo, after the manner of the Bedouin women. She brought me water, which she poured over my hands, moved about the room silently, a dark and stately figure, and having finished her ministrations she disappeared as silently as she had come, and I saw her no more. "She came in and saluted me," said the poet, he who lay in durance at Mecca, "then she rose and took her leave, and when she departed my soul went out after her." No one sees Yūsef's wife. Christian though he be, he keeps her more strictly cloistered than any Moslem woman; and perhaps after all he is right.

The rain beat against the windows, and I lay down on the quilts with Mikhāil's exclamation in my ears: "Māsha-'llah! your Excellency is fortunate."