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Table of Contents

“Rather proclaim it

That he which hath no stomach to this fight

Let him depart. His passport shall be made.”

Shakespeare.

Beating about—Bozra—We leave the Turkish dominions—Mohammed vows to kill a sheep—The citadel of Salkhad and the independent Druses—We are received by a Druse chieftain—Historical notice of the Hauran.

December 18.—Our caravan has lost some of its members. To begin with the two guides, the Kreysheh and the Shammar have failed to make their appearance. Then Abd er-Rahman, the little Agheyl, came with a petition to be allowed to go home. He was too young, he said, for such a journey, and afraid he might die on the road. He had brought a cousin with him as a substitute, who would do much better than himself, for the cousin was afraid of nothing. The substitute was then introduced, a wild picturesque creature all rags and elf locks and with eyes like jet, armed too with a matchlock rather longer than himself, and evidently no Agheyl. We have agreed, however, to take him and let the other go. Unwilling hands are worse than useless on a journey. Lastly, the slave Awwad has gone. Like most negroes he had too good an opinion of himself, and insisted on being treated as something more than a servant, and on having a donkey to ride. So we have packed him too off. He was very angry when told to go, and broke a rebab we had given him to play on, for he could both play and sing well. We are now reduced to our two selves, Mohammed, Abdallah, Hanna, Ibrahim and the substitute—seven persons in all, but the Tafazz people are to go the first two days’ march with us and help drive the camels.

We were glad to get clear of the dirt and noise of the Suk, and leaving the Haj road, took a cross track to the south-east, which is to lead us to Bozra. All day long we have been passing through a well-inhabited country, with plenty of villages and a rich red soil, already ploughed, every acre of it, and waiting only for rain. The road was full of people travelling on donkey-back and on foot to Mezárib, singing as they went along. In all the numerous villages we saw the effects of the late murrain in the dead cattle strewed about. I counted seventy carcasses in one small place, a terrible loss for the poor villagers, as each working cow or bullock was worth ten pounds. I asked what disease had killed them, and was told it was “min Allah” (from God). Mohammed, however, calls it abu hadlan (father of leanness).

This district is said to be the best corn-growing country anywhere, and looks like it, but unless rain falls soon, the year must be barren. The villages depend almost entirely on rain for their water supply. In each there is an old reservoir hollowed out of the rock. It is difficult to understand how these tanks get filled, for they seem to have no drainage leading to them, being on the contrary perched up generally on high ground. They are now all dry, and the villagers have to send many miles for their drinking water. All this country belongs to the Hauran, and we are now in a Haurani village called Ghízeh. The people are evidently not pure Arabs, as many of them have light eyes.

We are being hospitably entertained by the village Sheykh, who is an old acquaintance of Mohammed’s father’s, and insists on setting all he has got before us—coffee, a plate of rice, barley for the mares, and, what is more precious just now, water for them as well as for ourselves. Hassan, for such is his name, has a very pretty wife, who was among the crowd which gathered round us on our arrival at the village. She, like the women of all these villages, made no pretence of shyness, and was running about unveiled as any peasant girl might in Italy. She was evidently a spoilt child, and required more than one command from Hassan before she would go home. The Sheykh has been spending the evening with us. He is in great distress about his village, which is in the last straits for water. The cattle, as I have said, have all died, and now even the beasts of burden which have to go for the water are dying. The nearest spring is at Bozra, twelve miles off; and if the donkeys break down the village must die too of thirst. He told us that a Frank passed this way two years ago, and had told him that there must be an ancient well somewhere among the ruins of which the village is built, and he has been looking for it ever since. He entreated us to tell him the most likely spot either for finding the old well or digging a new one. We are much distressed at not being engineers enough to do this for him; and I can’t help thinking how much a real reformer (not a Midhat) might do in Turkey by attending to such crying wants as these. Ghízeh is within fifty miles from Damascus as the crow flies, and there are scores of villages in like condition throughout the Hauran, which a Syrian governor might relieve at the cost of sending round an engineer. But until tramways and railroads and new bazaars have been made, I suppose there is little chance for mere wells under the present regime.

