6561 Cornell University Library DS 49.2.B43 Amurath to Amurath. 3 1924 028 548 737 The original of tiiis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924028548737 AMURATH TO AMURATH THE MONASTERY OF RABBAN HORMUZD. AMURATH TO AMURATH GERTRUDE LOWTHIAN BELL Author of^"- The Desert and the Sown," i^c. ILLUSTRATED NEW YORK : E. P. BUTTON AND COMPANY MCMXI Printed in England. 1 We wither away but they wane not, the stars that above us rise ; The mountains remain after us, and the strong towers when we are gone. Labid ibn Rabt'ah. PREFACE Dear Lord Cromer, When I was pursuing along the banks of the Euphrates the leisurely course of oriental travel, I would sometimes wonder, sitting at night before my tent door, whether it would be possible to cast into shape the experiences that assailed me. And in that spacious hour, when the silence of the embracing wilderness was enhanced rather than broken by the murmur of the river, and by the sounds, scarcely less primeval, that wavered round the camp fire of my nomad hosts, the task broadened out into a shape which was in keeping with the surroundings. Not only would I set myself to trace the story that was scored upon the face of the earth by mouldering wall or half-choked dyke, by the thou- sand vestiges of former culture which were scattered about my path, but I would attempt to record the daily life and speech of those who had inherited the empty ground whereon empires had risen and expired. Even there, where the mind ranged out unhindered over the whole wide desert, and thought flowed as smoothly as the flowing stream — even there I would realize the difficulty of such an undertaking, and it was there that I conceived the desire to invoke your aid by setting your name upon the first page of my book. To you, so I promised myself, I could make clear the intention when accomplish- ment lagged far behind it. To you the very landscape would be familiar, though you had never set eyes upon it : the river and the waste which determined, as in your country of the Nile, the direction of mortal energies. And you, with your profound experience of the East, have learnt to reckon with the unbroken continuity of its history. Conqueror follows upon the heels of conqueror, nations are overthrown and cities topple down into the dust, but the conditions of exist- viii PREFACE ence are unaltered and irresistibly they fashion the new age in the likeness of the old. " Amurath an Amurath succeeds " and the tale is told again. Where past and present are woven so closely together, the habitual appreciation of the divisions of time slips insensibly away. Yesterday's raid and an expedition of Shalmaneser fall into the same plane; and indeed what essential difference lies between them ? But the reverbera- tion of ancient fame sounds more richly in the ears than the voice of modern achievement. The banks of the Euphrates echo with ghostly alarums; the Mesopotamian deserts are full of the rumour of phantom armies ; you will not blame me if I passed among them "trattando I'ombre come cosa salda." And yet there was a new note. For the first trme in all the turbulent centuries to which those desolate regions bear witness, a potent word had gone forth, and those who had caught it listened in amazement, asking one another for an explanation of its meaning. Liberty — what is liberty? I think the question that ran so perplexingly through the black tents would have received no better a solution in the royal pavilions which had once spread their glories over the plain. Idly though it fell from the lips of the Bedouin, it foretold change. That sense of change, uneasy and bewildered, hung over the whole of the Ottoman Empire. It was rarely un- alloyed with anxiety; there was, it must be admitted, little to encourage an unqualified confidence in the immediate future. But one thing was certain : the moving Finger had inscribed a fresh title upon the page. I cannot pretend to a judicial indifference in this matter. I have drawn too heavily upon the good-will of the inhabitants of Asiatic Turkey to regard their fortunes with an impartial detachment. I am eager to seize upon promise and slow to be overmastered by disappointment. But I should be doing an equivocal service to a people who have given me so full a measure of hos- pitality and fellowship if I were to underestimate the problems that lie before them. The victories of peace are more laborious than those of war. They demand a higher integrity than that which has been practised hitherto in Turkey, and a finer conception of citizenship than any which PREFACE ix has been current there. The old tyranny has lifted, but it has left its shadow over the land. The five months of journeying which are recounted in this book were months of suspense and even of terror. Con- stitutional government trembled in the balance and was like to be outweighted by the forces of disorder, by fanaticism, massacre and civil strife. I saw the latest Amurath succeed to Amurath and rejoiced with all those who love justice and freedom to hear him proclaimed. For 'Abdu'l Hamid, help- less as he may then have been in the hands of the weavers of intrigue, was the symbol for retrogression, and the triumph of his faction must have extinguished the faint light that had dawned upon his empire. The confused beginnings which I witnessed were the translation of a generous ideal into the terms of human imperfection. Nowhere was the character of ithe Young Turkish movement recognized more fully than in England, and nowhere did it receive a more disinterested sympathy. Our approval was not confined to words. We have never been slow to welcome and to encourage the advancement of Turkey, and I am glad to remember that we were the first to hold out a helping hand when we saw her struggling to throw off long-established evils. If she can win a place, with a strong and orderly government, among civilized states, turning her face from martial adventure and striving after the reward that waits upon good administration and sober industry, the peace of the world will be set upon a surer basis, and therein lies our greatest advantage as well as her own. That day may yet be far off, but when it comes, as I hope it will, perhaps some one will take down this book from the shelf and look back, not without satisfaction, upon the months of revolution which it chronicles. And remem- bering that the return of prosperity to the peoples of the Near East began with your administration in Egypt, he will understand why I should have ventured to offer it, with respectful admiration, to you. Gertrude Lowthian Bell. Rounton, Oct. igio. NOTE The greater part of Chapter IV appeared in the Quarterly Review, and half of Chapter VIII in Blackwood's Magazine ; I have to thank the editors of these journals for giving me permission to reprint my contributions to them. I am indebted also to the editor of the Times for allowing me to use, in describing the excavations at Babylon and at Asshuf, two articles written by me which were published in the Times. The Geographical Society has printed in its journal a paper in which I have resumed the topographical results of my journey down the Euphrates. The map which accom- panies this book is based upon the map of Asiatic Turkey, recently published by that society, and upon a map of the Euphrates from Tell Ahmar to Hit which was drafted to illustrate my paper. Mr. David Hogarth, Mr. L. W. King, Mr. O. M. Dalton and Professor Max van Berchem have furnished me with valuable notes. To Sir Charles Lyall, who has been at the pains to help me with the correcting of the proofs, I tender here my grateful thanks for this and many another kindness. CONTENTS CHAP. I ALEPPO TO TELL AHMAR II TELL AHMAR TO BUSEIRAH . Ill . BUSEIRAH TO hIt The Parthian Stations of Isidorus of Charax IV hIt to kerbelI The Palace of Ukheidir V KERBELA to BAGHDAD .... VI BAGHDAD TO MOSUL .... The Ruins of SAmarra . VII m6sul to zAkh6 VIII ZAKHO TO DIYARBEKR . IX diyArbekr to konia .... INDEX PAGE I 35 77 io8 "S 147 159 198 231 247 289 327 361 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS THE MONASTERY OF RABbAn HORMUZD ALEPPO, THE CITADEL ALEPPO, HITTITE LION IN CITADEL . BASALT EAGLE IN THE FRENCH CONSULATE ALEPPO, jAmi' ESH SHAIbIyEH, CORNICE FIRDAUS, MEDRESSEH OF EL MALIK EZ ZAHIR ALEPPO, jXUl' KL HELAwIyEH . FIRDAUS, A TOMB ALEPPO, A MAMlOk DOME ALEPPO, A MAMlOk DOME khAn el wazIr khAn ES SAB&N WINDOW OF A tURBEH, FIRDAUS GATE OF CITADEL, ALEPPO ALEPPO, THE GREAT MOSQUE TELL AHMAR FERRY TELL AHMAR CARCHEMISH FROM THE BIG MOUND TELL AHMAR, HITTITE STELA . TELL AHMAR, EARTHENWARE JAR SERrIn, northern TOWER TOMB SERRtN, SOUTHERN TOWER TOMB SERrJn, north TOWER TOMB, PLAN AND ELEVATION INSCRIPTION IN CAVE NEAR SERrIn WIFE AND CHILDREN OF A WELDEH SHEIKH PLAN OF MUNBAYAH MUNBAYAH, WATER GATE NESHABAH, TOWER TOMB MAHALL ES SAFsAf kal'at ja'bar . kal'at ja'bar, minaret kal'at ja'bar, hall of PALACE KA'LAT ja'bar, brick WALL ABOVE GATEWAY HARAGLAH haraglah, vault rakkah, eastern minaret RAKKAH, PLAN OF MOSQUE AND SECTIONS OF rakkah, mosque FROM BAST . RAKKAH, ARCADE OF MOSQUE, FROM NORTH xiii Frontispiece To face MOULDINGS To face To face jj To face It 9) To face Toface II 12 12 13 13 14 14 IS IS 26 26 27 27 30 30 31 31 36 40 46 45 47 47 49 50 SO 51 SI S3 S2 52 57 S3 53 XIV LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS RAKKAH, CAPITALS OF ENGAGED COLUMNS, MOSQUE RAKKAH, PALACE .... RAKKAH, DETAIL OF STUCCO ORNAMENT, PALACE RAKKAH, DOMED CHAMBER IN PALACE RAKKAH, BAGHdAd GATE FROM EAST . RAKKAH, INTERIOR OF BAGHDAD GATE RAKKAH, BAGHDAD GATE RECONSTRUCTED HALEBtYEH .... IRZl, TOWER TOMB IRZ!, TOWER TOMB NAOURA OF 'AJMtYEH . THE INHABITANTS OF RAWA . 'AnAH FROM THE ISLAND OF LUBbAd . 'AnAH, a FISHERMAN . HJt, PITCH-SPRING hIt ..... HtT, THE SULPHUR MARSHES . MINARET ON ISLAND OF LUBbAd MINARET AT MA'mOrEH madlObeh .... MA'mOrEH, MINARET . h!t, the BITUMEN FURNACES . THE EUPHRATES AT hIt the well at kebeisah 'ain za'zu .... KASR KHUBBAz and RUINS OF THE TANK KASR KHUBbAz, THE GATEWAY KASR KHUBbAz, A VAULTED CHAMBER THEMAIL . ^ . KASR KHUBbAz .... THEMAIL. .... MUHAMMAD EL 'ABDULLAH KHEipiR, MA'ASHt AND SHEIKH 'ALI . BARDAWt. .... BARDAWt FROM SOUTH-WEST . BARDAWl, EAST END OF VAULTED HALL SHEtAtEH, SULPHUR SPRING . KASR SHAM'Cn, OUTER WALL UKHEIDIR FROM NORTH-WEST . UKHEipiR, INTERIOR FROM SOUTH-EAST UKHEIDIR, GROUND PLAN UKHEIDIR, THE BATH . UKHEIDIR, SECOND STOREY UKHEIDIR, THIRD STOREY UKHEIDIR, NORTH-EAST ANGLE TOWER UKHEIDIR, STAIR AT SOUTH-EAST ANGLE UKHEIDIR, INTERIOR OF SOUTH GATE. UKHEIDIR, CHEMIN DE RONDE OF EAST WALL UKHEIDIR, NORTH GATE, FROM OUTSIDE UKHEIDIR, FLUTED DOME AT A Toface S6 >i S6 5 J 57 ,j 57 »» 58 M 58 59 Toface 59 . 83 Toface 84 j» 84 )» 8S )) 94 >> 95 J) 95 ,, 104 j» 104 S) 105 3) los )» loS , 106 Toface loS »» 108 »j 109 j> 109 >» 118 ») 118 >> 119 »> 119 120 . 130 Toface 134 >3 134 . 136 Toface 135 )» 135 >j 138 »> 138 J) 139 >j 139 149 ISO 152 152 Toface 142 »S 142 )S 142 S) 143 >» 143 )» 146 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS XV UKHElpiK, FLUTED NICHE, SOUTH-EAST CORNER OF COURT D UKHEipiR, GREAT HALL . . . . , UKHEipiR, COURT D AND NICHED FACADE OF THREE-STOREYED BLOCK ..... UKHEipiR, VAULT OF ROOM I . UKHEipiR, ROOM I . . . . UKHEipiR, CUSPED DOOR OF COURT S . . . UKHElpiR, CORRIDOR Q . . . . . UKHEipiR, VAULTED END OF P, SHOWING TUBE UKHEipiR, VAULTED CLOISTER O' . UKHEipiR, GROIN IN CORRIDOR C . UKHEipiR, SQUINCH ARCH ON SECOND STOREY UKHEipiR, NORTH SIDE OF COURT M . UKHEipiR, SOUTH-EAST ANGLE OF COURT S . UKHEipiR, WEST SIDE OF B^ . UKHEipiR, DOOR LEADING FROM V TO W, SEEN FROM SOUTH BABYLON, THE LION ..... BABYLON, ISHTAR GATE BABYLON, ISHTAR GATE .... CTESIPHON, FROM EAST. .... CTESIPHON, FROM WEST .... CTESIPHON, REMAINS OF VAULT ON WEST SIDE OF SOUTH WING GUFFAHS OPPOSITE THE WALL OF SELBUCIA . BAGHD5.D, THE LOWER BRIDGE BAGHdAd, TOMB OF SITT ZOBEIDEH . BAGHDAd, INTERIOR OF SPIRE, SITT ZOBEIDEH BAGHDAD, bAb ET TILISM .... BAGHDAD, DETAIL OF ORNAMENT, bAb ET TILISM . baghdAd, minaret in sOk el GHAZL wAnEH, ImAm MUHAMMAD 'ALt wAnEH, ImAm MUHAMMAD 'al} kAdisIyah from south-east .... sAmarrA, ruined mosque from south sAmarrA, from malwiyeh .... sAmarrA, ruined mosque, interior of south wall ABU DULAF, from EAST .... ABU DULAf, INTERIOR, LOOKING NORTH NAHRAWAn CANAL ..... imAm D&R ..... imAm dOr ...... tbkrIt ferry .... COFFEE-MAKING, SHEIKH 'aSKAR TBKRtT, THE ARBAtN . . . • KhAn KHERNtNA, MIHrAb .... KhAn KHERnInA, DETAIL OF FLAT VAULT . KhAn KHERnInA, vault, SHOWING TUBE . KhAn KHERnInA, SETTING OF DOME . TELL NIMROd ...... KAL'At SHERgAt, the ZIGURRAT and ruins OF NORTH WALL sAmarrA, mosque ...... To face To face Toface PAGE 146 148 149 149 ISO ISO ISO 150 151 iSi 152 152 153 153 170 171 171 180 180 181 184 184 iSS I8S 190 190 191 202 202 202 203 203 203 212 212 213 213 2IS 216 216 217 217 218 218 219 219 222 232 XVI LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS samarra, interior of south gate, ruined mosque samarrI, ruined mosque, small door in west wall sAmarrA, ruined mosque, south-west angle tower sAmarrA, ruined mosque, window in south wall samarrA, mosque, detail of pier, south door. sAmareA, ruined mosque, big door in north wall sAmarrA, bl 'ashik, west end of north facade EL 'ashik ...... sAmarrA, el 'ashik from north sAmarrA, el 'ashik from south EL 'ashik, detail OF NICHING ON NORTH FACADE slebIyeh ..... sAmarrA, slebIyeh ..... sAmARRA, SLEBtVEH, SETTING OF DOME sAmARRA, BEIT EL KHAlIfAH .... sAmARrA, BEIT EL KHAlIfAH . SAMARrA, BEIT EL KHAl!fAH, .DETAIL OF VAULT OF SIDE CHAMBER BEIT EL KHALtFAH, FRAGMENT OF STUCCO DECORATION ON ARCH sAmARrA, BEIT EL KHALIfaH, STUCCO DECORATION sAmARRA, BEIT EL KHAlIfAH, FRAGMENT OF RINCEAUX WORKED IN MARBLE ..... sAmARrA, BEIT EL KHAlIfAH, STUCCO DECORATION STUCCO DECORATIONS, sAmaRrA sAmARRA, stucco DECORATION sAmarrA, stucco decoration sAmarrA, fragment of pottery sAmarrA, fragment of pottery ■ . ABU DUlAf .... ABU DUlAf, arcade ABU dulAf, niched pier of northern arcade m6sul ..... mAr ahudAnI .... m6sul, mAr jirjis m6sul, mAr tOmA m6sul, mAr tOmA m6sul, mAr shim'un . m6sul, plaster work in kal'at lOlO m6sul, tomb of the imAm yahyA . karak6sh, decoration on lintel of mAr shim'O ASSYRIAN reliefs AT BAViAn . 'alI beg ..... the khAt^tn at the door of sheikh 'adI SHEIKH 'AOi .... zAkh6 ..... BRIDGE over THE KhAbOr HASANAH, ASSYRIAN RELIEF . shakh, assyrian relief noah's ark .... JEZtRET IBN 'uMAR, GATE OF FORTRESS JEZtRBT IBN 'UMAR, BRIDGE . Toface Toface )) Toface Toface )i Toface >) Toface Toface j» it >» Toface Toface Toface PAGE 223 223 232 232 233 233 233 236 238 238 238 239 239 239 240 240 240 241 241 241 241 242 242 242 242 242 244 243 243 248 258 249 249 258 258 258 259 264 272 273 273 274 27s 275 290 290 291 296 296 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS xvii JEZtRET IBN 'UMAR, FOUNTAIN OF MOSQUE JEZtRET IBN 'UMAR, RELIEFS ON BRIDGE PARTHIAN RELIEF, KASR GHELLI PARTHIAN RELIEF, FINIK THE HILLS OF FINIK . STELA AT sArEH kal'at hatim tAi, chapel mAr AUGEN THE BISHOP OF mXr MELKO KHXkH, THE NUN NARTHEX OF MAR GABRIEL KhAkh, church of THE VIRGIN KEFR ZEH, MAR 'azMyEH ; PARISH CHURCH SAlAh, mXr Ya'kOb ; monastic TYPE KHAkH, CHURCH OF THE VIRGIN KHSkH, CHURCH OF THE VIRGIN, CAPITALS KHAKH, CHURCH OF THE VIRGIN, DOME ON SQUINCH ARCHES THE chelae! .... FORDING THE TIGRIS BELOW DIYARBEKR DIYArBEKR, MARDtN GATE diyXrbekr, YENI KAPU diyArbekr, chemin de ronde, north wall diyArbekr, court of ulu jami' ARGHANA MA'dEN GOLJIK .... KHARpOt, THE CASTLE . IZ OGLU FERRY . MALATIYAH ESKISHEHR VALLEY OF THE TOKHMA SU TOMB AT OZAN . OZAN, TOMB THE GORGE AT DERENDEH TOMB NEAR YAZI KBUI . TOMARZA, CHURCH OF THE PANAGIA FROM SOUTH-EAST TOMARZA, CHURCH OF THE PANAGIA, SETTING OF DOME TOMARZA, WEST DOOR OF NAVE, CHURCH OF THE PANAGIA SHAHR, DOORWAY OF SMALL TEMPLE FATTtH .... ON THE ROAD TO SHAHR SHAHR, TEMPLE-MAUSOLEUM, UPPER AND LOWER STOREYS SHAHR, TEMPLE-MAUSOLEUM . SHAHR, THE CHURCH ON THE BLUFF AVSHAR ENCAMPMENT . KAISAR!yEH, THE CITADEL MOUNT ARGAEUS FROM NORTH-WEST NIGDEH, TOMB OF HAVANDA . NIGDEH, TOMB OF HAVANDA, DETAIL OF WINDOW TOMB OF HAVANDA .... MAP OF TURKEY IN ASIA PACE Toface 297 )» 297 )7 298 99 298 »> 299 >) 306 Jt 306 19 307 99 314 )9 314 19 315 99 31S 31S 316 318 Toface 318 99 318 99 319 9» 319 99 322 ,, 322 99 323 99 323 99 328 99 328 19 329 9J 329 99 336 J9 336 >» 337 341 Toface 340 99 340 )9 341 99 341 ,, 346 99 346 ,, 347 99 347 . 348 Toface 348 J) 348 ta 349 tt 349 „ 354 ,» 3SS )» 355 356 Toface 370 AMURATH TO AMURATH CHAPTER I ALEPPO TO TELL AHMAR Feb. 3 — Feb. 21 A SMALL crowd had gathered round one of the booths in the saddlery bazaar, and sounds of controversy echoed down the vaulted ways. I love to follow the tortuous arts of Oriental commerce, and moreover at the end of the dark gallery the February sun was shining upon the steep mound of the citadel ; therefore I turned into the saddlers' street, for I had no other business that afternoon than to find the road back into Asia, back into the familiar enchantment of the East. The group of men round the booth swayed and parted, and out of it shouldered the tall figure of Fattxih. " May God be exalted ! " said he, stopping short as he caught sight of me. " It is well that your Excellency should witness the dealings of the saddlers of Aleppo. Without shame are they. Thirty years and more have I lived in Aleppo, and until this day no man has asked me to give two piastres for a hank of string." He cast a withering glance, charged with concentrated animosity, upon the long- robed figure that stood, string in hand, upon the counter. " Allah ! " said I warily, for I did not wish to parade my ignorance of the market value of string. "Two piastres?" "It is good string," said the saddler ingratiatingly, hold- ing out what looked like a tangled bundle of black wool. "Eh wah ! " intervened a friend. "'Abdullah sells nought but the best string." I took a seat upon a corner of the counter and Fattiih B 2 AMURATH TO AMURATH came slowly back, shaking his head mournfully, as one who recognizes but cannot amend the shortcomings of mankind. The whole company closed in behind him, anxious to witness the upshot of the important transaction upon which we were engaged. On the outskirts stood one of my muleteers like a man plunged in grief; even the donkey beside him — a recent purchase, though acquired at what cost of eloquence only Fattuh can know — drooped its ears. It was plain that we were to be mulcted of a farthing over that hank of string. Fattuh drew a cotton bag out of his capacious trousers. "Take the mother of eight," said he, extracting a small coin. "He gives you the mother of eight," whispered one of the company encouragingly to the saddler. " By God and the Prophet, it cost me more ! Wallah, it did, oh my uncle ! " expostulated the saddler, enforcing his argument with imaginary bonds of kinship. Fattuh threw up his eyes to the vault as though he would search heaven for a sign to confound this impious state- ment ; with averted head he gazed hopelessly down the long alley. But the vault was dumb, and in all the bazaar there was no promise of Divine vengeance. A man touched his elbow. iOh father," he said, "give him the mother of ten." The lines of resolution deepened in Fattuh's face. "Sir, we would finish ! " he cried, and fumbled once more in the cotton bag. The suspense was over; satisfaction beamed from the countenances of the bystanders. "Take it, oh father, take it!" said they, nudging the saddler into recognition of his unexampled opportunity. The hank of string was handed over to Hajj 'Amr, who packed it gloomily into the donkey's saddle bags, already crammed to overflowing with the miscellaneous objects essential to any well-ordered caravan on a long journey. Fattfih and H&jj 'Amr had been shopping since dawn, and it was now close upon sunset. I climbed down from the counter. "With your leave," said I, saluting the saddler. ALEPPO 3 "Go in peace," he returned amicably. "And if you want more string Fattiih knows where to get it. He always deals with me." The crowd melted back to its avocations, if it had any, and the excitement caused by our commercial dealings died away. "Oh Fattuh," said I, as we strolled down the bazaar with the donkey. "There is great labour in buying all we need." Fattuh mopped his brow with a red handkerchief. "And the outlay!" he sighed. "But we got that string cheap." And with this he settled his tarbush more jauntily, kicked the donkey, and "Yallah, father ! " said he. If there be a better gate to Asia than Aleppo, I do not know it. A virile population, a splendid architecture, the quickening sense of a fine Arab tradition have combined to give the town an individuality sharply cut, and more than any other Syrian city she seems instinct with an inherent vitality. The princes who drew the line of massive masonry about her flanks and led her armies against the emperors of the West, the merchants who gathered the wealth of inner Asia into her bazaars and bartered it against the riches of the Levant Company have handed down the spirit of enterprise to the latest of her sons. They drive her caravans south to Baghdad, and east to Van, and north to Konia, and in the remotest cities of the Turkish empire I have seldom failed to find a native of Aleppo eager to provide me with a local delicacy and to gossip over local politics. " Here is one who heard we were from Aleppo," says Fattuh with an affected indifference. "His brother lives in the next street to mine, and he has brought your Excellency some apples. But they are not like the apples of Aleppo." Then we exchange a greeting warm with fellow-citizenship and the apples are flavoured with good-will, even if they cannot be expected to vie with the fruit of our own countryside. It was at Aleppo that I made acquaintance with the Turkey which had come into being on July 24, igo8. Even among those whose sympathies were deeply engaged on behalf of the new order, there were not many Europeans who, in B 2 4 AMURATH TO AMURATH January 1909, had any clue to public opinion outside Con- stantinople and Salonica. The events of the six stirring months that had just elapsed had yet to be heard and appre- hended, and no sooner had I landed in Beyrout than I began to shed European formulas and to look for the Asiatic value of the great catchwords of revolution. In Aleppo, sitting at the feet of many masters, who ranged down all the social grades from the high official to the humblest labourer for hire, I learnt something of the hopes and fears, the satisfac- tion, the bewilderment, and the indifference of Asia. The populace had shared in the outburst of enthusiasm which had greeted the granting of the constitution — a moment of unbridled expectation when, in the brief transport of universal benevolence, it seemed as if the age-long problems of the Turkish empire had been solved with a stroke of the pen ; they had journeyed back from that Utopia to find that human nature remained much as it had been before. The public mind was unhinged; men were obsessed with a sense of change, perplexed because change was slow to come, and alarmed lest it should spring upon them unawares. ' The relaxation of the rule of fear had worked in certain directions with immediate effect, but not invariably to the increase of security. True, there was a definite gain of personal liberty. The spies had disappeared from official quarters, and with them the exiles, who had been condemned by 'Abdu'l Hamid, on known or unknown pretexts, to languish helplessly in the provincial capitals. Everywhere a daily press had sprung into existence and foreign books and papers passed unhindered through the post. The childish and exasperat- ing restrictions with which the Sultan had fettered his Christian subjects had fallen away. The Armenians were no longer tied to the spot whereon they dwelt; they could, and did, travel where they pleased. The nimusiyeh, the identification certificate, had received the annual government stamp without delay, and without need of bribes. In every company. Christian and Moslem, tongues were unloosed in outspoken criticism of official dealings, but it was extremely rare to find in these freely vented opinions anything of a ALEPPO 5 constructive nature. The government was still, to the bulk of the population, a higher power, disconnected from those upon whom it exercised its will. You might complain of its lack of understanding just as you cursed the hailstorm that destroyed your crops, but you were in no way answerable for it, nor would you attempt to control or advise it, any more than you would offer advice to the hail cloud. Many a time have I searched for some trace of the Anglo-Saxon accept- ance of a common responsibility in the problems that beset the State, a sense the germs of which exist in the Turkish village community and in the tribal system of the Arab and the Kurd; it never went beyond an embryonic application to small local matters, and the answers I received resembled, mutatis mutandis, that of Fattuh when I questioned him as to the part he had played in the recent general election. "Your Excellency knows that I am a carriage-driver, what have I to do with government? But I can tell you that the new government is no better than the old. Look now at Aleppo; have we a juster law? wallah, no ! " In some respects they had indeed a yet more laggard justice than in "the days of tyranny" — so we spoke of the years that were past — or perhaps it would be truer to say a yet more laggard administration. The dislocation of the old order was a fact considerably more salient than the substitu- tion for it of another system. The officials shared to the full the general sense of impermanence that is inevitable to revo- lution, however soberly it may be conducted; they were uncertain of the limits of their own authority, and as far as possible each one would shuffle out of definite action lest it might prove that he had overstepped the mark. In the old days a person of influence would occasionally rectify by processes superlegal a miscarriage of the law; the mis- carriages continued, but intervention was curtailed by doubts and misgivings. The spies had been in part replaced by the agents of the Committee, who wielded a varying but practically irresponsible power. How far the supremacy of the local committees extended it was difficult to judge, nor would a conclusion based upon evidence from one province 6 AMURATH TO AMURATH have been applicable to another; but my impression is that nowhere were they of much account, and that the further the district was removed from the coast, that is, from contact with the European centres of the new movement, the less influential did they become. Possibly in the remoter provinces the local committee was itself reactionary, as I have heard it affirmed, or at best an object of ridicule, but in Syria, at any rate, the committees existed in more than the name. Their inner organization was at that time secret, as was the organization of the parent society. They had taken form at the moment when the constitution was proclaimed, and had undergone a subsequent reconstruction at the hands of delegates from Salonica, who were sent to instruct them in their duties. I came across one case where these delegates, having been unwisely selected, left the committee less well qualified to cope with local conditions than they found it, but usually they discharged their functions with discretion. The committees opened clubs of Union and Progress, the members of which numbered in the bigger towns several hundreds. The club of Aleppo was a flourishing institution lodged in a large bare room in the centre of the town. It offered no luxuries to the members, military and civilian, who gathered round its tables of an evening, but it supplied them with a good stock of newspapers, which they read gravely under the shadow of a life-sized portrait of Midhat Pasha, the hero and the victim of the first constitution. The night of my visit the newly formed sub-committee for commerce was holding its first deliberations on a subject which is of the utmost importance to the prosperity of Aleppo : the railway connection with the port of Alexandretta. To this discussion I was admitted, but the proceedings after I had taken my seat at the board were of an emotional rather than of a practical character, and I left with cries of "Yasha Inghilterra ! " ("Long live England ! ") in my ears. I carried away with me the impression that whatever might be the future scope of its activities, the com.mittee could not fail, in these early days, to be of some educational value. It brought men together to debate on matters that touched the ALEPPO 7 common good and invited them to bear a part in their promotion. The controlling authority of the executive body was of much more questionable advantage. Its members, whose names were kept profoundly secret, were supposed to keep watch over the conduct of affairs and to forward reports to the central committee : I say supposed, because I have no means of knowing whether they actually carried out what they stated to be their duties. They justified their position by declaring that it was a temporary expedient which would lapse as soon as the leaders of the new movement were assured of official loyalty to the constitution, and arbitrary as their functions may appear it would have been impossible to assert that Asiatic Turkey was fit to run without leading- strings. But I do not believe that the enterprise of the committees was sufficient to hamper a strong governor; and so far as my observation went, the welfare of each province depended, and must depend for many a year to come, upon the rectitude and the determination of the man who is placed in authority over it. Underlying all Turkish politics are the closely interwoven problems of race and religion, which had been stirred to fresh activity by exuberant promises. Fraternity and equality are dangerous words to scatter broadcast across an empire composed of many nationalities and controlled by a dominant race. Under conditions such as these equality in its most rigid sense can scarcely be said to exist, while fraternity is complicated by the fact that the ruling race pro- fesses Islam, whereas many of the subordinate elements are Christian. The Christian population of Aleppo was bitterly disheartened at having failed to return one of their own creed out of the six deputies who represent the vilayet. I met, in the house of a common friend, a distinguished member of the Christian community who threw a great deal of light on this subject. He began by observing that even in the vilayet of Beyrout, though so large a proportion of the inhabitants are Christian, the appointment of a non- Moslem governor would be impossible ; so much, he said, for the boast of equality. This is, of course, undeniable, 8 AMURATH TO AMURATH though in the central government, where they are not brought into direct contact with a Moslem population, Christians are admitted to the highest ofSce. He com- plained that when the Christians of Aleppo had urged that they should be permitted to return a representative to the Chamber, the Moslems had given them no assistance. "They replied," interposed our host, "that it was all one, since Christians and Moslems are merged in Ottoman." I turned to my original interlocutor and inquired whether the various communions had agreed upon a common candidate. "No," he answered with some heat. "They brought for- ward as many candidates as there are sects. Thus it is in our unhappy country ; even the Christians are not brothers, and one church will not trust the other." I said that this regrettable want of confidence was not con- fined to Turkey, and asked whether, if they could have commanded a united vote, they would have carried their candidate. He admitted with reluctance that he thought it would have been possible, and this view was confirmed by an independent witness who said that a Christian candidate, carefully chosen and well supported, would have received in addition the Jewish vote, since that community was too small to return a separate representative. As for administrative reform, it hangs upon the urgent problem of finance. From men who are overworked and underpaid neither efficiency nor honesty can be expected, but to increase their number or their salary is an expensive business, and money is not to be had. How small are the local resources may be judged from the fact that Aleppo, a town of at least 120,000 inhabitants, possesses a municipal income of from ;^3,ooo to ;^4,ooo a year. Judges who enjoy an annual salary of from ;^6o to ;^90 are not likely to prove incorruptible, and it is difficult to see how a mounted policeman can support existence on less than £12 a year, though one of my zaptiehs assured me that the pay was sufficient if it had been regular. In the vilayet of Aleppo and the mutesarriflik of Deir all the zaptiehs who accom- panied me had received the arrears due to them as well as ALEPPO 9 their weekly wage, but this fortunate condition did not extend to other parts of the empire. The plain man of Aleppo did not trouble his head with fiscal problems ; he judged the new government by immediate results and found it wanting. I rode one sunny afternoon with the boy, Fattflh's brother-in-law, who was to accompany us on our journey, to the spring of 'Ain Tell, a mile or two north of the town. Jiisef — his name, as Fattflh was careful to point out, is French : " I thought your Excellency knew French," he said severely, in answer to my tactless inquiry — Jiisef conducted me across wet meadows, where in spring the citizens of Aleppo take the air, and past a small mound, no doubt artificial, a relic perhaps of the constructions of Self ed Dauleh, whose palace once occupied these fields. Close to the spring stands a mill with a pair of stone lions carved on the slab above the door, the heraldic supporters of some prince of Aleppo. They had been dug out of the mound together with a fine basalt door, like those which are found among the fourth and fifth century ruins in the neigh- bouring hills ; the miller dusted it with his sleeve and observed that it was an antica. A party of dyers, who were engaged in spreading their striped cotton cloths upon the sward, did me the honours of their drying-ground — merry fellows they were, the typical sturdy Christians of Aleppo, who hold their own with their Moslem brothers and reckon little of distinctions of creed. "Christian and Moslem," said one, "see how we labour! If the constitution were worth anything, the poor would not work for such small rewards." "At any rate," said I, "you got your n^musiyeh cheaper this year." "Eh true! " he replied, "but who can tell how long that will last?" "Please God, it will endure," said I. "Please God," he answered. "But we should have been better satisfied to see the soldiers govern. A strong hand we need here in Aleppo, that the poor may enjoy the fruits of their toil." lo AMURATH TO AMURATH "Eh wah!" said another, "and a government that we know." Between them they had summed up popular opinion, which is ever blind to the difficulties of reform and impatient because progress is necessarily slow footed. We passed on our return the tekiyeh of Abu Bekr, a beautiful Mamluk shrine with cypresses in its courtyard, which lift their black spires proudly over that treeless land. The brother of the hereditary sheikh showed me the mosquej it contains an exquisite mihrab of laced stone work, and windows that are protected by carved wooden shutters and filled with old coloured glass. Near the mosque is the square hall of a bath, now fallen into disrepair. Four pen- dentives convert the square into an octagon, and eight more hold the circle of the dome — as fine a piece of massive construction as you would wish to see. The sheikh and his family occupied some small adjoining rooms, and the young wife of my guide made me welcome with smiles and lemon sherbet. From the deep embrasure of her window I looked out upon Aleppo citadel and congratulated her upon her secluded house set in the thickness of ancient walls. "Yes," she replied, eagerly detailing the benefits of providence, "and we have a carpet for winter time, and there is no mother-in-law." Aleppo is the Greek Beroea, but the town must have played a part in the earlier civilizations of North Syria. It lies midway between two Hittite capitals, Carchemish on the Euphrates, and Cadesh on the Orontes, in the heart of a fertile country strewn with mounds and with modern mud- built villages. The chief town of this district was Chalcis, the modern Kinnesrtn, a day's journey to the south of Aleppo, but with the development of the great Seleucid trade-route between Seleucia on the Tigris and Antioch on the Orontes, which Strabo describes as passing through Hierapolis, Aleppo, being on the direct line to Antioch, must have gained in importance, and it was perhaps for this reason that the little Syrian village saw the Seleucid founda- tions of Beroea. The Arabic name, Haleb, retains a reminis- FIG. 1. — AT.EPPO, THE CITADEL. FIG. 2. — ALEPPO, HITTITE LIO.V IN CITADEL. FIG. 3. — BASALT EAGLE IN THE FRENCH CONSULATE. FIG. 4. — ALEPPO, JAMI' ESH SHAIBIYEH, CORNICE. FIG. 5. — FIRDAUS, MEDRESSEH OF EL MALIK EZ ZAIIIR. ALEPPO 1 1 cence of the original local appellation, which never slipped out of memory and finally conquered the Greek Beroea. Mohammadan tradition recognizes the fact that Haleb was the ancient name of the city in the foolish tale which connects it with the cows of Abraham, the root of the word Haleb being the verb signifying to milk, and the Emperor Julian knew that Beroea was the same as Chaleb. Aleppo is not without evidences of a remote antiquity. Every archaeologist in turn has tried his hand at the half obliterated Hittite inscription which is built, upside down, into the walls of the mosque of Kiklin near the Antioch gate; among the ruins of the citadel are two roughly worked Hittite lions (Fig. 2 ; Mr. Hogarth was the first to identify them), and I found in the French Consulate a headless eagle carved in basalt which belongs to the same period (Fig. 3). The steep escarpment of the castle mound is akin to the ancient fortified sites of northern Mesopotamia. Julian mentions the acropolis of Bercea. It was protected in a later age by a revetment of stone slabs, most of which were stripped away by Ttmfir Leng when he overwhelmed the town in 1401 and laid it in ruins. I know of only one building in Aleppo the origin of which can be attributed with certainty to the pre-Moham- madan period, the JSmi' el Heliwlyeh near the Great Mosque (Fig. 6). It has been completely rebuilt; the present dome, resting on pendentives, with a tambour broken by six win- dows, belongs to one of the later reconstructions, but the beautiful acanthus capitals must be ascribed to the fifth century on account of their likeness to the capitals in the church of St. Simeon Stylites, a day's journey north-west of Aleppo. The great school of architecture which they represent affected the builders of Isl&m through many a subsequent age, and you will find the Mamlfiks still flinging the leaves of the wind-blown acanthus about the capitals in their mosques. In the tenth century Aleppo was the chief city of the Hamdanid prince Seif ed Dauleh, a notable patron of the arts. It was he who built the south gate in the walls, the Bab Kinnesrin, and rebuilt the Antioch Gate after its destruction by Nicephorus Phocas ; he repaired the citadel , 12 AMURATH TO AMURATH set the shrine of Hussem upon the hill-side west of the town, and erected his own splendid dwelling outside the walls to the north. His palace was ravaged before his death, his gates and mosques have been rebuilt, and there remains for the period before Saladin little or nothing but the mosque inside the citadel, built in 1160 by Nur ed Din, the greatest of the Syrian atabegs, and the J^mi' esh Shaibtyeh near the Antioch Gate, which, in spite of its ruined condition, is one of the loveliest monuments of the art of Islkm in the whole town of Aleppo (Fig. 4).^ Along the top of the wall and carried uninterruptedly round the square minaret, runs a Cufic in- scription, cut in a cavetto moulding. Below it is a band of interlacing rinceaux, unsurpassed in boldness and freedom of design, and above it a heavy cymatium, borne on modil- lions and adorned with rinceaux. The classical outline of the cornice, together with the exquisite Oriental decoration, give it a singular hybrid beauty. This mosque apart, the finest buildings are due to the Ayyiabids, and chiefly to El Malik ez Z&hir, the son of Saladin, who ruled in Aleppo at the end of the twelfth century. Beyond the walls to the south of the city, in the quarter of Firdaus, the descendants of Saladin held their court, and though their palaces have disappeared — how much more we should know of Mohammadan archi- tecture if each successive conqueror had not ruined the house of his predecessor ! — the suburb is still resplendent with mosques and tombs. Here stands the Medreseh of El Malik ez Zahir, with an arcade borne on capitals that retain a reminiscence of classical form though they are hung with a garland of leaves that are closer to the Sasanian than to the Greek (Fig, 5).^ Near it is the mosque of Firdaus built by the king's widow when she was regent for her son. Over the mihrUb of this mosque is a bold entrelac decoration which is to be found also in the shrine of Hussein, a building that ' It is dated in the year 545 a.h., i. e. a.d. 1150. 2 The Persian influence had probably filtered through Egypt, for similar leaf motives are to be found in Cairo, for example in a fine bit of woodwork in the Museum : Herz Bey, Catalogue Raisonni, fig. 24. The prototype must be looked for in the plaster decorations of Ibn TOlOn. FIG. 6.— ALEPPO, JAMi' EL HELAWtVEH. FIG. 7. — FIRDAUS, A TOMB. ALEPPO 13 owes its present form to El Malik ez ?ahir.^ The mosque of Es SMihln shelters a gigantic footprint of Abraham, and about it lie the tombs of the pious who sought a resting- place near the site sanctified by the patriarch — tombstones worthy of a museum, carved with Cufic inscriptions and with vine scrolls and bunches of grapes. And falling now into unheeded decay are other memorials of the dead, their walls covered with delicate tracery and their windows filled with an exquisite lacework of stone (Fig. 7). They were great builders these princes of Islim, Ayyfibid and Mamluk, and in nothing greater than in their mastery of structural diffi- culties. The problem of the dome, its thrust and its setting over a square substructure, received from them every possible solution ; they bent the solid stone into airy forms of infinite variety (Figs. 8 and 9). Their splendid masonry satisfied the eye as does the wall of a Greek temple, and none knew better than they the value of discreet decoration. The restraint and beauty of such treatment of the wall surface as is to be found in the Khan el Wazlr (Fig. 10) or the Kh4n es Sabiin (Fig. 11) bear witness to a master hand. The grace and ordered symmetry of these fagades are as devoid of monotony as are the palace walls of the early Venetian renaissance, to which they are closely related, and here as in Venice the crowning beauty of colour is added to that of form and proportion. But it is colour of the sun's own making; the sharp black outline of a window opening, the half tones of a carved panel lying upon the smooth brightness of the masonry soberly enhanced by the occasional use of a darker stone, either in courses or in alter- nate voussoirs. If you are so fortunate as to have many friends in Aleppo, you will find that the domestic architec- ture is no less admirable, and drinking your coffee under panelled ceilings rich with dull golds and soft deep reds, you will magnify once again the genius of the artificers of Asia. The walls and gates of the city, though they are not so well preserved as those of Diy^rbekr, are fine examples of 1 M. Saladin believes this entrelac to be of Damascene origin. Manuel d'Art Musulman, i. p. 115. 