Chapter 5

A DRUZE PLOUGHBOY

Presently Nasīb fell behind and engaged in a whispered conversation with an old man who was his chief adviser, while the others crowded round me and told me tales of the desert and of great ruins to the south, which they were prepared to show me if I would stay with them. Atthe foot of the tell we met a group of horsemen waiting to impart to Nasīb some important news about the Arabs. Mikhāil and I stood aside, having seen our host look doubtfully at us out of the comers of his eyes. That the tidings were not good was all we heard, and no one could have learnt even that from Nasīb's crafty unmoved face and eyes concealed beneath the lids as if he wished to make sure that they should not reveal a single flash of his thoughts. Here we left him, to his evident relief, and rode up the tell. Now there is never a prominent hill in the Jebel Druze but it bears a sanctuary on its summit, and the building is always one of those early monuments of the land that date back to the times before Druze or Turk came into it. What is their history? Were they erected to Nabatæan gods of rock and hill, to Drusāra and Allāt and the pantheon of the Semitic inscriptions whom the desert worshipped with sacrifice at the Ka'abah and on many a solitary mound? If this be so the old divinities still bear sway under changed names, still smell the blood of goats and sheep sprinkled on the black doorposts of their dwellings, still hear the prayers of pilgrimscarrying green boughs and swathes of flowers. As at the Well of El Khuḍr, there is always in the interior of the sanctuary an erection like a sarcophagus, covered with shreds of coloured rags, and when you lift the rags and peer beneath you find some queer block of tufa, worn smooth with libations and own brother to the Black Stone at Mecca. Near at hand there is a stone basin for water—the water was iced over that day, and the snow had drifted in through the stone doors and was melting through the roof, so that it lay in muddy pools on the floor.

The next day was exceedingly cold, with a leaden sky and a bitter wind, the forerunner of snow. Milḥēm Iliān came down to invite me to lodge with him, but I refused, fearing that I should feel the temperature of my tent too icy after his heated room. He stayed some time and I took the opportunity of discussing with him my plan of riding out into the Ṣafa, the volcanic waste east of the Jebel Druze. He was not at all encouraging, indeed he thought the project impossible under existing conditions, for it seemed that the Ghiāth, the tribe that inhabits the Ṣāfa, were up in arms against the Government. They had waylaid and robbed the desert post that goes between Damascus and Baghdad, and were expecting retribution at the hands of the Vāli. I f therefore a small escort of zaptiehs were to be sent in with me they would assuredly be cut to pieces. Milḥēm agreed, however, that it might be possible to go in alone with the Druzes though anything short of an army of soldiers would be useless, and he promised to give me a letter to Muḥammad en Naṣṣār, Sheikh of Ṣāleh, whom he described as a good friend of his and a man of influence and judgment. The Ghiāth are in the same position with regard to the Druzes as are the Jebeliyyeh; they cannot afford not to be on good terms with the Mountain, since they are dependent on the high pasturages during the summer.

Towards sunset I returned Milḥēm's visit. His room was full of people, including Nasīb newly returned from his expedition. They made me tell them of my recent experiences in the desert, and I found that all my friends were counted as foes by the Druzes and that they have no allies save the Ghiāth and the Jebeliyyeh—the Sherarāt, the Da'ja,the Beni Ḥassan, there was a score of blood against them all. In the desert the wordgōm, foe, is second to none save only that ofdaif, guest, but in the Mountain it comes easily first. I said:

BOṢRA ESKI SHĀM

"Oh Nasīb, the Druzes are like those of whom Kureyt ibn Uneif sang when he said: 'A people who when evil bares its teeth against them, fly out to meet it in companies or alone.'"

The sheikh's subtle countenance relaxed for a second, but the talk was drifting too near dangerous subjects, and he rose shortly afterwards and took his leave. His place was filled by new comers (Milḥēm's coffee-pots must be kept boiling from dawn till late at night), and presently one entered whom they all rose to salute. He was a Kurdish Agha, a fine old man with a white moustache and a clean-shaven chin, who comes down from Damascus from time to time on some business of his own. Milḥēm is a native of Damascus, and had much to ask and hear; the talk left desert topics and swung round to town dwellers and their ways and views.