Besides meat and drink, Hassan has given us useful advice. He has reminded Mohammed of another old friend of his father’s, who he thinks might be of more service to us than anybody else could be, and he advises us to go first to him. This is Huseyn ibn Nejm el-Atrash, a powerful Druse Sheykh, who lives somewhere beyond the Hauran mountains. He must certainly have relations with some of the Bedouin tribes beyond, for it appears he lives in a little town quite on the extreme edge of the inhabited country towards the Wady Sirhán. We have always heard of this Druse country as unsafe, but what country is not called unsafe outside the regular Turkish authority? The Ghízeh Sheykh’s suggestion seems worth following, and we shall make for the Druse town.

The little greyhound Shiekhah (so called from a plant of that name) is very docile and well-behaved. She is a regular desert dog, and likes dates better than anything else. I have made her a coat to wear at night for she is chilly.

December 19.—Hassan with true hospitality did not leave his house this morning, but let us depart quietly. His coming to wish us good-bye would have looked like asking for a present, and he evidently did not wish for anything of the sort. This is the first time we have received hospitality absolutely gratis in a town, for even when staying with Mohammed’s father at Tudmur, the women of the family had eagerly asked for money. In the desert, Hassan’s behaviour would not have needed remark.

Before leaving Ghízeh we went to look at a house where there is a mosaic floor of old Roman work, scrolls with orange trees and pomegranates, vines with grapes on them, vases and baskets, all coloured on a white ground. It speaks well for the quality of the workmanship that it has so long stood the weather and the wear, for it is out of doors, and forms the pavement in the courtyard of a house.

Three and a half hours of steady marching brought us to Bozra, where we now are. The entrance of the town is rather striking, as the old Roman road, which has run in a straight line for miles, terminates in a gateway of the regular classic style, beyond which lie a mass of ruins and pillars, and to the right a fine old castle. A raven was sitting on the gateway, and as we rode through solemnly said “caw.”

Bozra is, I have no doubt, described by Mr. Murray, so I won’t waste my time in writing about the ruins, which indeed we have not yet examined. They seem to be Roman, and in tolerable preservation. The castle is more modern, probably Saracenic, a huge pile built up out of older fragments. It is occupied by a small garrison of Turkish regulars, the last, I hope, we shall see for many a day, for Bozra is the frontier town of the Hauran, and beyond it the Sultan is not acknowledged. I believe that its occupation is not of older date than fifteen to twenty years ago, the time when Turkey made its last flicker as a progressing state, and that before that time the people of Bozra paid tribute to Ibn Shaalan, as they once had to the Wahhabis of Nejd. The Roala still keep up some connection with the town, however, for a shepherd we met at the springs just outside it assured us that Ibn Shaalan had watered his camels at them not two months ago. It was somewhere not far from Bozra that the forty days battle between the Mesenneh and the Roala, described by Fatalla, 7 was fought. Though the details are no doubt exaggerated, Mohammed knows of the battle by tradition. Wilfrid asked him particularly about it to-day, and he fully confirms the account given by Fatalla of the downfall of the Mesenneh. He has added too some interesting details of their recent history. We are encamped outside the town at the edge of a great square tank of ancient masonry, now out of repair and dry. Here would be another excellent occupation for Midhat and his Circassians.

December 20.—We were disturbed all night by the barking of dogs, and the strange echoes from the ruined places round. I never heard anything so unearthly—a cold night—and melancholy too, as nights are when the moon rises late, and is then mixed up in a haggard light with the dawn.

The Tafazz relations are gone, very sorrowful to wish us good-bye. Selim, the elder of the two, told me that he has been thirty years now in the Hauran, and has no idea of going back to Tudmur. The land at Tafazz is so good that it will grow anything, while at Tudmur there are only the few gardens the stream waters. He is a fellah and likes ploughing and sowing better than camel driving. To Tafazz they are gone, Selim on his chestnut mare, old, worn, and one-eyed, but asil; Aamar on his bay Kehîleh from the Roala, also old and very lame. They went with tears in their eyes, wishing us all possible blessings for the road.