14 AMURATH TO AMURATH mediseval fortification. To the north a prosperous quarter lies beyond the older circuit and the heraldic lions of the Mamluks look down upon streets crowded with traffic. Armorial bearings played a large part in the decorative scheme of the Mohammadan builders. The type characteristic of Aleppo is a disk projecting slightly from the wall, carved with a cup from the base of which spring a pair of leaves. Upon the cup there are strange signs which are said to have been imitated from Egyptian hieroglyphs, a motive introduced by the Mamlilks; but I have noticed a variety of coats of the same period, such as the whorl which fills the disk upon the Bab el Mak^m, and the pair of upright pot-hooks, set back to back, upon the Jami' el Makamat in the Firdaus quarter. These disks, together with bands of inscriptions, are the sole ornaments placed upon the city gates. The sombre splendour of the architecture of Aleppo is dis- played nowhere better than in the Bimaristan of El Malik ez Zahir, which was built as a place of confinement for criminal lunatics and is still used for that purpose. The central court terminates at the southern end in the liwSn of a mosque covered with an oval dome ; before it lies the ceremonial water- tank, if any one should have the heart to wash or pray in that house of despair. A door from the court leads into a stone corridor, out of which open rectangular stone chambers with massive walls rising to a great height, and carrying round and oval domes. Through narrow window slits, feeble shafts of light fall into the dank well beneath and shiver through the iron bars that close the cells of the lunatics. They sit more like beasts than men, loaded with chains in their dark cages, and glower at each other through the bars ; and one was sick and moaned upon his wisp of straw, and one rattled his chains and clawed at the bars as though he would cry for mercy, but had forgotten human speech. " They do not often recover," said the gaoler, gazing indifferently into the sick man's cell, and I wondered in my heart whefher there were any terms in which to reckon up the misery that had accumulated for generations under El Malik ez Z^hir's domes. FIG. lO. — KHAN EL WAZIR. "^^5i:^4A.d^^3^ -KHAN ES SABUN. n- ,'* . FIG. 12. -WINDOW OF A TUREEH, FIRDAUS. FIO. 13. -GATE OF CITADEI., ALEPPO. ALEPPO 15 Like the numismatic emblem of a city goddess, Aleppo wears a towered crown. The citadel lies immediately to the east of the bazaars. A masonry bridge resting on tall narrow arches spans the moat between a crenelated outpost and the great square block of the inner gatehouse. Through a worked iron door, dated in the reign of El Malik ez Zahir, you pass into a vaulted corridor which turns at right angles under an arch decorated with interlaced dragons (Fig. 13), and ends at another arched doorway on which stand the leopards of Sultan Baybars, who rebuilt the castle in the thirteenth century. Above the entrance is a columned hall, grass-grown, and ruined; passages lead down from it into vaulted chambers which would seem to hai^e been repaired after Timur had sacked Aleppo. Some of the blocks used in the walls here are Jewish tombstones dated by Hebrew inscrip- tions in the thirteenth century, and since it is scarcely possible that Baybars should have desecrated a cemetery of his own day, they must indicate a later period of reconstruction. The garrison was supplied with water from a well eighty metres deep which lies near the northern edge of the castle mound. Besides the well-hole, a stair goes down to the water level, near which point vaulted passages branch out to right and left. Tradition says that the whole mound is raised upon a substruc- ture of masonry, but tradition is always read)' with such tales, and the only inscription in the passages near the well is Cufic. At the northern limit of the enclosure stands a high square tower, up which, if you would know Aleppo, you must climb. From the muedhdhin's gallery the town lies revealed, a wide expanse of fiat roof covering the bazaars, broken by dome and minaret, by the narrow clefts of streets and the courts of mosque and khan. The cypresses of Abu Bekr stand sentinel to the north; from that direction Timflr entered through the BUb el Hadid. In the low ground beyond the Antioch Gate, the armies of the Crusaders lay encamped; the railway, an invader more powerful than Baldwin, holds it now. Turn to the east, and as far as the eye can see, stretch rolling uplands, the granary of North Syria, and across them wind the caravan tracks that lead into inner Asia. There through the waste 1 6 AMURATH TO AMURATH flows the Euphrates — you might almost from the tower catch the glint of its waters, so near to the western sea does its channel approach here. I have never come to know an Oriental city without finding that it possesses a distinctive personality much more strongly accentuated than is usually the case in Europe, and this is essentially true of the Syrian towns. To compare Damascus, for example, with Aleppo, would be to set side by side two different conceptions of civilization. Damascus is the capital of the desert, Aleppo of the fertile plain. Damascus is the city of the Arab tribes who conquered her and set their stamp upon her; Aleppo, standing astride the trade routes of northern Mesopotamia, is a city of merchants quick to defend the wealth that they had gathered afar. So I read the history that is written upon her walls and impressed deep into the character of her adventurous sons. At Aleppo the current of the imagination is tributary to the Euphrates. With Xenophon, with Julian, with all the armies captained by a dream of empire that dashed and broke against the Ancient East, the thoughts go marching down to the river which was the most famous of all frontier lines. So we turned east, and on a warm and misty February morn- ing we passed under the cypresses of Abu Bekr and took the road to Hierapolis. It was a world of mud through which we journeyed, for the rains had been heavy, and occasionally a shower fell across our path ; but rain and mud can neither damp nor clog the spirit of those who are once more upon the road, with faces turned towards the east. The corn was beginning to sprout and there were signs too of another crop, that of the locusts which had swarmed across the Euphrates the year before, and after ravaging the fields had laid their eggs in the shallow earth that lies upon the rocky crest of the ridges between cornland and cornland. Whenever the road climbed up to these low eminences we found a family of peasants engaged, in a desultory fashion, in digging out the eggs from among the stones. Where they lay the ground was pitted like a face scourged with smallpox, but for every square yard cleared a square mile was left undisturbed, and bAb 17 the peasants worked for the immediate small reward which the government paid for each load of eggs, and not with any hope of averting the plague that ultimately overwhelmed their crops. It comes and goes, for what reason no man can tell, lasting in a given district over a term of lean years, and disappearing as unaccountably as it came : perhaps a storm of rain kills the larvae as they are hatching out, perhaps the breeding season is unfavourable — God knows, said Hajj 'AH, the zaptieh who accompanied me. The country is set thick with villages, of which Kiepert marks not the tenth part — and even those not always rightly placed. We passed his Sheikh Najar, and at Sheikh Ziyad I went up to see the ziyarah, the little shrine upon the hill-top, but found there nothing but a small chamber containing the usual clay tomb. We left Serbes on the right — it was hidden behind a ridge — and took a track that passed through the village of Shammar. Not infrequently there were old rock-cut cisterns among the fields and round the mounds whereon villages had once stood. At Tell el Hal, five hours from Aleppo, a modern village lies below the mound, and by the roadside I saw part of the shaft of a column, with a moulded base, while several more frag- ments of columns were set up as tombstones in the graveyard. An hour before we reached Bab we caught sight of the high minaret of the ziyarah above it. It is a flourishing little place with a bazaar and several khans, in one of which I lodged. The heavy rain-clouds that had hung about us all day were closing down as evening approached, but I had time to climb the steep hill to the west of the village, where a cluster of houses surrounds the ziyarah of Nebi Hashil — so I heard the name, but Abu'l Fida calls it the Mashhad of 'Akil ibn AbJ Tlilib, brother of the Khalif 'Ali ^ — an old shrine of which the lower part of the walls is built of rusticated stones. The tomb itself was closed, but I went to the top of the minaret and had a fine view of the shallow fruitful valley of the Deheb, which, taking its source near Bab and the more northerly Tell Batnan, runs down to the salt marshes at the foot of Jebel ^ Ed. Reinaud, p. 267. He wrote in a.d. 1321. 1 8 AMURATH TO AMURATH el Hass. Across the valley there is a notable big mound with a village at its foot, the Buza'i of the Arab geographers, "smaller than a town and larger than a village," said Ibn Jubeir in the twelfth century. The ancient Bathnas where Julian rested under "a pleasant grove of cypress trees" is represented by Buz^'i and its "gate" Bab. He compares its gardens with those of Daphne, the famous sanctuary oi Apollo near Antioch, and though the gardens and cypresses have been replaced by cornfields, it is still regarded by the inhabitants of Aleppo as an agreeable and healthy resort during the hot months of summer. Perhaps we may carry back its history yet earlier and look here for the palace of Belesys, the Persian governor of Syria, at the source of the river Dardes, which Xenophon describes as having "a large and beautiful garden containing all that the seasons pro- duce." 1 Cyrus laid it waste and burned the palace, after which he marched three days to Thapsacus on the Euphrates ; but the Arab geographers place Balis (which some have con- jectured to have occupied the site of the Persian palace) two days from Aleppo, and the position of Thapsacus has not been determined with any certainty. If it stood at Dibseh, as Moritz surmises,^ Cyrus could well have reached it in three marches from Bab, and I am inclined to think that Xeno- phon's account identifies the satrap's pleasaunce with the garden of Bathnae. In Kiepert's map the relative distances between Aleppo and Bab and Bab and Manbij are not correct. I rode the two stages in almost exactly the same time (seven and a quarter hours), and the caravan took nine hours each day, whereas the map would have the march to Manbij a good two hours longer than the march to Bab.^ A stormy wind, bringing with it splashes of rain, swept us next morning over the wet uplands. About an hour from Bab we were joined by a Circassian wrapped in a thick black felt cloak, which, with the white woollen hood over an 1 Anabasis, Bk. I. ch. iv, lo. 2 Zur antiken Topographic der Palmyrene, p. 31. ' Mr. Hogarth also noticed that Bab is marked out of its true place : Annual of the British School at Athens, XIV. p. 185. HIERAPOLIS 19 astrachan cap, skirted coat with cartridges ranged across the breast, and high riding-boots, is the invariable costume of these emigrants from the north. His name was MahmQd Agha. His father had left the Caucasus after the Russians took the country and had gone with all his people to Roumelia, where they settled down and built houses. And then the Russians seized that land also, and again they left all and came to Manbij, and the Sultan gave them fields on his own estates. "But if the Russians were to come here too," he concluded, with the anxious air of one who faces an ever-present danger, "God knows where we should go." "Their frontier is far," said I reassuringly. " Please God," said he. I asked him about the recent elections and found that he took a lively interest in the politics of the day. He knew the names of the deputies who had been returned for the vilayet of Aleppo, and said that a thousand people had given their votes in the Manbij district, though there should have been many more if all had been on the register. But they would not trouble to have their names placed upon it. "Wallah, no," observed Hajj 'All. "Do you think that the fellahin of all these villages wish to vote ? If they knew that their name was written down by the government, they would take to their heels and flee into the desert, leaving all that they have. So great would be their fear." This was a new view of the duties and privileges of citizen- ship, and once more I had to shift my ground and look at representative institutions through the eyes of the Syrian peasant. "Then none of the Arab vote?" I asked, when I had accomplished this revolution of the mind. The Arab are the Bedouin. "God forbid ! " replied Hajj 'All. "Where is Aleppo and where their dwelling-place ! " "We are all equal now before the law," said Mahmlid AghS inconsequently (but he was thinking of townsfolk, not of the Arab), "and all will be given an equal justice. We shall not c 2 20 AMURATH TO AMURATH wait for months at the door of the serayah before we are given a hearing — and then only with bribes." "I have heard that all are equal," said I, "and that Chris- tian and Moslem will serve together in the army. What think you ? " "Without doubt the Christians may serve," he answered, "but they cannot command." In three and a half hours we reached the village of Arimeh, where there are two Roman milestones that have been copied by Mr. Hogarth. He dates them a.d. 197, in which year the Emperor Septimius Severus, whose name is inscribed upon them, probably completed the road. I suspect that it followed the Seleucid trade route mentioned by Strabo. There are not more than a dozen houses at Arimeh, but the ancient settlement was more important. Cut stones lie about the modern hovels, and behind them are ruined foundations, among which we found the fragment of a bas-relief, a pair of shod feet and another foot beside them : I did not judge it to be earlier than the Roman period. A large stone block built into the wall of one of the courtyards bore a much worn foundation inscription of El Malik ez Zahir, his name and the words "he built it" being alone decipherable. We rode on to Hierapolis across a hollow plain, all cultivated, the sacred domain of the Syrian goddess "whom some call Nature herself, the cause that produces the seed of all things." ^ When we passed over the ground it was still a chiflik, the private property of 'Abdu'l Hamid, wrested by him bit by bit during the last thirty years from its owners, the half-settled Arabs. With all the rest of his landed estates it was appro- priated after his deposition in April by the State, and if it is put up for sale there will be no lack of customers in Aleppo, for the merchants are eager to lay field to field, and I have heard them complain of the difficulty of buying land near home, since all was held by the Sultan. We rode between the air-holes of underground canals, of which there were a great number bringihg water to Hierapolis. The old line of ' Plutarch : In Crass. HIERAPOLIS 21 the city walls is clearly marked, though the Circassian colony, which grows in numbers and prosperity in spite of the antagonism of the neighbouring Arabs, is rapidly digging out the stones and using them in the construction of houses. Just within the walls, as we approached from the west, is a large pond, surrounded by masonry, the remains of the stairs by which the worshippers descended into the pool of Atar- gatis that they might swim to the altar in its midst. Lucian declares that the pool wherein were kept the sacred fish was over 200 cubits deep, but his informants must have exagger- ated, inasmuch as Pocock, who visited Hierapolis in 1787, mentions that the pool was dry, and does not speak of so remarkable a hole as Lucian's estimate would imply. Maun- drell, who saw it in 1699, describes it as a deep pit containing a little water, but choked by the walls and columns of great buildings that had stood all about it. East of the pool there is a modern mosque erected by 'Abdu'l Hamid on the site of a foundation of El Malik ez Zahir. Nothing remained of the earlier building, I was told, but a ruined minaret,^ which has now gone. In the sahn, the court, I saw three inscriptions of El Malik ez Zahir which had belonged to his mosque. Below the pavement of the sahn, said the guardian of the mosque, a second pavement had been found which he believed to have been that of a Christian church ; there were one or two columns lying about here, and an acanthus capital which was certainly pre-Mohammadan and probably pre-Christian. Manbij was at one time a bishopric; the earlier travellers mention several ruined churches which have now vanished, and Ibn Khurdddhbeh, one of the first of the Arab geographers, remarks that "there is no wooden building fairer than the church at Manbij, for it has arches of jujube wood " 2 — an observation which is repeated with wearisome iteration by many of his successors. The pool and the mosque stand for the two periods of former splendour, the pagan and the Mohammadan. Bam- ^ Sachau saw it : Reise in Syrien und Mesopotamien, p. 148. ^ Ed. de Goeje, p. 162. He wrote in A.D. 864. 22 AMURATH TO AMURATH byce — to give; it the classicized form of its ancient local name ^ — must have been a shrine of some importance when the Seleucids rechristened it Hierapolis, but, as at Aleppo, the older word was never forgotten, and Strabo in the first century calls it by both names. His account is suggestive of the conditions that prevailed in the Seleucid empire. "The road for merchants," says he, "going from Syria to Seleucia and Babylon, lies through the country of the Scenitse and through the desert belonging to their territory. The Euphrates is crossed in the latitude of Anthemusia, a place in Mesopotamia.2 Above the river, at a distance of four schoeni, is Bambyce, where the Syrian goddess Atargatis is worshipped. After crossing the river the road runs through a desert country on the borders of Babylonia, to Scenae. From the passage across the river to Scenas is a journey of five-and-twenty days. There are on the road owners of camels who keep resting-places which are well supplied with water from cisterns, or transported from a distance. The Scenitae exact a moderate tribute from merchants, but do not molest them : the merchants therefore avoid the country on the banks of the river and risk a journey through the desert, leaving the river on the right hand at a distance of nearly three days' march. For the chiefs of the tribes living on both sides of the river are settled in the midst of their own peculiar domains, and each exacts a tribute of no moderate amount for himself." ^ It is evident that the Alexandrids never succeeded in subduing the Arab tribes, who pushed up in a wedge along the Euphrates between their Mesopotamian and their Syrian provinces, and Strabo has here left us a description of the pre-Parthian line of traffic. Where it crossed the river it would be hazardous to pronounce. The two most famous passages of the middle Euphrates were at Birejik and at Thapsacus : at the former Seleucus Nicator 1 Manbij is the name used in literary Arabic, but it is noticeable that in the colloquial the word approaches more nearly to the earliest form, being pronounced Bumbuj. ^ Eski SerOj according to Chapot : La frontiere de I'Euphrate, p. 306. 3 Geography, Bk. XVI. ch. i. 27. HIERAPOLIS 23 built a bridge,^ and Crassus, in the first century before Christ, found a bridge at Birejik and crossed with all the omens against him, even the eagle of the first standard turning its head backwards when it was brought down to the river. But between these two points the Euphrates can easily be crossed in boats at many places,^ and in the numerous Roman expedi- tions against the Sasanians, when Hierapolis came to be used as a convenient starting-point for eastern campaigns, the passage seems usually to have been made lower down than Birejik, more nearly opposite Hierapolis, and the Mesopo- tamian road ran thence by Thilaticomum and through the desert to Bathnae in Osrhcene.^ Julian marching from Hiera- polis presumably took this shorter road, for he was anxious to reach Mesopotamia before intelligence of his movements should have come to the enemy,* and it has been conjectured that he threw his bridge of boats across the river from Caeciliana, a place mentioned in the Peutinger Tables and identified tentatively with Kal'at en Nejm.^ There is, how- ever, a ferry just below the mouth of the Sajur river which during the last few years has been used regularly by caravans and carriages going to Urfah, the ancient Edessa, in prefer- ence to the longer road by Birejik. This route had long been abandoned on account of the insecurity of the deserts through which it passes. Before the granting of the constitution some advance had been made towards order, and since the over- throw of Ibrahim Pasha, the Kurd, in the autumn of igo8, it has become as safe as can reasonably be expected. The land- ing-place on the east bank is at Tell Ahmar, a tiny hamlet which has inherited the site of a very ancient city. Here perhaps Strabo's road crossed the river;® here Julian may 1 Ritter : Erdkunde, Vol. VII. p. 961. * Procopius makes the same observation : De Bell. Per., II. 20. ' It is so given in the Antonine Itinerary : Hierapoli — Thilaticomum — Bathnas — Edissa. * Ammianus Marcellinus, Bk. XXIII. ch. ii. 7. ' Chapot, op. cit. p. 281. ' Chapot believes that the passage was effected at a point north of Cseciliana, which would fit in with Tell Ahmar : op. cit. p. 254, note 5. 24 AMURATH TO AMURATH have constructed his pontoon bridge, and it is not improbable that for the first four or five hundred years of the Christian era it was the customary point of passage for travellers from Hierapolis to Edessa.^ Thapsacus, which lies lower down than Casciliana-Kal'at en Nejm, was of earlier importance. Xenophon crossed there, and nearly a hundred years later, Darius, fleeing headlong eastwards with his broken army after the battle of Issus, with Alexander headlong at his heels, passed over the river at Thapsacus.^ Julian saw Manbij in the last days of its pagan glory, and for him, as for Crassus before him, the omens of Hierapolis were unfavourable, for as he entered the gates of "that large city, a portico on the left fell suddenly while fifty soldiers were passing under it, and many were wounded, being crushed beneath the vast weight of the beams and tiles." ^ A couple of hundred years later its estate was so much dimin- ished that no attempt was made to defend it against Chosroes, 1 Mr. Hogarth suggests that the Abbess ^theria crossed at Tell Ahmar on her way to Edessa : loc. cit. p. 183. ^ Birejik and the Tell Ahmar passage (whatever may have been its ancient name) and Thapsacus do not exhaust the number of recorded routes, for Chosroes, in his first expedition against Justinian, crossed at Obbanes, somewhere about the modern Meskeneh, and on his third expedition he built a bridge of boats near Europus, which is perhaps the modern Jeriblus. (Mr. Hogarth doubts the accepted identification of JerSblus with Europus: Annals of Arch, and Anthrop., Vol. II. p. 169.) During the Mohammedan period other points are mentioned. Ibn KhurdSdhbeh, writing in the ninth century, makes the road from Aleppo to Babylon cross at BMis, the ancient Barbalissos (ed. de Goeje, p. 74), but Istakhri, a hundred years later, says that Balis, though it was once the Syrian port on the Euphrates, had fallen into decay since the days of Seif ed Dauleh, and was little used by merchants (ed. de Goeje, p. 62). In the twelfth century, and perhaps earlier, its place had been taken by Kal'aten Nejm, where NdredDin, who died in 1 145, built a great fortress, famous during the wars against the Crusaders. The bridge there was called Jisr Manbij ("the bridge of Manbij "), but it cannot have been con- structed by Ndr ed Din, for Ibn Jubeir, writing about the year 1185 a description of his journey from Harran (Carrhae) to Manbij, says that he "crossed the river in small boats, lying ready, to a new castle called Kal'at en Nejm" (Gibb Memorial edition, p. 248). In Yakut's day (circa 1225) the caravans from Harrdn to Syria always crossed here. ' Ammianus Marcellinus, Bk. XXIII. ch. ii. 6. HIERAPOLIS 25 who held it to ransom, and then treacherously sacked it. Procopius says that the space enclosed by the wide circuit of the walls was at that time a desert, and since it was far too large to be defended by the scanty remnants of the popula- tion, Julian drew in the walls to a smaller compass.^ After the Mohammadan conquest, Hllrfln er Rashid made Manbij one of the fortresses of his frontier province, el 'Aw&sim, the Strongholds ; it passed from hand to hand in the wars carried on by the Greek emperors and the Crusaders against the khalifs, and finally remained in the possession of the latter. Under the house of Saladin it enjoyed a second period of prosperity, and the inscriptions near the mosque show that El Malik ez ZShir, that great builder, must have expended some of his skill upon it. Ibn Jubeir found it rich and populous, with large bazaars and a strong castle. But its fortifications could not protect it against Hulaku, who took and sacked it in 1259, and sixty years later Abu'l Fida found most of its walls and houses in ruins. It never recovered from this dis- aster, but sank gradually into the featureless decay from which the Circassian colony is engaged in rescuing it. The khSnjt and all others interested in our arrival being happily engaged in receiving the news of the day from Fattuh, I slipped away alone and walked round the western and southern line of the ruined city wall. The space within is covered by shapeless heaps of earth, with cut stones and frag- ments of columns emerging from them. Towards the north- east corner, where the ground rises, the hollow of the theatre is clearly marked just inside the wall, and beyond it a large depression probably indicates the site of the stadium. The rain-clouds scudded past upon the wind ; little and solitary, a Circassian shepherd boy came wandering in over the high downs, driving his flock of goats across the ruins of the wall and through the theatre, where they stopped to graze in shelter from the furious blast. I followed them half across the wasted city and turned aside to pay my respects to the tomb of a holy man, a crumbling mosque, with the graves of 1 The Buildings of Justinian (Palest. Pilgrims' Text Society), p. 66. 26 AMURATH TO AMURATH the Faithful about it. The Circassian who has his dweUing in the courtyard hastened to open the shrine and to relate the story of Sheikh 'Akil. He lived in the days of Timur Leng, and enjoyed so great a reputation that when the conqueror was preparing to besiege the town, he thought fit to warn the sheikh of his intentions. Sheikh 'Akil begged him to hold aloof for three days, and having obtained this respite, he counselled the inhabitants to destroy all that might tempt to pillage. They followed his advice, and Timur, finding nothing but smoking ruins, passed the city by, while the populace escaped with their lives. So ran the Circassian's tale : I give it for what it is worth. Meantime the baggage had come in and the horses were being watered at the sacred pool, amid anxious cries from the muleteers, who had heard rumours of its fabulous depth : "Oh father, look to yourself ! may God destroy your dwelling ! no further ! " Besides Hajj 'Amr, who had travelled with me before, Fattuh had engaged two others, both Christians, Selim and Habib, the latter a brother of his own. These three, with Jusef, accompanied me during all the months of the journey, and I never heard a word of complaint from them, neither had I cause to complain. I had intended to ride next day to Carchemish, sending the caravan across the ford to Tell Ahmar, where I meant to join it in the evening, but the kh^nji and Mahmud Agha, who had dropped in to see that we were comfortably lodged, dis- suaded me, saying that if the wind rose, as it had done that evening, the ferry boats would not come over from Tell Ahmar and I should be left on the river bank with my camp on the opposite side. I was reluctant to give up my scheme, and Fattuh backed me with the observation that the passage was easy and need not be taken into account. "Oh my brother," Mahmiid admonished him, "it is the Euphrates ! " And we were all silenced. Early in the morning, I left Manbij with Jusef and Hajj 'Alt, and rode past a bewildering number of villages un- marked by Kiepert (I noted Mangabeh and Wardana on our left hand, and after them 'Ain Nakhileh on our right) to the rii;. 14. — AT.KiTii, THi: (ikeat .MOMjrp.. MG. Iv — IM.L \nM\K IlikKN. TELL AHMAR 27 Sajilr valley, which we reached near Chat. We had left the carriage track and now followed the windings of the Sajfir by a path narrow at best and none the better for the recent rains. A man on a dohkey jogged along behind us, and I caught fragments of his conversation witli Hajj 'Alf. He asked the meaning of the word hurriyeh (liberty), a question to which he received no very definite answer. He did not press the point, but remarked that for his part he knew nothing of the new government, but this he knew, that no one in these villages had done military service (I suppose on account of the exemp- tion that was extended to all who dwelt upon the Sultan's domains) and no one was written down " 'and el hukfimeh " (on the official register). He prayed God that this fortunate estate might not suffer change. In three hours from Manbij we reached Osheriyeh, turned a bit of rising ground and came in sight of the Euphrates, flowing beneath white cliffs. If I had been instructed in the proper ceremonies I should have wished to offer up a sacrifice or raise a bethel stone, but failing these I paid the only tribute that can be accorded in an un- gracious age and photographed it. Hajj 'Ali drew bridle and watched the proceeding. " I see it for the first time," said I apologetically. "Eh yes," he replied, "this is our Euphrates," and he turned an indulgent eye upon the rolling waters that are charged with the history of the ancient world. The path dropped down into the valley and ran under cliffs which are honeycombed with chambered caves, made, or at least deepened, by the hand of man. The water was low at this season, and where we joined the river it was divided into two arms by a long island. Half-ah-hour further down the arms met, and lower still another little island, which is covered after the snows begin to melt in the northern mountains, was set in the wide stream. Here was the ferry (Fig. 15). A company of bedraggled camels and camel-drivers waited on the sands while the cumbrous boats were dragged up from the point to which they had been washed by the current. The ferrymen had been weatherbound at Tell Ahmar, and the caravans had spent a weary two days by the river's edge. 28 AMURATH TO AMURATH They had eaten misery, sighed the camel-drivers; wallah, no bread they had had, no fire and no tobacco; but with the patient deference of the East they stood aside when the first boat came lumbering up and observed that the Consul Effendi had best cross while the air was still. We drove our horses into the ferry boat, and by a most unnautical process, con- nected with long poles, our craft was run ashore updn the island, over which we ploughed our way and found a second boat ready to take us across the smaller channel. We landed in Mesopotamia at the village of Tell Ahmar, which takes its name from the high mound, washed by Euphrates, under which it lies (Fig. i6). Jflsef spread out my lunch on the top of the tell, and we watched the caravan embark from the opposite bank and were well pleased to have accomplished the momentous passage in good o'rder, with all our eagles pointing the right way. I lingered on the mound, making acquaintance with a world which was new to me, but immeasurably old to fame. The beautiful empty desert stretched away east and north and south, bathed in the soft splendour of the February sun, long gentle slopes and low bare hills, and the noble curves of the Euphrates bordering the waste. Near the river and scattered over the first two or three miles of country to the east of it, there are a number of isolated mounds which represent the site of very ancient settlements.^ Of these Tell Ahmar is by far the most important. The ridge of silted earth which marks the line of the walls encloses three sides of a parallelo- gram, the river itself defending the fourth side. Strewn about the village are several stone slabs carved in relief with Hittite figures; outside one of the gates in the east wall are the broken remains of a Hittite stela, and before the second more southerly gate lie two roughly carved lions with inscrip- 1 A few of these may have preserved a certain importance in a later age : Tell el Ghinah, directly to the east of Tell Ahmar, has been con- jectured to be Thilaticomum (possibly incorrectly : Regling, Beitrage zur alien Geschichte, 1902, Vol. I. p. 474) and Tell Bada'ah to be Aniana, the first being mentioned in the Antonine Itinerary and the second by Ptolemy. TELL AHMAR 29 tions of Shalmaneser IL^ By the time I had finished lunch Hajj 'All had selected a villager to serve me as guide to the wonders of Tell Ahmar, and we set off together to inspect the written stones. My new friend's name was Ibrahim. As we ran down to Shalmaneser's lions he confided to me that for some reason, wholly concealed from him, wallah, he was not beloved of the K^immakam of Bumbuj, and added that he proposed to place himself under my protection, please God. "Please God," said I, wondering to what misdeeds I might, in the name of my vassal, stand committed. The fragments of the Hittite stela were half buried in the ground, and I sent Ibrahim to the village, bidding him collect men with picks and spades to dig them out. The monument had been a four-sided block of stone with rounded corners, covered on three sides with an inscription and on the fourth with a king in low relief standing upon a bull (Fig. 18). When we had disengaged the bull from the earth the villagers fell to discussing what kind of animal it was, and Ibrahim took upon himself to pronounce it a pig. But Hajj 'Alt, who had been tempted forth from the tents to view the antica, intervened decisively in the debate. "In the ancient days," said he, "they made pictures of men and maidens, lions, horses, bulls and dogs; but they never made pictures of pigs." This statement was received deferentially by all, and Ibrahim, with the fervour of the newly convinced, hastened to corroborate it. "No, wallah ! They never made pictures of pigs." The whole village turned out to help in the work of making moulds of the inscriptions, those who were not actively em- ployed with brush and paste and paper sitting round in an attentive circle. There is little doing at Tell Ahmar, and even the moulding of a Hittite inscription, which is not to the European an occupation fraught with interest, affords a wel- ^ Mr. Hogarth (at whose request I visited Tell Ahmar) has published the carved slabs and the stela in the Annals of ArchcEology and Anthro- pology, Vol. II. No. 4. He saw them when he was at Tell Ahmar in 1908. 30 AMURATH TO AMURATH come diversion — to say nothing of the prospect of earning a piastre if you wait long enough. But on the third day, wind and rain called a halt, and guided by the sheikh of the neigh- bouring village of Kubbeh I explored the river-bank. Half- an-hour below Tell Ahmar, among some insignificant ruins, we found a small Hittite inscription cut on a bit of basalt, and close to it a block of limestone carved with a much effaced relief. A few minutes further to the east a lion's head roughly worked in basalt lay upon a mound. The head is carved in the round, but we dug into the mound and uncovered a large block on which the legs were represented in relief. We rode on to Kubbeh, where the inhabitants are Arabic-speaking Kurds, and found in the graveyard the fragment of a Latin inscription in well-cut letters — C O M F LONG H F R V I A S We left the hamlet of Ja'deh a little to the right, and an hour further down passed the village of Mugharah, beyond which the eastern ridge of high ground draws in towards the river. In a small valley, just before We reached the slopes of the hill, I saw the remains of some construction that looked like a bridge built of finely squared stones, and on the further side a graveyard with a couple of broken stone sarcophagi in it. The sheikh said that after rain he had found glass and gold rings here. He insisted on my inspecting some caves by the water's edge where he was positive we should find writing, and I went reluctantly, for a series of disillusions has ended in destroying the romantic interest that once hung about caves. These were no better than I had expected, and the writing was a cross incised over one of the entrances. The rain had stopped and we rode on to the big mound of Kara Kaz^k (Kiepert calls it Kyrk Kazak), at the foot of which there is a considerable area covered with cut and moulded stones, and massive door-jambs still standing upright with half their height buried in the earth. I should say that it was the site of a town of the Byzantine period. When we returned to FIG. l8. — TEI.L AHMAR, HITTITE STELA. FIG. 19. — TELL AHMAR, EARTHENWARE JAK. CARCHEMISH 31 camp Ibrahtm brought me two fragments of a large earthen- ware jar decorated round the top with a double line raised and notched in the clay (Fig. 19). In the band between were set alternately a head in high relief and a semi-circle of the notched clay. The heads were finely worked, the eyes rather prominent and the cheeks round and full — a type which recalled that of the stone heads carved upon the walls of the Parthian palace at Hatra. Whether it were Parthian or not, the jar was certainly pre-Mohammadan. The night closed in cloudless and frosty, and I resolved to risk the caprices of the river and ride up next morning to Carchemish, for it is impossible to lie within half-a-day's journey of a great capital and yet make no effort to see it. Before dawn we sent a messenger up the river and charged him to bring us a boat to a point above the camp, that we might land on the west bank of the Euphrates above its junction with the Sajur, a river which we were told was diffi- cult to cross. In half-an-hour Fattuh and I reached Tell el 'Abr (the Mound of the Ford), where there is a small village, and on going down to the river found, to our surprise, that the boat was there before us — but not ready ; that would have been too much to expect. I left Fattuh to bale out the water with which it was filled and went off to inspect Tell el Kum- luk, a quarter of an hour away if you gallop. Here there was no village, but only a large graveyard with broken columns used as tombstones. By the time I returned to the river the boat had been made more or less seaworthy, but a sharp little wind had risen, the swift current of the Euphrates was ruffled, and the boatmen shook their heads and doubted whether they would dare to cross. We did not leave the decision to them, but hurried the horses into the leaking craft •and pushed off. The stream swept us down and the wind held us close to the east bank, but with much labour and frequent invocation of God and the Prophet we sidled across and ran .aground on the opposite shore. Our troubles were not yet over, for our landing-place turned out to be a big island, and there was still an arm of the river before us. The stream had risen during the rain of the previous day and was racing 32 AMURATH TO AMURATH angrily through the second channel, but we plunged in and, with the water swirling round the shoulders of our horses, succeeded in making the passage. We shook ourselves dry and turned our faces to Carchemish. The road under the bluffs by tTie river-side was impassable, and we climbed up a gorge into the rocky country that lies along the top of the cliff. At one point we saw a mass of ruins, door-jambs and squared stones, which Kiepert — I know not on what ground — calls Kloster Ruine. In that bare land we met a cheerful old man driving a donkey and carrying a rifle. "Whither going in peace?" said he. "To Carchemish," we answered (only we called it Jerablus), and I fell to considering how often the same question had met with the same answer when the stony path was full of people from the Tell Ahmar city going up and down to learn the news of the capital and bring back word of the movements of Assyrian armies and the market price of corn. Fattuh, elated by the conquest of the river, bubbled over with talk, simple tales of his beloved Aleppo, of the ways of its inhabitants great and small, and of his many journeys to Killiz and 'Ain T&b, Urfah, Diyirbekr, and Baghdad. " Your Excellency knows that I was the first man to take a carriage to Baghdad, for there was no road then, but after- wards they made it. And as for my carriage, Zekiyeh has lined it inside and filled it with cushions, so that the gentry may lie at ease while I drive them. And have I told you how I got Zekiyeh ? " "No," said I mendaciously; I have travelled with Fattuh before, and have not been left unaware of the episodes that led to his betrothal, but reminiscences that take the listener into the heart of Eastern life bear repetition. The lady of Fattuh 's choice was fourteen when he first set eyes on her; he went straight to her father and made a bid for her hand, but the girl was very fair and the father asked a larger dowry than Fattuh could give. "Fortunately," continued Fattuh ingenuously, "he had an illness of the eyes, and I said to him : ' There is in Aleppo a doctor who loves me, and will cure you for my sake.' But he answered : ' God give you CARCHEMISH 33 wisdom ! none can cure me save only God.' And I mounted him in my carriage, and drove him to that doctor, and look you, he healed him so that he saw like a youth. Then he said, ' There is none like Fattiih, and I will give him my daughter even without a dowry.' So I bought her clothes and a gold chain and all that she desired, for I said, ' She shall have nought but what I give her.' And since we mar- ried I have given her gold ornaments and dresses of silk, and when we return from this journey I will take her on a pil- grimage to Jerusalem. And indeed she loves me mightily, and I her," said Fattuh, bringing his idyll to a satisfactory conclusion. I have seen Zekiyeh in all the bravery of her silk gowns and gold ornaments, and I do not think she has ever had cause to regret the day when Fattuh mounted her father in his carriage. We rode fast, and in a couple of hours came down to the Euphrates again, and so over the low ground for another hour till we reached a tell by the river with a village close to it. This village and tell, as well as the large mound half-an- hour away to the north-west, and the farm near it, are all called Jer^blus,^ and probably local tradition is right in drawing no distinction between the widely separated mounds, the whole area between them having been, in all likelihood, occupied by the houses and gardens of the Hittite capital. Until you come to Babylon there is no site on the Euphrates so imposing as the northern mound of Carchemish (Fig. 17). It was the acropolis, the strongly fortified dwelling-place of king and god. At its north-eastern end it rises to a high ridge enclosed on two sides in a majestic sweep of the river. From the top of this ridge you may see the middle parts of the strategic line drawn by the Euphrates from Samosata to Thapsacus, strung with battlefields whereon the claims of Europe and Asia were fought out; while to the west stretch the rich plains that gave wealth to Carchemish, to Europus, ^ JeriUlus or Jerlibis, the names are used indiscriminately. The former is thought by Noldeke to be an Arabic plural of Jirbds (mentioned by Y4k(lt as opposite Kinnesrin, Dictionary, Vol. II. p. 688) and the latter as Arabicized from Europus. D 34 AMURATH TO AMURATH and to Hierapolis. They are now coming back into cultivation as the merchants of Aleppo acquire and till them, or enter into an agricultural partnership with their Arab .proprietors, and if the Baghdad railway is brought this way, as was confidently expected, the returns from them will be doubled or trebled in value. The northern mound is covered with the ruins of the Roman and Byzantine city, columns and moulded bases, foundations of walls set round paved courtyards, and the line of a colonnaded street running across the ruin field from the high ridge to a breach that indicates the place of a gate in the southern face of the enclosing wall. A couple of carved Hittite slabs, uncovered during Henderson's excavations and left exposed at the mercy of the weather, bear witness to the antiquity of the site. It has long been desolate, but there is no mistaking the greatness of the city that was protected by that splendid mound. Fattuh had ordered the boatmen to pull or punt the boat over to the west bank during our absence ; the river was rising and the arm that we had crossed with difficulty in the morn- ing might have been impassable by nightfall. The boat was surrounded when we arrived by every one in the district who happened to have business on the opposite bank, and recog- nized in our passage an unusually favourable opportunity for getting over for nothing. As soon as we had embarked, some twenty persons and four donkeys hustled in after us and were like to swamp us, but Fattuh rose up in anger and ejected half of them, pitching the lean and slender Arab peasafits over the gunwales and into the water at haphazard until we judged the boat to be sufficiently lightened. Those who were allowed to remain earned their passage, for when we presently ran aground on the head of the island — as it was obvious to the most inexperienced eye that we must — they leapt out and wading waist high in the stream, pushed us off. So we galloped home beside the swiftly-flowing river, aglint with the sunset, and found the camp fire lighted and the cooking pots a-simmer, and Tell Ahmar settling down to its evening meal and to rest. CHAPTER II TELL AHMAR TO BUSEIRAH Feb. 21 — March 7 The water of the Euphrates is much esteemed by the inhabitants of its banks. It is, I think, an acquired taste; the newcomer will be apt to look askance at the turgid liquid that issues from the spout of his teapot and to question whether a decoction of ancient dust can be beneficial to the European constitution. Fattuh, being acquainted with my idiosyncrasies in the matter of drinking water, accepted with- out a murmur the sacrilegious decree that that which was destined for my flask must be boiled; whereby, though we did not succeed in removing all solid bodies, we reduced them to a comparative harmlessness. But if it cannot be described as a good table river, the Euphrates is the best of travelling companions, and the revolution of the seasons will never again bring me to the last week of February without setting loose a desire for the wide reaches of the stream and the open levels of the desert through which it flows, the sharp cold of nightfall, the hoar frost of the dawn, and the first long ray of the sun striking a dismantled camp. "There is no road," said Fattuh, "like the road to Baghdad : the desert on one hand and the water on the other." Our way next morning took us past Kubbeh to Mughdrah, which we reached in three hours. Here we left the river and climbing the low, rocky hill to the east, found ourselves in a stony and thinly populated country bounded by another ridge of eastern hill. After twenty-five minutes' riding we saw the hamlet of Kayyik Debfi about half-a^mile to the left of the track, and in another quarter of an hour we reached a few deserted houses. Four hours from Tell Ahmar D 2 35 36 AMURATH TO AMURATH we pitched camp on the further bank of a small stream near the village of Serrin, for I wished to examine two towers which stand upon the crest of a high ridge about half-an- hour to the east. They are called by the Arabs the Wind- mills, but in reality they are tower tombs. The more northerly, which is the best preserved, is 420 m. square and two storeys high (Fig. 20). The walls of the lower storey rise in solid masonry to a height of about six metres and are crowned by a plain course of projecting stones, which serves SCALE I — I — I— « — • — I 1 METRES 5 O 5 FIG. 20. — SERRtN, NORTH TOWER TOMB, PLAN AND ELEVATION SHOWING MOULDINGS. as cornice (Fig. 21). On the east and west sides, just below the cornice, there is a pair of gargoyles, much weathered. They represent the head and fore-quarters of lions. A little below the pair of heads on the west side is a Syriac inscrip- tion, dated in the year 385 of the Seleucid era, i. e. a.d. 74, which states that the tomb was built by one Manu for himself and his sons.