Chapter 4

A TRAVELLING ENCAMPMENT OF THE 'AG̣ĒL

Knowing the independence of Arab women and the freedom with which marriages are contracted between different tribes of equal birth, I saw many romantic possibilities of mingled love and hatred between the Montagues and the Capulets. "Lo, on a sudden I loved her," says Antara, "though I had slain her kin." G̣ablān replied that these difficult situations did indeed occur, and ended sometimes in a tragedy, but if the lovers would be content to wait, some compromise could be arrived at, or they might be able to marry during one of the brief but oft-recurring intervals of truce. The real danger begins when blood feud is started within the tribe itself and a man having murdered one of his own people is cast out a homeless, kinless exile to shelter with strangers or with foes. Such was Imr ul Ḳais, the lonely outlaw, crying to the night: "Oh long night, wilt thou not bring the dawn? yet the day is no better than thou."

A DESERT WELL

A few miles further north the Ḥassaniyyeh encampments had not yet heard of yesterday's misfortune, and we had the pleasure of spreadingthe ill-news. G̣ablān rode up to every group we passed and delivered his mind of its burden; the men in buckram multiplied as we went, and perhaps I had been wrong in accepting the four hundred of the original statement, for they had had plenty of time to breed during the twenty-four hours that had elapsed between their departure and our arrival. All the tents were occupied with preparations not for war but for feasting. On the morrow fell the great festival of the Mohammedan year, the Feast of Sacrifice, when the pilgrims in Mecca slaughter their offerings and True Believers at home follow their example. By every tent there was a huge pile of thorns wherewith to roast the camel or sheep next day, and the shirts of the tribe were spread out to dry in the sun after a washing which, I have reason to believe, takes place but once a year. Towards sunset we reached a big encampment of the Beni Ḥassan, where G̣ablān decided to spend the night. There was water in a muddy pool near at hand and a good site for our tents above the hollow in which the Arabs lay. None of the great sheikhs were camped there and, mindful of Namrūd's warnings, I refused all invitations and spent the evening at home, watching the sunset and the kindling of the cookingfires and the blue smoke that floated away into the twilight. The sacrificial camel, in gorgeous trappings, grazed among my mules, and after dark the festival was heralded by a prolonged letting off of rifles. G̣ablān sat silent by the camp fire, his thoughts busy with the merrymakings that were on foot at home. It went sorely against the grain that he should be absent on such a day. "How many horsemen," said he, "will alight to-morrow at my father's tent! and I shall not be there to welcome them or to wish a good feast day to my little son!"

A DESERT WATER-COURSE

We were off before the rejoicings had begun. I had no desire to assist at the last moments of the camel, and moreover we had a long day before us through country that was not particularly safe. As far as my caravan was concerned, the risk was small. I had a letter in my pocket from Fellāḥ ul 'Isa to Nasīb el Aṭrash, the Sheikh of Ṣalkhad in the Jebel Druze. "To the renowned and honoured sheikh, Nasīb el Aṭrash," it ran (I had heard my host dictate it to Namrūd and seen him seal it with his seal), "the venerated, may God prolong his existence! We send you greetings, to you and to all the people of Ṣalkhad, and to your brother Jada'llah, and to the son of your uncle Muḥammad el Aṭrashin Umm er Rummān, and to our friends in Imtain. And further, there goes to you from us a lady of the most noble among the English. And we greet Muḥammada and our friends. . . . etc., (here followed another list of names), and this is all that is needful, and peace be with you." And beyond this letter I had the guarantee of my nationality, for the Druzes have not yet forgotten our interference on their behalf in 1860; moreover I was acquainted with several of the sheikhs of the Ṭurshān, to which powerful family Nasīb belonged. But G̣ablān was in a different case, and he was fully conscious of the ambiguity of his position. In spite of his uncle's visit to the Mountain, he was not at all certain how the Druzes would receive him; he was leaving the last outposts of his allies, and entering a border land by tradition hostile (he himself had no acquaintance with it but that which he had gathered on raiding expeditions), and if he did not find enemies among the Druzes he might well fall in with a scouring party of the bitter foes of the Da'ja, the Ḥaseneh or their like, who camp east of the hills.