"Look you, your Excellencies," said a man who was making coffee over the brazier, "there is no religion in the towns as there is in country places."

"Yes," pursued Milḥēm—

"May God make it Yes upon you!" ejaculated the Kurd.

"May God requite you, oh Agha! You may find men in the Great Mosque at Damascus at the Friday prayers and a few perhaps at Jerusalem, but in Beyrout and in Smyrna the mosques are empty and the churches are empty. There is no religion any more."

"My friends," said the Agha, "I will tell you the reason. In the country men are poor and they want much. Of whom should they ask it but of God? There is none other that is compassionate to the poor save He alone. But in the towns they are rich, they have got all they desire, and why should they pray to God if they want nothing? The lady laughs—is it not so among her own people?"

I confessed that there was very little difference in this matter between Europe and Asia and presently left the party to pursue their coffee drinking and their conversation without me.

Late at night some one came knocking at my tent and a woman's voice cried to me:

"Lady, lady! a mother's heart (are not the English merciful?) listen to the sorrow of a mother's heart and take this letter to my son!"

I asked the unseen suppliant where her son was to be found.

"In Tripoli, in Tripoli of the West. He is a soldier and an exile, who came not back with the others after the war. Take this letter, and send it by a sure hand from Damascus, for there is no certainty in the posts of Ṣalkhad."

I unfastened the tent and took the letter, she crying the while:

"The wife of Nasīb told me that you were generous. A mother's heart, you understand, a mother's heart that mourns!"

So she departed weeping, and I sent the mysterious letter by the English post from Beyrout, but whether it ever reached Tripoli of the West and the Druze exile we shall not know.

The Ḳāimaḳām came out to see us off next morning and provided us with a Druze zaptieh to show us the way to Ṣāleh. The wind was searchingly cold, and the snow was reported to lie very deep on the hills, for which reason we took the lower road by Ormān, a village memorable as the scene of the outbreak of the last war. Milḥēm had entrusted my guide, Yūsef, with the mail that had just come in to Ṣalkhad; it consisted of one letter only, and that was for a Christian, an inhabitant of Ormān, whom we met outside the village. It was from Massachusetts, from one of his three sons who had emigrated to America and were all doing well, praise be to God! They had sent him thirty liras between them the year before: he bubbled over with joyful pride as we handed him the letter containing fresh news of them. At Ormān the road turned upwards—I continue to call it a road for want of a name bad enough for it. It is part of the Druze system of defence that there shall be no track in the Mountain wide enough for two to go abreast or smooth enough to admit of any pace beyond a stumbling walk, and it is the part that is the most successfully carried out. We were soon in snow, half melted, half frozen, concealing the holes in the pathbut not firm enough to prevent the animals from breaking through into them. Occasionally there were deep drifts on which the mules embarked with the utmost confidence only to fall midway and scatter their packs, while the horses plunged and reared till they almost unseated us. Mikhāil, who was no rider, bit the slush several times. The makers of the Palestine Exploration map have allowed their fancy to play freely over the eastern slopes of the Jebel Druze. Hills have hopped along for miles, and villages have crossed ravines and settled themselves on the opposite banks, as, for instance, Abu Zreik, which stands on the left bank of the Wādi Rājil, though the map places it on the right. At the time it all seemed to fit in with the general malevolence of that day's journey, and our misery culminated when we entered on an interminable snow field swept by a blizzard of cutting sleet. At the dim end of it, quite unapproachably far away, we could just see through the sleet the slopes on which Ṣāleh stands, but as we plodded on mile after mile (it was useless to attempt to ride on our stumbling animals and far too cold besides) we gradually came nearer, and having travelled seven hours to accomplish a four hours' march, we splashed and waded late in the afternoon though the mounds of slush and pools of water that did duty asstreets. There was not a dry place in all the village, and the snow was falling heavily; clearly there was nothing to be done but to beat at the door of Muḥammad en Naṣṣār, who has an honoured reputation for hospitality, and I made the best of my way up steps sheeted with ice to his maḳ'ad.