^ The second storey is decorated with fluted engaged columns, four on either side, the outer pair forming ' The inscription is given by Pognon : Inscriptions de la Misopotamie, p. 17. The tomb was visited by Oppenheim, and is mentioned by him in Tell Halaf (ist number, loth year of Der alte Orient), and in his Griechische und lateinische Inschriften. (Byzantinische Zeitschrift, 1905, p. 7.) SERRtN 37 the angles. The bases of these columns rest upon a course of masonry adorned with three fasciae : it is to be noted that the mouldings are not carried straight through to the angles, but are returned one within the other like the mouldings of a door lintel. The Ionic capitals carry a plain Ionic entablature consisting of an architrave with fasciae, which are here taken through to the corners, a narrow frieze and a cyma of considerable projection. Probably the whole was surmounted by a stone pyramid. There are two burial chambers, one in each storey. The lower chamber can be entered by a door in the east wall which was originally closed by a large block of stone. The entrance to the upper chamber, high up in the east wall between the columns, was closed in the same fashion, and the block of porphyry which sealed it is still intact.^ Pognon, who has given the best description and illustrations of the monument, mentions five other examples of tower tombs crowned with pyramids, one of them being the southern tower at Serrin. The well-known tower tombs of Palmyra and the HaurSn are not capped by a pyramid, nor is the face of their walls broken at any point by engaged columns. I believe the type illustrated at Serrin to be compounded of the simple tower tomb and the canopy, or cyborium, tomb.^ The cyborium tomb exists in an infinite number of variations in Syria, in the mountain district near Birejik (whence M. Cumont has supplied me with four examples, three of them as yet unpublished ^), in Asia Minor and in the African Tripoli. Sometimes the columns stand free,* sometimes they are engaged in the walls,^ some- ' Oppenheim thought it was the end of a sarcophagus, but Pognon 's guide climbed into the upper chamber and found it to be nothing but a block of stone closing the entrance. ^ For the cyborium tomb, see Heisenburg : Grabeskirche und Apostel- kirche, Vol. I. ch. xvi. ' A photograph of the fourth, the Ziareh of Khoros at Cyrrhus, was published by Chapot in Le Tour du Monde, April 8, 1905, p. 162. * Mylasa : published by the Dilettanti Society ; Tripoli : Nouvelles Archives des Missions, Tome XII. fas. i ; Dana : De Vogu^, La Syrie Centrale, plate 78. ° Tomb of Absalom, Jerusalem. 38 AMURATH TO AMURATH times they are represented only by engaged angle piers, ^ sometimes by free standing angle piers,^ and occasionally column and pier have dropped away and the plain wall alone remains,^ but the pyramidal roof is an almost constant feature, which, even in the simplest of these tombs, recalls the original canopy type. In the hill side near the tower I noticed several rock-cut mausoleums, now half-choked with stones and earth, and the hill was no doubt the necropolis of a town lying in the low ground that stretches down to the modern village by the stream.* The second tower, of which only the south wall remains, is situated on the southern end of the ridge, half-an-hour's ride from the first (Fig. 22). It differs slightly in detail from the other. In the lower storey a shallow engaged pier stands at either angle, while in the upper storey, in place of the porphyry block, there is an arched niche between the two central engaged columns. The fascice returned at the corners reappear, but the columns are not fluted. The hill top commands a wide view over country which appears to be entirely desert. My guide, who was a Christian from Aleppo, an agent of the Liquorice Trust for the Serrin district, said that there was no settled population to the east of us, and that the few Arab encamp- ments which were visible upon the rolling steppe were those of the Beni Sa'fd, a subdivision of the Beni Fahl. As we sat in the sunshine under the tower, Jirji related tales of his neighbours, the Arab sheikhs, for whom he entertained, as the townsman will, feelings that ranged between contempt and fear — contempt for their choice of a black tent in the desert as a dwelling-place, and fear inspired by the authority ' Gereme : Rott, Kleinasiatische Denkmaler, p. 171 ; El Barah : De Vogii^, op. cit. pi. 75. 2 M. Cumont's monuments are of this type and I have seen a fine example at Barid in N. Syria, also as yet unpublished except for a photograph given by me in The Desert and the Sown, p. 287. ^ Maden Sheher : published by Sir W. Ramsay and myself in The Thousand and One Churches, p. 230. * The name which has been suggested for the site is Baisampse, a place mentioned by Ptolemy. There are a considerable number of cut stones on the mound near the village. KAL'AT EN NEJM 39 which they wielded from that humble abode. But chiefly his simple soul was exercised by the swift downfall of Ibrahim Pasha, who for so many years had been, as the fancy prompted him, the scourge or the mighty protector of all the inhabitants of northern Mesopotamia, a man with whom the government had to make terms, while the great tribes stood in awe of him and the lesser tribes fled at the whisper of his name. Jirjt, like many another, refused to believe that he was dead, and entertained us with wild surmises as to the manner of his possible return from the unknown refuge where he lay in hiding. "God knows he was a brave man," said he. "Oh lady, do you see Kal'at en Nejm yonder ? " And he pointed west, where across the Euphrates the walls and bastions of the fortress crowned the precipitous bank. "There be forded, he and eight hundred men with him, when he hastened back from Damascus to his own country, hearing that the government was against him. They swam the river with their horses and rested that night at Serrin. But the Pasha was grave and silent : God's mercy upon him, for he befriended us Christians." H^jj 'Ali shook his head. "He wrecked the world," said he. "Praise God he is dead." Somewhere between the two opinions lies the truth. I suspect that though the way in which his overthrow was accomplished left much to be desired, the MilH Kurds, of whom he was the chief, had gained under his bold leadership a pre- eminence in lawlessness which no government was justified in countenancing. But since he is dead, peace to his memory, for he knew no fear. We could not see the river from Serrin, but next morning I rode down to it and looked across to the splendid walls of Kal'at en Nejm. The castle, seated upon a rocky spur, encloses the steep slopes with its masonry until it seems like a massive buttress of the hill, as ageless and no less imperishable than the rock itself. We turned away from this stern ghost of ancient wars and rode from the Euphrates up a bare valley wherein we came upon a great cave, in- habited by a few Arabs. It contained three large chambers, 40 AMURATH TO AMURATH the opening of which had been fenced in by the latest in- habitants with screens made of rushes. Upon one of the walls I found a curious inscription written in characters not unlike those seen by Sachau in a cave near Urfah ^ (Fig. 23). The Arab women with their children in I /^ Ji their arms clamoured round me, and I / \ \ / the claims of all. One scolding wench /^ j.^ '^ Ij, distributed among them what small 7 ^-_ ^y^J coins I had with me, without satisfying ""^ ran after us up the valley vociferating it I t^ slipped and fell upon a smooth stone, f . / her demand that ten paras should be V— J \ J^ given to her swaddled babe. We had not ridden far before Jusef's horse / r*\ given to her swaddled babe. We had dismounting his rider, who was at no FIG. 23. — INSCRIPTION IN CAVE NEAR serrIn. time too ccrtaiu of his seat. "Allah ! " ejaculated Hajj 'All; "it was the woman's curse that brought him down." But the male- diction had missed fire, or perhaps it was only ten paras' worth of damnation, for Jusef and his horse scrambled up together unhurt. At the head of the valley we came out on to a green sward. The rains on this side of the river had been scanty and the grass had scarcely begun to grow, but already there were a few encampments of the Fahl in sheltered places which later in the season would be set thick with the black tents of the 'Anazeh, who do not come down to the river until the rain pools are exhausted in their winter quarters. The thin blue smoke of the morn- ing camp fires rose out of the hollows and my heart rose with it, for here was the life of the desert, in open spaces under the open sky, and when once you have known it, the eternal savage in your breast rejoices at the return to it. As we rode near the tents a man galloped up to us and begged for a pinch of tobacco. He was clothed in a ragged cotton shirt and a yet more ragged woollen cloak, but Hdjj 1 It was re-copied by Pognon and published by him in Inscrip. de la Misopotamie, p. 82. The similarity between some of the characters in the two inscriptions is striking. RUMEILEH 41 'All looked after him as he turned away and observed, " His mare is worth ;^200." In three hours from Serrin we caught up the baggage animals at the last village we were to see until we reached Rakkah. Mas'udlyeh is its name. On a mound close to the river Oppenheim found three mosaic pavements, parts of which are still visible, but the most beautiful of the three has been almost destroyed and nothing remains of it but a simple geometrical border of diagonal intersecting lines.^ Beyond Mas'iidiyeh we crossed a long belt of sand, lying in a bend of the river ; we left a small mound (Tell el Ban&t) a mile to the east, climbed a ridge of bare hill and dropped down into a wide stretch of grass country, empty, peaceful and most beautiful. It was enclosed in a semicircle of hills that stood back from the river, and from out of the midst of it rose an isolated peak known to the Arabs as Kuleib. This land is the home of the Weldeh tribe, and not far from the Euphrates we found a group of their tents pitched between green slopes and the broad reaches of sand which give the spot its name, Rumeileh, the Little Sands. It was the encampment of Sheikh Sall^l, and no sooner had we arrived than the sheikh's son, Muhammad, came out to bid us welcome and invite us to his father's tent. The two zaptiehs and I took our places round the hearth while Muhammad roasted and pounded the coffee beans, telling us the while of the movements of the great tribes, where Hakim Beg of the 'Anazeh was lying, and where Ibn Hudh- dhM of the Amarat, and similar matters of absorbing interest. Sheikh Sallal was in reduced circumstances by reason of a recent difference of opinion with the government. His brother had been enlisted as a soldier and had subsequently deserted, whereupon the government had seized Sallal 's flocks and clapped the sheikh into gaol, and finally he had sold "the best mare left to us, wallah ! " for ;C^37 and with the money procured his own release. ' It appears in the extreme right-hand top corner of his Fig. 22, Inschrif. aus Syrien und Mesopot. 42 AMURATH TO AMURATH "Eh billah!" said H^jj 'Alt, shaking his head over the confused tale in which, as is usual in these episodes, the wrongdoing seemed to be shared impartially by all con- cerned. "Such is the government ! " "And now, oh lady," pursued the sheikh, "we have neither camels nor sheep, for the government has eaten all." "How do you live?" said I, looking round the circle of dark, bearded faces by the camp fire. " God knows ! " sighed the sheikh, and turning to Hajj 'All he asked him what was this new government of which he heard, and liberty, what was that ? "Liberty?" said H^jj 'All, evading the question; "how should there be liberty in these lands? Look you, they talk of liberty, but there is no change in the world. In Aleppo many men are murdered every week, and who knows what they are doing, those envoys whom we sent to Constantinople ? " In spite of his misfortunes Sheikh Sallal designed to enter- tain me at dinner and had set aside for that purpose an ancient goat. My attention was attracted to it by the sound of bleating in the women's quarters and I was just in time to save its life, expending myself, however, in protestations of gratitude. Muhammad ibn Sallil took me round the encampment before the light failed and pointed out the foundations of a number of stone-built houses. Behind my tents the summits of some grassy mounds were ringed round with circles of great stones, of the origin of which he knew nothing. I counted five of them ; in the largest lay founda- tions of small rectangular chambers. As we walked back to the tents Muhammad said reproachfully : "Oh lady, you have not laughed once, not when I showed you the ruins, nor when I told you the name of the hills." I hastened to amend my ways, and thus encouraged he enumerated a string of ruined sites in the neighbourhood and accepted an invitation to serve us as guide next morning. He prepared himself for the journey by slipping on four cartridge belts, one over the other, although our whole MUNBAYAH 43 road lay in the Weldeh country, and the worst enemy we encountered was a raging wind which sent the Euphrates sands whirling about us and obscured the landscape near the river. In about an hour we climbed up on to the higher ground of the grass plain at a point called Shems ed Din, where among a heap of cut stones I found fragments of an entablature carved with dentils and palmettes. Perhaps the ruins were the remains of a tower tomb. At Tell ez ZSher, an hour further south, we saw heaps of unsquared building-stones. Above this site stood Sheikh Sin, a steep hill which we ascended, but found no trace of construction on it. I sent my zaptieh down to stop the baggage and bid Fattuh camp at the mound of Munbayah near the river, and with Muhammad turned inland to a hill called by him Jerniyeh, some five miles to the east. Muhammad rode across the downs at a hand gallop in the teeth of the wind, and I behind him, too much buffeted by the storm to call a halt. The immediate reason for our haste, as I presently discovered, was a couple of pedlars from whom he desired to buy soap, a commodity of which he stood in great need. The two men were Turks ; they greeted me with effusion as a fellow alien in those wastes, and at parting pressed upon me a handful of raisins with their blessings. We galloped on faster than before and arrived breathless at Jerniyeh which lifts its solitary head a hundred feet or more above the surrounding plain. On the summit are three large mounds into which the Arabs had dug and uncovered fine cut stones ; I conjecture that there may have been here watch towers or tower tombs belonging to the town of which the ruins lie below, to the south of the hill. These ruins comprise a large low mound ringed round with a wall and a ditch, and a con- siderable area covered with remains of buildings made of unsquared stones. Occasionally the plan of house or court was marked out upon the grass and Muhammad showed me several deep cisterns — altogether a very remarkable ruin field though it is not named on Kiepert's map. On our way back to the river we climbed Tell el Ga'rah and found the founda- tions of a fort on the top of it. Here we picked up a much- 44 AMURATH TO AMURATH weathered Byzantine coin and a quantity of sherds of glazed Arab pottery, blue and green and purple. Munbayah, where my tents were pitched — the Arabic name means only an elevated spot — has been conjectured to be the Bersiba of Ptolemy's catalogue of place names. It is an irregularly- shaped double enclosure, resting on one side on the river (Fig. 25). The line of the walls is marked by high grass mounds, but here and there a bit of massive polygonal masonry, large stones laid without mortar, crops out of the soil. The outer enclosing wall is not continued along the north side, but ends in a heap of earth and stones which looks like the ruins of a tower or bastion. To the south there is a clearly-marked gate in the outer wall, corresponding with a narrower opening in the inner line of fortification ; another gate leads out to the north, and facing the river there are traces of a broad water gate, protected on either side by a wall that drops down the slope towards the stream (Fig. 26). Twenty minutes further down the bank lies another mound, Tell Sheikh Hassan. There are vestiges of construction by the water's edge between the two mounds, and south of Tell Sheikh Hassan the ground is broken by a large stretch of ruin mounds, among which I saw a rude capital. In another half- hour down stream, at 'AnSb, there is again an enclosure of grassy heaps strewn with stones. For a distance of about three miles, therefore, the left bank of the river would seem to have been inhabited and guarded, though possibly at different dates. JernJyeh and Munbayah are by far the most interesting sites which I saw on the little-known stretch of the river between Tell Ahmar and Kal'at Ja'bar; it is useless to conjecture in what way, if at all, they were connected with each other, but in both places I should like to clear away the earth and see what lies beneath. If it had been possible to cross the Euphrates I would have examined the high tell of Sheikh 'Arfid which had been all day the fixed point for my compass, but though there was a boat to be had, the intolerable wind continued till night- fall and made the passage impracticable. The mental exasperation produced by wind when you are living and IVlUiMiAIAn 45 PLAN of the Mounds of M U N B AY A H >f/ .f ■ft.' y Water 'If: »■4WfcJa\^JV,„^^^l,„,,S^U«^^<^^M, #r 5p ^^=^. ^^ Scale o( Metres M too MvnfWi tnf Isutt, liMttn Fie. a;. 46 AMURATH TO AMURATH trying to work out of doors, passes belief. The blast seizes you by the hand as you would hold your compass steady, dances jigs with your camera and elopes with your measuring tape, and when after an exhausting struggle you return vanquished to your tent, it is only to find your books and papers buried in sand. Moreover, commissariat arrange- ments were complicated by the interruption of communica- tions with the opposite side of the river. Fortunately I had foreseen that there would be little food for man or beast on the left bank, where no travellers pass, and contrary to my habits had laid in a provision of tinned meats, for which we had reason to be thankful. The baggage animals were lightly loaded and could carry four days' corn besides their packs; when this ran short Fattuh went foraging in every Arab encampment, but occasionally the horses were without their full allowance, for at this time of the year the Arabs themselves are very scantily supplied. We soon learnt to place no reliance on assurances, however emphatic, that the next sheikh down the river would be well furnished, and as our road led us into regions that had suffered more and more severely from the lack of rain, we gave up all hope of ekeing out our corn with the grass which never grew that year. The corn, too, became dearer, until at Baghdad it touched famine prices. On the upper parts of the river there is no fuel and we carried charcoal for cooking purposes ; but when the tamarisk bushes began to appear, about a day's march north of Rakkah, the muleteers boiled their big rice pot over a fire of sticks and the zaptiehs warmed their hands in the sharp chill of the early morning at the heap of embers that had been kept alive all night. The zaptiehs are sup- posed to feed themselves, but except on the rare occasions when we were on a high road, they shared the meals of my servants. I would find them sitting in the dark round the steaming dish served up by Hajj 'Amr, and with them the Arab who had been our guide that day, or one who had dropped in towards supper time to give us information of the road, or any aged person considered by Fattuh to be worthy of our hospitality. We held many a frugal feast FIG. 24. — WIFE AND CHILDREN OF A WELDEH SHEIKH. FIG. 26. — MUNBAYAH, WATER GATE. FIG. 28. — NESHABAH, TOWER TOMB. UlbbJiH 47 under the stars where the waters of the Euphrates roll through the wild. During the next day's ride we followed the course of the river closely, save where the grassy edge of the desert was separated from the water by a tract of sand and stones covered in time of flood, and therefore devoid of all trace of settled habitation. The tents of the Weldeh were scattered along the banks and occasionally a small bit of ground had been scratched with the plough and sown with corn. At one point we saw the white canvas tent of a man from Aleppo who was engaged in negotiating an amicable partnership with the Weldeh sheikhs. The majestic presence of the river in the midst of uncultivated lands, which, with the help of its waters, would need so little labour to make them productive, takes a singular hold on the imagination. I do not believe that the east bank has always been so thinly peopled, and though the present condition may date from very early times, it is probable that there was once a con- tinuous belt of villages by the stream, their sites being still marked by mounds. Half-an-hour from 'Anab we passed Tell Jifneh, with remains of buildings about it; in another hour and a half there were ruins at Hallaweh, and forty minutes further we came to a big mound called Tell Mur- raibet. From this point the grass lands retreated from the Euphrates, leaving place for a wide stretch of sand and scrub opposite Old Meskeneh, Kiepert marks two towers on some high ground to the east, but they must have fallen into ruin since Chesney's survey, for I could not see them. Six hours from Bersiba we reached in heavy rain the tents of Sheikh Mabruk and pitched our camp by his, so that we might find shelter for our horses under his wide roof. We were about opposite Dibseh, which was perhaps the famous ford of Thapsacus. Mabruk told me that in summer, when the water is low, camels can cross the river just above Dibseh ; at Meskeneh a ferry boat is to be had, but at no other point until you come to Rakkah. Next morning a young man from the sheikh's tent, cousin to MabrQk (all the unmarried youths of the sheikh's family 48 AMURATH TO AMURATH are lodged in his great house of hair) rode with us to Kal'at Ja'bar. He told me of a ruin called Mudawwarah (the Circle), an hour and a half away to the east : it may represent one of Kiepert's towers, but according to Ibrahim's account nothing is now to be seen but a heap of stones. We rode out of the camp with a troop of women and children driving donkeys into the hills, where they collect brushwood. "Last year," said my companion, "they dared not stray from the tents, lest the horsemen of Ibrahim Pasha should attack them and seize the donkeys. Wallah ! the children could not drive out the goats to pasture, and every man sat with his loaded rifle across his knees and watched for the coming of raiders. For indeed he took all, oh lady; he robbed rich and poor; he held up caravans and killed the solitary traveller." "Eh wah ! " said the zaptieh, "and the soldiers of the government he killed also. He was sultan in the waste." "But now that he is gone," continued Ibrahim, "we are at rest. And as soon as we heard of his death we blessed the government, and all the men of the Weldeh rode out and seized the flocks that he had captured from us, and more besides. And behold, there they pasture by the river."" And he pointed to some sheep grazing under the care of a couple of small boys. "Then all the desert is safe now ? " said I. "Praise God!" he answered, "for the 'Anazeh are our friends. We have no foes but the Shammar, and their lands are far from us." Before we reached Kal'at Ja'bar we galloped up into the low hills to see a rock-cut tomb. Through a hole in the ground we let ourselves down into a chamber 5"iom. x 7"oo m., with nine arcosolia set round it, each containing from four to six loculi (Fig. 27). On one of the long sides there was a small rectangular niche between the arcosolia. Ibrahim called the place Mahall es Safsaf and assured me that it was the only cavern known to him in these hills. From here he took me down to a mound named Tell el Afrai, which lies about a quarter of a mile from the river. On the landward side gCALEI FIG. 27. — MAHALL ES SAFSAF. KAL'AT JA'BAR 49 it is protected by a dyke forming a loop from the Euphrates. At one time the water must have filled this moat, but the upper end has silted up and the channel is now dry. Out of the mound, which is un- usually large, the rains had washed a number of big stones, some of them squared. We were now close to the two towers of Kal'at Ja'bar, one being a minaret that rises from the centre of the fortress, while the other, known to the Arabs as Neshabah, stands upon an isolated hill to the north-west 1 (Fig. 28). Of the Neshabah tower nothing remains but a rectangular core of masonry (unworked stones set in thick mortar) containing a winding stair which can be approached by a doorway about four metres from the ground. Below the door there is a vaulted niche which looks like the remains of a sepulchral chamber. All the facing stones have fallen away, but the core is ridged in a manner that suggests the former existence of engaged columns, and I believe that Neshabah is a tower tomb older than the castle, rather than the outlying watch- tower of an Arab fort.^ The buildings at Kal'at Ja'bar are mainly of brick, though some stone is used in the walls and bastions that surround the hill-top (Fig. 29). The entrance is strongly guarded ; from the outer gate-house a long narrow passage, hewn out of the rock, leads into the interior of the 1 I could not reconcile the topography here with Kiepert's map. He marks a northern tower, which he calls Nesheib (doubtless my Neshabah) and places there the Maz^r of Sultan 'Abdullah. He has a second tower further to the south-east, and finally the castle itself. The second tower is non-existent, or else it represents the minaret in the castle. The only mazSr which I saw or heard mentioned is that of Sultan SelJm, a small modern building between Neshabah and the castle. 2 It resembles the tower tombs at Irzi, which will be described later, 50 AMURATH TO AMURATH castle. Among the ruins within the walls are a vaulted hall and parts of a palace composed of a number of small vaulted chambers. The construction of the small vaults struck me as having stronger affinities with Byzantine than with the typical Mesopotamian systems, and I should not assign to them a very early date. The palace had also contained a hall of some size, but only the south wall is standing (Fig. 31). It is broken by a deep recess, possibly a mihrclb, with a doorway on either side, and the upper part is decorated with a row of flat tri- foliate niches. In the centre of the castle a round minaret rises from a massive square base (Fig. 30). Towa'rds the top of the minaret there is a double band of ornamental brickwork with a brick inscription between. I could not decipher the inscription, owing to its great height, but the characters were not Cufic, and the round shape of the minaret makes it im- probable that it should be earlier than the twelfth century. Beyond the minaret is a vaulted cistern. The shelving north- west side of the hill is defended by a double ring of brick towers, but on the south-east side, where the rocks are precipitous, there is little or no fortification. The brick walls of the buildings above the gate-way are decorated with string courses and bands of diamond-shaped motives, the diamonds set point to point or enclosed in hollow squares (Fig. 32). The history of the castle is not easy to disentangle from the accounts left by the Arab geographers. An earlier name for it was Dausar, but even this does not seem to have been applied before the seventh century, though Idrisi, writing in the twelfth century, ascribes its foundation to Alexander. He is the first author who mentions Dausar and he gives no authority for his statement as to its origin. Opposite Dausar, on the right bank of the Euphrates, stretches the battlefield of Siffin, where in a.d. 657 the Khalif 'Ali met the forces of the Umayyad Mu'dwiyah. Tradition has it that 'Ali entrusted his ally Nu'man, a prince of the house of Mundhir, with the defence of these reaches of the Euphrates, and that a servant of the latter, Dausar by name, built the castle which was called after him. It took its present name from an Arab of the Kusheir, from whose sons it was wrested (in a.d. 1087) FIG. 29. — KAI. AT .)A BAR. FIG. 30. — KAL'aT JA'bAR, minaret. FIG. 31. — KAI.' AT JA' BAR, HALL OF PALACE. W2^t.,.;c ^*v>^ FIG. 37. — RAKKAH, MOSQUE FROM EAST. FIG. 38. — RAKKAH, ARCADE OF MOSQUE, FROM NORTH. HARAGLAH 53 then camped under a mound called Tell 'Abd 'Ali, not far from a couple of very poor tents of the Afadleh, with the river a mile avi^ay. The night was exquisitely stiil, but from time to time an owl cried with a shrill note like that of a shepherd- boy calling to his flocks. Our camp proved to be but two hours' ride from Rakkah. A little more than half-way between the two places we reached the enigmatic ruin which is known to the Arabs as Haraglah, a name which may be a corruption of Heraclea. It consists of a rectangular fortress, almost square, with a series of small vaulted chambers forming the outer parts of the block and, as far as I could judge, larger vaulted chambers filling up the centre (Fig. 32). At the four angles there are round towers. The building as it now stands is merely a substructure, a platform rest- ing on vaults, on which stood an upper storey that has disappeared. The masonry is mostly of unsquared stones laid in a bed of very coarse mortar mixed with small stones, but the vaults are of brick tiles, and it is notice- able that these tiles are not laid in the true Mesopo- tamian fashion, whereby centering could be dispensed with (i. e. in narrow slices leaning back against the head-wall), but that the double ring of tiles is treated like the voussoirs of a stone arch and must have been built on a centering (Fig. 34). This structure would be enough to show that the work does not belong to the Mohammadan period. The fortress is ringed round by an outer wall, now completely ruined. Beyond it to the south runs a dyke, and beyond the dyke, some 500 m. south-east of the central fort, there is another mound on which I saw cut stones larger than the stones used at Haraglah. Still further SCALE IMn^ 1- FIG. 33. — HARAGLAH. 54 AMURATH TO AMURATH to the south lies a third mound, Tell Meraish, with a second dyke to the south of it. The two dykes appeared to be loop canals from the Euphrates and must therefore have formed part of an extensive system of irrigation ; probaby there had once been a considerable area of cultivation under the pro- tection of the fortress.^ So we came to Rakkah and there joined forces with the army of Julian, who had marched down from Carrhce and the head waters of the Belikh 1,500 years ago and more — the account of the march given by Ammianus Marcellinus is, however, irreconcilable with the facts of geography, for he says that Julian reached Callinicum in one day from the source of the river Belias, whereas it is at least a two days' journey. Callinicum was not the earliest town upon the site of Rakkah, though the record of history does not go back further than to its immediate predecessor, Nicephorium, which some say was founded by Alexander and others by Seleucus Nicator. When Julian stopped there to perform the sacrifice due at that season to Cybele, Callinicum was a strong fortress and an important market. Chosroes, a couple of hundred years later, finding it insufficiently guarded, seized and sacked it. Justinian rebuilt the fortifications, but in a.d. 633, according to Abu'l Fida, it fell to the Mohammadan invaders. In A.D. 772 the Khalif Mansur strengthened the position with a second fortified city, RSfikah (the Comrade), built, it is said, upon the same round plan as Baghdad, which was another city of his founding. Hclrun er Rashid built himself a palace either in Rakkah or in Rafikah, and used the place as his summer capital. In the subsequent centuries the older founda- tions fell into ruin and the Comrade, which continued to be a flourishing town, usurped its name, so that in Yakut's day (1225) the original Rakkah had disappeared, but Rafikah was known as Rakkah. Here is fine matter for confusion among the Arab geographers, and they do not fail to make the most of it. White Rakkah, Black Rakkah, Burnt Rakkah, and no ^ Sachau thought that Haraglah was of Hellenistic origin (Reise in Syrien und Mesopotamien, p. 245) ; Sarre believes that it may be Parthian, and the circular outer fortification gives colour to the sugges- tion (Zeitschr. der Gesell. fiir Erdkunde zu Berlin, 1909, No. 7). RAKKAH 55 less than two Middle Rakkahs figure upon their pages, and it is impossible to determine whether any or none of these titles stands for RSfikah, or which of them denotes the old Rakkah. But by 132 1 when Abu'l Fida wrote, all the Rakkahs were reduced to uninhabited ruin (perhaps by the Mongol hordes of Hulagii), and it only remains for the traveller to collect the names of sites, which his Arab guide will furnish with an alacrity that runs ahead of accuracy, and apply them as he thinks best to the list of recorded towns. And lest I should fail to add my quota to the tangled nomen- clature, I will hasten to state that at a distance of an hour and ten minutes east of the ruins that lie about the modern village, I rode over a large stretch of ground on which there were traces of habitation and was told that its name was Brown Rakkah — (Rakkat es Samra) — and on further inquiry I learnt that nearer to the Euphrates there was a similar area called Red Rakkah — (Rakkat el Hamra) — but as I neglected to visit the spot I need not do more than mention that Kiepert marks Black Rakkah — (Rakkat es SaudS) — at about the place where it must be. To come to matters less controvertible, the modern Rakkah consists of two villages, of which the westernmost has recently been erected by a Circassian colony upon high broken ground that certainly indicates the existence of an older settle- ment. Beyond it to the east there is a large semi-circular enclosure, the straight side turned towards the Euphrates and lying at a distance of about a mile from that river. The walls are built of sun-dried brick alternating with bands of burnt brick, and set at regular intervals with round bas- tions. There are clear traces of a moat or ditch and of a second, less important, wall beyond it. The Arab village lies in the south-west corner of this enclosure, near the centre are the ruins of a mosque with a round minaret, on the east side the remains of a large building, probably a palace, and at the south-east corner part of a gate called the Baghdad gate. Still further east there is yet another ruin field. Towards the middle of it rises a square minaret standing in a rectangular space which has been enclosed by walls of sun-dried brick, no doubt a mosque (Fig. 35). The minaret is of brick, but it rests 56 AMURATH TO AMURATH upon a square base formed of large blocks of marble. The brickwork is broken by six horizontal notched rings, the uppermost surmounting a wide band of ornamental brick. The notches in the brick were obviously intended to contain some other material, possibly wood, which has now perished. There are numerous fragments of columns in the neighbour- hood of the minaret. The, only other buildings are, north of the minaret, a small domed ziyarah, which local tradition would have to be the tomb of Yahya el Barmaki, who, as well as his more famous son Ja'far, was vizir to Harun er Rashid, and not far from the BaghdUd gate a similar shrine, known as the Ziydrah of Uweis el Karani. Uweis fell in a.d. 657 in one of the engagements fought on the Euphrates between 'Ali and Mu'awiyah, but his tomb is of no great interest except in so far as it is composed of older materials. Over the door- way is an inscription which states that "this fortress and shrine were repaired by Sultan Suleiman, son of Selim Khdn," who reigned from 1526-1574.^ It is obvious that the stone must have been brought from elsewhere, since the inscription cannot refer to the insignificant structure on which it is placed. In the adjoining graveyard there are many frag- ments of columns, presumably taken from the mosque, and some much battered capitals, one of them worked with acanthus leaves. I saw, too, a small marble double column of the type so common in the early Christian churches of Asia Minor. It is tempting to suppose that in the eastern ruin field we have the site of the oldest city, Nicephorium-Callinicum- Rakkah, that the columns were derived from Hellenistic or Byzantine buildings and re-used in a mosque of which nothing now remains but the square minaret.^ I think it not 1 Sachau (op. cit. p. 243) gives the inscription, and my copy tallied with his. 2 Just as the first mosque in Cairo, that of 'Amr, was built entirely on columns taken from earlier buildings, Mukaddasi describes one of the Rakkah mosques as 33^ jj* JJJLsto ; it would be satisfactory to imagine that he referred to the columned arcades of the mosque round the square minaret, but the phrase cannot reasonably be twisted into that or any other meaning. The square minaret is the ancient Syrian tower type ; Thiersch has recently published an exhaustive study of it in his Pharos. FIG. 39. — RAKKAH, CAPITALS OF ENGAGED COLUMNS, MOSQUE. FIG. 40. — RAKKAH, PALACE. FIG. 41. — RAKKAH, DETAIL OF STUCCO ORNAMENT, PALACE. FIG. 42. — RAKKAH, DOMED CHAMBER I.N PALACE. RAKKAH 57 improbable that the semi-circular enclosure represents Man- ser's foundation, R^fikah, though it does not follow that any of the existing ruins, except perhaps parts of the wall, belong I J, r J i^^ETOS FIG. 36. — RAKKAH, PLAN OF MOSQUE AND SECTIONS OF PIBRS. to his time. They are nevertheless of great importance in the history of Mohammadan art. The mosque is surrounded by a wall of sun-dried brick broken by round bastions (Fig. 36). In the centre of the sahn, or court, there is a small ziyarah 58 AMURATH TO AMURATH recently rebuilt, and in the north-east corner the round brick minaret springs from a square stone base composed of ancient materials (Fig. 37). The upper part of the minaret is decor- ated with bands of brick dog-tooth ornament. One of the great arcades which enclosed the sahn still stands on the south side (Fig. 38).