CAMELS OF THE ḤASENEH

After an hour or two of travel, the character of the country changed completely: the soft soil of the desert came to an end, and the volcanic rocks of the Ḥaurān began. We rode for some time up a gulley of lava, left the last of the Ḥassaniyyeh tents in a little open space between some mounds, and found ourselves on the edge of a plain that, stretched to the foot of the Jebel Druze in an unbroken expanse, completely deserted, almost devoid of vegetation and strewn with black volcanic stones. It has been said that the borders of the desert are like a rocky shore on which the sailor who navigates deep waters with success may yet be wrecked when he attempts to bring his ship to port. This was the landing which we had to effect. Somewhere between us and the hills were the ruins of Umm ej Jemāl, where I hoped to get into touch with the Druzes, but for the life of us we could not tell where they lay, the plain having just sufficient rise and fall to hide them. Now Umm ej Jemāl has an evil name—I believe mine was the second European camp that had ever been pitched in it, the first having been that of a party of American archæologists who left a fortnight before I arrived—andG̣ablān's evident anxiety enhanced its sinister reputation. Twice he turned to me and asked whether it were necessary to camp there. I answered that he had undertaken to guide me to Umm ej Jemāl, and that there was no question but that I should go, and the second time I backed my obstinacy by pointing out that we must have water that night for the animals, and that there was little chance of finding it except in the cisterns of the ruined village. Thereupon I had out my map, and after trying to guess what point on the blank white paper we must have reached, I turned my caravan a little to the west towards a low rise from whence we should probably catch sight of our destination. G̣ablān took the decision in good part and expressed regret that he could not be of better service in directing us. He had been once in his life to Umm ej Jemāl, but it was at dead of night when he was out raiding. He and his party had stopped for half an hour to water their horses and had passed on eastward, returning, by another route. Yes, it had been a successful raid, praise be to God! and one of the first in which he had engaged. Mikhāil listened with indifference to our deliberations, themuleteers were not consulted, but as we set off again Ḥabīb tucked his revolver more handily into his belt.

UMM EJ JEMĀL

We rode on. I was engaged in looking for the rasīf, the paved Roman road that runs from Ḳal'at ez Zerka straight to Boṣrā, and also in wondering what I should do to protect if necessary the friend and guide whose pleasant companionship had enlivened our hours of travel and who should certainly come to no harm while he was with us. As we drew nearer to the rising ground we observed that it was crowned with sheepfolds, and presently we could see men gathering their flocks together and driving them behind the black walls, their hurried movements betraying their alarm. We noticed also some figures, whether mounted or on foot it was impossible to determine, advancing on us from a hollow to the left, and after a moment two puffs of smoke rose in front of them, and we heard the crack of rifles.

G̣ablān turned to me with a quick gesture.

"Ḍarabūna!" he said. "They have fired on us."

I said aloud: "They are afraid," but to myself, "We're in for it."

G̣ablān rose in his stirrups, dragged his fur-lined cloak from his shoulders, wound it round his left arm and waved it above his head, and very slowly he and I paced forward together. Another couple of shots were fired, and still we rode forward, G̣ablān waving his flag of truce. The firing ceased; it was nothing after all but the accepted greeting to strangers, conducted with the customary levity of the barbarian. Our assailants turned out to be two Arabs, grinning from ear to ear, quite ready to fraternise with us as soon as they had decided that we were not bent on sheep stealing, and most willing to direct us to Umm ej Jemāl. As soon as we had rounded the tell we saw it in front of us, its black towers and walls standing so boldly out of the desert that it was impossible to believe it had been ruined and deserted for thirteen hundred years. It was not till we came close that the rents and gashes in the tufa masonry and the breaches in the city wall were visible. I pushed forward and would have ridden straight into the heart of the town, but G̣ablān caught me up and laid his hand upon my bridle.

"I go first," he said. "Oh lady, you were committed to my charge."

And since he was the only person who incurred any risk and was well aware of the fact, his resolution did him credit.

WATERING CAMELS

We clattered over the ruined wall, passed round the square monastery tower which is the chief feature of the Mother of Camels (such is the meaning of the Arabic name), and rode into an open place between empty streets, and there was no one to fear and no sign of life save that offered by two small black tents, the inhabitants of which greeted us with enthusiasm, and proceeded to sell us milk and eggs in the most amicable fashion. The Arabs who live at the foot of Ḥaurān mountains are called the Jebeliyyeh, the Arabs of the Hills, and they are of no consideration, being but servants and shepherds to the Druzes. In the winter they herd the flocks that are sent down into the plain, and in the summer they are allowed to occupy the uncultivated slopes with their own cattle.

