CHAPTER VIII.THE SAJUR.

Itrained in the Syrian March of 1908 when it did not snow, and wet or fair it blew a gale. We came to Aleppo in a deluge, wallowed in mud at Mumbij, found Euphrates swinging in full flood round his mighty curves, crossed him before a wet gale, recrossed and rode all the way to Aintab head down to the same laden blast. Sleet and snow, rain and hail spent themselves in turn on that highland town during four miserable days. But on the fifth morning the sky was clear. The tracks had hardened in one fair night, and bush and tree were eager for spring. When we wheeled on the crest of a low pass for a last look into the sunlit valley, a far-away frame of dazzling peaks had risen where clouds were hanging yesterday. Life was sweet once more, and the world seemed good.

The hope of hunters beckoned us ahead. A fortnight ago, while we lay in camp by Carchemish, a friendly Syrian had promised two things, first, “black written stones” near a village two hours to the north; second, “writing like nails,” to be seen on the farther bank of Euphrates over against the outfall of the Sajur. The first promise had been fulfilled, and the black stones of Kellekli were put to our credit. The second promisewe were now on our way to prove. A mound called Tell Ahmar was marked on our maps opposite the mouth of the Sajur, and there we would look for the Syrian’s “nail-like” writing, which could hardly mean other than the wedge-shaped script of the Assyrians. Cuneiform records would be worth the finding on the frontier of the Hatti land.

EUPHRATES FROM THE MOUND OF CARCHEMISH.

Moreover, there might be quarry on the road. On this first night we should camp under Tell Bashar, known to historians of the Crusades as a great mound by the Sajur, whither the Frank lords of Edessa betook themselves when driven back across Euphrates. When I passed through Aintab for the first time, fifteen years ago, I found in its bazars and khans sundry Hittite seals and trinkets, which were said by their vendors to have been found, one and all, on Tell Bashar. I doubted their story then, knowing how natives will combine to say that small antiquities come from the most notable ruin in their district, whatever its age; but with wider knowledge of Syria I began to believe. Few or no mounds so large as this was reported to be, have ever been built up from the level by Franks. Rather as at Aleppo and Hamah and a score of other places the Crusaders, like the Moslems before and after them, set their towers on old mounds of the Hittites. It was worth while, at least, to spend a night in some hamlet near the Tell, and enquire diligently if such trinkets had indeed been found there by husbandmen and shepherds, or were hanging yet on the neck-strings of their wives.

I had met with no record of any antiquary’s visit to Tell Bashar, and the place was reported to us in Birejik and Aintab to be a spot where a stranger would not bewell received. The nearest village was a home of outlaws with whom the Pasha meant to deal faithfully,bukra, to-morrow, or may be next day, or may be next year. But the outlaw in Turkey is more often a friend than a foe to wandering sahibs who may make his peace for him some day, and we rode on. Many laden camels were in the road—we were still on the bridle path which leads to Aleppo—and their drivers greeted us in friendly fashion, as glad as we of the unaccustomed sunlight and new-washed air: but each man carried his ready gun. Presently our way parted from the main track, and bore south by east over a deep hill-girt plain to the banks of a little canal, unwonted sight in Turkey of Asia. Here at least men live who take thought for the morrow, and in a land of ancient violence, hold something better than to rob and kill. We sighted a few women, bent over the wet earth in their daily quest for liquorice root, but no near villages; and when we halted at noon by a double spring, no one came near us except two curious herd-boys. The traveller in Turkey, who must eat most of his bread at noon and night amid the odours of villages and under the unflinching regard of scornful eyes, remembers with blessing his rare meals by wayside fountains. There he has no questions to answer and none to ask. The sunshine is his, and his the best of the shade. Lolling at his western ease, with no eastern punctilio to bear in mind, he forgets for a moment those twin spoilsports of the Levant, suspicion and bakshish.