^ An inscription over the central arch states that the mosque was repaired by the Atabeg Nur ed Din in 1 166, and I conjecture that the minaret is of his building.^ The mosque is of the true Mesopotamian type, of which the most famous examples are the two mosques at Samarra and the mosque of Ibn Tiilun at Cairo. With all these it shows the closest structural affinities, and it may be assumed that Nur ed Din retained the original plan when he repaired the building. The stucco capitals of the engaged columns on the piers belong to the same family as the elaborate stucco orna- ments of Ibn Tulun, which date from the latter half of the ninth century, and in both cases the decorative motives employed are probably Mesopotamian in origin (Fig. 39). Stucco decorations are also the main feature of the group of palace ruins near the east wall. The most noticeable of these is a rectangular tower-like structure (Fig. 40), where the chamber on the ground-floor shows bold stucco ornament on which are traces of colour (Fig. 41). On the walls of another chamber of the palace, which was covered with a dome set upon squinch arches, there is a row of arched niches, the arch being cusped on the inside. Below the niches is a brick dog-tooth string-course (Fig. 42). The squinches contain a primitive stalactite motive. There are two other small rooms, both of which are roofed with an oval dome {s'87 m. x 3"32 m. 1 I saw traces of two such arcades on the E., N. and W. sides of the court, and, judging from the vestiges that remain, the arcades must have been three deep to the south. The briclts of the vanished arcades have been dug out and carried away for building purposes. The outer walls are so much ruined that I could not determine the position of the gates with certainty. ^ Professor van Berchem has published the inscription in his Arahische Inschriften, a chapter appended to the work of Professor Sarre and Dr. Herzfeld entitled Reise in Euphrat- und Tigris-Gebiet. But the publication has appeared too late for me to do more than refer to it. FIG. 43. — RAKKAH, BAGHDAD GATE FROM EAST. FIG. 44. — RAKKAH, INTERIOR OF BAGHDAD GATE. RAKKAH 59 and 4'02 m. x 2"03 m.) ; in both cases the dome is very shallow and the rectangular substructure is adapted to the oval by means of wooden beams laid across the angles. Everywhere wooden beams were used in conjunction with brick, and it is to be borne in mind that though the country round Rakkah is now entirely devoid of trees, all the Arab geographers speak of the well-wooded gardens and groves of fruit-trees that surrounded the town. In the tower-like building and in the Baghdad gate bands of wood were laid in the face of the wall, but the wood has perished, leaving the space it occupied to tell of its former presence, as in the eastern minaret. The cusp motive can be seen in the blind arcade on the exterior of the BaghdM gate (Fig. 43). In the interior there is a bay to the south which appears to have been covered by a barrel vault, and may have been balanced by a similar bay to the north of the doorway, for the blind arcade on the out- side of the gatehouse breaks off abruptly at the northern end and must certainly have been carried further (Fig. 44). This would allow for a northern bay corresponding to the bay that still appears south of the door. The vaulting of the gate has fallen, but from the indications that are left it appears certain that while the south bay was covered by a barrel vault the central space was occupied by a groin (Fig. 45).^ The whole of the two areas of ruin are strewn with pot- sherds of the Mohammadan period, and over the greater part of the walled city the ground is honeycombed with irregular holes and trenches, the excavations of peasants in search of the now celebrated Rakkah ware. A few years ago their labours were rewarded by a large find of unbroken pieces, many of which made their way through the hands of Aleppo ' M. VioUet has published a short description of these ruins {Publica- tions de I'Acadimie des Inscrip. et Belles-Lettres, 1909, Vol. XII. part 2). He believes the palace to have been erected by HdrOn er Rashid. FIG. 45. — RAKKAH, BAGHDAD GATE, RECONSTRUCTED. 6o AMURATH TO AMURATH dealers to Europe, and though such a stroke of good fortune is rare, perfect specimens are occasionally unearthed, and I saw a considerable number, together with one or two frag- ments of exquisite glass embossed with gold, during the two days I spent at Rakkah. In some instances the original factories and kilns have been brought to light, and it is not unusual to see bowls or jars which have been spoilt in the baking and thrown away by the potter. No exhaustive study of Rakkah ware has as yet been made, though it is of the utmost importance in the history of the arts of Islam. The fabrication of it must have reached a high state of perfec- tion during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, to which period the pieces which have been preserved are usually assigned. At Rakkah matters fell out in a way which, if they had not been handled firmly, might well have wrecked my plans, for a telegram arrived from the Valt of Aleppo directing all whom it might concern to put a stop to my progress down the left bank of the Euphrates, on account of the disturbed con- dition of the desert. The Vali commanded that I should be turned back "across the river and conveyed carefully from guardhouse to guardhouse along the high road. It was the Mudir of Rakkah who was ultimately responsible for the execution of these orders, and he, honest man, was much perplexed when he discovered that one side of the Euphrates was not the same to me as the other, nor was he helped to a better understanding when I explained that I preferred the Jezireh, the Mesopotamian bank, because no one travelled there. The Shamiyeh, the Syrian bank, he hastened to assure me, was also chol (wilderness), if that was what I desired, and he begged me to believe that I should find the guardhouses most commodious. Thereupon I took up the question on a different issue, and called his attention to the fact that the VMi, who was newly appointed to Aleppo, could not have heard how peaceful the desert had become since the death of Ibrahim Pasha. The Mudir admitted the truth of this observation, and we compromised by sending a telegram to the Vali, asking him to reconsider his decision. But the telegraphic system of the Turkish empire leaves an ample JEBEL MUNAKHIR 6i margin for the exercise of individual discretion in emer- gencies, and since upon the third day no reply had been received, I was spared from showing a direct disregard of official dictates, while the Mudtr, seeing my caravan set out towards the Belikh, wisely made the best of a bad business and sent a couple of zaptiehs with me. One of them was a Circassian who had little Arabic, but the other, Mahmiad by name, proved an agreeable and intelligent fellow-traveller, well informed, and a keen politician. It is exactly two hours' ride from Rakkah to the Belikh. Our path lay between stretches of marsh, which must always have existed hereabout, for the word Rakkah means a swamp. Where we crossed the Belikh it was a muddy brook, almost all the water having been drawn off for irrigation purposes, and the bridge was merely a few bundles of brushwood laid upon some poles. I sent the caravan down the bank of the Euphrates and taking one of my zaptiehs with me, turned slightly inland towards a group of hills called Jebel Munakhir, the Nebs. In about two hours we reached a small outlying limestone tell on the top of which there were traces of masonry. Jebel Munakhir, a mile or so from the tell, is an extinct volcano, and the lava beds extend almost to the tell. We climbed to the summit of the mountain and found the crater to be a distinctly marked basin with broken sides. On one of the peaks there is a ziyarah, a square enclosure made of undressed stones piled together without mortar, and a small tomb-chamber of the same construction. I looked carefully for any trace of ancient work, but my search was rewarded only by finding clumps of pale blue irises growing among the rocks. The west massif of Jebel Munakhir, on which we were standing, rises several hundred feet above the level of the plain, and we had an extensive view over the unknown desert to the north. About three miles to the east lay another but smaller block of hill called Jebel Munkhar esh Sharki, the Eastern Neb, and on the horizon, almost due north, we could see some rising ground which my guide, an Arab of those parts, stated to be Jebel 'Ukala.^ Below it there are ' I expect that this is Sachau's Bergland Tulaba— see Kiepert's map. 62 AMURATH TO AMURATH wells, and another well, Abu Tutah, lies between it and the Belikh. Between Jebel Mundkhir and Jebel 'Abdu'l 'Aziz (which I could not see) there is a low ridge of hill, Jebel Beida. AH through this desert country there are small wells of water (jubb is the Arabic word) sufficient to supply the 'Anazeh, who pasture their flocks here during the spring ; I saw a few of their encampments, but the greater part of the tribe was still in winter quarters further to the east and south. The tents along the river were those of the 'Afadleh — 'Ajeil el Hamrl is the chief sheikh of the tribe, but I did not happen to meet him. An hour's ride from the hills we reached a large encampment at a spot called Kubur ej Jebel, near the Euphrates. The name means the Graves of the Mountain, but I could not hear of any tombs in the neighbourhood. Our own tents were pitched an hour further down on some grassy mounds by the river far from any Arabs; Meida, my guide called the place. In the low ground between Kubfir ej Jebel and Meida, but above flood-water level, we crossed an area ringed round with a notable deep ditch. Somewhere near my camp Julian must have received his Arab reinforce- ments. On leaving Nicephorium, he marched along the bank of the Euphrates, "and at night he rested in a tent, where some princes of the Saracen tribes came as suppliants bring- ing him a golden crown and adoring him as master of the world, and of their own nations. . . . While he was address- ing them," pursues Ammianus Marcellinus,^ "a fleet arrived as lar^e as that of the mighty lord Xerxes ; . • . they threw a bridge over the broadest part of the Euphrates. The fleet consisted of one thousand transports bringing provisions and arms, and fifty ships of war, and fifty more for the construc- tion of bridges. . . ." At this point a hubbub arose in the servants' tents; the golden crowns and the battleships went tumbling on to the grass, and I ran out just in time to see a troop of little shadowy forms hurrying in the moonlight across the sands by the water's edge. They were wild pig, the only herd we encountered. It is essential to have a local man by you if you would > Bk. XXIII. ch. iii. 8. ABU SA'lD 63 ascertain local names (even then the nomenclature is apt to be confusing), and accordingly I took an Arab with me next morning. We rode in five minutes to a grassy mound by the river, Khirbet Hadawl, in another quarter of an hour to Khirbet ed Dukhtyeh, and in twenty minutes more to Jedeideh. At none of these places did I see any trace of con- struction, but at Abu Sa'id, ten minutes further, there is an 'Anazeh mazar with graves round it marked by fragments of columns and small basalt mills for grinding corn. It would be interesting to know from what period these mills date ; I saw quantities of them in the burial-grounds between Mun- bayah and Tell Murraibet, but none of the Arabs know what they are, and when they find them they use them as tomb- stones. At Abu Sa'id we turned away from the river and rode inland in a north-easterly direction. The great bare levels were more than usually enchanting that morning; the hot sun beat upon them, a sharp little wind, the very breath of life, swept across them, and all the plain was aromatic with sweet-scented plants. Presently we passed a few 'Anazeh tents, and I stopped and gave the aristocracy of the desert a respectful salutation. An inmate of the tents, hearing my greeting, picked up his spear, mounted his mare and bore us company for a mile or two; I do not know what dangers he expected to encounter or whether the spear was merely for sheref (honour), but when time hangs as heavy as it does in an Arab tent, you may as well put in the hours by carrying a spear about the countryside as in any other manner. We engaged in an exceedingly desultory conversation, in the course of which he called out to me : "Lady, my mare is sick." "God cure her," said I. "Please God! " he returned. "It is her mind — her mind is sick." But I could suggest no remedy for that complaint, whether in man or beast. When he left us, the zaptieh and I began to talk of the prospects of good administration under the new order. Mahmud was by birth a Turk, a native of Kars, whence he had migrated when it fell into the hands of the Russians. 64 AMURATH TO AMURATH His long acquaintance with the Arabs had only served to enhance in his estimation the Turkish capacity for govern- ment, and the granting of the constitution had raised it yet higher. "The Turks understand politics," said he, "and look you, the constitution was from them. But as for the Arabs, what do they know of government ? " He placed great confidence in the Young Turks, and said that every one except the effendis was in favour of the dastur (the constitu- tion). "The effendis fear liberty and justice, for these are to the advantage of the poor. But they, being corrupt and oppressors of the poor, set themselves in secret against the dastur, and because of this we have confusion everywhere. And if one of them is sent to Constantinople as a deputy his work will not be good, for he will work only for himself. And in the vilayets there will be no justice unless the English will send into each province an overseer (mufattish) who will look to it that the dastur is carried out. Effendim, do you see my clothes ? " I examined his ragged nondescript attire ; save for the torn and faded jacket it would have been difficult to recognize in it a military uniform. "Twice a year the government gives us clothes, but they never reach us at Rakkah. The officers in Aleppo eat them, and with my own money I bought what I wear now." "Are you paid?" I inquired. "The government owes me twenty-four months' pay," he answered. 1 asked what he thought of the scheme for enlisting Christians. "Why not?" said he. "The Christians should help the Moslems to bear the burden of military service." And then he added, " If there be no treachery." There was no need to ask him what he meant by the last phrase. I had heard too often from the lips of Christians the expression of a helpless fear that the new regime must founder in blood and anarchy, after which the nations of Europe would step in, please God, and take Turkey for themselves. This forecast was not by any means confined to the Christians, but they, of all others, should have refrained TELL ESH SHA'Ir 65 from putting it into words, for it did not encourage patriots like Mahmud to believe in their loyalty. We reached our goal, Tell esh Sha'lr, in two hours and forty minutes from Abu Sa'ld, but the time in this case represents about twelve miles, since we were not riding at caravan pace. There were no buildings on the tell, but a number of large stones had been dug out of it and set up as a landmark — rijm, the Arabs call such guiding stone heaps. Two shepherds of the 'Anazeh joined us while we were at lunch, much to their material advantage, for we shared our provisions with them ; from them I learnt that there had once been a well here, but that it was now choked up. They knew of no ruins in the desert beyond, and my impression is that there has never been any settled population in this region, away from the Euphrates. We struck back to the river in a south-easterly direction, and in three hours came to our camp, pitched by some Afadleh tents on a mound of which I have not recorded the name. It is the boundary between the kazas of Rakkah and of Deir, and lies about an hour's march below a site called by Kiepert the Khan. From our camp we rode in an hour to the ruins of Khmeidah, where there were vestiges of a considerable town, squared stones, baked brick walls and a stone sarcophagus. An Arab on a broken-down mare joined us here, and as we rode together Mahmud described to me the nature of the authority exercised by the government over the tribes, and particularly the incidence of the sheep-tax. "Effendim," said he, "you must know that the government levies the sheep-tax from each sheikh." Four piastres per head of sheep is the amount. "And the scribe having com- puted the number of sheep that belong to those tents, he calls upon the sheikh to make good the sum due, and perhaps the sheikh will have to pay 2,000 piastres. Then he levies from the men of his tents 3,000 piastres, and to the government he gives 1,800." "True, true," said the Arab beside us. "Wallah, so it is." "And then," pursued Mahmud, "another man is sent out by the government, with his clerk and half-a-dozen of us zaptiehs. And all this costs much money. And the sheikh r 66 AMURATH TO AMURATH levies another 500 piastres, and pays 150 piastres; and so it goes on till the sum is found, but the expenses of collection are heavy. And as for the tax on cultivated land, the owner gives a bribe to him who is sent to value it, and he estimates the produce at less than half the real amount. And so it is with the sheep-tax. Effendim, do you think that all the sheep are counted ? No, wallah ! Last year the cornlands of the Shamiyeh between Rakkah and Deir paid only ;^8oo, and the sheep-tax in the Jeztreh was no more than ;^2,ooo." "Eh yes," said the Arab, "but the government takes much." "The sheikhs take much," returned Mahmfid. "Oh Ma'lfll, is it not true that they levy a tax for themselves on every tent ? " "Eh wallah ! " said the Arab. "But if the men of the tents make complaint, the sheikh attacks them and slays them." "Allah, Allah! he knows the truth," cried Ma'lul in vociferous approval. "And they have no protection," concluded Mahmiid. "Eh wah ! " responded the Arab, "who is there to protect us?" So the ancient tyrannies bear sway even in the open wilderness. Three-quarters of an hour from Khmeidah we passed another mound strewn with potsherds, and thirty-five minutes further down we came upon the ruins of Abu, 'Atik. They lie upon high rocky ground that drops steeply into an old bed of the Euphrates from which the river has retreated into a new bed a few hundred yards away. The whole area is covered with stone and brick foundations, some of them built of great blocks of hewn basalt, and the site must represent a city of no small importance. Below it the river is forced into a narrow defile where it flows between steep hills. A little valley, Wadi M41ih, joins the main stream half-an-hour from the ancient town, and it was here that we were overtaken by a breathless zaptieh from Rakkah who was the bearer of the answer to my telegram to the Valt of Aleppo. It was a ZELEBlYEH 67 refusal, politely worded, to my request that I should be per- mitted to travel down the left bank of the Euphrates, and with it came a covering letter from the Mudir of Rakkah saying that if I did not return he would be obliged to recall the zaptiehs he had sent with me. I fear that even those who cannot properly be numbered among the criminal classes catch an infection from the lawless air of the desert, but what- ever may be the true explanation of our conduct, we never contemplated for a moment the alternative of obedience, and bidding a regretful farewell to friend Mahmiid, we went on down the defile. Mahmud came galloping back to give us a final word of advice. "Ride," said he, "to Umm Rejeibah, where you will find a kishla (a guardhouse), but do not camp to-night in a solitary place, for this is the country of the Baggarah, and they are all rogues and thieves." The Euphrates, gathered into a single channel, flows very grandly through the narrow gorge. At first the hills slope down almost to the water's edge, but afterwards they draw back and leave room for a tract of level ground by the stream. An hour and a half from Wadi Malih the valley widens still more, and on the opposite bank the great castle of Halebiyeh lifts its walls from the river almost to the summit of the hill, a towered triangle of which the apex is the citadel that dominates all the defile (Fig. 46).^ Twenty minutes lower down, the Mesopotamian bank is crowned by the sister fortress of Zelebiyeh. It is a much less important building. The walls, set with rectangular towers, enclose three sides of an oblong court; the fourth side — that towards the river — must also have been walled, and it is probable that the castle approached more nearly to a sqfuare than at present appears, for the current has undermined the precipitous bank and the western part of the fortifications has fallen away. The masonry is of large blocks of stone, faced on the interior and on the exterior of the walls, while the core is mainly of rubble 1 It was visited and planned by Sarre and Herzfeld in 1907 ; Sarre, Reise in Mesopotamien, in the Zeitschrift der Gesch. fur Erdkunde zu Berlin, 1909, No. 7, p. 429. Sarre pronounces the greater part of the ruins to date from the time of JusJtinian. F2 68 AMURATH TO AMURATH and mortar. There are six towers, including the corner bastions, in the length of the east wall, and between the two central towers is an arched gate. On the north and south sides there is now but one tower beyond the corner. Each tower .contains a small rectangular chamber approached by an arched doorway. The court is covered with ruins, and on either side of the gate there is a deep arched recess. Under the north side of the castle hill there are foundations of build- ings in hewn stone, but the area of these ruins is not large. The name Zelebiyeh carries with it the memory of an older title; in the heyday of Palmyrene prosperity a fortress called after Zenobia guarded the trade route from her capital into Persia, and all authorities are agreed that the fortress of Zenobia described by Procopius is identical with yale- blyeh, Procopius states further that Justinian, who rebuilt Zenobia and Circesium, refortified the next castle to Cir- cesium, which he calls Annouca. The Arab geographers make mention of a small town, Khdnuhah, midway between Karktslya (Circesium) and Rakkah,^ and the probable identity of Annouca and Khanukah has already been observed by Moritz.2 But I think it likely that the flourishing mediaeval Arab town was situated not in the confined valley below Zelebiyeh but at Abu 'Atik, where the ruin field is much larger. It may be that there was a yet older settlement at Abu 'Atik, and that the stone foundations there belonged to the town of Annouca which stood at the head of the defile, while the castle of the same name guarded the lower end. We struck across the barren hills and so came down in an hour and half to Kubra, a ziySrah lying about a quarter of a mile from the river. There were no tents to be seen, whether of the Baggarah or of any other tribe, and no man from whom we could ask the way; by misfortune we hap- pened to be that day without an Arab guide, and mindful of Mahmud's parting injunctions, we began to look eagerly ^ Ibn Haukal is, I think, the first to speak of it. Idrisi says that it had busy markets and that much traffic went through it. They wrote respectively in the tenth and twelfth centuries. 2 Zur antiken Topographie der Palmyrene, p. 39. MUNGA'RAH 69 ahead for the kishla. Some way lower down, the Euphrates swept close under a low ridge which we were obliged to climb, and once on the top we espied Kishla el Munga'rah nestling under the further side of the slope. It had taken us two and a half hours to reach it from Zeleblyeh. The kishlS, which was built ten years ago and is already falling into ruin, was garrisoned by eight soldiers. They gave us an enthusiastic welcome and helped us to pitch our tents under the mud walls of the guardhouse ; visitors are scarce, and the monotony of existence is broken only by episodes connected with the lawless habits of the Baggirah. I never came into contact with the tribe, but I was told that, alone among the river Arabs, they had been the allies of Ibrahim Pasha and were consequently gom (foes) of the 'Anazeh and their group. Enmities of this kind are usually accompanied by overt acts, and the Baggarah had their hand against every man. It would be difficult to exaggerate the isolation of the guardhouses which are scattered through remote parts of the Turkish empire. The garrisons receive but a scanty allow- ance of their pay, and a still scantier of clothing ; frequently they are left unchanged for years in the midst of an ungrate- ful desert where the task assigned to them is too heavy for them to perform — eight men, as the soldiers at Munga'rah observed, cannot keep a whole tribe in check — and where there is no alternative occupation. Often enough I have contemplated with amazement, in some lonely kishlS or karSgh61, the patient Oriental acceptance of whatever fate may be allotted by the immediate or the ultimate authority; and many an hour has passed, far from unprofitably for the understanding of the East, while a marooned garrison has shown me, with a pitiful and childlike eagerness, its poor little efforts to while away the weary days — here a patch of garden snatched from the wilderness, where only a hand-to- hand struggle with the drifting sand can keep the rows of wizened onions from total extinction ; there a desultory excavation in a neighbouring mound, in which if you dig far enough a glittering treasure must surely lie; a captive quail 70 AMURATH TO AMURATH for snaring, warmly pressed upon me for my evening meal, or the small achievements in what may, for want of an exacter term, be called carpentry, with which the living-room is adorned. If you will reckon up the volume of unquestion- ing, if uninstructed, obedience upon which floats the ship of the Turkish State, you will wonder that it should ever run aground. The relaxation of the men of Munga'rah was taken among the ruins that covered the top of the hill. Umm Rejeibah is a large area enclosed in a wall, clearly marked by mounds, with a ditch beyond it. On the north side an old channel of the river sweeps under the hill, and before the water left this course, it had carried away a part of the ground on which the city stood. The walls break off abruptly where the hill has fallen away, and it is therefore difficult to deter- mine the exact shape of the enclosure. It appears to have been an irregular octagon. Towards its northern extremity the hill-top is seamed by the deep bed of a torrent draining down to the present channel of the Euphrates ; it cuts through the ruins and reveals in section what is elsewhere hidden by an accumulation of soil. On the slope of its bank the soldiers had observed traces of masonry, and by digging a little way into the hill had disclosed a small circular chamber with brick walls and a white tesselated pavement. Just above the kishla, in an Arab graveyard, there are fragments of columns and basalt flour mills. The oldest, raggedest and most one-eyed of the garrison accompanied us to Deir : I had not the heart to refuse his proffered escort, since it would enable him to spend a night in the local metropolis. The road was entirely without interest. About an hour from Deir cultivation began on the river bank in patches of cornland irrigated by rude water- wheels; jird is the Arabic word for them. We reached the ferry in six hours. The road from Aleppo to Mosul crosses the Euphrates at Deir, and some ten years ago it was pro- posed to replace the ferry by a bridge. The work was actually put in hand and has advanced at the rate of one pier a year, according to my calculations; but it can scarcely be DEIR 71 expected that this rate of progress will be maintained, since the point has been reached where the piers must be built in the bed of the stream, and construction will necessarily be slower than it was when the masons were still upon dry ground. We pitched our camp upon the left bank and there spent thirty-six hours, resting the horses and laying in pro- visions. The bazaars are well supplied, but Deir is not in other respects remarkable. It is first mentioned by Abu'l Fida, in a.d. 1331,^ and contains, so far as I know, no vestiges of older habitation. It is built partly upon an island; the gardens of this quarter, exactly opposite my camp, were rosy with flowering fruit-trees. None but the richer sort, and such as have flocks to bring over, cross the river in the ferry boats ; more modest persons are content with an inflated goat-skin. I had not seen this entertaining pro- cess, except on the Assyrian reliefs in the British Museum, and I watched it with unabated zest during the greater part of an afternoon. You blow out your goat-skin by the river's edge, roll up your cloak and place it upon your head, tuck your shirt into your waistcloth and so embark, with your arms resting upon the skin and your legs swimming in the water. The current carries you down, and you make what progress you can athwart it. On the further side you have only to wring out your shirt, don your cloak and deflate your goat-skin, and all is done. The Mutesarrif of Deir had recently been removed and the new man had not yet arrived, but I paid my respects to his vicegerent, the Kidi, a white-bearded old Turk, who did not regard my visit as an honour, though he promised me all I wanted in the matter of zaptiehs. The interview took place while he was sitting in the seat of judgment and was presently interrupted by a case. It was a dispute concern- ing a debt between a merchant and an Arab Sheikh. The sheikh came in dressed in the full panoply of the desert, black-and-gold cloak, black kerchief and white under-robe; his Skin was darkened by the sun, his beard coal-black. The ^ The reference is not, however, certain : Moritz, op. cit. p. 35. 72 AMURATH TO AMURATH merchant was a shaven, white-faced townsman in a European coat. The pair were, to my fancy; symbolic of the East and the advancing West, and I backed the West, if only because the merchant had the advantage of speaking Turkish, and the Kadi was anything but proficient in Arabic. After a few moments of angry recrimination they were both dis- missed to gather further evidence; but the K^di called the sheikh back and shook his finger at him. "Open your eyes, oh sheikh," said he. Asia, open your eyes ! I have some friends in Deir, Mohammadan gentlemen of good birth and education ; to them I went for information as to passing events, no news from the outer world having reached me for a fortnight. They told me that the Grand Vizir, Kiamil Pasha, had fallen, which was true; and that the Mejlis had quarrelled with the Sultan and were about to depose him, which was only prophetic. They made me realize how different an aspect the new-born hopes of Turkey wore on the Bosphorus, or even on the Mediterranean, from that which they presented to the dwellers on the Euphrates : I had already passed beyond the zone that had been quick- ened by the enthusiasm of European Turkey into some real belief in the advent of a just rule. One of my friends had received an invitation to join the local committee, but he had refused to do so. "I am lord over much business," said he, "but they are the fathers of idle talk." All thinking men in Deir were persuaded that a universal anarchy lay before them ; the old rule was dead, the new was powerless, and the forces of disorder were lifting their heads. "Yes," said another, "revolution means the shedding of blood — and the land of the Ottomans will not escape. Then perhdps the nations of Europe will come to our aid and we shall all have peace." I replied that the only substantial peace would be one of their own making, and that good government takes long to establish. "What benefit have I," he protested, "if my children's children see it?" I asked whether they had heard any rumours of an Arab movement, and they answered that there was much wild writing in the newspapers of a separate Arab assembly, and that words like these might stir DEIR 73 up trouble and revolt. "But where is unity? Aleppo hates Deir, and Deir hates Damascus, and we have no Arab nation." The financial position, both public and private, they pronounced to be hopeless. " I know a man," said one, "who has land on the Euphrates that might be worth ;^i5,aoo and is worth as many piastres. He dares not put money into irrigation because he could not get protection against the tribes and his capital would bring him no return. But indeed there is not enough capital in all Deir to develop the land." He complained that the best land was chiflik, the private property of the Sultan, and this I mention be- cause it is a grievance that has already been remedied — may it be of good omen ! The conversation left me profoundly discouraged, there was so much truth in all that I had heard, together with so complete an absence of political initiative. Thus it is through all the Asiatic provinces, and the further I went the more convinced did I become that European Turkey is the head and brains of the empire, and that if the difficult task of reform is to be carried out in Asia it can only be done from western Turkey. I believe that this has been recognized in Constantinople, for the provincial governors appointed under the new regime have been almost invariably well chosen. On March 6 we took the road again, still following the left bank of the Euphrates. The country down these reaches of the river is, as Xenophon says, exceptionally dull : "the ground was a plain as level as the sea." Below Deir the Euphrates has left its original channel and now runs further to the west, and there was generally a stretch of low ground, an older bed, between our road and the stream. This alluvial land is thinly populated and partly irrigated by water-wheels. Along the higher ground, which had once been the bank but is now touched only by the extreme points of the river loops, there were occasional mounds representing the villages of an earlier age. The baggage animals travelled in six and three-quarter hours to Buseirah, which lies in the angle formed by the KhSbfir and the Euphrates. The site is very ancient. Xenophon when he arrived at the Araxes 74 AMURATH TO AMURATH (the Khabur) found there a number of villages stored with corn and wine, and the army rested for three days collecting provisions. Diocletian made Circesium the frontier station of the Roman empire. He fortified it with a wall, says Procopius, terminating at either end on the Euphrates in a tower, but he did not protect the side of the town along the Euphrates. The stream sapped one of the towers, the walls were allowed to fall into decay, and Chosroes in his first expedition had no difficulty in taking possession of the fortress. Justinian repaired the ruined tower with large blocks of stone, built a wall along the Euphrates, and added an outer wall to that which already existed, besides improv- ing the baths in the town. Under the name of KarkisiyS, Circesium continued to be a place of some importance during the Middle Ages. Istakhri (tenth century) praises its gardens and fruit-trees, but the later geographers describe it as being smaller than its neighbour Rahbah, on the opposite side of the Euphrates, and with this it fades out of history. Extensive though not very scientific excavations were being carried on when I was at Buseirah. The peasants were engaged in digging out bricks from the old walls, ostensibly to provide materials for a bridge over the Khabur. I was therefore able to see more of the ruins than was revealed to former travellers, and my conviction is that I saw nothing that was older than the time of Justinian, while most of the work belonged to the Arab period. The excavations were so unsystematic that it was never possible to make out a ground plan, but in one place the peasants had dug down at least 5 m. below the upper level of the ruin heaps, and had cleared some small chambers near the northern fortification wall. The materials used in these buildings were square tiles in two sizes (42 x 45 x 3 cm. and 21 X 21 X 3cm.) laid in mortar as wide as the tiles them- selves, and small roughly-squared stones also laid in thick mortar. The lower parts of the chambers were of large tiles, the upper parts of stone. From the traces left upon the walls, the rooms would seem to have been roofed over with barrel vaults, and there were some remains of brick BUSEIRAH 75 arched niches below the stonework. Above these rooms, which were possibly only a vaulted substructure, there were foundations of upper rooms constructed of the smaller tiles. The face of the tile walls had been covered with plaster. There were simple patterns moulded in the broad sides of ^«=s^ lk.c.J /^j. (.]^g south-east angle of the tiles : enclosing wall stands a tower, round and domed and built entirely of the smaller tiles. The dome is slightly flattened and I believe the structure to be Mohammadan work. The Euphrates flows at a distance of about a mile from the city enclosure, but in all probability its course was once imme- diately under the wall, and the bed has made the same change here as it has done immediately above Circesium. The modern Buseirah must be the site of the ancient city, and I conclude that in Diocletian's time the Euphrates flowed under the mound and that this was the side which was not fortified until Justinian's day. In the Arab village, which has sprung up near the south- west corner of the ruins, there are portions of a large building which the natives call the church. It is surrounded on three sides by a very thick wall, roughly built of brick and rubble, with round towers at the angles. Within the wall there are remains of a niched structure which, so far as I could judge, consisted of two domed octagonal chambers. The masonry is of brick and rubble, plastered over, and both this ruin and the outer wall seem to have been built out of older materials pillaged from other parts of the town and mixed indiscrimin- ately together. Finally there is a substructure of brick, octagonal in plan and covered by a much flattened brick dome. The flattened dome is typically Mohammadan : I do not remember any instance where it can be assigned with certainty to an earlier period, and I am therefore led to the conclusion that the whole building cannot be older than the time of the khalifs. The area of the city is strewn with potsherds, by far the greater proportion being unmistak- ably Arab and closely related to the coarser sorts of Rakkah 76 AMURATH TO AMURATH ware. Almost all the coins that were brought to me were Arab. My tents were pitched outside the city wall, at the extreme limit of the Roman empire, a frontier line which you must travel far to find. Did Julian, with the ominous news from Gaul in his hand, feel any misgiving when he ordered the building of the bridge over which his army was to pass to the irrevocable destruction that Sallust predicted in his letters ? " No human power or virtue," says Ammianus Mar- cellinus, "can prevent that which is prescribed by Fate." Impending disaster, long since fallen, leapt again from his pages and stood spectral upon the banks of the Khdbur. CHAPTER III BUSEIRAH TO HIt March 7 — March 18 At Buseirah we were confronted with one of the difficulties that awaits the traveller in the Jezireh. Since there is no traffic along the left bank of the river, there are no zaptiehs to serve as escort ; my two zaptiehs from Deir were to have been relieved at Buseirah, but there was only one available man there, and he feared the return journey alone, and was therefore extremely reluctant to come with us. We solved the question by carrying off Mustafa, one of the men from Deir, whereupon Hmeidi, the Buseirah zaptieh, consented to bear him company. Both were to return from Abu KemM, three days' journey lower down. This plan suited Hmeidi well, for he was a doubly married man, and while one of his wives remained at Buseirah, the other dwelt at Abu Kemal. His beat was between the two places. "And so," he ex- plained, "I find a wife and children to welcome me at either end." "That is very convenient," said I. "Yes," he replied gravely. We crossed the Kh^bflr in a ferry-boat so badly constructed that loaded animals could not enter it, and in consequence all the packs had to be carried down to the river and re-loaded on the other side. I pitied Cyrus from the bottom of my heart, and regarded Julian's bridge with feelings very different from those that had been conjured up by the moon of the previous night. The level ground on the opposite side was covered with potsherds, most of them blue and green glazed wares, and all, so far as I saw, Mohammadan. An hour later we passed over another small area strewn thickly with the same pottery, and while I was acquainting Hmeidi with the nature 77 78 AMURATH TO AMURATH of the evidence it supplied, I took occasion to confide to him my belief that the ruin at Buseirah which they call the church dates from the Mohammadan period. "Effendim," he replied, "what you have honoured us by observing is quite correct. The origin of that church is Arab. It was doubtless built by Nimrod, who lived some years before Harun er Rashid." "That is true," said I, with a mental reservation as to parts of the statement. Between the Khabflr and the Euphrates, Kiepert marks an ancient canal and names it the Daurin. According to the map it leaves the Khabur at a point opposite to the village of Hoj-neh and joins the Euphrates opposite SMihiyeh.^ The existence of the canal cutting is well known to all the inhabit- ants of these parts (they call it the Nahr Dawwarin), but they affirm that its course is much longer than is represented by Kiepert, and that it touches the Euphrates at Werdi. My route on the first day lay between the canal and the Euphrates, at a distance that varied from an hour to half-an-hour from the river, and though I did not see the Dawwarin, its presence was clearly indicated by the line of Kanats (underground water conduits) running in a general southerly direction — NNW. to SSE. to be more accurate — across ground that was almost absolutely level. The whole of this region must once have been cultivated, and it had also been thickly populated.