The consequence is, we have to do more than our share of work, and have had a hard day loading and reloading the camels, for we were among the hills, and the roads were bad. The beasts have not yet become accustomed to each other, and the old camel we bought at Mezárib shows every sign of wishing to return there. He is an artful old wretch, and chose his moment for wandering off whenever we were looking the other way, and wherever a bit of uneven ground favoured his escape. Once or twice he very nearly gave us the slip. He wants to get back to his family, Abdallah says, for we bought him out of a herd where he was lord and master, a sultan among camels. Our road to-day has been very rough. We were told to make our way to Salkhad, a point on the far horizon, just on the ridge of the Hauran, and the only road there was the old Roman one. This went in an absolutely straight line over hill and dale, and as two out of every three of the stones paving it were missing, and the rest turned upside down, it was a long stumble from beginning to end. We had been warned to keep a good look-out for robbers, so Wilfrid and I rode ahead, reconnoitering every rock and heap. We passed one or two ruined villages, but met nobody all day long, still following the pointed hill of Salkhad, which, as we got nearer it, we could see was crowned by a huge fortress. The country had now become a mass of boulders, which in places had been rolled into heaps, making gigantic cairns, not recently, but perhaps in ancient days, when there were giants in the land. The soil thus uncovered was a rich red earth, and here and there it had been cultivated. There was now a little pasture, for on the hills rain had fallen, and once we saw some goats in the distance.

As we approached Salkhad the road got so bad that Mohammed made a vow of killing a sheep if ever we got safe to Huseyn el-Atrash. We were amused at this and asked him what it meant; and he told us the story of the prophet Ibrahim who made a vow to kill his son, and who was prevented from doing so by the prophet Musa, who appeared to him and stopped him, and showed him two rams which he said would do instead. These vows the Arabs make are very curious, and are certainly a relic of the ancient sacrifices. Mohammed explained them to us. “The Bedouins,” he said, “always do this when they are in difficulties,” he could not say why, but it was an old custom; and when they go back home they kill the sheep, and eat it with their friends. He does not seem to consider it a religious ceremony, only a custom, but it is very singular.

Nine and a half hours’ march from seven o’clock brought us to the foot of the conical hill, on which the fortress of Salkhad stands. This is a very ancient building, resembling not a little the fortress of Aleppo, a cone partly artificial and surrounded by a moat, cased with smooth stone and surmounted by walls still nearly perfect. We remarked on some of them the same device as at Aleppo, a rampant lion, the emblem of the Persian Monarchy. The fortress itself, however, is probably of much older date, and may have existed at the time the children of Israel conquered the country. Wilfrid and I, who had gone on in front, agreed to separate here, and ride round the citadel, he to the right, and I to the left, and I was to wait on the top of the ridge till he gave me some signal. This I did and waited so long, that at last the camels came up. He in the meantime had found a little town just under the fortress on the other side and had ridden down into it. At first he saw nobody, and thought the place deserted, but presently people in white turbans began to appear on the house-tops, very much astonished to see this horseman come riding down upon them, for the road was like a stair. He saluted them, and they saluted politely in return, and answered his inquiry for Huseyn el-Atrash, by pointing out a path which led down across the hills to a town called Melakh, where they said Huseyn lived. They asked where he was going, and he said Bussora, Bussora of Bagdad, at which they laughed, and showing him the Roman road, which from Salkhad still goes on in a straight line about south-east, said that that would take him to it. This is curious, for it certainly is exactly the direction, and yet it is impossible there can ever have really been a road there. It probably goes to Ezrak but we hope to find out all about this in a day or two. At the bottom of the hill Wilfrid beckoned to me, and I found him at a large artificial pool or reservoir, still containing a fair supply of water, and there, when the rest had joined us, we watered the camels and horses. Mohammed in the meanwhile had been also on a voyage of discovery, and came back with the news that Huseyn el-Atrash was really at Melakh, and Melakh was only two hours and a half further on.

Salkhad is a very picturesque town. It hangs something like a honeycomb under the old fortress on an extremely steep slope, the houses looking black from the colour of the volcanic stone of which they are built. Many of them are very ancient, and the rest are built up of ancient materials, and there is a square tower like the belfry of a church. 8 The tanks below are at least equally old with the town, having a casing of hewn stone, now much dilapidated, and large stone troughs for watering cattle. Its inhabitants, the people in the white turbans, are Druses, a colony sent I believe from the Lebanon after the disturbances in 1860.