We had remounted and ridden forward for less than an hour, when the low eastern range ran out into a second plain and a great mound sprang out of the flats ahead. Needless to ask if it were Tell Bashar. Longer,broader, and higher than the acropolis of Carchemish, it had the same abrupt flat-topped form, and even at our distance could be seen to rise between the horns of a low crescent of mounds, which kept the line of some city’s buried wall. We rode over the Sajur by the high-pitched bridge of Sarambol which has carried the mule-track from Aleppo to Birejik for centuries; and, having cut across an elbow of the meandering stream, we recrossed to the village of Bashar, and chose a camping ground on sodden grass beyond its huts. The sheikh called us to his upper chamber, and we took coffee amid a gathering throng of peasants who seemed willing enough to further our desires, but could muster only a defaced coin or two after a two-hour sitting, and tell us nothing of Hittite seals. Our hopes sank low. But the evening and the morning, when shepherds and women are home from the fields, often bring forth that which the afternoon knows not; and we thought it well to leave the village to talk us over, while we went on to the site.

Huge the Tell loomed near at hand, as we rode through a green gap in the outer crescent of mounds, and the climb to its flat summit proved very steep. All that was to be seen thereon was work of the Franks—foundation lines of their halls and ramparts, choked cisterns of their making, and two fragments of towers that had kept their main entrance on the south side—with nothing of an earlier day unless it were certain black blocks of basalt, worked here and there into their masonry. From this height the outer mounds could be seen to enclose west, south and east a site larger than Carchemish, but alas! ploughed from end to end, and cleared of all stones, modern or ancient. On the norththe ground falls steeply from the foot of the mound and stretches flat a hundred yards to the Sajur, whose sinuous reaches gleamed in the sinking sunlight. The river passes Tell Bashar in loops and counter-loops, fetching a wide compass to the east before finding its southward way again, and probably it has shifted its course continually in the soft, stoneless plain. The little fall of the land at the northern foot of Tell Bashar may well, therefore, be a forgotten bank, and the mound have risen, like other early fortresses, from the water’s very edge.

It was an hour after sunset when the first-fruits of the harvest we sought appeared at our tent-door. They were two seals of steatite, gable-shaped and engraved, which had been strung on a woman’s necklace in the company of modern charms to avert the ‘eye.’ No price was asked, but what we chose to give. We paid well, and had not time to finish supper before spoil of the Hittites—their cylinders, their beads, their seals, gable-shaped, conical, scarabaeoid—flowed in from all sides, and the source of the Aintab objects was beyond all doubt. So thick became the throng of vendors at last that the sheikh, attended by armed satellites, came up to close the market. He was nervous, and begged we would not sleep. His village, he protested, was bad, and some months before had fought a pitched battle for its lands, and killed some Aintablis. The Pasha’s police had come to arrest the slayers, but been driven off, and the ringleaders, yet at large, had nothing to lose by an attack on our camp. He, the sheikh, would suffer if a hair of our heads was touched. We promised to be wary, and he went off, leaving his guards by the tents.

THE SAJUR VALLEY AT SUNSET FROM TELL BASHAR.

The night was bitterly cold. The north wind, whichhad so cheered our morning hours, did not die at sunset as is its wont, but blew on through the dark in token that the weather was not yet firm, and the sodden grass grew crisp under its breath. It was too chill for stripping, and almost too chill for sleep, and had robbers come at any hour of that night they would have found one or the other of us awake. But they came not, and I doubt if any had ever a mind to come. The peasants shewed us, first and last, as good hospitality as their poverty allowed, offering again and again their little cups of bitter coffee half filled in the Arab fashion, and at sunrise they came to the tents once more asking no higher prices than overnight. Collecting was too easy a business here to be a sport at all; but the bag consoled us. When we rode off to the south we had gathered in nearly sixty Hittite things. Few women in that little village had not hung a cylinder or a seal on their necklaces to win ease in childbed, and make the milk sweet in their breasts, and I trust they have found others of equal virtue to replace those for which two Franks were so ready to pay their silver.