THE VILLAGE GATEWAY, ḤABRĀN

If Providence owed us any compensation for the discomforts of the day, it paid us, or at least it paid me, full measure and running over, by the enchanting evening that I spent in the sheikh's house. Muḥammad en Naṣṣār is a man full of years and wisdom who has lived to see a large family of sons and nephews grow up round him, and to train their quick wits by his own courteous and gracious example. All the Druzes are essentially gentlefolk; but the house of the sheikhs of Ṣāleh could not be outdone in good breeding, natural and acquired, by the noblest of the aristocratic races, Persian or Rajputs, or any others distinguished beyond their fellows. Milḥēm's letter was quite unnecessary to ensure me a welcome; it was enough that I was cold and hungry and an Englishwoman. The fire in the iron stove was kindled, my wet outer garments taken from me, cushions and carpets spread on the divans under the sheikh's directions, and all the band of his male relations, direct and collateral, dropped in to enliven the evening. We began well. I knew that Oppenheim had taken his escort from Ṣāleh when he went into the Ṣafa, and I happened to have his book with me—how often had I regretted that a wise instinct had not directed my choice towards Dussaud's two admirable volumes, rather than to Oppenheim's ponderous work, packed with information that was of little use on the present journey! The great merit of the book lies in the illustrations, and fortunately there was among them a portrait of Muḥammad en Naṣṣār with his two youngest children. Having abstracted Kiepert's maps, I was so generous as to present the tome to one of the family who had accompanied the learned German upon his expedition. It has remained at Ṣāleh to be a joy and a glory to the sheikhs, who will look at the pictures and make no attempt to grapple with the text, and the hole in my bookshelves is well filled by the memory of their pleasure.

A DRUZE MAḲ'AD, ḤABRĀN

We talked without ceasing during the whole evening, with a briefinterval when an excellent dinner was brought in. The old sheikh, Yūsef the zaptieh, and I partook of it together, and the eldest of the nephews and cousins finished up the ample remains. The topic that interested them most at Ṣāleh was the Japanese War—indeed it was in that direction that conversation invariably turned in the Mountain, the reason being that the Druzes believe the Japanese to belong to their own race. The line of argument which has led them to this astonishing conclusion is simple. The secret doctrines of their faith hold out hopes that some day an army of Druzes will burst out of the furthest limits of Asia and conquer the world. The Japanese had shown indomitable courage, the Druzes also are brave; the Japanese had been victorious, the Druzes of prophecy will be unconquerable: therefore the two are one and the same. The sympathy of every one, whether in Syria or in Asia Minor, is on the side of the Japanese, with the single exception of the members of the Orthodox Church, who look on Russia as their protector. It seems natural that the Ottoman government should rejoice to witness the discomfiture of their secular foes, but it is more difficult to account for the pleasure of Arab, Druze (apart from the secret hope of the Druzes above mentioned), and Kurd, between whom and the Turk there is nolove lost. These races are not wont to be gratified by the overthrow of the Sultan's enemies, a class to which they themselves generally belong. At bottom there is no doubt a certainSchadenfreude, and the natural impulse to favour the little man against the big bully, and behind all there is that curious link which is so difficult to classify except by the name of a continent, and the war appeals to the Asiatic because it is against the European. However eagerly you may protest that the Russians cannot be considered as a type of European civilisation, however profoundly you may be convinced that the Japanese show as few common characteristics with Turk or Druze as they show with South Sea Islander or Esquimaux, East calls to East, and the voice wakes echoes from the China Seas to the Mediterranean.