^ Twenty-five minutes' ride beyond the potsherds where Hmeidi had sketched for me the history of Buseirah, we passed some foundations constructed out of the smaller sort of tiles which I had observed in the town. A quarter of an hour further there was a low mound called Tell el Krah, covered with tiles and coloured pottery — indeed the pottery was continuous between the one patch of broken tiles and the other, and Nimrod had evidently been very busy here. The villages 1 Sachau travelled up the left bank of the Kh4b6r, and should there- fore have crossed the course of the canal, but he makes no mention of it. 2 I should conjecture that on the Euphrates as on the Tigris the dis- appearance of the settled population dates from the terrible disaster of the Mongol invasion. ZEITHA 79 represented by these remains had been supplied with water from the Dawwarin. In another hour and five minutes we reached a considerable mound, Tell Buseyih ; it formed three sides of a hollow square, the side turned towards the river being open. We were now close to the Euphrates and could see, about half-a-mile away, a long tract of cultivation and the village of Tiydna on the water's edge. We turned slightly inland from Buseyih and in fifty minutes came to the mounds of Jemmah where, so far as identification is possible on a hasty survey, I would place Zeitha. "Here," says Ammianus Marcellinus, "we saw the tomb of the Emperor Gordian, which is visible for a long way off." Jemmah con- sists of a large area surrounded by a wall and a deep ditch ; beyond the ditch lies broken ground where, at one point, the Arabs had scratched the surface and revealed what looked like a pavement of solid asphalt ; still further away there is an Arab graveyard strewn with fragments of the smaller tiles. Except in the graveyard there are no tiles and very little pottery, none of it characteristically mediseval Mohammadan. The ditch had been fed by a water channel coming from the north-east, no doubt an arm of the Dawwartn if it were not the canal itself. We rode from Jemmah to the Euphrates in an hour and ten minutes and found the camp pitched imme- diately below the village of Bustan. The baggage anirhals had been six hours on the march from the Khabur. The climate was changing rapidly as we journeyed south. The last cold day we experienced was March 2, when I had ridden out to Tell esh Sha'ir; on March 7 when we camped at Bustan the temperature at three o'clock in the afternoon was 70° in the shade, but the nights were still cold. A strip of irrigated land and numerous villages lay along the river for the first two hours of the succeeding day's march. We were forced to ride outside the cornfields that we might avoid the water conduits, but I do not think we missed any- thing of importance, for every twenty or thirty years the Euphrates rises high enough to submerge the cultivation, and the floods must have destroyed all vestiges of an older civiliza- tion. The low-lying fields cannot have been, within historic 8o AMURATH TO AMURATH times, a former bed of the stream, as was the case above Buseirah ; an occasional mound near the river showed that the bank had long been inhabited. We passed on the high ground a tell that looked like the site of an ancient village which had received its water from the Nahr Dawwafin. An enormous amount of labour is expended upon the irrigation of the cornfields ; sometimes there is a double system of jirds, those nearest the river watering the lowest fields and filling deep channels whence the water is again lifted by another series of jirds to the higher level. In the lower ground the peasants grow a little corn and clover for early pasture and sow a second crop when the spring floods have retreated. After two hours' riding we entered a long stretch of sand heaped up into little hills which were held together by tamarisk thickets; it is apt to be submerged when the river is high, and we saw more than one overflow channel filled with pools of stagnant water. On the Syrian side the Euphrates is hemmed in here by hills whereon stands the castle of Salihiyeh. In this wilderness we came upon some Arabs who were ploughing up a desolate spot in search of locusts' eggs. "Are there many locusts here?" said I, for locusts are not accustomed to lay their eggs in sand. "No," they answered, "there are none here; but, as God is exalted ! there are thousands lower down ." "Then why do you plough here? " I asked, with the tire- some persistence of the European. "The government ordered it," said they, and resumed their task. In another hour we reached Tell ech Cha'bi (el Ka'bi?) where there is an Arab cemetery, the graves covered with unglazed potsherds. Hmeidi told me that when the Arabs bury their dead in such places they dig into the mound and extract broken pottery to strew upon the graves ; the Bedouin use no pottery, their water-vessels being of copper or of skin. While we sat upon the top of the tell lunching and waiting for the caravan, which was delayed for nearly an hour in the loose sand, Hmeidt gave me his views on politics. TELL ABU'L HASSAN 8i "Effendim," said he, "we do not care what sultan we have so long as he is a just ruler. But as for 'Abdu'I Hamld, he keeps three hundred women in his palace, and, look you, they have eaten our money." Wherein he wronged the poor ladies; it was not they who scattered the revenues of the State. In thirty minutes we came to Tell Simbal, a small sandy mound ; in one hour and fifteen minutes more to Tell el Hajtn, with a village by the river, and after another hour afid twenty minutes to Tell Abu'l Hassan, where we camped, seven and a quarter hours from Bustan. Abu'l Hassan is marked in Chesney's map as "mound." It is a very striking tell rising fifty feet above the river ; upon the summit are Arab graves strewn with coarse pottery and with undressed stones dug out of the hill, and for a distance of a quarter of an hour's walk to the north and east there are fragments of brick upon the ground. The graves are those of the Jebbfir, who, said Hmeidi, left this district thirty years ago and migrated to the Tigris, where I subsequently saw them. Nearly all the SilmSn have also gone away, and though their camping grounds are marked by Kiepert on the Euphrates, their pre- sent quarters are on the KhSbflr. The Deleim and the Ageidat, a base-born tribe, together with the Bu KemSl, now occupy the Euphrates' banks, and the 'Anazeh come down to the river in the summer. There was no living thing near our camp except an enormous pelican, who was floating con- tentedly on the broad bosom of the stream. Our advent roused in him the profoundest interest, and as he floated he cast backward glances at us, to see what we were doing in his wilderness. A pleasant four hours' march, mostly through tamarisk thickets that were full of ducks, pigeons and jays, brought us to the ferry opposite Abu KemSl. When we had pitched our tents near the reed- and mud-built village of Werdl, Fattiih and Selim went across to buy corn and Hmeidi to report our arrival and ask for fresh zaptiehs. The village of Abu Kernel has recently been removed to a distance of about a mile from the right bank, because the current has undermined the 82 AMURATH TO AMURATH foundations of the original village, which now stands deserted and in ruin. But it is chiefly on the left bank that the river has played tricks with the land. Within the circuit of a great bend in the channel, the ground for three miles or so is extremely low, and is partially submerged when the stream comes down in flood. The low ground is bounded on its eastern side by a rocky ridge which crosses the desert from a point a little to the south of the Kh^bflr, passes behind what I suppose to be the course of the Dawwarln, and terminates in the bold bluffs of Irzi above the Euphrates, at the lower limit of the Werdi bend. When the river is exceptionally high it covers the whole area up to the hills ; my informant, one 'IsS, an Arab of the Bu Kem^l, remembered having once seen this occur ; but in ordinary seasons it merely overflows a narrow belt and fills a canal that lies immediately under the eastern hills. The canal is fed by two branch canals from the river and joins the Euphrates under the bluff of Irzi. The river rises "at the time of the flowering of pomegranates," said 'Is&, "for unto all things is their season," that is, about the middle of April; but the big canal under the hills was still half full of water when I saw it in March, and the crops were irrigated from it by jirds. It is known locally as the Werdiyeh, but I was informed that it was in fact the lower end of the Dawwarin which joins the Euphrates here and not at Salihiyeh.i The site of Werdi is generally believed to be that of Xenophon's Corsote, "a large deserted city which was entirely surrounded by the Mascas." The river Mascas was a plethron (loo ft.) in breadth; the army of Cyrus stayed there three days and the soldiers furnished themselves with provisions.^ By the Mascas, Xenophon is understood to have meant a loop canal, and I think it probable that the canal was not merely a small loop enclosing the bend of the river, but that it is represented to this day by the Dawwarin and the irrigation system connected with it. ' I looked carefully for any trace of a big canal opposite Saiihiyeh and saw none. 2 Anabasis, Bk. I. ch. 5, 9. B IRZl 83 But if Werdi be the descendant of Corsote, at least one other town must be placed between these two in the genea- logical table. The bluff at the lower end of the river bend is covered with the ruins of Irzl, which have been remarked by every traveller who has passed by, either on the river or on the west bank. Balbi, who descended the Euphrates in 1579, says that the ruins occupied a site larger than Cairo and appeared to be the massive walls and towers of a great city. So far as I know no one has examined them closely, and when I climbed up the hill I found, not the bastioned walls that I had expected, but a number of isolated tower tombs. They stand in various stages of decay round the edge of the bluff and over the whole extent of a high rocky plateau which cannot be seen from below. There are no traces of houses, nor any means of obtaining water from the river, nor any cisterns for the storage of rain. Balbi's city is a city of the dead; it is the necropolis of a ^^'-^ s ' ' ' ' o ' '^^"'^ town that stood, presum- ^,^ „ ,„,, ^„„,^„ ^„. „ ' r- FIG. 47. — IRZI, TOWER TOMB. ably, in the irrigated country below. The towers were all alike (Fig. 47). They are built of irregular slabs of stone, the shining gypsum of which the hill is formed, laid in beds of mortar. Each tower rests upon a square substructure, about 170 m. high; in this substructure are the tombs, hollowed out of the solid masonry, irregular in number and in position. In the best preserved of the towers I could see but one tunnel-like grave opening on the west side (Fig. 48), while there were two or three to the north and east. The tombs are covered by a small vault made of two stones leaning against one another. Above the substructure the walls are broken by corner piers of small projection, with two engaged columns between them. The columns are crowned by capitals made of a single projecting slab, above which a' slightly projecting band of plaster forms an entabla- G2 §4 AMURATH TO AMURATH ture. Then follows a plain piece of wall about a metre high upon which stands an upper order of engaged columns, half as large as those below, so that there was place for five between the corner piers, if these were repeated on the upper part of the tower. A door between the corner pier and one of the engaged columns opens on to a winding stair which leads to the top of the tower. No rule was observed as to the direction of the compass in which the doors were placed. The towers cannot be as old as Xeno- phon's time; they are more likely to date from the first or second century of the Christian era; therefore the town to which they belonged must have been later than Corsote, and Corsote, it will be remembered, was deserted when he saw it. It is easy to understand that a city lying in the low ground might have been destroyed by inundations, and to imagine that a region so favourably situated for purposes of cultiva- tion, and provided with an elaborate system of irrigation, should have been repopulated in a later age. And this is the explanation which I offer. ^ The practice of burying the dead above "the common crofts, the vulgar thorpes," is still observed by the Arabs. All their graves lie loftily upon the nearest height, even if it should be only a mound by the river. From my camp I watched one of their funeral processions making its slow way from the village of Abu Kem&l towards some barren hills. Three or four miles the dead man was carried across the desert to find his resting-place among the graves of his ancestors, and no tribesman would have been content to lay him at the village gates, like a Turk or a town dweller. They carried him to the hills and so performed, as in the days of the Irzi city, their final service. Fattuh and Selim returned after nightfall, and reported the zaptieh problem to be still unsolved. Even at Abu Kemal there was but one man, and we were forced once again to commandeer Mustafa, who saw himself dragged further and 1 With the doubtful contribution made by Ammianus Marcellinus to the questioRj I have dealt hi the Appendix to this chapter. P,e^ 49._NAOURA OF 'AJMIYEH. NINMALA 85 further from his home at Deir. We promised that he should return from Kayim with 'Abdullah, the zaptieh from Abu Kemdl, and Mustafa agreed with alacrity to this arrangement. All zaptiehs of my acquaintance enjoy travelling, with its contingent advantage of a regular daily fee from the effendi whom they escort. But neither he nor 'Abdullah knew the way g^long the left bank. "We have never heard of any one who wished to go by this road, wallah ! " Moreover, they stood in considerable fear of the tribes whom we might encounter. I therefore engaged as guide 'Is&, the affable, ragged person who had conducted me to Irzi, but since we were fully loaded with corn, we could not mount him and he marched smilingly for seven hours through a temperature of 83° in the shade. We rode over the Irzl bluffs and dropped by a steep and rocky path into the plain on the farther side, between the hills and the meandering river. To the right the village of Rabat, with a long stretch of corn, lay near the water's edge, and though our path lay only through tamarisk thickets, traces of numerous irrigation canals showed that the ground must once have been under cultivation. The plain is known as the K^'at ed Deleim, the land of the Deleim, and the tents of that tribe were to be seen on the banks of the Euphrates. It did not take me long to discover that we should reach Kayim, or rather the point opposite to it, for it lies on the right bank, in about five hours from Werdi, and my heart sank to contemplate another long delay while we crossed and changed zaptiehs; therefore I refused to go down to the Euphrates and cut straight across a bend over high stony ground. So it happened that we never went near Kayim, and the two kidnapped zaptiehs were embarked before they knew it on the road to 'Anah. We touched the river again seven hours from Werdi, where we found an encampment of the Jeraif, and since we were completely ignor- ant of what lay ahead, we pitched our tents there, opposite an island which Kiepert calls Ninmala. I found it almost impossible to get at any names for the numerous islands in these reaches of the Euphrates. The generic word for them is khawijeh, and they bear no other title in the local speech. 86 AMURATH TO AMURATH The Jeraif or Jerifeh is a tribe wliich belongs properly to the right bank, but a few tents had come over on account of the terrible drought, there being always more pasture in the Jezireh than in the Shamiyeh. They are usually, so 'Isa explained, gom to his tribe, the Bu Kemal, but a truce had recently been patched up and he was received as hospitably as any of us. There lies below 'Anah and to the west of the Euphrates a region of desert through which few travellers have passed. The track of Chesney's journey of 1857 skirts it to the west; Thielmann crossed it nearly forty years later a little further to the east; Huber, following the Damascus post-road, touched its northern edge. So said Kiepert, and with this meagre information as a base I questioned that night the Arabs gathered round Fattuh's cooking fire as to the north- west corner of the Sasanian Empire. Among them was an aged man who had been to Nejd, in Central Arabia, and had brought back thence a bullet which was still lodged in his cheek ; he knew that country, and if I would give him a horse he would take me to all the castles therein, KhubbSz, 'Amej, Themail, Kheidir. . . . "Where is Kheidir?" said I, for the name was unknown to me or to Kiepert. "Beyond Shetateh," answered a lean and ragged youth. " I too know it, wallah ! " "Is it large?" I asked. "It is a castle," he replied vaguely, and one after another the men of the Jeraif chimed in with descriptions of the road. The sum total of the information offered by them seemed to be that water was scarce and raids frequent, but there were certainly castles ; yes, in the land of Fahd Beg ibn Hudhdh^l, the great sheikh of the Amarat, there was Kheidir. I made a mental note of the name. The region which we had nov/ entered is particularly law- less. The government makes no attempt to control the Bedouin, and according to their custom they are occupied exclusively in raiding one another and in harrying the out- lying property of the inhabitants of Rawa, the town opposite SHEIKH JID'NA 87 to 'Anah. In addition to the depredations of the local tribes, the country is swept by armed bands of the Shammar from far away to the east, and of the Yezidis, whom the Moham- madans call Devil Worshippers, from the Jebel Sinjar. Accordingly when we asked for a guide, we were told that there was no one who would come with us alone, lest he should be attacked on his solitary return by blood enemies from half the world away. We took with us, therefore, two horsemen, 'Aff&n, of the sheikhly house, and Murawwah, the one armed with a rifle and the other with a rusty sword, and for the better part of the day we discussed the observance of blood feud. The old man with the bullet in his cheek, who was on his way to BaghdM and proposed to travel with us as far as possible, served as an illustration of the text. It had a purely objective interest, for in spite of the fears exhibited by the JerSif, there was very small risk of our meeting with a foe ; the season for raiding is the summer, but the spring is a close time. 'Aflan was eloquent in describing the long rides across the desert in the burning heat: "Lady, I have ridden four days with no water but what I could carry ; that was when we bore off cattle and mules from the Jebel Sinjir." "Eh billah ! " asseverated Murawwah, and felt for the hilt of his rusty sword. We had not gone far before my mare shied out of the path and there swung up beside us a jovial personage mounted on a blood camel with his serving-man clinging behind him. He proved to be a sheikh of the Amarat, who are a branch of the 'Anazeh, and indeed he was own brother to Fahd ibn Hudhdhal. His appearance suited his high birth. He was wrapped in a gold-bordered cloak, a fine silk kerchief was bound about his head, and his feet were shod with scarlet leather boots ; he was tall and well liking, as are few but the great sheikhs among the half-fed Bedouin. He related to me the business which had brought him so far from his own people. One of the Jeraif had murdered a man of the Amarat, and the two tribes being on friendly terms, Sheikh Jid'an (such was his name) had crossed the river to demand the summary execution of the murderer or the payment of 88 AMURATH TO AMURATH blood money. He was hunting the man down through the Jer^if tents. "Shall you find him ? " I asked. "Eh wah ! " he affirmed and laughed over his task. Him too I questioned concerning Kheidir. "Go forward to 'Anah," he said, "and there any man will take you to Kheidir. And if you come to my tents, welcome and kin- ship." So we parted. In thirty-five minutes from the camp we passed the mound of Balijah with Arab graves upon it ; then for three hours we saw nothing of interest until we came to the mazar of Sultan 'Abdullah, a small modern shrine. Somewhere near it are the ruins of Jabarlyeh, but they must lie closer to the mazar than Kiepert would have them. I rode on looking for them for half-an-hour, and when I questioned 'Affan he replied : " Jebariyeh ? It is under the mazSr. When you turned away I thought you did not wish to see those ruins." It was too hot to go back. We were now opposite Kal'at R&fidah, a splendid pile upon the right bank of the Euphrates, and here we left the caravan with Murawwah to guide it and followed the course of the river to Kal'at Bulik, which the Arabs , call RetSjah, an hour and a quarter's ride in blazing sun. We found there a small square fort with round towers at the angles, the whole built of sun-dried brick. Though it is in complete ruin, I believe it to be modern, probably a Turkish kishla, but I saw some fragments of stone and mortar build- ing which are, at any rate, older than the mud fort, and the site is so magnificent that it can scarcely have been neglected in ancient times. The hill on which the ruins stand is all but converted into an island by an abrupt turn of the river, which washes the precipitous rock on three sides. The current is gradually undermining the high seat of RetSjah and the greater part of the older stone building has fallen into the stream. We had a hard gallop to catch up the caravan, and a long pull over rocky ground before we sighted the river again, flowing in wide and tranquil curves under the sunset. On either side the banks were lined with naouras, the Persian water-wheels. The quiet air was full of the rumble and 'AJMlYEH 89 grumble of them, a pleasant sound telling of green fields and clover pastures, but there were no villages or any other sign of man. As I looked, I knew that we had passed over an unseen frontier; whether the geographers admitted it or no, this was Babylonia. We rode down wearily to the first naoura and there threw ourselves from our horses. The river turned the wheel, the wheel lifted the water, the water raced down the conduit and spread itself out over a patch of corn and round the roots of a solitary palm-tree, and all happened as if it were a part of the processes of nature, like the springing of the palm tree and the swelling of the ears of corn. But it was nature in leading-strings, and the lords of creation, in a very unassum- ing guise, surged up from a hole in the ground roofed with palm fronds and bade us welcome to their domain — two men and a little boy who watched over the crops on behalf of a RawS merchant. The place has a name, 'Ajmiyeh, and a history, if only I could have deciphered it in the cut stones and fragments of wall which the river slowly washed bare and then washed away. But the immediate present was of greater importance. Before the moon was up, supper was spread by the naoura, and the watchmen, the boy, the Arabs and the old man with the bullet were sharing with my servants and zaptiehs an ample meal of rice. We had marched ten hours. In the morning I saw that quantities of pottery were washed out of the bank together with the stones. Much of it was glazed with black upon the inside, some was the usual coloured Mohammadan stuff, and there were pieces of the big pointed jars, unglazed, which belong to every age. Beyond the corn lay masses of similar potsherds; the river bank must once have been strewn with small villages. When we had ridden for half-an-hour we met three horsemen of the Jerdif, and 'Affan declared that he would return with them to his tents, and as for Murawwah he might cross with us to 'Anah and go home along the right bank. I had no objection to raise, and as Murawwah did not demur to the scheme 'Affdn was allowed to leave us. Murawwah was a small man 90 AMURATH TO AMURATH and a lean, mounted on a half-starved mare, himself half starved, with naked feet, a ragged cotton cloak thrown over his head to protect him from the sun, and a rusty sword by his side to defend him from his enemies. We had struck up a wordless friendship and now that 'Affan was gone we fell into talk. I asked him whether he had heard of liberty. "Eh wah ! " he answered, "but we know not what it means." "It means to obey a just law," said I, seeking for some didactic, definition. But Murawwah knew nothing of obedi- ence nor yet of just rule. The zaptieh 'Abdullah took up my word. "Oh Muraw- wah," said he, "when there is liberty in this land, there will be no more raiding and the Arabs will serve as soldiers." " No wallah ! " returned Murawwah firmly. 'Abdullah laughed. "Slowly, slowly," he said, "the government will lay hands on the desert, and the Arabs will be brought in, for they are all thieves." Murawwah drew himself up on his hungry mare. "Thieves!" he cried. "Thieves are dogs. How can you compare the Arabs with them ? We will not bow our heads to any government. To the Arabs belongs command." And he slashed the air defiantly with his tamarisk switch as he proclaimed the liberties of the wilderness, the right of feud, the right of raid, the right of revenge — the only liberty the desert knows. Three hours and a half from 'Ajmiyeh we stopped at a naoura, Natariyeh, to water our horses, and just beyond it we were overtaken by half-a-dozen angry men from Rawa, mounted and carrying rifles. The cause of their ride and of their anger they were not slow to make known to us. The watchman at their naoura had sent in word to Raw^ that the Deleim had come down and were pasturing their mares in the corn. "And we went to the Kaimmakim and asked for soldiers to drive them off, and the Kaimmakam answered, ' Go ask the Vilt of Baghdad, for I have none.' As God is exalted ! there were but two soldiers in the kishl^ of Rawa. And we took our rifles and mounted our mares and rode out NATARIYEH 91 alone, and all last night we hunted them through the desert until we were so far from the river that we dared not go on. We are six men, look you, and the Deleim are counted by thousands. So we returned, and a curse upon the govern- ment that cannot protect our property, and may all Arabs burn in hell I " At this point one of them perceived Murawwah, who was riding in discreet silence by my side. "Listen, you! dog son of a dog," he cried. "We lay out our capital and you take the interest; we sow and you gather the harvest, yes, without reaping, and we may starve that you and your accursed brothers may fatten. I have a mind to take you as hostage to Rawa and hold you till we get our due." Muraw- wah, though for a free child of the desert he was unfortunately placed between zaptiehs and angry citizens, was not alarmed by the threat. We had changed parts as soon as we neared civilization, and he now edged nearer to me, knowing that he was safe under my protection, but for which he would not have ventured into Rawa where there were too many reckon- ings scored up against the tribes. We were not to escape without ourselves taking a lesson in the elements of raiding. Half-an-hour or so from Natdrtyeh, Jusef came riding up from the caravan, which was behind us, to ask if we had seen anything of the donkey, the unrivalled donkey purchased in Aleppo, and to our consternation we discovered that he was missing. There had been a few Arabs at Natiriyeh, and while we were engaged in watering the baggage animals, the donkey had strayed away to make acquaintance with some low-born Bedouin donkeys and had remained behind. Fattuh and 'Abdullah rode back and speedily found him (he was twice the size of the others), but his pack saddle and other trappings were gone. Thereupon Fattiih, like the merchants of RawS, took the law into his own hands, drove off an Arab donkey together with our own, and declared that unless the Arabs restored our property to us that night at 'Anah he would sell theirs in the open market and keep the money. Thus it was that we turned raiders like every one else who lives in the desert. Fattuh caught me up 92 AMURATH TO AMURATH two and a half hours later opposite the island of Karabileh, where I had stopped to lunch, and we sent Murawwah back to reclaim the pack saddle, bidding him join us at 'Anah. He was exceedingly loth to obey this order, saying that he dared not enter 'Anah alone, and 1 never expected to see him again, in spite of the fact that he had not received his bakhshish. In another twenty minutes we were riding through the fruit gardens and palm groves of Raw^ — the fruit-trees were all in flower, a delectable sight for travellers in the wilderness. While the ferry-boats were being brought up I climbed the hill to the modern citadel (Rawa, so far as I am aware, has no ancient history) and thence looked down upon the long thin line of 'Anah, houses and palm-trees folded between the hills and the river, and afar the island that was ancient Anatho, floating upon the broad waters. The population of Rawa swarmed up the hill after me, watching my every move- ment with strained attention, and before we were fairly embarked I registered a vow that no caravan of mine should ever again pass through the town, so exasperating it is to find two hundred people in your path whichever way you would turn (Fig. 50). When once we had crossed the river we fell into a merciful obscurity ; the post-road runs through 'Anah, and it matters not a para to anybody but the khanji whether one European more or less comes down it. The khanji, a friend of Fattuh's, was unfeignedly glad to see us, and his kh^n looked good, but better still the patch of ground behind that stretched down to the water's edge. Here with the consent of mine host we pitched our tents, in full view of an exquisite little island, green with corn and shaded by palm-trees; and whatever love you bear the desert there can be no doubt that green growing things are pleasant to the eye, and that the spirit rests comfortably upon the assurance that a good dinner, not tinned curry, will shortly be forthcoming. Just as it was ready, behold Murawwah, obedient to the call of hunger — minus his sword indeed, for he had left it in pawn to the ferryman, but bringing with him the owner of the donkey we stole, together with the goods that had been stolen from us. And every one came to his own again. But 'ANAH 93 the episode has never faded from Fatfiih's memory, and in the hour of reminiscence he is wont to say, "Your Excellency remembers how we raided the Arabs ? May God be exalted I We have travelled much in the desert, and the only raid we ever saw was one of our own making." There was another arrival at our camp that night. Late in the evening Jusef inquired whether I would receive a soldier, and thinking it was to-morrow's zaptieh, I consented. A grizzled man appeared at the tent door and sat down on his heels. "Peace be upon you," said he. " And upon you peace," I answered. "Effendim," he said, "I am a man advancing in years." He made the gesture of one who strokes a venerable beard, although his chin was bare. "And for long I have prayed for a son. Praise be to God, this night God has granted my request." "Praise be to God," said I. "God give you the reward," he rejoined. "Effendim, in honour of this exceptional occasion, will you kindly help with the expenses ? " Now it happened somewhere about the year 1300 B.C. that Hattusil, King of the Hittites, wrote to the King of Babylon, and among other matters of international interest, he observed that the reason for the interruption of diplomatic relations with the court of Babylonia was the uncertainty of travel caused by the movements of the Bedouin. No other considera- tion, he said, should have prevented him from dispatching his ambassador to the son of so excellent a father. The con- ditions described in Hattusil's letter hold good until to-day. The Bedouin are still masters of the desert road, and estab- lished order is helpless before the lawless independence of the tribes. The truth is that nomad life and civilization are incom- patible terms : the peaceful cultivator and the merchant cannot exist side by side with the sheikh, and either the settled population must drive the Bedouin from out their borders, or the Bedouin will put progress and the accumulation of wealth beyond the power of the most industrious. Until we drew 94 AMURATH TO AMURATH near to 'Anah, our road had led us through regions which the Arabs hold in undisturbed possession. No caravans pass down the east bank of the Euphrates; no towns are built there ; save for the spasmodic labours of the half settled tribes, no fields are cultivated. But with the first naoura of the Rawd townsmen the conditions were altered, and when we crossed the river we plunged into the struggle that has been waged for all time between the nomad and the State. For four days we followed the high road to Baghdad — unwillingly enough, since I was ever looking for a door into the Syrian desert — and I had opportunity to study the oldest problem of government. The town of 'Anah has been lengthening steadily ever since the sixteenth century, for Rauwolff says that it is one hour long, and della Valle two, and I know that it is three. But it was and remains a single street wide, a Babylonish mud- built thoroughfare, green with palms, murmurous with naouras and lapped by the swift current of the Euphrates (Fig. 51). From the hilltop of Rawa I had already caught sight of the only vestiges of antiquity that 'Anah can boast, the ruined castle and tall minaret upon the island of Lubbad at the lower end of the town. Here stood the fortress which, "like many others in that country, is surrounded by the Euphrates."^ Julian, seeing the difficulties of a siege, came to terms with the inhabitants, who surrendered to him and were treated with all kindness. But the fortress he burnt. I was determined not to leave 'Anah without visiting the island, and having settled with Fattuh the length of the day's march, I left him to buy provisions and load the caravan, and rode down to a ferry opposite the island. The boat was commonly used to transport stones from the castle, and when we arrived it was in course of being loaded on the other side. Much shouting at length attracted the attention of the ferryman, and we went into a neighbouring coffee-house to await his coming. A party of citizens had gathered together over the morning cup ; we joined the circle and shared in the coffee and the ^ Amm. Mar., Bk. XXIV. ch. i. 6. 'ANAH 95 talk. The men in the coffee-house entertained no hope that the constitutional or any other government would succeed in establishing order. "Ever since the days of the Bent Ghassdn," said one (and I could have added "ever since the days of the Hittites "), " the Arabs have ravaged the land, and who shall stop them ? The government does nothing and we can do nothing. We have no power and all of us are poor." "In the last six years," said another, "we have had fourteen K^immakims at 'Anah. Not one of these gave a thought to the prosperity of the town, but he extorted what money he could before he was removed." "There is a new Kaimmakim on his way here," I observed. "True," he replied. "When the telegram came last summer telling of liberty and equality, the people assembled before the serSyah, the government house, and bade the Kaimmakam begone, for they would govern themselves. Thereat came orders from Baghdad that the people must be dispersed ; and the soldiers fired upon them, killing six men. And we do not know what the telegram about liberty and brotherhood can have meant, but at least the Kaimmakam was dismissed." My zaptieh broke in here. "Effendim," said he, "it fell out once that I was in Bombay — yes, I was sent from Basrah with horses for one of the kings of India. And there I saw a poor man whose passport had been stolen from him, and he carried his complaint to the judge. Now the judge was of the English, and he fined the thief and cut off two of his fingers. That is government; in India the poor are protected." "Allah!" said one of the coffee-drinkers in undisguised admiration. I knew better than to question the validity of the anecdote, and, with what modesty I could assume, I accepted the credit that accrued from it. "But even the English," pursued another, "cannot hold the tribes. Effendim, have the Afghans submitted to you ? Wallah, no." He had laid his finger upon a knotty point, and I took up the questiofi from a different side. 96 AMURATH TO AMURATH " Have not you men of 'Anah sent a deputy to the mejlis ? " I asked. "Eh wallah ! " they answered. "Let him make known in Constantinople the evils under which you suffer, that the government may seek for a remedy." The suggestion was received in silent perpkxity. "For what purpose did you pay the deputy to go to Stambul ? " I pursued. "The order came," replied one of my interlocutors. "We do not know why the deputy was sent. Doubtless he has his own business in Stambul and he is not concerned with 'Anah." "His business is yours," I said; "and if he will not see to it, at the next election you must choose a better man." " Will there be another election ? " said they, and I found all 'Anah to be under the impression that their representative held a life appointment. The island is a little paradise of fruit-trees, palms and corn, in the middle of which is a village of some thirty houses built in the heaped-up ruins of the castle. From among the houses springs a tall and beautiful minaret, octagonal in plan (Fig. 56). Its height is broken by eight rows of niches, each face of the octagon bearing in alternate storeys a double and single niche, all terminating in the cusped arch which is employed at Rakkah. Some of the niches are pierced with windows to light the winding stair. The tower rises yet another two storeys, but the upper part is of narrower diameter, and the windows and niches are covered with plain round arches. At the northern end of the island the walls and round bastions of the fortress stand in part, but they are not very ancient. Ibn Khurd^dhbeh, who is the first of the Mohammadan geographers to mention 'Anah, says only that it is a small town on an island ; ^ in Abu'l Fidel's time it was still confined to the island; 2 Rauwolff (1564) notices the town on the island ■ Ed. de Goeje, p. 233. 2 Ed. Reinaud, p. 286. LUBBAd 97 and the town on the right bank; ^ Yakdit (1225) speaks of the castle, but the walls which I saw cannot be as old as his day. The minaret may belong to a different period, and de Beyli^ places it in the earliest centuries of Islam.^ I think that there was probably a fortress on the island long before the first written record which has come down to us, but I was close upon a generation too late to see the remains of it. From two informants in 'Anah I heard that there had been big stone slabs at the northern end of the island "with figures of men upon them and a writing like nails," but they had fallen into the water within the memory of the older inhabitants and had been washed away or covered by the stream. This tale of cuneiform inscriptions would not in itself be worth much, but while I was examining the minaret, a villager brought me a fragment of stone covered with carving in relief which was unmistakably Assyrian. I asked him whence it came, and he replied that it had formed part of a big stone picture which had fallen into the river. I bought from him a broken bowl inscribed with Jewish incantations of the well-known type.^ The island was once connected with both banks by bridges. There are some traces of the section that led across to the Jeztreh, and many piers of the Shamiyeh bridge stand in the river. Though these piers no longer serve the purpose for which they were intended, they are still put to use, for the inhabitants of the island spread nets between them, and the fish swimming down with the current are entangled in the meshes and so caught (Fig. 52), We pulled up one of the nets as we passed, and it produced two large fish which I bought for a few pence. It is curious that the Bedouin neglect the ample supply of food with which the river would furnish them; in spite of frequent inquiries we had never found fish in their tents. Just below the houses of 'Anah on the Shamiyeh bank » Quoted by Ritter, Vol. XL p. 717. 2 De Beyli^ : Prome et Samarra, p. 68. See, too, Viollet's memoir presented to the Acad, des Inscrip. et B.-Lettres, quoted above. He, too, was shown the fragment of Assyrian relief and gives an illustration of it, for which reason I do not trouble to publish my photograph. ' Pognon : Inscriptions mandaites des coupes de Khouabir, H 98 AMURATH TO AMURATH there were mounds by the river from which, said my zaptieh, the people get antlcas after rain, and sometimes small gold ornaments are washed out of them. On the opposite bank I could see ruins for a distance of an hour's ride from 'Anah ; they ended at a big mound called Tell Abu Thor, which appeared to be a natural outcrop of the rock, though there were many small, seemingly artificial, mounds about it.^ An hour and a half from 'Anah we passed another rocky hill, also called Tell Abu Thor, but I could see no traces of ruins round it. From the summit of the tell there was a fine view of the little fortified island of Tilbes, the island castle of Thilutha, whose inhabitants refused to surrender to Julian. I could see the bastions of masonry on the upper end of the island, together with the ruins of a castle on the Jezireh bank, and if there had been any possibility of crossing the river I should have gone down to it; but there was no ferry nearer than 'Anah. I did not follow the winding course of the Euphrates from 'Anah to Hit. Many of the ruins marked in Chesney's map deserve a careful survey, but my mind was now set upon another matter, and we rode on from stage. to stage hoping each day that the next would provide lis with a guide into the western desert. My zaptieh, Muhammad, lent a sympathetic ear to the scheme which I developed to him as we rode. The arm of the law, weak enough on the Euphrates, does not reach into the wilderness, and his duties had taken him but a little way west of the road; the main difificulty to be encountered was the lack of water, a difificulty much en- hanced by the drought. " God send us rain ! " he sighed. " Effendim, at this time of the year I am used to stay my mare at such places as these " (he pointed to the hollows in the barren ground), "and while I smoke a cigarette she will have eaten her fill of grass. But this year there is no spring herbage, and in the season of the rains, forty days have passed without rain. All the water- pools in the Sh^miyeh are exhausted, and the Arabs are ' Chesney notices that the ruins of the old town lie on the left bank below the present 'Anah. Quoted by Ritter, Vol. XI. p. 724. FHEMEH 99 crossing to the Jezireh lest they die, for their flocks can give no milk." Presently we met a train of thirsty immigrants driving their goats to the Euphrates. Muhammad called to them and asked if they would give us a cup of leben, sour milk. A half-starved girl shouted back in answer : "If we had leben we should not be crossing to the Jezireh." "God help you ! " cried Muhammad. "Cross in the peace of God." A little further we passed through a number of newly-made graves, scattered thickly on either side of the road. "They are graves of the Deleim," said Muhammad. "A year ago a bitter quarrel arose within the tribe, and here they fought together and seventy men were slain. They buried them where they fell, the one party on one side of the road, and the other on the other side." We travelled fast and in five hours from 'Anah came down to the river at Fhemeh, where we found our tents pitched near a kishlH. The guardhouse is the only building here, the village of Fhemeh being in the Jezireh about half-an-hour up stream. About the same distance lower down lies the island of Kuro, which is perhaps Julian's Akhaya Kala, but I saw it only from afar and do not know whether there are still ruins upon it. We had parted at 'Anah from Cyrus and from Julian ; they marched with their armies down the Jezireh bank, and our road lost much of its charm in losing the shadowy pageants of their advance. We were tormented during the next three days by an intolerable east wind. It blew from sunrise to sunset, and, for aught we could tell, it might have issued from the mouth of a furnace, so scorching was its dust-laden breath. I heard of ruins at Sus, a place where the Jeraif own corn- fields; but it lay at the head of a peninsula formed by a great bend of the stream, and I had no heart to go so far out of the way.