From Salkhad our road lay principally down hill, for we had now crossed the watershed of the Jebel Hauran, and became somewhat intricate, winding about among small fields. The country on this side the hills is divided into walled enclosures, formed by the rolling away of boulders, which give it a more European look than anything we have seen of late. These date I should think from very early times, for the stones have had time to get covered with a grey lichen, so as to resemble natural rather than artificial heaps, and in these dry climates lichen forms slowly. In some of the enclosures we found cultivation, and even vines and fig-trees. It is remarkable how much more prosperous the land looks as soon as one gets away from Turkish administration. The sun was setting as we first caught sight of Melakh, another strange old mediæval town of black stone, with walls and towers much out of the perpendicular; so leaving the camels to come on under Abdallah’s charge and that of a man who had volunteered to guide us, we cantered on with Mohammed, and in the twilight arrived at the house of Huseyn el-Atrash.

Huseyn is a fine specimen of a Druse sheykh, a man of about forty, extremely dark and extremely handsome, his eyes made darker and more brilliant by being painted with kohl. This seems to be a general fashion here. He was very clean and well dressed in jíbbeh and abba; and, unlike most of the Druses, he wore a kefiyeh of purple and gold, though with the white turban over it in place of the aghal. He was sitting with his friends and neighbours on a little terrace in front of his house, enjoying the coolness of the evening, while we could see that a fire had been lit indoors. He rose and came to meet us as we dismounted, and begged us to come in, and then the coffee pots and mortar were set at work and a dinner was ordered. The Sheykh’s manners were excellent, very ceremonious but not cold, and though we conversed for an hour about “the weather and the crops,” he carefully avoided asking questions as to who we were and what we wanted. Neither did we say anything, as we knew that the proper moment had not come. At last our camels arrived, and dinner was served, a most excellent one, chicken and burghul, horse-radishes in vinegar and water, several sweet dishes, one a puree of rice, spiced tea, cream cheese, and the best water-melon ever tasted. The cookery and the people remind us of the frontier towns of the Sahara, everything good of its kind, good food, good manners, and good welcome. Then, when we had all eaten heartily down to the last servant, he asked us who we were. Mohammed’s answer that we were English persons of distinction, on our way to Jôf, and that he was Mohammed, the son of Abdallah of Tudmur, made quite a coup de théâtre, and it is easy to see that we have at last come to the right place. We have been, however, glad to retire early, for we have had a hard day’s march, nearly twelve hours, and over exceedingly bad ground.

December 21.—The shortest day of the year, but still hot, though the night was cold.

We spent the morning with Huseyn. His house has not long been built, but it looks old because it is built of old stones. Its construction is simple but good, the main room being divided into sections with arches so as to suit the stone rafters with which it is roofed. In front there is a pleasant terrace overlooking an agreeable prospect of broken ground, with glimpses of the desert beyond. While Wilfrid was talking to Huseyn I went to see the ladies of the establishment. Huseyn has only one wife; her name is Wardi (a rose). She is the mother of a nice little boy, Mohammed, about six years old and very well behaved, whom we had seen with the Sheykh; and of a pretty little girl of two, named Amina. There are, besides, some older children by a former husband. Wardi is rather fat, with a brilliant complexion and well-kohled eyes and eyebrows; she has good manners, and received me very cordially in a room opening on to a terrace, with a beautiful view eastward of some tells at the edge of the Hamad. She sat surrounded by dependants and relations, among whom were Huseyn’s mother and her own. The former was suffering from cough and loss of voice, and another member of the family complained of a rheumatic arm; both wanted me to advise them as to treatment. The ladies would not uncover their faces until Assad, the Sheykh’s secretary, who accompanied me, had retired. Wardi’s concealment of her features was, however, a mere make-believe, only a corner of her head veil pulled half across her face. She talked a great deal about her children of the former marriage, Mustafa a son of eighteen, who is chief of a neighbouring village, and a daughter of perhaps twelve who was present. This young girl seemed particularly intelligent and had received some education; enough to read out a phrase from my Arabic exercise book, and to repeat the first chapter of the Koran. The pleasure of my visit was somewhat marred by the quantity of sweetmeats and tea and coffee served; with the tea and coffee I got on very well, as the cups were of the usual small size, but the sugar-plums were of so massive a kind that it was impossible to swallow them. The two small children fortunately came to my rescue; and by their zeal in devouring everything I handed to them, took off their mother’s attention from my shortcomings. At parting Wardi gave me a bunch of feathers pulled then and there out of an ostrich skin hanging up against the wall; the skin, she said, had been brought to her some months before, from somewhere in the south.