Records of Shalmaneser II. mention a notable fenced place, situated on the riverSaguraand taken once and again by the Great King on his forays across Euphrates. He names it, in his long-winded Ninevite way, Ashur-utir-asbat; but, he says, “the Hatti call it Pitru.” By the latter name the Pharaohs of the Eighteenth Dynasty also knew a strong city of northern Syria, which lay on their way to Carchemish. The site of Pitru on the Sagura has never been fixed; but no one before us with Pitru in his mind had seen Tell Bashar, which is by far the largest ancient site on the Sajur. If Til-Barsip, whereShalmaneser crossed Euphrates, was indeed at modern Birejik, as Assyriologists believe, be it noted that Tell Bashar lies on the straightest road from this point to Halman, or Aleppo, whither the King marched from Pitru in the year before Christ, 854. That diggers will prove some day that Pitru and Bashar are one, I make small doubt; but I feel less sure that, as some of those who study the geography of the old Hebrew world think, Pitru was also the same town as that Pethor “in Aram in the mountains of the east”; whence Balak the Moabite called Balaam to curse Israel. Pethor is said elsewhere to have been of Aram Naharaim, or Mesopotamia; but the Hebrew scribes were not scientific geographers, and I will leave another dark saying of theirs concerning Pethor, that it was “by the river of the land of the children of Balak’s people,” to the Higher Critics. Nevertheless, if ever there be a plan afoot to dig Tell Bashar, one might invoke reasonably enough the name of the son of Beor to open purses which are usually closed to diggers unashamed to beg.

Our second day by the Sajur passed cloudless as the first, and the land still kept the festival of yesterday. The ride over the treeless rolling downs would be dreary enough in mirky weather; but on that day the shallow dales rejoiced in the sun, the brooks laughed as we forded them, the sheep flecked emerald slopes, and wherever there was tilth, the young wheat showed an even brighter green. So crystal clear was the air that the freshly powdered peaks of Amánus stood up boldly in the west as though ten, instead of sixty miles away, and from every higher swell of the downs we got a backward view to yet more distant snows on Taurus. The very packhorses, sorry jades that they were, felt the spur of spring:they hinnied, squealed, headed off the track to gallantry and combat, till at last they broke into a frenzy of kicking and galloping which brought their packs about their heels and their panting drivers’ fists about their heads. A packhorse, who fancies himself Pegasus, is the most laughable beast on earth till he begins to scatter your bedding, your instruments, your garments and your food over a mile of rock or bog.

Low bluffs of basalt ran for a long distance on our left, in which quarries of the Hittites will be found some day; for tooled blocks of their black stone were scattered over both a small mound passed on the way, and a much larger acropolis which we spied at noon in the trough of a tributary valley. Tell Khalid is the second site on the Sajur for size, and must survive from some town known to Assyrian history. In a hamlet on the farther bank of the stream, which was reached by plunging through almost too swollen a flood, we were bidden rest and eat by the Bey, a friendly Mussulman, rich in beautiful brood mares, which were browsing unshackled with their young on lawn-like pastures; and during this short stay, the peasants had time to bethink them of three or four trifles picked up at one time or another on their mound—of a scarabaeus in paste, two engraved seals, some haematite beads, and, more welcome than these, a terra-cotta figurine of the Goddess of Syria, pressing her breasts in the manner of Ishtar.

Well pleased we rode on in the early afternoon to the bridge of the Sajur at Akjé, where rumour had it we might lodge in a khan. But the khan proved ruinous, like the bridge, and empty of all but dung and fleas, since the waggons bound from Aleppo to Mesopotamia have ceased to pass this way; and we hadno choice but to keep on, parted by the stream from a chain of villages on the left bank, each built on or by an ancient mound. After an hour and a half we reached a spot marked on the maps a hamlet, Kubbeh, but in reality a large farmstead with attendant hovels and a water-mill, owned by a wealthy Aleppine who lives away till the summer-time. His bailiff, a grave, black-bearded man, bade us welcome with respectful eyes, and abased himself even to draw off our shoes. We lay comfortably in the Bey’s chamber, and on the morrow went our way his debtors. The old feudal families may be extinct or reduced to shadows in Turkey; but the spirit of feudal dependence is as strong as ever in the country folk. Instinctively the peasants gather about a rich man’s dwelling, be he only a tax-farmer—as indeed were most of the “Deré Beys”; and they would rather be his vassals than small proprietors on their own lands. Traditions of ancient lawlessness and present fear of strong men, armed by the law, do something to keep this habit alive: but its roots lie deeper—deep down in that immemorial respect of persons which goes in the East with a fixed belief that they are respected by the Most High.