I spent the hour of daylight that remained in examining the wonderful Nabatæan necropolis outside the walls. Monsieur Dussaud began the work on it five years ago; Mr. Butler and Dr. Littmann, whose visit immediately preceded mine, will be found to have continued it when their next volumes are given to the world. Having seen what tombs they had uncovered and noted several mounds that must conceal others, I sent awaymy companions and wandered in the dusk through the ruined streets of the town, into great rooms and up broken stairs, till G̣ablān came and called me in, saying that if a man saw something in a fur coat exploring those uncanny places after dark, he might easily take the apparition for a ghoul and shoot at it. Moreover, he wished to ask me whether he might not return to Ṭneib. One of the Arabs would guide us next day to the first Druze village, and G̣ablān would as soon come no nearer to the Mountain. I agreed readily, indeed it was a relief not to have his safety on my conscience. He received three napoleons for his trouble and a warm letter of thanks to deliver to Fellāḥ ul 'Isa, and we parted with many assurances that if God willed we would travel together again.

STRIKING CAMP

The stony foot of the Jebel Ḥaurān is strewn with villages deserted since the Mohammedan invasion in the seventh century. I visited two that lay not far from my path, Shabḥa and Shabḥīyyeh, and found them to be both of the same character as Umm ej Jemāl. From afar they look like well-built towns with square towers rising above streets of three-storied houses. Where the walls have fallen they lie as they fell, and no hand has troubled to clear away the ruins. Monsieur de Vogüé was the first to describe the architecture of the Ḥaurān; his splendid volumes are still the principal source of information. The dwelling-houses are built round a court in which there is usually an outer stair leading to the upper story. There is no wood used in their construction, even the doors are of solid stone, turning on stone hinges, and the windows of stone slabs pierced with open-work patterns. Sometimes there are traces of a colonnaded portico, or the walls are broken by a double window, the arches of which are supported by a small column and a rough plain capital; frequently the lintels of the doors are adorned with a cross or a Christian monogram, but otherwise there is little decoration. The chambers are roofed with stone slabs resting on the back of transverse arches. So far as can be said with any certainty, Nabatæan inscriptions and tombs are the oldest monuments that have been discovered in the district; they are followed by many important remains of pagan Rome, but the really flourishing period seems to have been theChristian. After the Mohammadan invasion, which put an end to the prosperity of the Ḥaurān uplands, few of the villages were re-inhabited, and when the Druzes came about a hundred and fifty years ago, they found no settled population. They made the Mountain their own, rebuilt and thereby destroyed the ancient towns, and extended their lordship over the plains to the south, though they have not established themselves in the villages of that debatable land which remains a happy hunting ground for the archæologist. The American expedition will make good use of the immense amount of material that exists there, and knowing that the work had been done by better hands than mine, I rolled up the measuring tape and folded the foot-rule. But I could not so far overcome a natural instinct as to cease from copying inscriptions, and the one or two (they were extremely few) that had escaped Dr. Littmann's vigilant eye and come by chance to me were made over to him when we met in Damascus.

To our new guide, Fendi, fell the congenial task of posting me up in the gossip of the Mountain. Death had been busy among the great family of the Turshān during the past five years. Fāiz el Aṭrash, Sheikh of Kreyeh, was gone, poisoned said some, and a week or two before my arrival the most renowned of all the leaders of the Druzes, Shibly Beg el Aṭrash, had died of a mysterious and lingering illness—poison again, it was whispered. There was this war and that on hand, a terribleraid of the Arabs of the Wādy Sirḥān to be avenged, and a score with the Ṣukhūr to be settled, but on the whole there was prosperity, and as much peace as a Druze would wish to enjoy. The conversation was interrupted by a little shooting at rabbits lying asleep in the sun, not a gentlemanly sport perhaps, but one that helped to fill and to diversify the pot. After a time I left the mules and Fendi to go their own way, and taking Mikhāil with me, made a long circuit to visit the ruined towns. We were just finishing lunch under a broken wall, well separated from the rest of the party, when we saw two horsemen approaching us across the plain. We swept up the remains of the lunch and mounted hastily, feeling that any greeting they might accord us was better met in the saddle. They stopped in front of us and gave us the salute, following it with an abrupt question as to where we were going. I answered: "To Ṣalkhād, to Nasīb el Aṭrash," and they let us pass without further remark. They were not Druzes, for they did not wear the Druze turban, but Christians from Ḳreyeh, where there is a large Christian community, riding down to Umm ej Jemāl to visit the winter quarters of their flocks, so said Fendi, whom they had passed a mile ahead. Several hours before we reached the present limits of cultivation, we saw the signs of ancient agriculture in the shape of long parallel lines of stones heaped aside from earth that had once been fruitful. They looked like the ridge and furrow of a gigantic meadow, and like the ridge and furrow they are almost indelible, the mark of labour that must have ceased with the Arab invasion. At the foot of the first spur of the hills, Tell esh Shīḥ (it is called after the grey white Shīḥ plant which is the best pasturage for sheep), we left the unharvested desert and entered the region of ploughed fields—we left, too, the long clean levels of the open wilderness and were caught fetlock deep in the mud of a Syrian road. It led us up the hill to Umm er Rummān, the Mother of Pomegranates, on the edge of the lowest plateau of the Jebel Druze, as bleak a little muddy spot as you could hope to see. I stopped at the entrance of the village, and asked a group of Druzes where I should find a camping ground, and they directed me toan extremely dirty place below the cemetery, saying there was no other where I should not spoil the crops or the grass, though the crops. Heaven save the mark! were as yet below ground, and the grass consisted of a few brown spears half covered with melting snow. I could not entertain the idea of pitching tents so near the graveyard, and demanded to be directed to the house of Muḥammad el Aṭrash, Sheikh of Umm er Rummān. This prince of the Ṭurshān was seated upon his roof, engaged in directing certain agricultural operations that were being carried forward in the slough below. Long years had made him shapeless of figure and the effect was enhanced by the innumerable garments in which the winter cold had forced him to wrap his fat old body. I came as near as the mud would allow, and shouted:

MUḤAMMAD EL AṬRASH

"Peace be upon you, oh Sheikh!"

"And upon you peace!" he bawled in answer.

"Where in your village is there a dry spot for a camp?"

The sheikh conferred at the top of his voice with his henchmen in the mud, and finally replied that he did not know, by God! While I was wondering where to turn, a Druze stepped forward and announced that he could show me a place outside the town, and the sheikh, much relieved by the shifting of responsibility, gave me a loud injunction to go in peace, and resumed his occupations.

My guide was a young man with the clear cut features and the sharp intelligent expression of his race. He was endowed, too, like all his kin, with a lively curiosity, and as he hopped from side to side of the road to avoid the pools of mud and slush, he had from me all my story, whence I came and whither I was going, who were my friends in the Jebel Druze and what my father's name—very different this from the custom of the Arabs, with whom it is an essential point of good breeding never todemand more than the stranger sees fit to impart. In Aṭ Ṭabari's history there is a fine tale of a man who sought refuge with an Arab sheikh. He stayed on, and the sheikh died, and his son who ruled in his stead advanced in years, and at length the grandson of the original host came to his father and said: "Who is the man who dwells with us" And the father answered: "My son, in my father's time he came, and my father grew old and died, and he stayed on under my protection, and I too have grown old; but in all these years we have never asked him why he sought us nor what is his name. Neither do thou ask." Yet I rejoiced to find myself once more among the trenchant wits and the searching koḥl-blackened eyes of the Mountain, where every question calls for a quick retort or a brisk parry, and when my interlocutor grew too inquisitive I had only to answer:

"Listen, oh you! I am not 'thou,' but 'Your Excellency,'" and he laughed and understood and took the rebuke to heart.

There are many inscriptions in Umm er Rummān, a few Nabatæan and the rest Cufic, proving that the town on the shelf of the hills was an early settlement and that it was one of those the Arabs re-occupied for a time after the invasion. A delighted crowd of little boys followed me from house to house, tumbling over one another in their eagerness to point out a written stone built into a wādi or laid in the flooring about the hearth. In one house a woman caught me by the arm and implored me to heal her husband. The man was lying in a dark corner of the windowless room, with his face wrapped in filthy bandages, and when these had been removed a horrible wound was revealed, the track of a bullet that had passed through the cheek and shattered the jaw. I could do nothing but give him an antiseptic, and adjure the woman to wash the wound and keep the wrappings clean, and above all not to let him drink the medicine, though I felt it would make small odds which way he used it, Death had him so surely by the heel. This was the first of the long roll of sufferers that must pass before the eyes and catch despairingly at the sympathies of every traveller in wild places. Men and women afflictedwith ulcers and terrible sores, with fevers and rheumatisms, children crippled from their birth, the blind and the old, there are none who do not hope that the unmeasured wisdom of the West may find them a remedy. You stand aghast at the depths of human misery and at your own helplessness.