The Druses of the Hauran say that they are Arabs who came here with the immediate successors of the prophet from the south; that the Jebel was at that time inhabited by Rûmi (Greeks), whose descendants still live here and are Christians. We saw one of them in Huseyn’s house to-day, apparently on excellent terms with the other visitors. He was dressed like an Arab, and was undistinguishable from the ordinary felláhín Arabs one sees in the desert towns. The Druse women, except those of Huseyn’s family, go about unveiled. They are particularly well-mannered and civil, with clean fresh complexions and bright coloured cheeks, and always say “Salam aleykum” to travellers. They all kohl their eyes carefully and broadly.

There has of course been much discussion about our further journey. It is rather aggravating to think that a whole week has passed since we left Damascus, and yet we are not, as the crow flies, more than eighty miles on our way. Still there seems a chance now of our really getting forward, for Huseyn promises to send some men with us to Kâf, an oasis in the Wady Sirhán, with which there is occasional communication on this side of the Hauran, as there are salt beds to which the villagers send camels to fetch salt. They say it is about five days’ journey from here. The principal difficulty is that there are several Bedouin tribes on the road, and nobody knows which. The Sirdíeh are friends of Huseyn’s, and so are the Kreysheh, but there are others whom he does not know, Sherarât Sirhán and Howeysin, the last mere thieves “worse than the Sleb.” Any or all of these may be met with, though it is very possible we may meet nobody. Huseyn has sent a man on horseback to Ezrak, the first stage on our way, where there are wells and an old castle, to find out who is there. The Kreysheh we have letters to, from Mohammed Dukhi, and if we can find them there will be no more difficulty, as they are strong enough to give us protection from the rest. At any rate we go on to-morrow. We are anxious to get away to the desert, for life is very fatiguing in these towns; there are so many people to be civil to, and the children make such a noise. They have been playing hockey all day long just outside our tent, tiresome little wretches. Wilfrid went out for an hour this afternoon, and got some grouse, of which there are immense flocks all about the fields, while I made a picture of the town from behind a wall.

We have at last got a man to go with us as servant, who looks promising. He is a Shammari from Jebel Shammar who, for some reason or other, has left his own tribe (probably for some crime against Bedouin law), and has been settled for the last few years at Salkhad, where he has married a Druse woman. There is some mystery about his profession and way of life, but he has an attractive face, and in spite of very poor clothes a certain air of distinction. We both like him, and Huseyn seems to know something about him. Besides, he has made the whole journey from Nejd already, and has been backwards and forwards between Salkhad and Jôf more than once. He wants now, he says, to go back to his own country. Mohammed has also discovered a red-headed man, a native of Sokhne and as such almost a fellow countryman, who will come as camel driver under Abdallah; so that our complement of hands is made up to its original number, eight.

To-morrow we may hope to sleep in the desert.

Note. Alas, since this was written, our friends at Melakh have experienced sad reverses. In September, 1879, Midhat Pasha, to signalize his assumption of office at Damascus, and support that reputation of energy which Europe has given him, sent an armed force to coerce the independent Druses. At first these, fighting for their liberty, were successful. They met and defeated the Turkish troops advancing through the Leja, and the expedition returned with a loss of 400 men. A month later, however, Midhat retrieved his fortunes. He bribed or persuaded Mohammed Dukhi to overrun the Eastern Hauran with his Bedouins, and while these were blockading the towns, marched a second column of regular troops through the mountains, and so gained possession of Salkhad, Melakh, and the rest, reducing all to submission. An Ottoman Governor now replaces the native Sheykhs, and the blessings of the Sultan’s rule have been extended to every village of the Hauran.