The third morning broke grey, with a chill wind off the Mesopotamian desert and a threat of rain; but the weather held fair till we halted in the village of Dadat at noon. We had kept to the more mountainous right bank, though, for more than one long stretch, we found no beaten way. Most villages were seen, to-day as yesterday, on the farther side, and it would have been easier to have crossed the stream and journeyed on their linking paths. But the map showed an earlier traveller’s track on the left bank, while it left the right blank, bothof roads and villages (although we lighted on two as considerable as the largest of those opposite), and it seemed better to strike out a new route. The river kept us company, tumbling down a long and gently inclined ladder of rock, with short reaches of stiller water, in which herons waded, careless of our passing by: but beyond Dadat we saw it bear away to north, hugging the hills, and were warned that sheer bluffs would bar any farther riding by its bank.

It had begun to rain when we struck off over the downs, in hopes to reach shelter at the village of Chat ere the storm should become heavy. Two Turkman camps lay on our way, and the elders of the tents, as soon as persuaded we were no robbers, gave us guidance through a maze of tortuous sheep-tracks. Cold looked the black booths flapping in the searching easter, colder the rolling treeless down on which the wanderers’ lives were led, coldest the scudding wrack in the sky. All joy of yesterday had forsaken the world, and we hailed the hovels of Chat as a sailor hails a port. But Chat did not hail us. We were many men and more horses, and the best shelter was already over-full of wives and children and cattle, among whom a narrow space was not very willingly cleared for us. While he burned an armful of thorns in the chimney, the Headman pointed to the thinning clouds, and protested another village lay just beyond the hill.

Ready to be persuaded, we went farther to fare worse. Once on the downs again we met the full fury of the soaking, freezing gale. There was no pretence of a path, and the dusty hillsides were already become bog and slime. A horse slid, plunged, and broke his girths, then another and another; and the dusk came down so fastthat only the very last of the light served us into Avshariyeh, as mean a knot of cabins as one may see even in Syria. The one guest-house was packed with travellers, Circassian, Arab and Turk, who had been ferried over Euphrates in the afternoon; and no man had so much as an empty stable to offer. It was idle, however, to plead there would be better lodging in some farther village, for, less than a mile ahead, the Great River barred our way in the night; and there was but one course open—boldly to enter the sheikh’s dwelling and occupy till he came in the sacred name of hospitality, and the more potent name of the Frank. It was a large stone-built barn, three parts stable, with a small living space raised and railed, which we took for ourselves without more ado. The women and children scurried into the dark of the stable end: their old lord followed us, and accepting the inevitable, began forthwith, Arabwise, to revolve in his slow mind how the chance might be turned to profit. He too, it appeared, was a stranger in the land, going in fear of the Circassian farmers on the royal estate of Mumbij, and he had a likely son. Here wereInglizby his hearth,Inglizwho, their escort said, stood very near to the great Consul in Aleppo. If they spoke for his boy, would he not be madekavass, and, by the custom of generations, a rock of defence for all his kin in evil-doing as in well?

TELL AHMAR ACROSS EUPHRATES.

The old man said nothing of this till the morning; but, as his purpose grew, he waxed more kind, sending one for firewood and another for milk, and a third to find lodging for our beasts. The air was pungent with wood-smoke, and so laden with the ammoniac reek of the Augean stable, that the fumes from the drying garments of a dozen unwashed men could scarcely offend. Asudden blaze from a fresh tuft of waxy thorn would light up the depths of the lower barn, and show us for a moment our room-mates, a steaming throng of buffaloes, oxen, sheep and goats: but it was not till we wished to sleep in the small hours that we began to hear the intermittent ruckling of a camel. In the dawn there he loomed, nearest of all the menagerie, chawing and blowing forth his froth. Poor prisoned beast! We looked at the single low door. Nothing of stature within many inches of his could pass that way. How had he got in, and how could he go out? The old sheikh threw no light on a problem which he seemed unable to appreciate, and we were left to suppose his camel had led a cloistered existence ever since he was found on some fine morning to have grown in the night the little more that would mean so much.