^ We reached Hadithah in six hours from ^ It is, I suppose, Chesney's Sarifah, which has been conjectured to be the Kolosina of Ptolemy : Ritter, Vol. XI. p. 730. H2 loo AMURATH TO AMURATH Fhemeh and camped there, partly because we were weary of the wind and dust, and partly because Muhammad had advised me to seek there for a guide into the desert. The nearer we came to that adventure, the more formidable did it appear, and I was beginning to realize that it would be folly to take a caravan across the parched and stony waste, and to revolve plans for sending the muleteers to Kerbela and taking only Fattuh with me to Kheidir. At Hadithah we met an aged corporal, who declared that nothing would be easier than to go straight thence to Kasr 'Amej, and for water we should find every night a pool of winter rain. He had crossed the desert two years ago and there had been no lack of water. "But this year there has been no rain," I objected; "and all the Arabs are coming down to the river because of the great drought. Where, then, shall we find the pools?" "God knows," he answered piously, and I put an end to the discussion and turned my attention to the ruins of Hadithah. The village, like all the villages in these parts, lies mainly upon an island, though a small modern suburb has sprung up ufK)n the right bank. At the upper end of the island are the ruins of a castle, not unlike ^e ruins at 'Anah. A bridge had been thrown over both arms of the river, and a straight causeway across the island had connected the two parts. Needless to say, the bridge has fallen. Still mor6 remark- able, and quite unexpected, was a large area of ruins some way inland on the Shamiyeh side, hidden from the river village by a ridge of high ground. It must have been the site of a big town. In one place I saw four columns lying upon the ground, no doubt pre-Mohammadan, though upon one of them were four lines of a much-defaced Arabic inscrip- tion of which I could read only a few words. ^ Nearer to the river, and visible from it, are a number of small mazers, remarkable only because their pointed dome-like roofs show the same construction that is to be seen in the famous tomb of the Sitt Zobeideh at Baghdad. 1 These ruins give additional weight to Ritter's suggestion that Hadithah was the Parthian station of Olabus : Vol. XI. p. 731. The Arab town of IJadithah is first mentioned by Ibn Khurdidhbeh, ed. de Goeje, p. 74. 'UGLET HAURAN loi From 'Anah the river landscape is exceedingly monoton- ous : a few naouras and a patch or two of cultivation, each with its farmhouse, a small domestic mud fortress with a tower; an occasional village set in a grove of palm-trees on an island in midstream. The houses were of sun-dried brick, the walls sloping slightly inwards, and crowned with a low mud battlement — line for line a copy of their prototypes on the Assyrian reliefs. This world, which was already suffi- ciently dreary, was rendered unspeakably hideous by the east wind. River, sky and mud-built houses showed the universal dun colour of the desert, and even the palm-trees turned a sickly hue, their fronds dishevelled by the blast and steeped in dust. An hour and a half from Hadithah we crossed the W&di Hajldn, in which there is a brackish spring. Just opposite its mouth are the remains of a castle on an island, Abu Sa'ld, but the greater part of the island, and with it the castle, has been carried away by the stream. Below it is the palm- covered island of Berwan. Twenty minutes further we passed over a dry valley, Wadi Fadiyeh, where I left the high road and crossed the desert to Alus, which we reached in an hour and forty minutes. Kiepert, following Chesney, calls it Al' Uzz, but I doubt whether this spelling can be justified ; the Arab geographers knew it as Alus or Alusah, and the name has not changed until this day. The village stands on an island, but there is also a ruined castle on the right bank of the river. We rode straight from Alfls to Jibbeh in two hours, though the zaptiehs reckon it three for a caravan. There was nothing to encourage us to loiter, inasmuch as our path lay over a horrible wilderness, stony, waterless and devoid of any growing thing. Rather more than half-way across we came to the 'Uglet Hauran, a valley which is said to have its source in the Hauran mountains south of Damas- cus. At the point where we crossed it, it was dry, but my zaptieh told me that there were springs higher up and that in wet years the water will flow down it from the Hauran to the Euphrates. The wind was so strong that I could not row over to the village which stands on the island of Jibbeh. I02 AMURATH TO AMURATH though I was tempted by the tall round minaret that rises from among the palm-trees. As far as I could see through my glasses, it bears an inscription on its summit and a brick dog-tooth cornice. On the Jezireh bank there is a large and well-preserved fortress. We reached the solitary khan of BaghdMi a few minutes later; the caravan was there before us, having accomplished what is reckoned to be a nine-hours' stage in eight hours sixteen minutes. The village of Bagh- dad! is an hour's march lower down, and the khan by which we camped was only four months old; "Before that," said Fattuh, "we used to sleep under the sky, and there was no one but us and the jackals." I had heard that Fadh Beg Ibn HudhdhM had a garden at Baghdadi, and I cherished a hope that we might meet there one of his family who would help us on the way to Kheidir ; but when we passed by the garden a solitary negro was in charge, and as the palms were not yet three feet high, I could not blame Fadh Beg for not having elected to dwell among them. There was nothing to be done but to ride on to Hit.^ From Baghdadi the road climbs up into the barren hills. It is no better than a staircase cut out of the rock, and Fattuh admitted that carriage driving is not an easy matter here. He added that the stage from Baghdadi to Hit is less secure than any other, by reason of its being infested by the Deleim who exact a toll from unguarded caravans. We had found two zaptiehs at the khan and had taken one on with us when we sent the Hadithah man back, leaving the khan protected by a single zaptieh, so limited is the number of soldiers posted along the road. If you are not a person of sufficient con- sequence to claim an escort, you must wait until a body of travellers shall have collected at Baghdad or Aleppo, as the case may be, and set forth in their company, since it is not 1 Julian crossed the Euphrates at Parux Malkha, which cannot be far from Baghdidi, and captured the castle of Diacira. This castle must have stood at the southern end of the great bend made by the Euphrates below Baghd&di. Chesney saw the ruins of a fortress there. It is per- haps Ptolemy's Idicara and the Izannesopolis of Isidorus : Ritter, Vol. XI. p. 737. THE DELEIM 103 safe to venture singly over the Sultan's highroad. We met that morning a large caravan of people driving, riding in panniers, and walking. No matter what their degree, all wore the singularly abandoned aspect to which only the Oriental on a journey can attain, and the shapelessness of their baggage enhanced their personal disqualifications. About half-an-hour after the caravan had passed, we came upon five or six ragged peasants, who stopped us and lifted their voices in lamentation. They had been held up by five Deleimis in the valley below ; their cloaks had been taken from them, and the bread that was to have sufficed them till they reached 'Anah : "We are poor men," they wailed. " God curse those who rob the poor ! " "God curse all the Deleim ! " cried Fattiih. "Why did you linger behind the caravan in this part of the road ? " "We were weary and one of us had fallen lame," they explained. "But have a care when you reach the valley bottom; five men with rifles are lurking among the sand- hills." Their tale filled me with a futile anger, so that I desired nothing so much as to catch and punish the thieves, and without waiting to consider whether this lay within our power, I galloped on in the direction indicated by the peasants, with Fattuh, Jusef and the zaptiehs at my heels. We were all armed and had nothing to fear from five robbers. The valley was a sandy depression with a sulphur stream running through it. We searched the sand-hills without success, but when we came down to the Euphrates, there were five armed men strolling unconcernedly along the bank as though they would take the air. Now, you do not wander with a rifle in your hand in unfrequented parts of the Euphrates' bank for any good purpose, and we were persuaded that these black- browed Arabs were the five we sought. Probably they had intended to reap a larger harvest, but finding the caravan too numerous they had contented themselves with the stragglers. Unfortunately we had no proof against them : the bread was eaten and the cloaks secreted among the stones, and though we spent some minutes in heaping curses upon them, we 104 AMURATH TO AMURATH could take no steps of a more practical kind. The zaptieh, for his part, was in an agony of nervous anxiety lest we should propose to relieve them of their rifles. He looked forward to a return journey alone to Baghdadi, and it is not good for a solitary man to have an outstanding quarrel with the Deleim. Finally I realized that w€ were wasting breath in useless bluster and called Fattuh away. If we were to concern ourselves with the catching of thieves, we might as well abandon all other pursuits in Turkey. The town of Hit stands upon an ancient mound washed by the Euphrates (Fig. 54). Among the palm-trees at the river's edge rise columns of inky smoke from the primitive furnaces of the asphalt burners, for the place is surrounded by wells of bitumen, famous ever since the days when Babylon was a great city.^ Heaps of rubbish and cinders strew the sulphur marshes to the north of the town, and a blinding dust-storm was stirring up the whole devil's cauldron when we arrived. It was impossible to camp and we took refuge in the khan, where we were so fortunate as to meet with an English traveller on his way back from India, the first European whom I had seen since we left Aleppo. The dust-storm rose yet higher towards evening, and though we closed the shutters of the khan — there was no glass in the windows — the sand blew in merrily through the chinks, and we ate a gritty supper in a temperature of ninety-three degrees. Hit was the last possible starting-point for the Syrian desert, and no sooner had we arrived than I summoned Fattuh and presented him with an ultimatum. We had failed to get any but the most contradictory reports of wells upon the road to Kheidir and I would not expose the caravan to such uncertain chances, but if we went alone we could carry enough water for our needs. It only remained to dispatch ^ Herodotus mentions the bitumen wells and calls the town Is. It has been identified with the Ihi of the Babylonian inscriptions, the Ahava of Ezra, and with the 1st from which a tribute of bitumen was brought to Thothmes III, according to an inscription at Karnak. FIG. 56.--MINAKET ON ISLAND OF LUBBAD. FIG. 57. — .MINARET AT MA MUREII. -:4 ^^'^ FIG. 59. — MAHLIKEFI. HiT 105 the muleteers along the highway and to find a guide for ourselves. "Upon my head!" said Fattuh blandly. "Three guides wish to accompany your Excellency." "Praise be to God," said I. "Bid them enter." "It would be well to see each separately," observed Fattuh, "for they do not love one another." We interviewed them one by one, with an elaborate show of secrecy, and each in turn spent his time in warning us against the other two. Upon these negative credentials I had to come to a decision, and I made my choice feeling that I might as logically have tossed up a piastre. It fell upon a man of the Deleim, a tribe to whom we were not well disposed, but since the country through which we were to pass was mainly occupied by their tents, it seemed wiser to take a guide who claimed cousinship with their sheikhs. He was to find an escort of five armed horsemen and to bring us to Kheidir in return for a handsome reward, but we undertook to engage our own baggage camels. One of the drawbacks to this arrangement was that no camels were to be got at Hit, and I felt the more persuaded that we had struck a bad bargain when Naif came back and said: " How do I know that you will keep your word ? Perhaps to-morrow you will choose another guide." "The English have but one word," said I ; it is a principle that should never be abandoned in the East. We struck hands upon it and NMf left us "in the peace of God." Fattuh needed a day to complete his preparations, and I to see the pitch wells of Hit which lie some distance from the town. I did not see them all, but from the accounts I heard they would appear to be five in number. The largest is called the Marj (the Meadow) ; it is an hour and a quarter north-east of Hit and is said to be inexhaustible. The pitch is better in quality here than elsewhere, and the peasants can, when they choose, get 2,000 donkey-loads from it daily. The next in importance is at Ma'mfireh, but it is not worked. The pitch flows out over the desert and dries into an asphalt pavement io6 AMURATH TO AMURATH about half-a-mile square. Further south is a small spring, Lteif, from which they get twenty loads a day, and near the town there is a fourth well which yields fifty loads a day (Fig- 53)- The fifth well is on the other side of the Euphrates, at 'Ata'ut ; the average yield from it is twenty loads a day. Near the asphalt beds of Ma'mureh, about an hour south- west of Hit, lie the ruins of a village clustered round a minaret (Fig. 57). All the buildings were constructed of small unsquared stones set in mortar; the minaret was plastered on the outside and seemed to have been built of large blocks of stone and mortar, firmly welded together before they had been placed in position. The round tower, narrowing upwards and decorated at the top with a zigzag ornament, was placed upon a low octagonal structure which in turn rested upon a square base (Fig. 58). I climbed the winding stair that I might survey the country through which Naif was to .,^^„^^ take us. It was incredibly SCALE I I I I I I 1 METRES -' SOS desolate, empty of tent or FIG. 58.— ma'mOreh, minaret. village save where to the west the palm-groves of Kebeisah made a black splash upon the glaring earth. The heavy smoke of the pitch fires hung round Hit, and the sulphur marshes shone leprous under the sun — a malignant landscape that could not be redeemed by the little shrines which were scattered like propitiatory invocations among the gleaming salts. About a mile from Ma'mflreh there is a still more remark- able ruin known as Madlubeh. It is a large, irregularly shaped area marked off from the desert by heaps of stones half buried in sand. Standing among these heaps, and no doubt in their original position, there are a number of large monolithic slabs placed as if they were intended to form a wall (Fig. 59). Many of these must have fallen and been covered with the sand if the enclosure were at any time continuous, and perhaps the heaps are composed partly of buried slabs. HIT 107 Two stand in line with a narrow space between like a door (one of them was 5 m. long x 13 m. thick, and it stood 2 m. out of the ground) ; in another there was a small rectangular cutting that suggested a window-hole on the upper edge (it was 10 m. long x i'3 m. thick, and stood about 3 m. out of the ground). The stones were carefully dressed on all sides. The^ may have formed the lower part of a wall of which the upper part was of sun-dried brick or rubble, but at what age they were placed in those wilds a cursory survey would not reveal. When I returned to the khan, Fattuh greeted me with the intelligence that the Deleimi had broken his engagement. NSif admitted that for ordinary risks the money we had offered would have been sufficient, but Kheidir lay in the land of his blood enemies, the Beni Hassan, and he would not go. Perhaps he hoped to force us to a more liberal proposal, but in this he was disappointed. A bargain is a bargain, and we fell back upon my boast that the English have but one word. In this dilemma Fattuh suggested that he should see what could be done with the Mudir, and having a lively confidence in Fattuh's diplomacy, I entrusted him with my passports and papers, of which I kept a varied store, and gave him plenipotentiary powers. He returned triumphant. "Effendim," said he, "that Mudir is a man." This is ever the highest praise that Fattuh can bestow, and my experience does not lead me to cavil at it. "When he had read your buyuruldehs he laid them upon his forehead and said, ' It is my duty to do all that the effendi wishes.' I told him," inter- polated Fattuh, "that you were a consul in your own country. He will give you a zaptieh to take you to Kebeisah, and if you command, the zaptieh shall go with you to Kal'at Khub- bllz, returning afterwards to Hit. And it cannot be that we shall fail to find a guide and camels at Kebeisah, which is a palm-grove in the desert; for all the dwellers in it know the way to Kheidir. As for the caravan, another zaptieh will take it to Baghdad." "Aferin ! " said I. "There is none like you, oh Fattuh." "God forbid 1 " replied Fattfih modestly. "And now," he io8 AMURATH TO AMURATH proceeded, "let me bring your Excellency an omelet, for I am sure that you must be hungry." But I understood this exaggerated solicitude to be no more than a covert slur upon the culinary powers of Mr. X.'s servant, who had provided us with an abundant lunch during Fattuh's absence, and not even so voracious a consul as I could face a second meal. Fattuh retired in some displeasure to inform the muleteers that they would journey to Baghdad and Kerbela and there rejoin us, please God. We explored the village of Hit before nightfall, and a more malodorous little dirty spot I hope I may never see. "Why," says the poet, concerning some unknown wayfarer, "did he not halt that night at Hit ? " and it is strange that Ibn Khur- didhbeh, who quotes the question, should have been at a loss for the answer. Possibly he had no personal knowledge of Hit. On the top of the hill there is a round minaret, similar in construction to the minaret of Ma'mureh, but I saw no other feature of interest. The sun was setting as we came down to the palm-groves by the river. The fires under the troughs of molten bitumen sent up their black smoke columns between the trees (Fig. 60) ; half-naked Arabs fed the flames with the same bitumen, and the Euphrates bore along the product of their labours as it had done for the Babylonians before them. So it must have looked, this strange factory under the palm-trees, for the last 5,000 years, and all the generations of Hit have not altered by a shade the processes taught them by their first forefathers. THE PARTHIAN STATIONS OF ISIDORUS OF CHARAX The only modern record of the road along the left bank of the Euphrates from Rakkah to Deir is the rather meagre account given by Sachau ; Moritz travelled down the left bank from Deir to Buseirah, but I know of no published description of the road from Buseirah to 'Anah. It has not FIG. 60. — HIT,' THE- BITUMEN FURNACES. FIG. 6l.^THE EUPHRATES AT hIt. FIG. 62. — THE WELL AT KEBEISAH. KIG. 63. — 'aIN ZA'ZU. PARTHIAN STATIONS 109 therefore been possible hitherto to attempt to place in any continuous sequence the sites given by ancient authorities. Of these the fullest list is that of the Parthian stations fur- nished by Isidorus of Charax (Geographi OrcBci Minor es, ed. by Miiller, Vol. I. p. 244). It begins with the fixed point of Nicephorium (Rakkah) and ends with another fixed point, that of Anatho ('Anah). Between these two lies Nabagath on the Aburas. The Aburas may safely be assumed to indicate the Khabfir, and Nabagath is therefore Circesium- Buseirah. The following comparative table shows my sug- gestions for the remaining stations, combined with those which have already been made by Ritter and others. The times given are the rate of travel of my caravan ; between Rakkah and Deir I had the advantage of comparing them with Sachau's- time-table. No two caravans travel oyer any given distance at exactly the same pace, but the general average works out without any grave discrepancy. I have often tried to reckon the speed at which my caravan travels and have come to the conclusion that it is very little under three miles an hour, say about two and seven-eighths miles an hour. Isidorus computes his distances by the schcenus. According to Moritz i schiaenus = 5*5 kilometres. From Buseirah to 'Anah I travelled over Isidorus's road at the rate of i schcenus in i hr. 7 min., which would bring the schcenus down to 5' 166 kilometres. The section from Rakkah to Buseirah is not so easy to calculate because Isidorus has in two places omitted to give the exact distance between the stations, but my rate of travel was not far different here from that noted in the other sections. So much for the average. The individual distances do not tally so exactly, and in attempting to determine the sit^s, the evidence that can be gathered from the country itself seems to me to weigh heavier in the scale than the measurements given by Isidorus, especially as his inexactitude is proved by the fact that the sum of the distances he allows from station to station do not coincide with the total distances, from the Zeugma (Birejik) to Seleucia, and from Phaliga to Seleucia, as he states them. In both cases the sum of the small no AMURATH TO AMURATH distances comes to a larger figure than that which he allows for the totals — Zeugma to Seleucia . . . -171 sch. total of distances between stations 174 sch., without the two omitted by him. Phaliga to Seleucia . . . .100 sch. total of distances between stations 120 sch. without one omitted by him. As regards the second section, Kiepert believed that a copyist's error of 10 sch. too much had been made in Isidorus's table between Izannesopolis and Aeipolis (the modern Hit), but even this correction will not bring the totals together (Ritter, Vol. XI. p. 738). The road from the Zeugma to Nicephorium does not follow the river, and I am therefore unable to control the statements of Isidorus above Rakkah ; nor do I know the section between Hit and Seleucia. I need scarcely say that my table is of the most tentative character; it begins with the ninth station of Isidorus, Nicephorium. The first remarkable site which I saw on the river below Ral^ah was the large area surrounded by a ditch, half-an- hour above my camping-ground. Isidorus's tenth station from Zeugma is Galabatha. Ritter (Vol. XI. p. 687) observes that it must be above Abu Sa'Id, and the area enclosed by the ditch fulfils that condition. The eleventh station is Khubana which I put at Abu Sa'td, where there are frag- ments of columns and other evidences of antiquity. The twelfth station is Thillada Mirrhada; I have placed it at Khmeidah (squared stones, brick walls, a broken sarco- phagus), but the claims of Abu 'Atik are considerable, the extent of the ruin field at the latter place being much larger than at Khmeidah. But Abu 'Atik is 7 hrs. 5 min. from Abu Sa'id, and the caravan time between Khmeidah and Abu Sa'id (6 hrs. 5 min.) is already rather long for the 4 sch. allowed by Isidorus. The thirteenth station is Basilia with Semiramidis Fossa. Ritter long ago pointed to the prob- ability of its having been situated at Zelebiyeh (Vol. XI. PARTHIAN STATIONS ni 1 1 nil 1 1 II II 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 g 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 M 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 en 3| S B :§ 1 1 1 1 3 "'11' 1 1 1 if 1 < r 1 g. £ 1 1 1 ll ll 1 llil 1 « 1 1 s 1 1 1 1 1 .§ 1 1 ll 1 1 1 1 II 1 1 1 1 1 1 as ii 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1| II 1 1 1 II 1 1 1 H .5 mo viQ El -< " * 1 28 %. 1 "1 ° 1 8, 2 in i 1 |: Ijjf 1 1 ill i| ^ rv- -< « (^ M M M M »» )-H C4 3.S3-3 5 « W N N M ■•i a. 1 a. 112 AMURATH TO AMURATH p. 687). Serairamidis Fossa was no doubt a canal; Chesney saw traces of an ancient canal below Zelebiyeh. The distance, from Thillada to Basilia is not given by Isidorus. Ritter would allow 5 sch. and Herzfeld 7 sch. (Memnon, 1907, p. 92); according to my reckoning both these distances are too long. I marched from Khmeidah to Zelebiyeh in 3 hrs. 40 min., which implies a distance of not more than 3 sch. For the fourteenth station, Allan, Umm Rejeibah is the only possible site I saw. It is true that I reached it in 3 hrs. from Zelebiyeh, whereas Isidorus puts it 4 sch. from Basilia, but I cut straight across the hills, and if I had followed the river (i. e. from the mouth of the canal, Semiramidis Fossa) the time needed would have been considerably longer. The fifteenth station, Biunan, was conjectured by Ritter to lie opposite Deir. I saw no traces of ruins upon the left bank, though Sachau speaks of the remains of two bridges (Reise, p. 262), and I should he more inclined to look for Biunan at a nameless site mentioned by Moritz (op. cit., p. 36). The difference is not in any case of importance, for the site seen by Moritz is immediately below Deir. He would have it to be Phaliga, which is doubtless Pliny's Phaliscum, but that suggestion is difficult to reconcile with Isidorus's 14 sch. from Basilia to Phaliga, which brings Phaliga much nearer to Circesium. Moreover, Isidorus states that Nabagath is near Phaliga — ^so near that he does not trouble to give any other indication of the distance between the two stations — and as Nabagath on the Aburas cannot be other than Buseirahy Phaliga too must be close to the Khab{\r mouth. I did not see the site mentioned by Moritz because I neglected to follow the river closely immediately below Deir; if it be, as I suppose, Biunan, I cannot attempt to identify the site of Phaliga. The seven- teenth station, Nabagath, is, as has been said, Circesium- Karkistya-Buseirah. The eighteenth, Asikha, I would identify with the Zeitha of Ptolemy and Ammianus Mar- cellinus, and with the mounds I saw at Jemmah. For the nineteenth station, Dura, I know no other site than the very striking tell of Abu'l Hassan, the biggest mound upon PARTHIAN STATIONS 113 this part of the river. Miiller has suggested that the mound may represent Ptolemy's Thelda (in his edition of Ptolemy's Geography, p. 1003). Ammianus Marcellinus also mentions "a deserted town on the river" called Dura. The army of Julian reached it in two days' march from Zeitha, at which place the emperor had made an oration to his soldiers after sacrificing at Gordian's tomb. Now two days' march from Zeitha-Jemmah would bring the army to Werdi-Irzi, which is no doubt the place called by Xenophon Corsote and described by him as "a large deserted city." It is perhaps worthy of observation that, in spite of its being deserted, Cyrus provisioned his army at Corsote and that Julian's army found at Dura, though it too was deserted, "quantities of wild deer, so that the soldiers and sailors had plenty of food." My own impression on the spot was that Ammianus Marcellinus's Dura must be Irzi, The tower tombs were certainly erected before the middle of the fourth century, therefore they were in existence when Julian passed; moreover, they were far more numerous and conspicuous than they are at present, since almost all of them have now fallen into ruin. It is difficult to see how Irzi could have failed to attract the attention of Ammianus Mar- cellinus, and Dura is the one place- mentioned by him between Zeitha and 'Anah. But the Dura of Isidorus, the nineteenth station, has to be placed at Abu'l Hassan, not at Irzt, since his twentieth station, Merrhan, necessarily falls at Irzt, and I can only conjecture that, as in Julian's time both places were ruined and deserted, Ammianus Marcellinus made a confusion between them, or was wrongly informed, and trans- ferred the name of Dura (Abu'l Hassan) to Merrhan (Irzi). For the twenty-first station, Giddan, I can offer no sugges- tion. Jabariyeh will scarcely fit, as it is but 13 hrs. 15 min. from 'Anah, and Giddan was 17 sch. from Anatho, but it must be admitted that all the distances between the stations from Merrhan to 'Anah seem to be too long according to my caravan time. The twenty-second station, Belesibiblada, was placed by Chesney at Kal'at Bulik, and I saw no better site for it, though I took only 9 hrs. and 25 min. to reach it from 114 AMURATH TO AMURATH Irzi, and the distance given by Isidorus is 12 sch. Ritter would place at Kal'at BulSk Ptolemy's Bonakhe. I do not see any way of identifying with certainty the island station, the twenty-third, which was 4 sch. from 'Anah. There are many islands in the stream above 'Anah. One of them, Karibileh, is reported to have ruins upon it; it was about four hours' journey from ancient 'Anah, and may therefore be identical with the twenty-third station, which is placed at a distance of 4 sch. from Anatho. Anatho, the twenty-fourth station, Isidorus expressly states to be on an island; it was therefore the successor to the Assyrian fortress which I believe to have existed on the island of Lubbad. Xenophon does not mention it ; nor does Ptolemy, unless his Bethanna may be taken for 'Anah as Ritter believed (Vol. XI. p. 716). Rawa may possibly be the Phathusa of Zosimos, but I would rather place Phathusa on the left bank, opposite and below the island of Lubbad, where there are many mounds and ruins. I did not follow the river below 'Anah very closely, but the ruins I saw near Hadithah help to justify the presumption that Olabus was situated there. Chesney wished to identify Izannesopolis with the ruins of a castle between Baghdad! and Hit. I did not go to the spot, and my caravan time between Hadithah and Hit is therefore rather misleading, for if I had followed the river so as to visit the kasr, the journey would have taken more than the seventeen and a half hours which I have recorded. Isidorus's 16 sch. from Izannesopolis to Aeipolis can scarcely be correct, and Kie- pert's emendation (6 instead of 16) may well be accepted. CHAPTER IV hIt to kerbela March i8 — March 30 History in retrospect suffers an atmospheric distortion. We look upon a past civilization and see it, not as it was, but charged with the significance of that through which we gaze, as down the centuries shadow overlies shadow, some dim, some luminous, and some so strongly coloured that all the age behind is tinged with a borrowed hue. So it is that the great revolutions, "predestined unto us and we pre- destined," take on a double power; not only do they turn the current of human action, but to the later comer they seem to modify that which was irrevocably fixed and past. We lend to the dwellers of an earlier day something of our own know- ledge ; we watch them labouring towards the ineluctable hour, and credit them with a prescience of change not given to man. At no time does this sense of inevitable doom hang more darkly than over the years that preceded the rise of Islam ; yet no generation had less data for prophecy than the genera- tion of Mohammad. The Greek and the Persian disputed the possession of western Asia in profitless and exhausting war- fare, both harassed from time to time by the predatory expedi- tions of the nomads on their frontiers, both content to enter into alliance with this tribe or with that, and to set up an Arab satrap over the desert marshes. Thus it happened that the Beni Ghassan served the emperor of the Byzantines, and the Beni Lakhm fought in the ranks of the Sassanian armies. But neither to Justin II nor to Chosroes the Great came the news that in Mecca a child was born of the Kureish who was to found a military state as formidable as any that the world had seen, and nothing could have exceeded the fantastic improbability of such intelligence. I 2 115 ii6 AMURATH TO AMURATH I had determined to journey back behind this great dividing line, to search through regions now desolate for evidences of a past that has left little historic record, calling upon the shades to take form again upon the very ground whereon, substantial, they had played their part. So on a brilliant morning Fattfih and I saw the caravan start out in the direction of Baghdad, not without inner heart-searchings as to where and how we should meet it again, and having loaded three donkeys with all that was left to us of worldly goods, we turned our faces towards the wilderness. I looked back upon the ancient mound of Hit, the palm-groves, and the dense smoke of the pitch fires rising into the clear air, and as I looked our zaptieh came out to join us — a welcome sight, for the Mudir might well have repented at the eleventh hour. Now no one rides into the desert, however uncertain the adventure, without a keen sense of exhilaration. The bright morning sun, the wide clean levels, the knowledge that the problems of exist- ence are reduced on a sudden to their simplest expression, your own wit and endurance being the sole determining factors — all these things brace and quicken the spirit. The spell of the waste seized us as we passed beyond the sulphur marshes ; Hussein Onbashi held his head higher, and we gave each other the salaam anew, as if we had stepped out into another world that called for a fresh greeting. "At Hit," said he, and his words went far to explain the lightness of his heart, "I have left three wives in the house." "Mashallah!" said FattMi, "you must be deaf with the gir-gir-gir of them." " Eh billah ! " assented Hussein, " I shut my ears. Three wives, two sons and six daughters, of whom but two married. Twenty children I have had, and seven wives ; three of these died and one left me and returned to her own people. But I shall take another bride this year, please God." "We Christians," observed Fattuh, "find one enough." "You may be right," answered Hussein politely; "yet I would take a new wife every year if I had the means." "We will find you a bride in Kebeisah," said 1. KEBEISAH T17 Hussein weighed this suggestion. "The maidens of Kebeisah are fair but wilful. There is one among them, her name is Shemsah — wallah, a picture ! a picture she is !— she has had seven husbands." "And the maidens of Hit ? " I asked. " How are they ? " "Not so fair, but they are the better wives. That is why I choose to remain in Hit," explained Hussein. "The bim- bashl would have sent me to BaghdM, but I said, ' No, let me stay here ; the maidens of Hit do not expect much.' Your Excellency may laugh, but a poor man must think of these things." We rode on through the aromatic scrub until the black masses of the Kebeisah palm-groves resolved into tall trunks and feathery fronds.^ The sun stood high as we passed under the village gate and down the dusty street that led to the Mudir's compound. We tied our mares to some mangers in his courtyard and were ourselves ushered into his reception- room, there to drink coffee and set forth our purpose. The leading citizens of Kebeisah dropped in one by one, and the talk was of the desert and of the dwellers therein. The men of Kebeisah are not 'Arab, Bedouin ; they hold their mud- walled village and their 50,000 palm-trees against the tribes, but they know the laws of the desert as well as the nomads themselves, and carry on an uneasy commerce with them in dates and other commodities, with which even the wilderness cannot dispense, the accredited methods of the merchant alternating with those of the raider and the avenger of raids. There was no lack of guides to take me to Khubbaz, for the ruin is the first stage upon the post-road to Damascus, and half the male population was acquainted with that perilous way. "It is the road of death," said Hussein Onbashi, stuffing tobacco into the cup of his narghileh. "Eh billah !" said one who laid the glowing charcoal atop. ^ YikOt mentions Kebeisah as the oasis four miles from Hit upon the desert road. There are, he says, a number of villages there, the inhabit- ants of which live in the extreme of poverty and misery, by reason of the aridity of the surrounding waste. ii8 AMURATH TO AMURATH "Eight days' ride, and the government, look you, pays no more than fifteen mejidehs from Hit and back again." An old man, wrapped in a brown cloak edged with gold, took up the tale. "The government reckons fifteen mejidehs to be the price of a man's life. Wallah ! if the water-skins leak between water and water, or if the camel fall lame, the rider perishes." "By the truth, it is the road of death," repeated Hussein. "Twice last year the Deleim robbed the mail and killed the bearer of it." I had by this time spread out Kiepert. "Inform me," said I, "concerning the water." "Oh lady," said the old man, "I rode with the mail for twenty years. An hour and a half from Kebeisah there is water at 'Ain Za'zu', and in four hours more there is water in the tank of Khubbaz after the winter, but this year there is none, by reason of the lack of rain. Twelve hours from Khubbaz you shall reach Kasr 'Amej, which is another fortress like Khubbaz, but more ruined; and there is no water there. But eighteen hours farther you find water in the WMi Hauran, at Muheiwir." " Is there not a castle there ? " I asked. Kiepert calls it the castle of 'Aiwir. "There is nought but rijm," said he. (Rijm are the heaps of stones which the Arabs pile together for landmarks.) " And after nine hours more there is water at Ga'rah, and then no more till Dumeir, nine hours from Damascus." If this account is exact, there must be four days of waterless desert on the road of death. The springs in Kebeisah are strongly charged with sulphur, but half-way between the town and the shrine of Sheikh Khudr, that lifts a conical spire out of the wilderness, there is a well less bitter, to which come the fair and wilful maidens night and morning, bearing on their heads jars of plaited willow, pitched without and within (F'ig. 62). We did not fill our water-skins there when we set out next day for Kasr Khubbaz, but rode on to 'Ain Za'zu', where the water is drinkable, though far from sweet (Fig. 63). There are FIG. 64. — KASR KHUBBAZ AND RUINS OF THE TANK. FIG. 66. — KASR KHUBBAZ, THF, GATEWAY. FK;. 67.---KASR KHUl-lBAZ, A VAUI/IKll CIIAMI;!' I'H;. 6S. — THEMAII.. KHUBBAZ . 119 two other sulphurous springs, one a little to the north and one to the south, round each of which, as at 'Ain Za'zu', the inhabitants of Kebeisah sow clover, the sole fodder of the oasis in rainless years like the spring of 1909; so said Fawwaz, the owner of the two camels on which we had placed our small packs. Fawwaz rode one of them and his nephew, Sfaga, the other, and they hung the drip- ping water-skins under the loads. We followed the course of a shallow valley westwards, and before we left it sighted a train of donkeys making to the north with an escort on foot — Arabs of the Deleim. They looked harmless enough, but I afterwards found that they had caused Fawwaz great uneasiness ; indeed they kept him watchful all through the night, fearing that they might raid us while we slept. I was too busy observing the wide landscape to dwell on such matters. The desolate world stretched before us, lifting itself by shallow steps into long, bare ridges, on which the Arab rijm were vFsible for miles away. The first of these steps — it was not more than fifty feet high — was called the Jebel MuzShir, and when we had gained its summit we saw the castle of Khubbaz lying out upon the plain. To the north the ground falls away into a wadi, a shallow depression like all desert valleys, in which are traces of a large masonry tank that caught the trickle of the winter springs and held their water behind a massive dam (Fig. 64). The tank is now half full of soil and the dam leaks, so that as soon as the rains have ceased the water store vanishes. It had left behind it a scanty crop of grass and flowers, which seemed luxuriant to us in that dry season; we turned the mares and camels loose in what Fattuh called enthusiastically the rabi'ah (the herbage of spring), and pitched my light tent in the valley bottom, where my men could find shelter among the rocks against the chills of night. I left all these arrangements to Fattuh, and with Hussein and Fawwaz to hold the metre tape, measured and photographed the fort till the sun touched the western horizon. The walls of Khubbdz are built of stones, either unworked or very roughly squared, set in a thick bed of coarse mortar. 120 AMURATH TO AMURATH In form the fort is a hollow square with round bastions at the angles, and except on the side facing towards Kebeisah, where the centre of the wall is occupied by a gate, there is also a round bastion midway between the angle towers (Fig. 65). All these bastions are much ruined and I may be wrong in representing them as if unequal size. Before the door there has been a vaulted porch, among the ruins of which lies a large block of stone which looks as if it had served FIG. 65. — KHUBBAZ. as lintel to the outer door; I could see no moulding or inscription upon it (Fig. 66). The existing inner door is arched, the arch being set forward in a curious fashion. It opened into a vaulted entrance passage which communi- cated with an open court in the centre of the building. The court was surrounded by barrel-vaulted chambers, some of which showed traces of repair or reconstruction, though the oid and the new work are now alike ruined.^ All the vaults 1 The central division wall in the long south chamber is a later addition. KHUBBAZ 121 are set forward about three centimetres beyond the face of the wall (Fig. 67). Above the outset the first few courses of stones are laid horizontally, inclining slightly inwards, but where the curve of the vault makes it impossible to continue this method without the aid of centering beams, the stone is cut into narrow slabs which are set upright so as to form slices of the vault, and each slice has an inclination backwards, the first resting against the head wall and every succeeding slice rest- ing against the one behind it. This is the well-known Meso- potamian system of vaulting without a centering, which is as old as the Assyrians.^ It is best adapted to brick, but it can be carried out in stone when the span of the vault is not large, provided that the stones be cut thin, so as to resemble as nearly as possible brick tiles. On the south side, which is the best preserved, there are traces of an upper storey, or possibly of an upper gallery or chemin de ronde. A doorway led from it into a small chamber hollowed out of the thickness of the central bastion : I imagine that there was a similar out- look chamber in the other bastions, but in all these the upper part is ruined. I could find no inscriptions; the Arab tribe marks (awasim) were scratched upon the plaster with which the inner side of the walls had been coated. I do not doubt that Khubbaz belongs to the Mohammadan period, nor that it is a relic of the great days of the khalifate when the shortest road from Baghdad to Damascus was guarded by little com- panies of soldiers stationed at Khubbaz and 'Amej, and perhaps at other points. The plan is that of many of the Roman and Byzantine lime fortresses upon the Syrian side of the desert,^ of the Mohammadan forts and fortified khans scattered over Syria and Mesopotamia,^ and of the modern 1 Described by Choisy : L'Art de bdUr chez les Byzantins, p. 31. 