The path of archæology led me at last to the sheikh's door, and I went in to pay him an official visit. He was most hospitably inclined now that the business of the day was over; we sat together in the maḳ'ad, the audience room, a dark and dirty sort of out-house, with an iron stove in the centre of it, and discussed the Japanese War and desert ghazus and other topics of the day, while Selmān, the sheikh's son, a charming boy of sixteen, made us coffee. Muḥammad is brother-in-law to Shibly and to Yahya Beg el Aṭrāsh, who had been my first host five years before when I had escaped to his village of 'Areh from the Turkish Mudir at Boṣrā, and Selmān is the only son of his father's old age and the only, descendant of the famous 'Areh house of the Ṭurshān, for Shibly died and Yahya lives childless. The boy walked back with me to my camp, stepping lightly through the mud, a gay and eager figure touched with the air of distinction that befits one who comes of a noble stock. He had had no schooling, though there was a big Druze maktab at Kreyeh, fifteen miles away, kept by a Christian of some learning.

"My father holds me so precious," he explained, "that he will not let me leave his side."

"Oh Selmān," I began——

"Oh God!" he returned, using the ejaculation customary to one addressed by name.

"The minds of the Druzes are like fine steel, but what is steel until it is beaten into a sword blade?"

Selmān answered: "My uncle Shibly could neither read nor write."

I said: "The times are changed. The house of the Turshān will need trained wits if it would lead the Mountain as it did before."

But that headship is a thing of the past. Shibly is dead and Yahya childless, Muḥammad is old and Selmān undeveloped, Fāiz has leftfour sons but they are of no repute, Nasīb is cunning but very ignorant, there is Muṣṭafa at Imtain, who passes for a worthy man of little intelligence, and Ḥamūd at Sweida, who is distinguished mainly for his wealth. The ablest man among the Druzes is without doubt Abu Tellāl of Shaḥba, and the most enlightened Sheikh Muḥammad en Naṣṣār.

The night was bitterly cold. My thermometer had been broken, so that the exact temperature could not be registered, but every morning until we reached Damascus the water in the cup by my bedside was a solid piece of ice, and one night a little tumbling stream outside the camp was frozen hard and silent. The animals and the muleteers were usually housed in a khān while the frost lasted. Muḥammad the Druze, who had returned to his original name and faith, disappeared the moment camp was pitched, and spent the night enjoying the hospitality of his relations. "For," said Mikhāil sarcastically, "every man who can give him a meal he reckons to be the son of his uncle."

I was obliged to delay my start next morning in order to profit by the sheikh's invitation to breakfast at a very elastic nine o'clock—two hours after sunrise was what was said, and who knows exactly when it may suit that luminary to appear? It was a pleasant party. We discussed the war in Yemen in all its bearings—theoretically, for I was the only person who had any news, and mine was derived from aWeekly Timesa month old—and then Muḥammad questioned me as to why Europeans looked for inscriptions.

"But I think I know," he added. "It is that they may restore the land to the lords of it."

I assured him that the latest descendants of the former owners of the Ḥaurān had been dead a thousand years, and he listened politely and changed the subject with the baffled air of one who cannot get a true answer.

The young man who had shown us our camping ground rode with us to Ṣalkhad, saying he had business there and might as well have company by the way. His name was Ṣāleh; he was of a clerkly family, a reader and a scribe. I was so tactless as to ask him whether he were 'ākil,initiated—the Druzes are divided into the initiated and the uninitiated, but the line of demarcation does not follow that of social pre-eminence, since most of the Ṭurshān are uninitiated. He gave me a sharp look, and replied:

"What do you think?" and I saw my error and dropped the subject.

DESERT FLORA AND FAUNA

But Ṣāleh was not one to let slip any opportunity of gaining information. He questioned me acutely on our customs, down to the laws of marriage and divorce. He was vastly entertained at the English rule that the father should pay a man for marrying his daughter (so he interpreted the habit of giving her a marriage portion), and we laughed together over the absurdity of the arrangement. He was anxious to know Western views as to the creation of the world and the origin of matter, and I obliged him with certain heterodox opinions, on which he seized with far greater lucidity than that with which they were offered. We passed an agreeable morning, in spite of the mud and boulders of the road. At the edge of the snow wreaths a little purple crocus had made haste to bloom, and a starry white garlic—the Mountain is very rich in Spring flowers. The views to the south over the great plain we had crossed were enchanting; to the north the hills rose in unbroken slopes of snow, Ḳuleib, the Little Heart, looking quite Alpine with its frosty summit half veiled in mist. Two hours after noon we reached Ṣalkhad, the first goal of our journey.