The morning broke fair, if not fine. Our host, who had opened his heart at last, took shadowy promises and solid silver with equal zest, and sent his blessing with us as we rode towards a white bluff honeycombed with ancient tombs, beyond whose butt a great water gleamed. Hollow echoes awoke in the cliff, half a dozen eagles flapped from their eyries, and we beheld Euphrates once more. Three or four mounds broke the eastern line of horizon, of which the nearest, rising from the river’s edge, was that Tell Ahmar, where we were to seek the “writing like nails.”

Euphrates is not passed, however, in one hour or in two. For all our shouting and firing of guns the two ferry boats lay motionless specks under the farther bank till almost noonday, and we had ample time to gaze at the promised land from far. Gradually a little company formed about us, made up in part of Aleppine passengers,who had come down in two waggons to the ferry, in part of roamers from the neighbouring hills, who spied unfamiliar tents. A swarthy Bedawi sauntered up, seated himself, saluted and said, “I have nothing. With two hundred piastres I shall buy cattle.” “God give you!” I remarked, “why say you so to me?” “You have them, and I have not,” he replied simply. He gave place to the strange figure of a very old man, almost blind, who wore a silken coat of polychrome patchwork and a green turban, and had the delicate face and soft beard that one often sees among dervishes. The company murmured he was mad, but received him reverently, and one who was sick bowed while the thin lips muttered a prayer or charm over his head. This patriarch, also, wanted piastres. Allah had shown him in sleep the hiding-place of a great treasure, and for a little money the richpashasmight share the secret. Two days later we passed him digging beside a great boulder a mile down stream, but we had bought no right to share the gold he should find.

At last we descried twin high-pooped arks crawling upstream under the farther bank, each towed by a dozen straining men. In an hour they would cast off, and by grace of bare poles, unwieldy rudders, currents and eddies, cunningly used, hit our point on the shore or miss it by a hundred yards, by a quarter of a mile, by more or by less, as Allah should will. Eight times I have crossed Euphrates in flood, and eight times failed to see earthly cause why the ferry-boat should ever attain the farther shore. Once cast off, I have lost all sense of headway, and seemed to slide down a boiling race, which had the boat at its mercy, keeping pace at its sides; and thus I have drifted into mid-stream. Thensuddenly there is great shouting and working of the huge tiller to and fro, and behold the shore itself, rushing to the rescue, crashes on the keel and the boat heels over with a groan. When I find my feet again in the swaying bilge, I perceive, amazed, that I have crossed Euphrates.

A EUPHRATEAN FERRY.

We landed at the foot of the Tell itself, and climbed it forthwith. Its flat top proved small and bare of ancient stones; but a few basalt blocks lay pell-mell at the bottom of a deep cut in its flank, and on the plain below a faintly outlined horseshoe of walls could be descried, whose horns touched the river some distance to west and east of the Tell. Within the western horn lay a few struggling huts, among which we entered the ferry-master’s, to eat bread and learn what we might: but for a long while we learned nothing. Those who sat gravely round the low divan were, in the main, wayfarers like ourselves, come to take the ferry to-night or to-morrow, and the two or three natives, who came and went in the house, professed ignorance of all written or sculptured stones. At last I sent our Syrian servant outside to talk, for it was plain the peasants would not know what we wanted till they knew who we were. He went no farther, I believe, than the shady side of the hut, but in half an hour he re-entered with a man who would show a stone. We rose and followed scarcely twenty paces, and there, full in the open, lay a black slab, worn and polished by use as a seat or stand, but still faintly relieved by two sculptured figures shod with the peculiar Hittite boot. Bakshish changed hands; whispers passed round; and the guide remembered another stone, which he said was “written.”