2 For example Kastal (Briinnow and Domaszewski : Provincia Arabia, Vol. II. pi. xliv.); Kasr el Abyad (de Vogii^ : La Syrie Centrals, Vol. I. p. 69) ; Deir el Kahf, founded in a.d. 306 (Butler : Ancient Architecture in Syria, Section A, Part II. p. 146); Kuseir el HallibAt, dated a.d. 213 (ditto, p. 72); barracks at Anderin, dated a.d. 558 (ditto, Section B, Part II. pi. viii.). 5 Tuba with a triple court (Musil : Kuseir 'Amra, Vol. I. p. 13) ; Khar^ni (ditto, p. 97); KhSn ez Zebib {Provincia Arabia, Vol. II. p. 78). 122 AMURATH TO AMURATH Turkish guardhouse; the structural details are Mesopotamia!], dictated by the conditions of the land. At the pleasant hour of dusk I sat among the flowering weeds by my tent door while Fattuh cooked our dinner in his kitchen among the rocks, Sikga gathered a fuel of desert scrub, Fawwaz stirred the rice-pot, and the bubbling of Hussein's narghileh gave a note of domesticity to our bivouac. My table was a big stone, the mares cropping the ragged grass round the tent were my dinner-party; one by one the stars shone out in a moonless heaven and our tiny encamp- ment was wrapped in the immense silences of the desert, the vast and peaceful night. Next morning, as we rode back to Kebeisah, Fattuh and I, between intervals devoted to chasing gazelle, laid siege on our companions and persuaded them to accompany us in our further journey. Fawwaz avowed that he was satisfied with us and would come where we wished (and as for Sfaga he would do as he was told) as long as Hussein would give a semi-official sanction to the enterprise by his presence. It was more difficult to win over Hussein, who had received from the Mudir no permission to absent himself so long from Hit ; but Fattuh pointed out that, when you have three wives, with the prospect of a fourth, to say nothing of six daughters of whom but two are married, you cannot afford to neglect the opportunity of earning an extra bakhshish. This reasoning was conclusive, and before we reached 'Ain Za'zu' we had settled everything, down to the quantity of coffee-beans we would buy at Kebeisah for the trip. But when we got to Kebeisah we were greeted by news that went near to overturning our combinations. There had been alarums and excursions in our absence ; the Deleim had attacked a party of fuel-gatherers two hours from the oasis, in the very plain we were to cross, and had made off with eight donkeys. One of the donkeys belonged to Fawwaz; he shook his head over the baleful activity of the tribe and murmured that we were a small party in the face of such perils. Moreover, in the Mudir's courtyard there stood a half- starved mare which had been recaptured in a counter-raid from the seventh husband of the famous Shemsah. He too KEBEISAH 123 was of the Deleim. We gave the mare a feed of corn — her gentle, hungry eyes were turned appealingly on our full mangers ; but to Shemsah I was harder hearted, though her eyes were more beautiful than those of the mare. She came suppliant as I sat dining on the Mudir's roof at nightfall and begged me to recover her husband's rifle, which lay below in the hands of the government. Her straight brows were pencilled together with indigo and a short blue line marked the roundness of her white chin ; a cloak slipping backwards from her head showed the rows of scarlet beads about her throat, and as she drew it together with slender fingers, FattQh, Hussein and I gazed on her with unmixed approval, in spite of the irregular course of her domestic history. But I felt that to return his rifle to a Deleimi robber was not part of my varied occupations, though who knows whether Shem- sah's grace, backed by what few mejidehs she could scrape together, did not end by softening the purpose of Hussein and the Mudtr, "the Government," as in veiled terms we spoke of Ihem ? With the exercise of some diplomacy we induced FawwSz to hold to his engagement, but the Mudir took fright when he heard of our intentions, and threatened our guides with dire retribution if they led us into the heart of the desert. I think the threat was only intended to relieve him of responsi- bility, for Hussein shrugged his shoulders, and said it would be enough if we rode an hour in the direction of Ramadi, on the Euphrates, and then changed our course and made straight for Abu Jir, an oasis where we expected to find Arab tents. We set off next morning in the clear sunlight which makes all projects seem entirely reasonable, and dropped, after three-quarters of an hour, into a little depression. When we had crossed the sulphur marsh which lay at the valley bottom, we altered our direction to the south-west and rode almost parallel to a long low ridge called the Ga'rat ej Jem^l, which lay about three miles to the west of us. Four hours from Kebeisah we reached a tiny mound out of which rose a spring of water, sulphurous but just drinkable. The top of the mound was lifted only a few feet above the surrounding 124 AMURATH TO AMURATH level, but that was enough to give us a wide view, and since in all the world before us there was no shade or shelter from the sun, we sat down and lunched where we could be sure that a horseman would not approach us unawares. And as we rested, some one far away opened a bottle into which Solomon, Prophet of God, had sealed one of the Jinn. Up sprang a gigantic column of smoke that fanned outwards in the still air and hung menacingly over the naked, empty plain. I waited spellbound to see the great shoulders and huge horned head disengage themselves from the smoke- wreaths that rolled higher and — "'Ain el 'Awasil burns," said Faww^z. "A shepherd has set it alight." There was a small pitch-well an hour away to the south- east, and if springs that burn when the tinder touches them are more logical than spirits that issue from a bottle when the seal is broken, then the explanation of FawwSz may be accepted. But at that moment I could not stay to think the problem out, for if it was hot riding, sitting still was intoler- able, and we were not anxious to linger when every half- hour's march meant half-an-hour of dangerous country behind us. From noon to sunset the desert is stripped of beauty. Hour after hour we journeyed on, while the bare forbidding hills drew away from us on the right, and the plain ahead rolled out illimitable. We saw no living creature, man or beast, but an hour from 'Ain el 'Asfuriyeh, where we had lunched, we came upon a deep still pool in an outcrop of rock, the water sufficiently sweet to drink. This spot is called Jelib esh Sheikh ; it contains several such pools, said Fawwaz, and he added that the water had appeared there of a sudden two years before, but that now it never diminished, nor rose higher in the rocky clefts. Just beyond the pool we crossed the Wadi Muhammadi, which stretched westwards to the receding ridges of the Gar'at ej Jemal, and east to the Euphrates ; it was dry and blotched with an evil-looking crust of sulphur. Fawwaz turned his camel's head a little to the east of south and began to look anxiously for landmarks. We hoped to find at Abu Jir an encampment of the Deleim, ABU JIR il^ and, eagerly as we wished to avoid the scattered horsemen of the tribe by day, it was essential that we should pass the night near their tents. The desert is governed by old and well-defined laws, and the first of these is the law of hos- pitality. If we slept within the circuit of a sheikh's encamp- ment he would be "malzum 'aleina" (responsible for us)' and not one of his people would touch us ; but if we lay out in the open we should court the attack of raiders and of thieves. Two hours from the Wadi Muhammadi we reached a little tell, from the top of which we sighted the 'alamah (the landmarks) of Abu Jir, a couple of high-piled mounds of stones. An hour later they lay to the east of us, and we saw still farther to the south-east the black line of tamarisk bushes that indicated the oasis. But it was another hour before we got up to it, and the sun was very low in the sky when we set foot on the hard black surface that gives the place its name. There was no time to lose, and we embarked recklessly on the " Father of Asphalt," only to be caught in the fresh pitch that had been spread out upon the wilderness by streams of sulphurous water. We dismounted and led our animals over the quaking expanse, coasting round the head-waters of the springs — there are, I believe, eight of them — and experiment- ing in our own persons on half-congealed lakes of pitch before we allowed the camels to venture across them. The light faded while we were thus engaged, and seeing that too much caution might well be our undoing, I shouted to Fattuh to follow, and struck out eastwards. Fattuh was half inclined to look upon our case as a result of premeditated treachery on the part of Fawwdz, but I had noted unmistakable signs of fear and bewilderment in the bearing of the latter, and at all hazards I was resolved not to sleep in a pool of tar. We made for a line of tamarisk bushes behind which lay a thin haze of smoke, and as we broke through the brushwood we beheld a black tent crouching in the hollow. We rode straight up to the door and gave the salaam. "And upon you peace," returned the astonished owner. "What Arabs are you, and where is your sheikh's tent?" said I, in an abrupt European manner. ii6 amurath to amurath He was taken aback at being asked so many questions and answered reluctantly, "We are the Deleim, and the tent of Muhammad el 'Abdullah lies yonder." We turned away, and I whispered to Fattuh not to hasten, and above all to approach the sheikh's tent from in front, lest we should be mistaken for such as come upon an evil errand. He fell behind me, and with as much dignity as a tired and dusty traveller can muster, I drew rein by the tent ropes and gave the salaam ceremoniously, with a hand lifted to breast and lip and brow. A group of men sitting by the hearth leapt to their feet and one came forward. "Peace and kinship and welcome," said he, laying his hand on my bridle. I looked into his frank and merry face and knew that all was well. "Are you Muhammad el 'Abdullah, for whom we seek?" " Wallah, how is my name known to you ? " said he. " Be pleased to enter." Hussein Onbashi, when he appeared with the camels a quarter of an hour later, found a large company round the coffee-pots, listening in breathless wonder (I no less amazed than the rest) while the sheikh related the exploits of — a motor ! "And then, oh lady, they wound a handle in front of the carriage, and lo, it moved without horses, eh billah ! And it sped across the plain, we sitting on the cushions. And from behind there went forth semok." He brought out the English word triumphantly. "Allah, Allah ! " we murmured. Hussein took from his lip the narghileh tube which was already between them and explained the mystery. "It was the automobile of Misterr X. He journeyed from Aleppo to Baghdad in four days, and the last day Muhammad el 'Abdullah went with him, for the road was through the country of the Deleim." "I saw them start," said Fattuh the Aleppine. "But the automobile lies now broken in Baghdad." ABU JIR 127 Muhammad paid no heed to this slur upon the reputation of the carriage. "White!" said he. "It was all painted white. Wallah, the Arabs wondered as it fled past. And I was seated within upon the cushions." That night Fattuh and I held a short council. We had won successfully through a hazardous day, but it seemed less than wisdom to go farther without an Arab guide, and I proposed to add Muhammad el 'Abdullah to our party, if he would come. "He will come," said Fattuh. "This sheikh is a man. And your Excellency is of the English." Muhammad neither demurred nor bargained. I think he would have accompanied me even if I had not belonged to the race that owned the carriage. Our adventure pleased him ; he was one of those whose blood runs quicker than that of his fellows, whose fancy burns brighter, "whom thou, Mel- pomene, at birth "... upon many an unknown cradle the Muse sheds her clear beam. "But if we were to meet the raiders of the Beni Hassan ? " I asked, mindful of the unsuccessful parleyings at Hit. "God is great!" replied Muhammad, "and we are four men with rifles." There was once a town at Abu Jir, guarded by a little square fort with bastioned angles like Kasr Khubbaz. It was, however, much more ruined; of the interior buildings nothing remained, while the outer walls were little better than heaps of stones. But below this later work there were remains of older foundations, more careful masonry of larger materials, and outside the walls traces of a pavement, com- posed of big slabs of stone, accurately fitted together. All round the fort lay the foundations of houses, stone walls or crumbling mounds of sun-dried brick, not unlike the ruins of Ma'mureh. There must have existed here a mediaeval Mohammadan settlement, if there was nothing older, and the discovery was sufficiently surprising, for Abu Jir now lies far beyond the limits of fixed habitation. The Deleim still turn the abundant water of the oasis to some profit, planting a laS AMURATM TO AMURATH few patches of corn and clover in the low ground below the ruins, but the insecurity of the desert forbids all permanent occupation. We had not gone far on our way next morning before Muhammad stopped short in the ode he was singing and bent down from his saddle to examine some hoof-prints in the sandy ground. Two horsemen had travelled that way, riding in the same direction that we were taking. "Those are the mares of our enemies," he observed. " How do you know ? " I asked. "I heard that they had passed Abu Jir in the night," he answered and resumed his song. When he had brought it to an end, he called out — "Oh lady, I will sing the ode that I composed about the carriage." At this the camel-riders and Hussein drew near and Muhammad began the first kasidah that has been written to a motor. " I tell a marvel the like of which no man has known, A glory of artifice born of English wit." "True, true ! " ejaculated Fawwaz ecstatically. "Eh billah ! " exclaimed Hussein. " Her food and her drink are the breath from a smoke-cloud blown, If her radiance fade bright fire shall reburnish it." "Allah, Allah ! " cried the enraptured Fawwaz. "On the desert levels she darts like a bird of prey, Her race puts to shame a mare of the purest breed; As a hawk in the dusk that hovers and swoops to slay, She swoops and turns with wondrous strength and speed." "Wallah, the truth!" Hussein's enthusiasm was uncon- trollable. " Eh wallah ! " echoed Fawwaz and Sfaga. "He who mounts and rides her sits on the throne of a king . . ." "A king in very truth ! " cried Fawwaz. "If the goal be far, to her the remote is near . . ." THEM AIL T29 " Near indeed ! " burst from the audience. " More stealthy than stallions, more swift than the jinn a-wing, She turns the gazelle that hides from her blast in fear." "Allah ! " FawwSz punctuated the stanza. "Not from idle lips was gathered the wisdom I sing . . ." " God forbid ! " exclaimed Fawwaz, leaning forward eagerly. " In the whole wide plain she has not met with her peer." " Mashallah ! it is so ! it is the truth, oh lady ! " said Hussein. " I did not quite understand it all," said I humbly, feeling rather like Alice in Wonderland when Humpty Dumpty recited his verses to her. " Perhaps you will help me to write it down this evening." So that night, with the assistance of Fawwaz, who had a bowing acquaintance with letters, we committed it to paper, and I now know how the masterpieces of the great singers were received at the fair of 'Ukaz in the Days of Ignorance. " The truth ! it is the truth ! " shouted the tribes between each couplet. " Eh by Al Lat and by Al 'Uzzah ! " Three hours from Abu Jtr we cantered down to the Wadi Themail and saw some black tents pitched by a tell on the farther side. Flocks of goats were scattered over the plain ; the shepherds, when they perceived our party, drew them together and began to drive them towards the tents. At this Muhammad pulled up, rose in his stirrups, and waved a long white cotton sleeve over his head — a flag of truce. "They take us for raiders," said he, laughing. "Wallah, in a moment we should have had their rifles upon us." The mound of Themail is crowned by a fort built of mud and unshaped stones (Fig. 68). It has a single door and round bastions at the angles of the wall, like KhubbSz, but the figure described by the walls is far from regular, and there is no trace of construction within. The existing building looked to me like rough Bedouin work, though I suspeCt that 130 AMURATH TO AMURAlti it has taken the place of older defences (Fig. 69). A copious sulphur spring rises below it and flows into the cornfields of the Deleim. With a supply of water so plentiful Themail must always have been a place worth holding. We stayed for an hour to lunch, Muhammad's kinsmen supplementing our fare with a bowl of sour curds. Fawwaz was all for spending the night here, for there would be no tents at FIG. 69. — THEMAIL. 'Asileh, where we meant to camp, and the noonday stillness was broken by a loud altercation between him and the indig- nant Fattuh. I paid no attention until the case was brought to me for decision — the final court of appeal should always be silent up to the moment when an opinion is requested — and then said that we should undoubtedly sleep at 'Asileh. " God guide us, God guard us, God protect us ! " muttered Muhammad as he settled himself into the saddle. He never took the road without this pious ejaculation. WADI BURDAN 131 Four hours of weary desert lie between Themail and 'Aslleh, but Muhammad diversified the way by pointing out the places where he had attacked and slain his enemies. These historic sites were numerous. The Deleim have no friends except the great tribe of the 'Anazeh, represented in these regions by the Amarat under Ibn Hudhdhdl. To the 'Anazeh he always alluded as the Bedfi, giving me their names for the different varieties of scanty desert scrub as well as the common titles. Even the place-names are not the same on the lips of the Bedii ; for example El 'Aslleh is known to them as Er Radaf. "Are not the Deleim also Bedu ? " I asked. "Eh wah," he assented. "The 'Anazeh intermarry with us. But we would not take a girl of the Afadleh; they are 'Agedat " (base born). The friendship between the Amarit and the Deleim is inter- mittent at best, like all deSert alliances. As we neared the Wadl Burden, Muhammad called our attention to some tamarisk bushes where he and his raiding party had lain one night in ambush, and at dawn killed four men of the Amarat and taken their mares. "Eh billah ! " said he with a sigh of satisfaction. The very rifle he carried had been taken in a raid from Ibn er Rashtd's people. He showed me with pride that the name of 'Abdu'l 'Aziz ibn er Rashid, lately Lord of Nejd, was scratched upon it in large clear letters. "I did not take it from them," he explained. "I found it in the hands of one of the Beni Hassan." I fell to wonder- ing how many midnight attacks it had seen, and how many masters it had served since Ibn er Rashid's agents brought it up from the Persian Gulf. The Wadl Burdan is one of three valleys that are reputed to stretch across the Syrian desert from the Jebel Hauran to the Euphrates. The northernmost is the Wadi Haurin, which joins the river above Hit, and the southernmost the Wadi Lebai'ah, on which stands Kheidir. When the snow melts in the Flauran mountains water flows down all three, so I have heard, but later in the year there is no water in the K 2 132 AMURATH TO AMURATH Wadi Burdan, except at 'Asileh, though Kiepert marks it "quellenreich." Muhammad declared that there was no per- manent water west of 'Asileh save at Wtzeh, a spring which has often been described to me. It rises underground, and you approach it by a long passage through the rock, taking with you a lantern, my informants are careful to add. At the end of the passage you come to a shallow pool where the mud predominates, though it is always possible to quench your thirst at it. 'Asileh is an autumn camping-ground of the 'Anazeh. The deep fine sand of the valley is bordered by a fringe of tamarisk bushes, covered, when we were there, with feathery white flower. Their roots strike down into the water, which rises into cup-shaped holes scooped out in the sand, and the deeper you dig the clearer and the colder it is. For four days we had found no water that was sweet, and the pools under the tamarisk bushes tasted like nectar. It was a delightful solitary camp. The setting sun threw a magic cloak of colour and soft shadows over the sandhills of the Wadi Burdan, and under the starlight my companions lingered round the camp fire, smoking a narghileh and telling each other wondrous tales. When I joined them Fattuh was holding forth upon the evil eye, a favourite topic with him. I knew by heart the tragedy of his three horses who died in one day because an acquaintance had looked at them in their stable. "And if your Excellency doubts," said Fattuh, "I can tell you that there is a man well known in Aleppo who has one good eye and one evil. And this he keeps bound under a kerchief. And one day when he was sitting in the house of friends they said to him, ' Why do you bind up the left eye ? ' He said, ' It is an evil eye.' Then they said, ' If you were to take off the kerchief and look at the lamp hanging from the roof, would it fall ? ' ' Without doubt, ' said he ; and with that he unbound the kerchief and looked, and the lamp fell to the ground." "Allah!" said Faww^z. "There is a man at Kebeisah who has never dared to look at his own son." "At 'Anah," observed Hussein, letting the narghileh wAdI el 'ASIBIYEH 133 relapse into silence for a moment, "there is a sheikh who wears a charm against bullets." But Muhammad knew as much as most men about the ways of bullets, and he thought nothing of this expedient. "Whether the bullet hits or misses," he remarked, "it is all from God." He poured me out a cup of coffee. "A double health, oh lady," said he. The sun had not risen when we left 'Asileh, but it fell upon us as we climbed the sandhills, and gave to every little thorny plant a long trail of shadow. " God guide us, God guard us, God protect us ! " murmured Muhammad. The desert was unbearably monotonous that morning. The ground rose gradually, level above level in an almost imperceptible slope which was just enough to prevent us from seeing more than a quarter of an hour ahead. A dozen times I marked a bush on the top of the rise and promised myself that when we reached it we should have a wider prospect ; a dozen times the summit melted away into another slope as featureless a% the last. We were journeying in a south-easterly direction, straight into the sun, and as I rode, with eyes downcast to avoid the glare, I noticed that the ground was strewn with yellow gourds larger than an orange. "It is hanzal," said Muhammad. "It grows only where the plain is very dry, and best in rainless years. Wallah, so bitter is the fruit that, if you hold dates in your hand and crush the hanzal with your foot, they say you cannot eat the dates for the flavour of the hanzal. God knows." His words set loose a host of memories, for though I had never before seen the bitter colocynth gourds, the great singers of the desert have drawn many an image from them, and I drifted back through their world of heroic loves and wars to where Imru'l Kais stood weeping, as though his eyelids were inflamed with the acrid juice. Five hours from 'Asileh we dipped into the Wadl el 'Asibtyeh, where the marshy bottom still bore footprints of horses and camels that had come down to drink before the pools had vanished- A steep bank on the south side gave 134 AMURATH TO AMURATH us a rim of shadow in which we stretched ourselves and lunched, and from the top of the bank we sighted the palm- trees of Rahhaliyeh, an hour and a half to the south; we had seen them three hours earlier from the summit of a little mound and then lost them again. The oasis is surrounded by stagnant pools that lie rotting in the sun; at the end of the summer the evil vapours marry with the fresh dates, with which the inhabitants are surfeited, and breed a horrible fever that will kill a strong man in a few hours. The air was heavy with the rank smell of the marsh, and I warned my people to drink no water but that which we had brought with us from the clear pools of 'Asileh. There are sixteen thousand palm-trees at Rahhaliyeh and, buried in their midst, a village governed by a Mudir, to whom I hastened to pay my respects. He gave me glasses of tea while my tent was being pitched — may God reward him ! We camped that night in a palm garden, where we were entertained by a troop of musicians playing on drums and a double flute, to which music one of them danced between the sun and shade of the palm fronds. Their faces were those of negroes, though they had the clear yellow skin of the Arab, and I noticed that most of the population of Rahhaliyeh was of this type. "They have always been here," said Hussein contemptu- ously, "they and the frogs." In spite of the flickering shade of the palm-trees it was stifling hot, and I looked with regret over the broken mud wall of our garden into the clean stretches of the open desert. But the splendours of the sunset glowed between the palm trunks; in matchless beauty a crescent moon hung among the dark fronds, and we lay down to sleep with the contentment of those who have come safely out of perilous ways. The Mudtr had given me useful information concerning some ruins that lie between RahhSlIyeh and ShetSteh. Next day I sent Fattdh and the camels direct to the second oasis, and, taking with me Hussein and Muhammad, with a boy for guide, set out to explore the site of an ancient city. Fawwaz objected loudly to this arrangement, and on reflec- tion I ani inclined to think that we overrated the security FIG. 73. — BARDAWI FKOM SOUTH-WEST. FIG. 74. — BARDAWI, EAST END OF VAULTED HALL. 'AIN ET TAMR 135 of the road, though no harm came of it. About an hour to the south of RahhMlyeh, on the northern edge of low- lying marshy ground, rich in springs, stands the shrine of Sayyid Ahmed ibn Hdshim, and near it to the north and west are vestiges of what must have been a large town. We followed for at least a quarter of a mile the foundations of a fine masonry wall 150 centimetres thick. Between this wall and the low ground the surface of the plain is broken by innumerable mounds and heaps of stone ; here, said the boy, after rain, the women of the two oases find gold ornaments and pictured stones. I saw and bought some of the pictured stones at Shetateh; they are Assyrian cylindrical seals; but without knowing in what quantities and with what other objects they appear, it would be rash to decide that the site is as old. There was undoubtedly a mediaeval Arab city there; all the ground was strewn with fragments of Arab coloured pottery, and at the western limit of the ruin field there are remains of the usual four-square fort; Murrat is its present name.^ It is built of uncut stone and unburnt brick ; the doorway in the north wall is covered with, a flat- tened pointed arch that suggests the thirteenth century or thereabouts.2 My own belief is that the town to which this castle belonged stood on the site of an older city, and I place here 'Ain et Tamr, an oasis that was famous in the days of the Persian kings. YSkfit describes it as having lain near Shetiteh, and observes that KhSlid ibn u'l Waltd took and sacked it in the year 12 a.h., but he says nothing about a later town on the same spot, to which the evidence of the ruins points. Perhaps it was absorbed in Shetateh. The interest of these speculations had caused me to forget that we were still in the desert. Our guide caught us up at MurrSt, whither we had galloped recklessly, and explained that he had had some difficulty in allaying the suspicions of a small encampment of the AmarSt half-hidden in the valley. The men, seeing us hurrying past, had taken us for robbers ' The whole area of ruins is known as Kherab = ruin. * It is not necessarily so late, for the Baghdad Gate at Rakkah ha» the same arch, and it is certainly earlier, 136 AMURATH TO AMURATH and were preparing to shoot at us. At a soberer pace we turned back along the valley. It was marshy in places, intersected by little streams from the springs, and covered with a white crust of salts — sabkhah, the Arabs call such regions — on which nothing grew but a malignant-looking thorny shrub, thelleth, useless to man and beast. The water of the springs was "heavy," Muhammad told me, like the water of Rahh^liyeh. Half-an-hour's ride down the valley we crossed the Rahhaliyeh-Shetateh road at a point where there were traces of good masonry. Another half-hour ahead stood the mound of Bar- . — 1 dawi, our objective. Being §in good spirits we devoted the interval to song. Mu- hammad gave us his ode to the motor, and I obliged with "God save the King," translated into indifferent Arabic for the benefit of the audience. "The words are good," said Muhammad politely, "but I do not care about the air." ^'=*^;— ; ; o**™" So we came to Bardawi, FIG. 72.-BARDAwt. ^ Striking tcll wlth an oval fortress standing upon it (Fig. 72). There had been at least three storeys of vaulted rooms lifting the strange tower-like structure high above the level of the desert (Fig. 73). It suggests a watch- tower guarding the eastern approaches to the city, but I am not prepared to affirm that the present edifice is earlier than the Mohammadan period. A substructure and the remains of an upper floor are standing, the ground plan of both being the same. A small vaulted hall, with three vaulted chambers on either side, occupied the centre of the building ; the door, with traces of a porch or ante-room, lay to the west ; while to the east there were two much-ruined chambers, which BARDAWl 137 communicated with the hall by means of a narrow door. The masonry is of undressed stones laid in mortar. The vaults of the side chambers seem to have been built over a rude centering; they are much flattened and so irregularly constructed as to approach in form to a gable roof. These rooms were lighted by a small round hole in the outer wall, under the apex of the vault. The vault of the hall springs with a double outset from the wall and terminates at the eastern end (the west end is ruined) in a semi-dome which was adjusted to the rectangular corners by means of squinch arches (Fig. 74). The partition walls are carried up above the level of the upper vaults, apparently for another storey. The lower part of a strong facing of masonry is still in existence on the south side, and I conjecture that it was continued originally to the top of the tower. Having photographed and planned this singular building, we dismissed our guide, whose services we no longer needed, and set out over broken sabkhah in the direction of ShetSteh. We were jogging along between hummocks of thorn and scrub, Muhammad as usual singing, when suddenly he broke off at the end of a couplet and said : "I see a horseman riding in haste." I looked up and saw a man galloping towards us along the top of a ridge; he was followed closely by another and yet another, and all three disappeared as they dipped down from the high ground. In the desert every newcomer is an enemy till you know him to be a friend. Muhammad slipped a cartridge into his rifle, Hussein extracted his riding-stick from the barrel, where it commonly travelled, and I took a revolver out of my holster. This done, Muhammad galloped forward to the top of a mound; I followed, and we watched together the advance of the three who were rapidly diminish- ing the space that lay between us. Muhammad jumped to the ground and threw me his bridle. "Dismount," said he, "and hold my mare." I took the two mares in one hand and the revolver in the other. Hussein had lined up beside me, and we two stood perfectly still while Muhammad advanced, rifle in hand, his 138 AMURATH TO AMURATH body bent forward in an attitude of strained watchfulness. He walked slowly, alert and cautious, like a prowling aninial. The three were armed and our thoughts ran out to a possible encounter with the Beni Hassan, who were the blood enemies of our companion. If, when they reached the top of the ridge in front of us, they lifted their rifles, Hussein and I would have time to shoot first while they steadied their mares. The three riders topped the ridge, and as soon as we could see their faces Muhammad gave the salaam; they returned it, and with one accord we all stood at ease. For if men give and take the salaam when they are near enough to see each other's faces, there cannot, according to the custom of the desert, be any danger of attack. The authors of this picturesque episode turned out to be three men from Rah- haltyeh. One of them had lent a rifle to the boy who had guided us and, repenting of his confidence, had come after him to make sure that he did not make off with it. We pointed out the direction in which he had gone and turned our horses' heads once more in the direction of ShetSteh. "Lady," said Muhammad reflectively, "in the day of raids I do not trust my mare to the son of my uncle and not to my own brother, lest they should see the foe and fear, and ride away. But to you I gave her because I know that the heart of the English is strong. They do not flee." " God forbid ! " said I, but my spirit leapt at the compli- ment paid to my race, however lightly it had been evoked. The incident led to some curious talk concerning the rules that govern desert wars. You do not invariably raid to kill ; on the contrary, you desire, as far as possible, to avoid bloodshed, with all its tiresome and dangerous consequences of feud. "Many a day," explained Muhammad, "we are out only to rob. Then if we meet a few horsemen who try to escape from us, we pursue, crying, ' Your mount, lad ! ' And if they surrender and deliver to us their mares, their lives are safe, even if they should prove to be blood enemies." It is usual to hold in small esteem the courage called forth by Arab warfare, and I do not think that the mortality is, FIG. 75. — SHETATEH, SULPHUR SPRING, FIG. 76. — KASR SHAM'uN, OUTER WALL. i I I SHETATEH 139 as a rule, high; but I have on one or two occasions found myself with an Arab guide under conditions that might have proved awkward, and I have never yet seen him give signs of fear. It is only to town-dwellers like FawwSz that the wilderness is beset with terrors. ShetSteh is an oasis of 160,000 palms. The number is rapidly diminishing, and on every side there are groups of headless trunks from which the water has been turned off. This is owing to the iniquitous exactions of the tax-gatherers, who levy three and four times in the year the moneys due from each tree, so that the profits on the fruit vanish and even turn to loss. The springs are sulphurous, but very abundant. The palm-trees rise from a bed of corn and clover ; willows and pomegranates edge the irrigation streams, and birds nest and sing in the thickets. To us, who had dropped out of the deserts of the Euphrates, it seemed a paradise. The glimmering weirs, the sheen of up-turned willow leaves, the crinkled beauty of opening pomegranate buds were so many marvels, embraced in the recurring miracle of spring, that grows in wonder year by year. Through these enchanted groves we rode from our camp to the castle of Sham'fln, the citadel of the oasis. Its great walls, battered and very ancient, tower above the palm-trees, and within their circuit nestles a whole village of mud-built houses (Pig. 76). There is an arched gateway to the north, but the largest fragment of masonry lies to the east, a massive, shapeless wall of stone and unburnt bricks, seamed from top to bottom by a deep fissure, which the khalif, 'All ibn Abi TSlib, said my guide, made with a single sword cut. Among the houses there are many vestiges of old foundations, and a few vaulted chambers, now considerably below the level of the soil. It was impossible to plan the place in its present state; I can only be sure that it was square with bastioned comers. My impression is that it is pre-Mohammadan, repaired by the conquerors, and local tradition, to which, however, it would be unwise to attach much value, bears out this view. Possibly Sham'un was the main fortress of 'Ain et Tamr before the Mohammadan invasion. I40 AMURATH TO AMURATH At ShetSteh I parted from Hussein, Muhammad, and the camel riders. Kheidir was reported to be four hours away, a little to the south of the Kerbela road. The KaimmakSm could supply me with two zaptiehs, and Fattuh had hired a couple of mules to carry our diminished packs. The four men intended to travel back together, making a long day from Rahhaliyeh to Themail so as to avoid a night in the open desert. They started next morning in good heart, forti- fied by presents of quinine, a much-prized gift, and other more substantial rewards. Muhammad would gladly have come with us to Kerbela, but we remembered the Beni Hassan and decided that it would be wiser for him to turn back, though before he left we had laid plans for a longer and a more adventurous journey to be undertaken another year, please God ! We had not gone more than an hour from Shetateh before we met a company of the Bent Hassan coming in to the oasis for dates, a troop of lean and ragged men driving donkeys. They asked us anxiously whether we had seen any of the Deleim at Shetateh. "No, wallah!" said Fattuh with perfect assurance, and I laughed, knowing that Muhammad was well on his way to Rahhaltyeh. We had ridden to the south-east for about three hours, through a most uncompromising wilderness, when, in the glare ahead, we caught sight of a great mass which I took for a natural feature in the landscape. But as we approached, its shape became more and more definite, and I asked one of the zaptiehs what it was. "It is Kheidir," said he. "Yallah, Fattuh, bring on the mules," I shouted, and galloped forward. Of all the wonderful experiences that have fallen my way, the first sight of Kheidir is the most memorable. It reared its mighty walls out of the sand, almost untouched by time, breaking the long lines of the waste with its huge towers, steadfast and massive, as though it were, as I had at first thought it, the work of nature, not of man. We approached it from the north, on which side a long low building runs UKHEipiR 141 out towards the sandy depression of the Wadt Lebai'ah (Fig. 77), A zaptieth caught me up as I reached the first of the vaulted rooms, and out of the northern gateway a man in long robes of white and black came trailing down towards us through the hot silence. "Peace be upon you," said he. "And upon you peace, Sheikh 'All," returned the zaptieh. "This lady is of the English." "Welcome, my lady Khdn," said the sheikh; "be pleased to enter and to rest." He led me through a short passage and under a tiny dome. I was aware of immense corridors opening on either hand, but we passed on into a great vaulted hall where the Arabs sat round the ashes of a fire. "My lady Khdn," said Sheikh 'All, "this is the castle of Nu'man ibn Mundhir." Whether it were a Lakhmid palace or no, it was the palace which I had set forth to seek. It belongs architecturally to the group of Sassanian buildings which are already^ known to us, and historically it is related to the palaces, famous in pre-Mohammadan tradition, whose splendours had filled with amazement the invading hordes of the Bedouin, and still shine with a legendary magnificence, from the pages of the chroniclers of the conquest. Even for the Mohammadan writers they had become nothing but a name. Khawarnak, Sadir, and the rest, fell into ruin with Hirah, the capital of the small Arab principality that occupied the frontiers of the desert, and their site was a matter of hearsay or con- jecture. "Think on the lord of Khawarnak," sang 'Adl ibn Zaid prophetically — " eyes guided of God see clear — He rejoiced in his might and the strength of his hands, the encom- passing wave and Sadir ; And his heart stood still and he spake : ' What joy have the living to death addressed? For the open cleft of the grave lies close upon pleasure and power and rest. Like a withered leaf they fall, and the wind shall scatter them east and west.' " 142 AMURATH TO AMURATH But for all its total disappearance under the wave of IslAm, the Lakhmid state had played a notable part in the develop- ment of Arab culture. It was at Hirah that the desert came into contact with the highly organized civilization of the Persians, with the wealth of cultivated lands and the long- established order of a settled population ; there, too, as among the Ghassanids on the Syrian side of the wilderness, they made acquaintance with the precepts of Christianity which exercised so marked an influence on the latest poets of the Age of Ignorance, some of whom, like 'Adi ibn Zaid himself, are known to have been Christians, and prepared the way for the Prophet's teaching.^ So little have the eastern borders of the Syrian desert been explored that except for the ruin field of Hirah, a town which was destroyed in order to furnish building materials for the Moslem city of Kufah, and a cluster of mouldering vaults, said to represent the castle of Khawarnak,2 not one of the famous pre-Moham- madan sites has been identified, and it is possible that important vestiges of the Lakhmid age may lie unsuspected within a few days' journey from regions familiar to travellers and even to tourists. Meanwhile Kheidir (the name is the colloquial abbreviation of Ukheidir=a small green place) is the finest example of Sassanian architecture which has yet been discovered. Its wonderful state of preservation is probably due to the fact that it was some distance removed from the nearest inhabited spot. Shetateh is separated from it by three hours of naked desert; the canals that feed Kerbela are yet further away, and the water supply of Ukheidir, derived from wells in the Wadi Lebai'ah, is too small to have tempted the fellahln to establish themselves there. Nowhere in the vicinity, so far as I could learn, are 1 See Rothstein : Die Dynastie der Lakhmiden in al Htra, p. 25. He gives reasons for believing that the art of writing Arabic was first practised at Hirah. The population was largely Christian (the 'IbSd of the Arab historians) ; Hirah was the seat of a bishopric, and frequent allusion is made to churches and monasteries in and near the town. 2 Meissner : " Hira und Khawarnak " Sendschriften der D. Orient Gesell., No. 2. "'.".'T'-'r ,.•£"■ 'vi ■ i FIl'.. S3. — UKHKIIlIK, XOK'ril-KAsT \N(;i.K TOWER. KIG. 84.— rKIIF.IllIK, SI.MR AC S( JU'I'I l-K.