Salcah, the city of King Og in Bashan, must have been a fortified place from the beginning of history. The modern village clusters round the base of a small volcano, on the top of which, built in the very crater, is the ruined fortress. This fortress and its predecessors in the crater formed the outpost of the Ḥaurān Mountains against the desert, the outpost of the earliest civilisation against the earliest marauders. The ground drops suddenly to the south and east, and, broken only by one or two volcanic mounds in the immediate neighbourhood, settles itself down into the long levels that reach Euphrates stream; straight as an arrow from a bow the Roman road runs out from Ṣalkhad into the desert in a line that no modern traveller has followed beyond the first two or three stages. The caravan track to Nejd begins here and passes by Kāf and Ethreh along the Wādi Sirḥan to Jōf and Ḥāil, a perilous way, though the Blunts pursued it successfully and Euting after them. Euting's description of it, done with all the learning and the minute observation of the German, is the best we have. Due south of Ṣalkhad there is an interesting ruined fort, Ḳal'at el Azrak, in an oasis where there are thickets full of wild boar: Dussaud visited it and has given an excellent account of his journey. No doubt there is more to be found still; the desert knows many a story that has not yet been told, and at Ṣalkhad it is difficult to keep your feet from turning south, so invitingly mysterious are those great plains.

THE CASTLE, ṢALKHAD

I went at once to the house of Nasīb el Atrāsh and presented Fellāḥ ul 'Isa's letter. Nasīb is a man of twenty-seven, though he looks ten years older, short in stature and sleek, with shrewd features of a typeessentially Druze and an expression that is more cunning than pleasant. He received me in his maḳ'ad, where he was sitting with his brother Jada'llah, a tall young man with a handsome but rather stupid face, who greeted me with "Bon jour," and then relapsed into silence, having come to the end of all the French he knew. Just as he had borrowed one phrase from a European tongue, so he had borrowed one article of dress from European wardrobes: a high stick-up collar was what he had selected, and it went strangely with his Arab clothes. There were a few Druzes drinking coffee in the maḳ'ad, and one other whom I instantly diagnosed as an alien. He turned out to be the Mudīr el Māl of the Turkish government—I do not know what his exact functions are, but his title implies him to be an agent of the Treasury. Ṣalkhad is one of three villages in Jebel Druze (the others being Sweida and 'Areh) where the Sultan has a Kāimaḳām and a telegraph station. Yūsef Effendi, Kāimaḳām, and Milḥēm Iliān, Mudīr el Māl, were considerably surprised when I turned up from the desert without warning or permission; they despatched three telegrams daily to the Vāli of Damascus, recounting all that I did and said, and though I was on the best of terms with both of them, finding indeed Milḥēm to be by far the most intelligent and agreeable man in the village, I fear I caused them much perturbation of mind. And here let me say that my experienceof Turkish officials leads me to count them among the most polite and obliging of men. If you come to them with the proper certificates there is nothing they will not do to help you; when they stop you it is because they are obliged to obey orders from higher authorities; and even when you set aside, as from time to time you must, refusals that are always couched in language conciliatory to a fault, they conceal their just annoyance and bear you no ill will for the trouble you have caused them. The government agents at Ṣalkhad occupy an uneasy position. It is true that there has been peace in the Mountain for the past five years, but the Druzes are a slippery race and one quick to take offence. Milḥēm understood them well, and his appointment to the new post of Ṣalkhad is a proof of the Vāli's genuine desire to avoid trouble in the future. He had been at Sweida for many years before he came to Ṣalkhad; he was a Christian, and therefore not divided from the Druzes by the unbridged gulf of hatred that lies between them and Islām, and he was fully aware that Turkish rule in the Jebel Ḥaurān depends on how little demand is made on a people nominally subject and practically independent. Yūsef Effendi was not far behind him in the strength of his conviction on this head, and he had the best of reasons for realising how shadowy his authority was. There are not more than two hundred Turkish soldiers in all the Mountain; the rest of the Ottoman forces are Druze zaptiehs, well pleased to wear a government uniform and draw government pay, on the rare occasions when it reaches them, though they can hardly be considered a trustworthy guard if serious differences arise between their own people and the Sultan. To all outward appearance Nasīb and his brother were linked by the closest bonds of friendship with the Kāimaḳām; they were for ever sitting in his maḳ'ad anddrinking his coffee, but once when we happened to be alone together, Yūsef Effendi said pathetically in his stilted Turkish Arabic: "I never know what they are doing: they look on me as an enemy. And if they wish to disobey orders from Damascus, they cut the telegraph wire and go their own way. What power have I to prevent them?"