He led us north-westward out of the village, towards a gap in the long low mounds which hide the silted ruin of the city wall, and went on for a hundred yards more to the crown of a low rise. There he stayed, and, coming up with him, we saw half a dozen fragments of black basalt, which bore raised Hittite pictographs, and some part of a sculptured scene in which figured a great gross bull. The finders had broken the stone, the guide said, but found no gold within. There used to be another fragment, but where it might be now he knew not. We saw that the well-preserved pictographs were in the fine style of Carchemish, and more in number than on any one Hittite monument yet discovered, and knew that we had not come in vain to Tell Ahmar. To get due record of the monument, however, would be the work of hours. The sun was westering, and idlers, who had followed our tracks, spoke of yet other stones, and especially of “lions, written not thus, but otherwise—like nailmarks.” To-morrow the camp could come over, but we must see those lions to-night.

HITTITE INSCRIPTION AT TELL AHMAR.

The men led us back by the corner of the hamlet, and stopped near the river bank at a heavy block, on whose upturned face were carved two winged horses supporting the sacred palm-tree. We did what we could with camera and pencil, and then followed the guides inland across the ancient site towards a conspicuous gap in the northern wall-mounds. Through this, we were told, passed the waggon-track to Urfa, and a group of tumbled stones half seen beyond the gate raised our hopes. Nor were they to be disappointed. There lay two great winged lions of heavy Assyrian style, each inscribed with a long cuneiform text on his inner flank. The one was complete in all his parts butbroken in two, the other was in one piece, but without his head: when erect, each had stood nearly ten feet high from claw to crest, looking up the road towards Nineveh. Their inscriptions are of Shalmaneser the Second, the Great King of the ninth centuryB.C.who crossed Euphrates from Til-Barsip to Carchemish and Pitru.

FALLEN LION OF SHALMANESER II. AT TELL AHMAR.

Yet another monument was shown to us that evening—a brokenstela, representing a king or god, some nine feet high, accepting the homage of a puny adorer; and three more, beside a score of little objects, cylinders and seals, both Hittite and Assyrian, we were to see on the morrow.

We tramped a mile up stream, and were poled across Euphrates again under the sunset, prize-winners in the lottery of antiquarian discovery. For we had lighted on no mean city, forgotten by Euphrates. Though passed seventy years ago by the British navigators of the river, it had been visited by no western scholar till our lucky star led us down the Sajur. What city it was and how named, its own cuneiform inscriptions do not say. Was it that Til Barsip, chief stronghold of “Ahuni, son of Adini,” which Shalmaneser renamed Kar-Shalman-asharid, and made a royal residence for himself? Or, if this be placed rightly by scholars at Birejik, was one of Ahuni’s lesser cities built at Tell Ahmar? This much is sure—that in Shalmaneser’s day there was a city of Mesopotamia, facing the Sajur mouth, larger in area than Carchemish, where both the Hittite and the cuneiform characters were known and used; and that diggers will search there some day for the bilingual text which shall unlock the last secrets of the Hittite script.

Dark fell starlit and still by the river. The curious loungers of the daytime withdrew presently to their cavesand huts on the western hills, and left us to solitary vigil. Even our muleteers, fearful for their beasts, returned at nightfall to the doubtful shelter of Avshariyeh, and the heavy silence about us was broken by nothing but the thunderous splashes, which told of Euphrates at his age-long Sisyphean task, taking from that bank to add to this. I lay uneasy with a slight fever caught yesternight, and the strong murmur of the river troubled my dreams. I seemed to drift helpless by shores that came no nearer, in a strange company of mitred men with square, curled beards, and stunt, long-nosed folk with tiptilted shoes. Then, without landing, I would find myself ashore between winged lions scanning elusive shifting symbols; but ever, before I read them, I was spirited back to the stream, and struggling among trousered bowmen to reach a bank piled with battlements and high, square towers. Suddenly the waters shrank below the boat, and the archer host rushed past me; and through a confused noise of battle and stamping hoofs, there rang in my ears a cry, “And the sixth angel poured out his vial upon the great river Euphrates; and the water thereof was dried up that the way of the Kings of the East might be prepared.” Whereupon I woke to find our mules trampling about the tents in the dawn, while their drivers bandied loud words with a knot of Turcomans, who were claiming the grass by the river bank; and the sun rose on the mean mud walls of Tell Ahmar out of an empty stream.

GLASGOW: PRINTED AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS BY ROBERT MACLEHOSE AND CO. LTD.

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