\ST ANGLE. FIG. 85. UKIIEII.IIK, IN'l'EKIOK Ol' S(Ji:']'II G/VFE. FIG. 86. — UKHEipiR, CHEMIN DE RONDE OF EAST WALL. FIG. 87. — UKHEipiR, NORTH GATE, FROM OUTSIDE. UKHEipiR 143 there more abundant springs, and the palace has therefore been allowed to drop into a slow decay, forgotten in the midst of its wildernesses, save when a raiding expedition brings the Bedouin into the neighbourhood of Shetateh. Most of us who have had opportunity to become familiar with some site that has once been the theatre of a vanished civilization have passed through hours of vain imaginings during which the thoughts labour to recapture the aspect of street and market, church or temple enclosure, of which the evidences lie strewn over the surface of the earth. And ever, as a thousand unanswerable problems surge up against the realization of that empty hope, I have found myself long- ing for an hour out of a remote century, wherein I might look my fill upon the walls that have fallen and stamp the image of a dead world indelibly upon my mind. The dream seemed to have reached fulfilment at Ukheidir. There the architecture of a by-gone age presented itself in unexampled perfection to the eye. It was not necessary to guess at the structure of vaults or the decorative scheme of niched fa9ades — the camera and the measuring-tape could register the methods of the builder and the results which he had achieved. But it was evident that no satisfactory record of Ukheidir could be made within the limits of the day which I had allowed myself for the expedition. We had exhausted our small stock of provisions, and the materials necessary for carrying out so large a piece of work as the planning of the palace were at Kerbeli with the caravan. Fattuh disposed of these difficulties at once by declaring that he intended to ride into Kerbeld that night and bring out the caravan next day. The truth was that he yearned for the sight of the baggage horses, and for my part I longed for a bed and for a table more than I could have thought it possible. I was weary of sleeping on the stony face of the desert, of sitting in the dust and eating my meals with a seasoning of sand — so infirm is feminine endurance. An Arab called Ghanim, clean-limbed and spare, like all his half-fed tribe, offered himself as guide, and 'Ali assured us that he knew every inch of the way. But when the zaptiehs heard that 144 AMURATH TO AMURAlJti one of them was to accompany the expedition they turned white with fear. To ride through the desert at night, they declared, was a venture from which no man was likely to come out alive. I hesitated — it requires much courage to face risks for others — but Fattuh stood firm, 'Ali laughed, and the thought of the bed carried the day. They started at eight in the evening, and I watched them disappear across the sands with some sinking of heart. All next day I was too well occupied to give them much thought, but when six o'clock came and 'All set watchers upon the castle walls, I began to feel anxious. Half-an-hour later Ma'ashI, the sheikh's brother and my particular friend, came running down to my tent. " Praise God ! my lady Khan, they are here." The Arabs gathered round to offer their congratulations, and Fattuh rode in, grey with fatigue and dust, with the caravan at his heels. He had reached Kerbela at five in the morning, found the muleteers, bought provisions, loaded the animals, and set off again about ten. "And the oranges are good in Kerbela," he ended triumph- antly. "I have brought your Excellency a whole bag of them." It was a fine performance. The" Arabs who inhabited Kheidir had come there two years before from J6f in Nejd : "Because we were vexed with the government of Ibn er Rashid," explained 'Ali, and I readily understood that his could not be a soothing rule. The wooden howdahs in which the women had travelled blocked one of the long corridors, and some twenty families lodged upon the ground in the vaulted chambers of princes. They lived and starved and died in this most splendid memorial of their own civilization, and even in decay Kheidir offered a shelter more than sufficient for their needs to the race at whose command it had been reared. Their presence was an essential part of its proud decline. The sheikh and his brothers passed like ghosts along the pas- sages, they trailed their white robes down the stairways that led to the high chambers where they lived with their women, UKHEipiR 145 and at night they gathered round the hearth in the great hall where their forefathers had beguiled the hours with tale and song in the same rolling tongue of Nejd. Then they would pile up the desert scrub till the embers glowed under the coffee-pots, while Ma'ashl handed round the delicious bitter draught which was the one luxury left to them. The thorns crackled, a couple of oil wicks placed in holes above the columns, which had been contrived for them by the men-at-arms of old, sent a feeble ray into the darkness, and Gh^nim took the rebabah and drew from its single string a wailing melody to which he chanted the stories of his race. "My lady Khan, this is the song of 'Abdu'l 'AzJz ibn er Rashid." He sang of a prince great and powerful, patron of poets, leader of raids, and recently overwhelmed and slain in battle ; but old or new, the songs were all pages out of the same chronicle, the undated chronicle of the nomad. The thin melancholy music rose up into the blackness of the vault; across the opening at the end of the hall, where the wall had fallen in part away, was spread the deep still night and the unchanging beauty of the stars. "My lady Kh^n," said Ghanim, "I will sing you the song of Ukheidir." But I said, "Listen to the verse of Ukheidir" — "We wither away but they wane not, the stars that above us rise; The mountains remain after us, and the strong towers when we are gone." "Allah!" murmured Ma'ashi, as he swept noiselessly round the circle with the coffee cups, and once again Labid's noble couplet held the company, as it had held those who sat in the banqueting-hall of the khalif. One night I was provided with a different entertainment. I had worked from sunrise till dark and was too tired to sleep. The desert was as still as death ; infinitely mysterious, it stretched away from my camp and I lay watching the empty sands as one who watches for a pageant. Suddenly 146 AMURATH TO AMURATH a bullet whizzed over the tent and the crack of a rifle broke the silence. All my men jumped up; a couple more shots rang out, and Fattuh hastily disposed the muleteers round the tents and hurried off to join a band of Arabs who had streamed from the castle gate. I picked up a revolver and went out to see them go. In a minute or two they had vanished under the uncertain light of the moon, which seems so clear and yet discloses so little. A zaptieh joined me and we stood still listening. Far out in the desert the red flash of rifles cut through the white moonlight; again the quick flare and then again silence. At last through the night drifted the sound of a wild song, faint and far away, rhythmic, elemental as the night and the desert. I waited in complete uncertainty as to what was approaching, and it was not until they were close upon us that we recognized our own. Arabs and Fattuh in their midst. They came on, still singing, with their rifles over their shoulders; their white garments gleamed under the moon ; they wore no kerchiefs upon their heads, and their black hair fell in curls about their faces. "Ma'ashi," I cried, "what happened?" Ma'ashi shook his hair out of his eyes. "There is nothing, my lady Kh^n. 'All saw some men lurking in the desert at the 'asr " (the hour of afternoon prayer), "and we watched after dark from the walls." "They were raiders of the Bent Dafi'ah," said Ghanim, mentioning a particular lawless tribe. "Fattuh," said I, "did you shoot?" "We shot," replied Fattuh; "did not your Excellency hear? — and one man is wounded." A wild-looking boy held out his hand, on which I detected a tiny scratch. "There is no harm," said I. "Praise God ! " " Praise God ! " they repeated, and I left them laughing and talking eagerly, and went to bed and to sleep. Next morning I questioned Fattfih as to the events of the night, but he was exceptionally non-committal. "My lady," said he, "God knows. 'All says that they FIG. SS. — UKHEipiR, FLDTED DOME AT A. FIG. 89.— UKHEIDIR, FLUTED NICHE, SOUTH-EAST CORNER OF COURT D. FIG. 90. — UKHEipiR, GREAT HALL. KERBELi 147 were men of the Beni Dafl'ah." Then with a burst of con- fidence he added, "But I saw no one." "At whom did you shoot?" said I in bewilderment. "At the Benl Dafi'ah," answered Fattflh, surprised at the stupidity of the question. I gave it up, neither do I know to tliis hour whether we were or were not raided in the night. Two days later my plan was finished. I had turned one of the vaulted rooms of the stable into a workshop, and spreading a couple of waterproof sheets on the sand for table, had drawn it out to scale lying on the ground. Some- times an Arab came in silently and stood watching my pencil, until the superior attractions of the next chamber, in which sat the muleteers and the zaptiehs, drew him away. As I added up metres and centimetres I could hear them spinning long yarns of city and desert. Occasionally Ma'ashi brought me coffee. "God give you the reward," said I. "And your reward," he answered gravely. The day we left Kheidir, the desert was wrapped in the stifling dust of a west wind. I have no notion what the country is like through which we rode for seven hours to Kerbela, and no memory, save that of the castle walls fading like a dream into the haze, of a bare ridge of hill to our right hand and the bitter waves of a salt lake to our left, and of deep sand through which we were driven by a wind that was the very breath of the Pit. Then out of the mist loomed the golden dome of the shrine of Hussein, upon whom be peace, and few pious pilgrims were gladder than I when we stopped to drink a glass of tea at the first Persian tea-shop of the holy city. THE PALACE OF UKHEIDIR I DO not propose to enter here into a detailed account of the palace of Ukheidir, which must be reserved for a subse- quent publication, but it is well to give a short elucidation 148 AMURATH TO AMURATH of the plan, and to consider briefly the theories which have been formed with regard to the origin of the building.^ The palace consists of a rectangular fortification wall set with round bastions, with larger round bastions at the angles, and of an oblong building surrounded on three sides by a court, together with a small annex in the eastern part of the court (Fig. 79). That part of the oblong building which adjoins the northern fortification wall is three storeys high; the remainder of the palace is one storey high. Outside the enclosing fortification wall there is a structure composed of fourteen vaulted parallel chambers, with a small open court at the southern end. To the west of the small court and of the first five chambers lies a larger court with round bastions on its western side. Between each of these bastions there is a door and either one or two groups of windows, each group consisting of three narrow lights. I noticed foundations of masonry which ran down from near the northern end of this 1 I have already published the plan in the Hellenic Journal for 1910, Part I., p. 69, in an article on the vaulting system of the palace. Ukheddir was visited in the year 1907 by M. Massignon, though this fact was unknown to me until I returned to England in July igog. He has published an account of it, together with a sketch plan made under circumstances of great difficulty, in the Bulletin de I'Acad. des Inscr. et Belles-Lettres of March igog, in the Gazette des Beaux Arts of April igog, and in the Mimoires de I'Institut franfais du Caire, vol. xxviii. (The last named has not yet appeared, but he has been so kind as to let me see an advance copy.) Neithter to M. Massignon nor toi me belongs the honour of discovery ; an unknown Englishman had visited the palace in the eighteenth century, and his brief report is given by Niebuhr (Reisebeschreibung, vol. ii., p. 225, note): " Ich habe in dem Tagebuch eines Englanders, der von Haleb nach Basra gereist war, gefunden, dass er 44 Stunden Siidfost nach Osten von Hit, eine ganz verlassene Stadt in der Wiiste angetroffen habe, wovon die Mauer 50 Fuss hoch und 40 Fuss dick war. Jede der vier Seiten hatte 700 Fuss, und in der Mauer waren Thiirme. In dieser Stadt oder grossem Castell, findet man noch ein kleines Castell. Von eben dieser ver- lassenen Stadt horte ich nachher, dass sie von den Arabern El Khader genannt werde, und nur 10 bis 12 Stunden von Meshed Ali entfernt sei." I cannot feel any doubt that the " forsaken town " referred to in the diary, the existence of which was confirmed by the Arabs, who spoke of it to Niebuhr under the name of Khader, is our Ukheidlir. So far as I have been able to discover, the nameless Englishman was the first modern traveller to visit the site. FIG. 92. — UKHEIDIR, VAULT OF ROOM I. FIG. 93. — UKHEIDIR, ROOM I. H*- FIG. 79. — UKHEIDIR, GRODND PLAN. f ""^ & I50 AMURATH TO AMURATH out-building towards the valley. To the N.W. of the palace there is another small detached building called by the Arabs the Bath (Fig. 80). Near it the surface of the ground is broken by low mounds which may indicate the presence of ruins. The Arabs assured me that by digging here brackish water could be obtained; there is also a well of brackish water in the western part of the palace court, but it is not used for drinking purposes. The water supply of Ukheidir is derived from the WMi Lebai'ah. It is obtained by FIG. 80.— UKHEIDIR, digging holes in the sandy bed of the THE BATH. ^^jjgy_ The fortification wall is arcaded without and within up to two-thirds of its height. These blind arcades support the walls of the chemin de ronde. The outer arcade serves the purpose of a machicoulis, a narrow space between its arches and the outer face of the main wall enabling the defenders in the chemin de ronde to protect with missiles the foot of the wall below them (Fig. 83). The chemin de ronde could be reached from the uppermost floor of the three-storeyed block of the palace, as well as by means of four staircases, one in each of the angles of the court (Fig. 84). Two of these staircases have now fallen completely. The chemin de ronde had been covered by a vault (Fig. 86). Arched doorways led into out- look chambers hollowed in the thickness of the bastions. Arched windows open on to the court. In the centre of each side of the fortification wall there is a gate (Fig. 85), that which stands on the northern side being the most important, since it communicates directly with the palace (Fig. 87). It opens into a passage with a guard-room on either side. The passage leads into a small rectangular chamber, A in the plan, covered with a fluted dome (Fig. 88). From this chamber an arched doorway communicates with a vaulted hall, B, which runs up to a height of two storeys and is the largest room in the palace (Fig. 90). The vault, borne on projecting engaged piers, spans seven metres. Beyond the hall vaulted corridors, C C C C, C C C C, surround an open FIG. 94. — UKHEipiR, CUSPED DOOR OP FIG. 96. — UKHEIDIR, CORRIDOR Q. COURT S. FIG. 95.— UKHEIDIR, VAULTED END OF P, SHOWING TUBE. FIG. 97. UKHEIDIR, VAULTED CLOISTER o'. FIG. Q». — UKHEIDIR, GROIN IN CORRIDOR C. FIG. 99.— UKHEIDIR, SQUINCH ARCH ON SECOND STOREY. UKHEipiR 151 court, D, as well as a block of rooms lying to the south of the court. The court D is set round with engaged columns form- ing vaulted niches (Fig, 91). At the S.E. corner the vault of one of these niches is fluted (Fig. 89). The bracketed setting of these small semi-domes over the angles is to be noted. The block of chambers south of court D is more carefully built than any other part of the palace. It consists of an oblong antechamber, E, leading into a square room, F. On either side of the antechamber there are a pair of rooms, the walls and vaults of those lying to the west, G' and H', being finished with stucco decorations and small columned niches. On either side of the square chamber, F, is a room containing four masonry columns which support three parallel barrel vaults (Figs. 92 and 93). South of room F stretches a cloister, J, which was covered with a barrel vault, now fallen. It opens into an unroofed court, K. The corridor C C runs to the south of court K, and still further to the south is another open court, L, with vaulted rooms round it. To east and west of the corridor C C, C C, lie four courts, M M' and N N'. To north and south of each of these courts there are three vaulted rooms, but in M and M' small ante- chambers in the shape of a narthex separate the rooms from the court, whereas in N and N' the rooms open directly on to the court. In every case there are traces of a vaulted cloister, O O and O' O', between the court and the outer wall (Fig. 97). Behind each block of rooms there is a rectangular space, P P P P and P' P' P' P', two-thirds of which are vaulted, while the central part is left open (Fig. 95). Similar open spaces are left in the corridor C C, C C, which would otherwise be exceedingly dark. To return to the north gate. On either side of the small domed chamber. A, long vaulted corridors, Q Q', lead to the outer court (Fig. 96). A door on the south side of corridor Q communicates with a small court, R, with chambers to north and south of it and vaulted cloisters to east and west. A group of vaulted chambers is placed between court R and the great hall B. West of hall B there is a smaller group of vaulted chambers. In the south wall of corridor Q', two 152 AMURATH TO AMURATH doors lead into an open court surrounded on three sides by a vaulted cloister, the vault of which has now fallen except for fragments in the south-east and south-west corners. These fragments are adorned with stucco decorations. I have suggested (in the Hellenic Journal, loc. cit.) that this court may be a mosque of a primitive type. (See, too, Der Islam, FIG. 81.— UKHEipiR, SECOND STOREY. vol. i. part ii. p. 126, where Dr. Herzfeld points out that a chamber somewhat similarly placed in the palace of Mshatta may also be a mosque.) No difficulty will be found in following on the plan the arrangement of the upper floors in the northern part of the palace. In the second storey, the space marked B^ is occupied by the vault of the great hall B (Fig. 81). At A^ FIG. 82. — UKHEipiR, THIRD STOREY. three windows open into the hall from the room in the second storey. R^ and S^ correspond with the two courts R and S. In the third storey the rectangular space A^ is unroofed, and the space B^, below which lies the vault of the great hall, is also unroofed (Fig. 82). The eastern part of this storey is completely ruined, but there would appear to have been rooms Fir.. loo.- -UKHEIIiIR, NORTH SIDE OF COURT M. -riClIEIIlIR, SOUTH-EAST ANGLE OF COURT S. I FIG. 102. — UKHEIDIR, WEST SIDE OF b". FIG. 103. — UKHEIDIR, DOOR LEADING FROM V TO W, SEEN FROM SOUTH. UKHEipiR 153 round R^ similar to the rooms round R^. The chemin de ronde, T T', is on a level with this storey. Between the main palace block and the eastern fortification wall there lies a group of rooms which is clearly an addition to the original scheme. It is interesting to observe that these rooms are in all essentials of their plan a repetition of the group of rooms to the south of court D. Room U corre- sponds with the antechamber E ; room V with the square room F ; W with the cloister J ; X, Y, and Z to G, H, and T. But the columns in 1 1' are not repeated in the small rooms, Z Z' ; room V is covered with a groined vault instead of the barrel vault of F, and the court A is not closed with a wall like the court K. I make no doubt that both these groups of rooms, which are so strikingly similar in arrangement, were intended for the same purposes, and I conjecture that they were ceremonial reception rooms. Herzfeld has com- pared E and F with the throne room of Mshatta (Der Islam, loc. cit.). All the rooms and corridors of the palace are vaulted. Some of the finer vaults are built of brick tiles (for example, over the great hall B and over rooms E, F, I, and I'), but as a rule the vaults are constructed with stones set in mortar, the stones being cut into thin slabs so as to resemble bricks as closely as possible. (Cf. the Sassanian palace of Firuz^b^d, Dieulafoy, L'Art Ancien de la Perse, vol. iv.) All the vaults, whether of brick or stone, are built without centering, and all are set forward slightly from the face of the wall. (The same construction is found at Ctesiphon, see below, Fig. 109.) ^ The groined vault occurs seven times in the corridor C C (Fig. 98), and it is also found in room V. (See my article in the Hellenic Journal above cited.) The fluted dome over room A is bracketed across the corners of the rectangular sub- structure (Fig. 88). In several cases where a barrel vault terminates not against a head wall, but against another section of barrel vault, it is adjusted to the angles of the substructure * I wish to call special attention to the presence of this construction at Ctesiphon because Dr. Herzfeld has stated erroneously that it does • not exist in Sassanian buildings. {Der Isldm, vol. i. part ii. p. in.) 154 AMURATH TO AMURATH by means of squinch arches (Fig. 99). A noticeable feature of the vault construction of Ukheidir is the presence of masonry tubes running between the parallel barrel vaults (Fig. 1 00). The structural purpose of these tubes is to diminish the mass of masonry between the barrel vaults. Whenever two barrel vaults lie parallel to one another, a tube will be found between them, and similar tubes exist between the vault of the cloister O O and O' O' and the outer wall. (See too Fig. 95, which shows a tube between a barrel vault and a straight wall.) Over the vaults of the rooms of the annex in the eastern part of the court, and also over the vaults of the fourteen parallel chambers outside the enclosing wall to the north, a false roof is laid (Fig. 103). It serves as a protection against the heat of the sun. Under the eastern annex there are some much-ruined subterranean chambers. A staircase at the south-eastern angle of court D leads down into similar cellars (ser&dib). The arches over the doorways are usually of an ovoid shape, sometimes slightly pointed. When the door-jambs take the form of engaged columns, the capitals of the columns, roughly blocked out in masonry, carry an arch slightly narrower in width than the opening of the doorway beneath it. But when the door-jambs are formed merely by the straight section of the wall, the span of the arch is wider than the opening of the doorway (Fig. 102 illustrates both types). This set-back of the arch was doubtless employed in order to facilitate the placing of centering beams. Three wide doorways with round arches, b b' and c, lead from the main block of the palace building into the surrounding court. The arches are usually characterized by double rings of voussoirs (c/. Ctesiphon and other buildings of the Sassanian and early Mohammadan period), the inner ring laid so as to show the broad face of the stones or tiles, while the narrow- end shows in the outer ring. (See the arch in Fig. 102.) The arch construction in the eastern annex is, however, much rougher in style. The outer ring of voussoirs is omitted there, nor is it invariable in other parts of the palace. The niche plays a large part in the decoration of Ukheidir.* A row of narrow niches runs along the top of the outer face UKHEipiR 155 of the northern enclosing wall, but very little of it is now left (Fig. 87). The southern face of the three-storeyed block bears an elaborate niche decoration (Fig. 91). Here the lowest row of niches forms part of the series already mentioned which runs round court D. Above these, on the second storey, are remains of another row of arched niches, each of which contains three small niches. So far as I know, this feature of a large niche enclosing groups of smaller niches has not yet been observed in Sassanian architecture. It is found, however, in a certain well-known type of early Christian church (see, for instance, Ala Klisse, published by me in the Thousand and One Churches, p. 403). On the third storey of the palace the face of the wall has been left blank, but above the windows there are still traces of a third order of small niches. Pairs of niches flanked by engaged columns are to be seen in room G'. They are set high up in the wall between the transverse arches. On these transverse arches there is a plaster decoration, the same in character as that which occurs in the semi-domes at the ends of the vault in Court S (Fig. loi). The motives there used are the flute (in the squinch arch and in the conical segment of the semi-dome above it), and a pattern which resembles a tiny battlemented motive. Upon the transverse arches the battlemented motive is doubled so as to form diamond-shaped patterns. In the centre of each of these diamonds, and in the centre of the tiny arched niches at the bottom of the vault, and also between those niches, there are small funnel-shaped motives formed of concentric rings. Between the transverse arches there is a boldly worked ribbing. The arch round the eastern of the two doors that leads into corridor Q' is surrounded by cusps (Fig. 94). (Cf. Ctesiphon, Dieulafoy, op. cit., vol. v. plate 6.) A blind arcade, borne by pilasters, is to be seen in courts M M' and N N'. In the antechamber U there are shallow niches on either side of the doors. With regard to the date of Ukheidir there are three possible hypotheses. It may belong — I. To the Sassanian or Lakhmid period prior to the Mohammadan conquest. 156 AMURATH TO AMURATH 2. To the 150 years after the Mohammadan conquest. 3. To the Abbasid period, i. e. after a.d. 750. I. In defence of the first theory can be urged the close relationship between Ukheidir and other places of the Sassanian age, not only in plan (c/. Kasr-i-Shirin, de Morgan, Mission Scientifique en Perse, vol. iv., part 2), but also in the technique of brick and ^ stone masonry and in the principles of vault construction (c/. Ctesiphon, FiruzabM, and Sarvistan, Dieulafoy, op. cit.). But since it is certain that the arts of the early Moslem era were dominated in Meso- potamia by Sassanian influence, these affinities do not offer a convincing proof of a pre-Mohammadan date. Even if Ukheidir belonged to the early Moslem age, it might, and probably would, have been built by Persian workmen. At the same time certain architectural features, such as the groined vault and the fluted dome, have not hitherto been observed in any Sassanian building. The earliest Meso- potamian example of the groined vault known to me, besides the groins of Ukheidir, is that of which fragments can be seen in the Baghdad Gate at Rakkah. There is, further, a passage in Y^kfit's Dictionary which might help to support the theory of a pre-Mohammadan origin (vol. ii., p. 626, under Dumat ej Jandal). In the accounts , given by the Arab historians of the invasion of Mesopotamia in 12 a.h. (a.d. 633-4), by Khalid ibn u'l Walid, frequent mention is made of 'Ain et Tamr, which Yikut expressly states to be the same as Sheflitha (Shet^teh is the modern colloquial form of the name). When KhMid ibn u'l Walid had taken the oasis, which was inhabited by Christian Arabs, and appears to have been the one place that offered him serious resistance (Teano : Annali dell' Islam, vol. ii., p. 940), he is said to have marched on Diimat ej Jandal, which he captured, putting to death its defender, Ukeidir 'Abdu'l Malik el Kindi.^ It is generally admitted that the name Diimat ej Jandal in this account is an error, and that the fortress which was taken by the Mohammadans in the ' The name Ukeidir can have no connection with the name Ukheidir. The two words are differently spelt in Arabic. UKHEipiR 157 year 12 a.h. was Dfimat el Hlrah. (For the reasons for sub- stituting Ddmat el Hirah for Dfimat ej Jandal in Tabarl's text, see Teano, op. cit., vol. ii., p. 991.) Now Y^kflt gives two conflicting traditions concerning the foundation of Diimat el Hirah, but he expresses no uncertainty as to its position. It was near to 'Ain et Tamr, and its ruins were known in Yakut's day (thirteenth century). According to the first tradition given by YSkut, the Prophet sent Khdlid ibn u'l Walid in the year 9 a.h. against Ukeidir, who was lord of Dumat ej Jandal. Khalid captured Dumat ej Jandal and made a treaty with Ukeidir, but after the death of Mohammad, Ukeidir broke the treaty, whereupon the Khalif 'Umar expelled him from Diimat ej Jandal. He retired to Htrah and built himself a palace near to 'Ain et Tamr, which he called Dumah. This Dumah, near 'Ain et Tamr, is no doubt Dumat el Hirah which KhSlid besieged and took in the year 12 a.h. The second tradition is substantially the same as the first as far as the Mohammadan invasion is con- cerned, but Yakut here implies that Ukeidir dwelt in the first instance at Diimat el Hirah, and was accustomed to resort to Dumat ej Jandal for the purposes of the chase, and he adds that Ukeidir named Dumat ej Jandal after Dumat el Hirah. Prince Teano (op. cit., vol. ii. p. 262) has exposed the improbabilities which attend this explanation, and he concludes that both traditions are equally untrustworthy, and doubts the authenticity of any part of the story of Ukeidir. It does, however, appear to me to be possible that the ruins of Dumat el Hirah which were standing in Yakut's day were no other than the abandoned palace of Ukheidir, though it is not necessary to accept either of Yakut's versions of the story of its foundation. 2. If the palace is to be ascribed to the period immediately succeeding the conquest, it would be a Mesopotamian repre- sentative of the group of pleasure palaces which were built upon the Syrian side of the desert by the Umayyad princes (Lammens : La Badia et la Hira, Melanges de la faculte orientale, Beyrout, vol. iv., p. 91). But whereas it was natural that the Umayyad khalifs should have constructed 158 AMURATH TO AMURATH hunting palaces in that part of the desert which lay on the direct road between their capital of Damascus and the spiritual capitals of their empire, Mecca and Medina, it is difficult to see why they should have selected a site so far from any of their habitual residences as Ukheidir. It is true that the Khalif 'Alt made Kufah his capital for five years. He was assassinated there in a.d. 66i. But during those years he was ceaselessly occupied in quelling rebellions, and I dismiss the possibility that he should have found leisure to build or to use the palace of Ukheidir. 3. I am not disposed to place Ukheidir as late as the Abbasid period. The Abbasid princes had lost the habit of the desert which was so strong a characteristic of their Umayyad predecessors. When they moved away from their capital of Baghdad they built themselves cities like Rakkah and Samarra. Moreover, the architectural features of Ukheidir, both structural and decorative, present marked differences from those of the ruins at Rakkah and at Samarrsi, and on architectural as well as on historical grounds I am inclined to ascribe Ukheidir to an earlier age. Whether that age be immediately before the Mohammadan conquest, or whether it fall shortly after the conquest, during the Umayyad period, I do not think we are as yet in a position to determine. It is to be borne in mind that the ruins of the palace bear witness to two different dates of building. The eastern annex and probably the edifice outside the enclosing wall to the north are an addition to the original plan and must be of a slightly later date. CHAPTER V KERBElA to BAGHDAD March 30 — April 12 To travel in the desert is in one respect curiously akin to travelling on the sea : it gives you no premonition of the changed environment to which the days of journeying are conducting you. When you set sail from a familiar shore you enter on a course from which the usual landmarks of daily existence have been swept away. What has become of the march of time? Dawn leads to noon, noon to sunset, sunset to the night; but night breaks into a dawn indistin- guishable from the last, the same sky above, the same sea on every side, the same planks beneath your feet. Is it indeed another day ? or is it yesterday lived over again ? Then on a sudden you touch the land and find that that recurring day has carried you round half the globe. So it is in the desert. You rise and look out upon the same landscape that greeted you before — the contour of the hills may have altered ever so slightly, the hollow that holds your camp has deepened by a few yards since last week, the limitless sweep of the plain was not hidden a fortnight ago by that little mound ; but here are the same people about you, speaking of the same things, here is the same path to be followed, yes, even the seasons are the same, and the dusty face of the desert is too old to flush at the advent of spring or to be wreathed in autumn garlands of gold and scarlet. Yet at the end of a long interval composed of periods recurrent and alike, you look round and see that the whole face of the universe has changed. When we reached Kerbeli we passed into a world of which the aspect and the associations were entirely new to me. I had set out from an Arab town in North Syria, and I emerged in a Persian city linked historically with the Holy IS9 i6o AMURATH TO AMURATH Places, with the first struggles and the only great schism of Isl^m. At Kerbela was enacted the tragedy of the death of Hussein, son of 'Alt ibn abi Tilib ; the place has grown up round the mosque that holds his tomb, and to one half of those who profess the Mohammadan creed it is a goal no less sacred than Mecca. But it was not the golden dome of Hussein, though it covers the richest treasure of offerings possessed by any known shrine (unless the treasure in 'All's tomb of Nejef touch a yet higher value), nor yet the presence of the green-robed Persians, narrow of soul, austere and stern of countenance — it was not the wealth and fame of the Shi'ah sanctuary that made the strongest assault upon the imagina- tion. It was the sense of having reached those regions which saw the founding of imperial Islam, regions which remained for many centuries the seat of the paramount ruler, the Com- mander of the Faithful. Within the compass of a two-days' journey lay the battlefield of K^disiyah, where KhMid ibn u'l Walid overthrew at once and for ever the Sassanian f>ower. Chosroes with his hosts, his satraps, his Arab allies — ^those princes of the house of Mundhir whose capital was one of the first cradles of Arab culture — stepped back at his coming into the shadowy past ; their cities and palaces faded and dis- appeared, Hirah, Khawarnak, Ctesiphon, and many another of which the very site is forgotten ; all the pomp and valour of an earlier time fell together like an army of dreams at the first trumpet-blast of those armies of the Faith which hold the field until this hour. Then came the day of vigour; the adding of dominion to dominion; the building of great Mohammadan towns, Kiifah, Wasit, Basrah, and last of all BaghdM, last and greatest. And then decline, and finally the transference of authority. This was the story that was unfolded before me as I stood upon the roof of a Persian house and gazed down into the gorgeously tiled courtyard of the mosque of Hussein, in which none but the Faithful may set foot. When I lifted my eyes and looked westward I saw the desert across which the soldiers of the Prophet had come to batter down the old civilizations ; when I looked east I saw the road to Baghdid, where their descendants had cultivated KERBELA i6i with no less renown, the arts of peace. The low sun shone upon the golden dome; the nesting storks held conversation from minaret to minaret, with much clapping of beaks and shaking out of unruffled wings ; the Spirit of Islkm marched out of the wilderness and seized the fruitful earth. There were other lesser things which aroused a more per- sonal if not a keener interest. The oranges were good at Kerbela, as Fattuh had said. The shops were heaped with them and with pale sweet lemons : I fear I must have aston- ished my military escort, for I stopped at every corner to buy more and yet more, and ate them as I went along the streets, hoping to satisfy the inextinguishable thirst born of the desert. Side by side with the oranges lay mountains of pink roses, the flowers cut off short and piled together ; every one in the town carried a handful of them and sniffed at them as he walked. After night had fallen I was invited to a bounti- ful Persian dinner, where we feasted on lamb stuffed with pistachios, and drank sherbet out of deep wooden spoons. And there I heard some talk of politics. Under the best of circumstances, said one of my inform- ants, constitutional government was not likely to be popular in the province of 'Irak. Men of property were all reactionary at heart. They had got together their wealth by force and oppression ; their title-deeds would not bear critical examina- tion, and they resented the curiosity and the comments of the newly-fledged local press. Nor were the majority of the ofiicials better inclined — how was it possible ? To forbid cor- ruption, unless the order were accompanied by a rise in salary corresponding to the perquisites of which they were deprived (and this was forbidden by the state of the imperial exchequer) meant for them starvation. A judge, for example, is appointed for two and a half years and his salary is ;^Ti5 a month, not enough to keep himself and his family in circumstances which would accord with his position. But over and above the expenses of living he must see to the provision of a sum sufficient to engage the sympathies of his superiors when his appointment shall have expired ; otherwise he might abandon the hope of further employment. Most probably he would 1 62 AMURATH TO AMURATH have to defray the heavy charges of a journey to Con- stantinople, to enable him to push his claim, not to speak of the fact that he might spend several unsalaried months in the capital before his request was granted. "And so it is that out of ten men, eleven take bribes, and, as far as we can see, nothing has come of the constitution but the black fez " (this because of the boycott on the red fez, made in Austria), "free speech and two towers, one at Kerbel^ and one at Nejef, to commemorate the age of liberty." Under the new regime Kerbel^ had received a mutesarrif whose story was a good example of the mistakes which men were apt to commit when first the old restraints were relaxed. He was of the Ahrar, the Liberals, and had begun his career as secretary to the Villi of Baghdad. The people of Baghdad raised a com- plaint against him, on the ground that in the fast month of Ramadan he had been seen to smoke a cigarette in the bazaar between sunrise and sunset, which showed clearly that he was an infidel, and he was dismissed from his post ; but since he was one of the Ahrar and had friends in Constantinople, he was presently appointed to Kerbel^. Now Kerbela, being a holy place inhabited mostly by Persian Shi'ahs, is one of the most fanatical cities in the Ottoman Empire^ and a mutesarrif who brought with him so unfortunate a reputation could do nothing that was right. Some of his reforms were in them- selves reasonable, but he was not the man to initiate them, nor was Kerbela the best field for experiments. The town, owing to blind extortion on the part of the government and to neglect of the irrigation system, is growing rapidly poorer and yields an ever diminishing revenue. This revenue is burdened by a number of pensions, and the mutesarrif, look- ing for a way of retrenchment, found it by depriving all pensioners of their means of livelihood. The pensioners were holy men, sayyids, whose duty it was to pray for the welfare of the Sultan. Some were old and some were deserving, some were neither, but all were holy, and the feelings that were aroused in Kerbeli when they were left destitute baffle description. "Yet," continued my host, "the Turks understand govern- KERBELA 163 ment. There was once in Basrah an excellent governor; his name was Hamdi Bey. When he came to Basrah it was the worst city in Turkey ; every night there were murders, and no one dared to leave his house after dark lest when he returned he should find that he had been robbed of all he possessed." "So it is now in Basrah," said I, for the town is a by-word in Mesopotamia. "Yes, so it is now," he returned, "but it was different when Hamdi Bey was governor. For a year he sat quiet and col- lected information concerning all the villains in the place; but he did nothing. Now there was at that time a harmless madman in Basrah whom the people called Hajji Beida, the White Pilgrim; and when they saw Hamdi Bey driving through the streets, they would point at him and laugh, saying : ' There goes Hajji Beida.' But at the end of a year he assembled all the chief men and said : ' Hitherto you have called me Hajji Beid^ ; now you shall call me Hajji Kara, the Black Pilgrim.' And then and there he cast most of them into prison and produced his evidence against them. And after a year's time the town was so peaceful that he ordered the citizens to leave their doors open at night ; and as long as Hamdi Bey remained at Basrah no man troubled to lock his door. And at another time there was a Commandant in Basrah, and he too brought the place to order. For when he knew a prisoner to be guilty, yet failed to get the witnesses to speak against him, he would put the man to death in prison by means of a hot iron which he drove into his stomach through a tube. Then it was given out that the man had died of an illness, and every one rejoiced that there should be a rogue the less." I made no comment, but my expression must have betrayed me, for my interlocutor added a justification of the com- mandant's methods. "In Persia," said he, "they bury them alive." "My soldiers have told me," said I, not to be outdone, "that in Persia they cut off a thief's hand, and I think they regard it as the proper sentence, for they generally add : ' That is hukm, justice.' " M 3 r64 AMURATH TO AMURATH "It is the sheri'ah," he replied simply, "the holy law," and he recited the passage from the Kuran : " If a man or woman steal, cut off their hands in retribution for that which they have done; this is an exemplary punishment appointed by God, and God is mighty and wise." I had intended to go straight from Kerbeli to Babylon, but I was reckoning without full knowledge of the Hindtyeh swamp. The history of this swamp is both curious and instructive. A few miles above the village of Museiyib, north-east of Kerbela, the Euphrates divides into two channels. The eastern channel, the true bed of the river, runs past Babylon and Hilleh and discharges its waters into the great swamp which has existed in southern 'Irak ever since the last days of the Sassanian kings. The western channel is known as the Nahr Hindiyeh ; it waters Kfifah, now a miser- able hamlet clustered about the great mosque in which the khalif 'Alt was assassinated, and flowing through the great swamp re-enters the Euphrates some way above the junction of the latter with the Tigris.^ The dam on the Euphrates which regulated the flowing of its waters into the Hindiyeh canal has been allowed to fall into disrepair; every year a deeper and a stronger stream flows down the Hindiyeh, and matters have reached such a pass that during the season of low water the eastern bed is dry, the palm gardens of Hilleh are dying for lack of irrigation, and all the country along the river-bank below Hilleh has gone out of cultivation. The growth of the Hindiyeh has proved scarcely less disastrous. ' The history of Mesopotamian rivers is exceedingly complicated owing to the frequency with which they change their beds. Mr. Le Strange {Lands of the Eastern Caliphate, p. 70 et seq.) believes that the Nahr Hindiyeh, which is probably identical with the 'Alkami of Kudamah and Mas'