NASĪB EL AṬRASH

A GROUP OF DRUZES

Nevertheless there are signs that the turbulent people of the Mountain have turned their minds to other matters than war with the Osmanli, and among the chief of these are the steam mills that grind the corn of Ṣalkhad and a few villages besides. A man who owns a steam mill is pledged to maintain the existing order. He has built it at considerable expense, he does not wish to see it wrecked by an invading Turkish army and his capital wasted; on the contrary, he hopes to make money from it, and his restless energies find a new and profitable outlet in that direction. My impression is that peace rests on a much firmer basis than it did five years ago, and that the Ottoman government has not been slow to learn the lessons of the last war—if only the Vāli of Damascus could have known how favourable an opinion his recent measures would force on the mind of the intriguing Englishwoman, he might have spared his telegraph clerks several hours' work.

There could scarcely have been a better example of the freedom withwhich the Druzes control their own affairs than was offered by an incident that took place on the very evening of my arrival. It has already been intimated on the authority of Fendi that the relations between the Mountain and the Desert were fraught with the usual possibilities of martial incident, and we had not spent an afternoon in Ṣalkhad without discovering that the great raid that had occurred some months previously was the topic that chiefly interested Nasīb and his brother. Not that they spoke of it in their conversations with me, but they listened eagerly when we told of the raid on the Ḥassan yyeh and the part the Ṣukhūr had played in it, and they drew from us all we knew or conjectured as to the present camping grounds of the latter tribe, how far the raiders had come, and in which direction retreated. The muleteers overheard men whispering at the street corners, and their whispers were of warlike preparations; the groups round Mikhāil's fire, ever a centre of social activity, spoke of injuries that could not be allowed to pass unnoticed, and one of the many sons of Muḥammad's uncle had provided that famished Beyrouti with a lunch flavoured with dark hints of a league between the Wādi Sirḥan and the Beni Ṣakhr which must be nipped in the bud ere it had assumed alarming proportions. The wave of the ghazu can hardly reach as far as Ṣalkhad itself, but the harm is done long before it touches that point, especially in the winter when every four-footed creature, except the mare necessary for riding, is far away in the southern plain.

My camp was pitched in a field outside the town at the eastern foot of the castle hill. The slopes to the north were deep in snow up to the ruined walls of the fortress, and even where we lay there were a few detached snowdrifts glittering under the full moon. I had just finished dinner, and was debating whether it were too cold to write my diary, when a sound of savage singing broke upon the night, and from the topmost walls of the castle a great flame leapt up into the sky. It was a beacon kindled to tell the news of the coming raid to the many Druze villages scattered over the plain below, and the song was a call to arms. There was a Druze zaptieh sitting by my camp fire; he jumped up and gazed first at me and then at the red blaze above us. I said:

FROM ṢALKHAD CASTLE, LOOKING SOUTH-EAST

"Is there permission to my going up?"

He answered: "There is no refusal. Honour us."

We climbed together over the half frozen mud, and by the snowy northern side of the volcano, edged our way in the darkness round the castle walls where the lava ashes gave beneath our feet, and came out into the full moonlight upon the wildest scene that eyes could see. A crowd of Druzes, young men and boys, stood at the edge of the moat on a narrow shoulder of the hill. They were all armed with swords and knives and they were shouting phrase by phrase a terrible song. Each line of it was repeated twenty times or more until it seemed to the listener that it had been bitten, as an acid bites the brass, onto the intimate recesses of the mind.

"Upon them, upon them! oh Lord our God! that the foe may fallin swathes before our swords!Upon them, upon them! that our spears may drink at their hearts!Let the babe leave his mother's breast!Let the young man arise and be gone!Upon them, upon them! oh Lord our God! that our swords maydrink at their hearts. . . ."

So they sang, and it was as though the fury of their anger would never end, as though the castle walls would never cease from echoing their interminable rage and the night never again know silence, when suddenly the chant stopped and the singers drew apart and formed themselves into a circle, every man holding his neighbours by the hand. Into the circle stepped three young Druzes with bare swords, and strode round the ring of eager boys that enclosed them. Before each in turn they stopped and shook their swords and cried:

"Are you a good man? Are you a true man?"

And each one answered with a shout:

"Ha! ha!"

The moonlight fell on the dark faces and glittered on the quivering blades, the thrill of martial ardour passed from hand to clasped hand, and earth cried to heaven: War! red war!

And then one of the three saw me standing in the circle, and strode up and raised his sword above his head, as though nation saluted nation.

"Lady!" he said, "the English and the Druze are one."

I said: "Thank God! we, too, are a fighting race."

Indeed, at that moment there seemed no finer thing than to go out and kill your enemy.

And when this swearing in of warriors was over, we ran down the hill under the moon, still holding hands, and I, seeing that some were only children not yet full grown, said to the companion whose hand chance had put in mine:

"Do all these go out with you?"

He answered: "By God! not all. The ungrown boys must stay at home and pray to God that their day may soon come."

When they reached the entrance of the town, the Druzes leapt on to a flat house roof, and took up their devilish song. The fire had burnt out on the castle walls, the night struck suddenly cold, and I began to doubt whether if Milḥēm and the Vāli of Damascus could see me taking part in a demonstration against the Ṣukhūr they would believe in the innocence of my journey; so I turned away into the shadow and ran down to my tents and became a European again, bent on peaceful pursuits and unacquainted with the naked primitive passions of mankind.

We had certain inquiries to make concerning our journey, and stores to lay in before we set out for the eastern side of the Mountain, where there are no big villages, and therefore we spent two days at Ṣalkhad. The great difficulty of the commissariat is barley for the animals. There had been enough for our needs at Umm er Rummān, but there was none at Ṣalkhad; it is always to be got at Sweida, which is the chief post of the Turkish government, but that was far away across the hills, and we decided to send down to Imtein, the path thither being bare of snow. It is worth recording that in the winter, when all the flocks are several hours away in the plain, it is impossible to buy a sheep in the Mountain, and the traveller has to make shift with such scraggy chickens as he may find. The want of foresight which had left our larder so ill-furnished affected Mikhāil considerably, for he prided himself onthe roasting of a leg of mutton, and he asked me how it was that all the books I had with me had not hinted at the absence of the animal that could supply that delicacy. I answered that the writers of these works seemed to have been more concerned with Roman remains than with such weighty matters as roasts and stews, whereat he said firmly:

ḲREYEH

"When your Excellency writes a book, you will not say: 'Here there is a beautiful church and a great castle.' The gentry can see that for themselves. But you shall say: 'In this village there are no hens.' Then they will know from the beginning what sort of country it is."

The first day of my visit I spent with Nasīb, watching him give orders for the grinding of the corn needed for the coming military expedition (to which we sedulously avoided any allusion), photographing him and the notables of his village, and lunching with him in his maḳ'ad on gritty brown-paper-like bread and dibs, a kind of treacle made from boiled grape juice, and a particularly nasty sort of soup of sour milk with scraps of fat mixed in it—kirkthe Druzes call it and hold it in an unwarrantable esteem. In the afternoon Nasīb was riding some ten miles to the south, to settle a dispute that had arisen between two of hisvillages, and he invited me to accompany him; but I thought that there were probably other matters on hand, in which it might be awkward if a stranger were to assist, and I compromised by agreeing to go with him for an hour and turn aside to visit a shrine on top of a tell, the Weli of El Khuḍr, who is no other than our St. George. Nasīb rode out in style with twenty armed men by his side, himself arrayed in a long mantle of dark blue cloth embroidered in black, with a pale blue handkerchief tucked into the folds of the white turban that encircled his tarbūsh. The cavalcade looked very gallant, each man wrapped in a cloak and carrying his rifle across his knees. These rifles were handed to me one by one that I might read the lettering on them. They were of many different dates and origins, some antiquated pieces stolen from Turkish soldiers, the most French and fairly modern, while a few came from Egypt and were marked with V.R. and the broad arrow. Nasīb rode with me for a time and catechised me on my social status, whether I would ride at home with the King of England, and what was the extent of my father's wealth. His curiosity was not entirely without a motive; the Druzes are always hoping to find some very rich European whose sympathies they could engage, and who would finance and arm them if another war were to break out with the Sultan; but so contemptuous was he of the modest competence which my replies revealed, that I was roused to ask subsequently, by methods more tactful than those of Nasīb, what was wealth in the Mountain. The answer was that the richest of the Ṭurshān, Ḥamūd of Sweida, had an income of about 5000 napoleons. Nasīb himself was not so well off. He had some 1000 napoleons yearly. Probably it comes to him mainly in kind; all revenues are derived from land, and vary considerably with the fortunes of the agricultural year. The figures given me were, I should think, liberal, and depended on a reckoning according with the best harvest rather than with the mean.

Back to Index Next