We talked also of the Turk. Muḥammad had been one of the many sheikhs who were sent into exile after the Druze war; he had visited Constantinople, and his experiences embraced Asia Minor also, so that he was competent to hold an opinion on Turkish characteristics. In a blind fashion, the fashion in which the Turk conducts most of his affairs, the wholesale carrying off of the Druze sheikhs and their enforced sojourn for two or three years in distant cities of the Empire, has attained an end for which far-sighted statesmanship might have laboured in vain. Men who would otherwise never have travelled fifty miles from their own village have been taught perforce some knowledge of the world; they have returned to exercise a semi-independence almost as they did before, but their minds have received, however reluctantly, the impression of the wide extent of the Sultan's dominions, the infinite number of his resources, and the comparative unimportance of Druze revolts in an empire which yet survives though it is familiar with every form of civil strife. Muḥammad had been so completely convinced that there was a world beyond the limits of the Mountain that he had attempted to push two of his six sons out into it by putting them into a Government office in Damascus. He had failed because, even with his maxims in their ears, the boys were too headstrong. Some youthful neglect of duty, followed by a sharp rebuke from their superior, had sent them hurrying back to thevillage where they could be independent sheikhs, idle and respected. Muḥammad took in a weekly sheet published in Damascus, and the whole family followed with the keenest interest such news of foreign politics, of English politics in particular, as escaped the censor's pencil. Important events sometimes eluded their notice—or that of the editor—for my hosts asked after Lord Salisbury and were deeply grieved to hear he had been dead some years. The other name they knew, besides Lord Cromer's, which is known always and everywhere, was that of Mr. Chamberlain, and thus there started in the maḳ'ad at Ṣāleh an animated debate on the fiscal question, lavishly illustrated on my part with examples drawn from the Turkish gumruk, the Custom House. It may be that my arguments were less exposed to contradiction than those which most free traders are in a position to use, for the whole of Ṣāleh rejected the doctrines of protection and retaliation (there was no half-way-house here) with unanimity.

There was only one point which was not settled with perfect satisfaction to all, and that was my journey to the Ṣafa. I have a shrewd suspicion that Milḥēm's letter, which had been handed to me sealed, so that I had not been able to read it, was of the nature of that given by Prætus to Bellerophon when he sent him to the King of Lycia, and that if Muḥammad was not commanded to execute the bearer on arrival, he was strongly recommended to discourage her project. At any rate, he was of opinion that the expedition could not be accomplished unless I would take at least twenty Druzes as escort, which would have involved so much preparation and expense that I was obliged to abandon the idea.

At ten o'clock I was asked at what hour I wished to sleep, and, to the evident chagrin of those members of the company who had not been riding all day in the snow, I replied that the time had come. The sons and nephews took their departure, wadded quilts were brought in and piled into three beds, one on each of the three sides of the immense divan, the sheikh, Yūsef and I tucked ourselves up, and I knew no more till I woke in the sharp frost of the early dawn. I got up and went out intothe fresh air. Ṣāleh was fast asleep in the snow; even the little stream that tumbled in and out of a Roman fountain in the middle of the village was sleeping under a thick coat of ice. In the clear cold silence I watched the eastern sky redden and fade and the sun send a long shaft of light over the snow field through which we had toiled the day before. I put up a short thanksgiving appropriate to fine weather, roused the muleteers and the mules from their common resting place under the dark vaults of the khān, ate the breakfast which Muḥammad en Naṣṣār provided, and took a prolonged and most grateful farewell of my host and his family. No better night's rest and no more agreeable company can have fallen to the lot of any wanderer by plain and hill than were accorded to me at Ṣāleh.

100LINTEL, EL KHURBEH

LINTEL, EL KHURBEH

My objective that day was the village of Umm Ruweik on the eastern edge of the Druze hills. Remembering the vagaries of the map, I took with me one of Muḥammad en Naṣṣār's nephews as a guide, Fāiz was his name, and he was brother to Ghishghāsh, the Sheikh of Umm Ruweik. I had singled him out the night before as being the pleasantest member of the pleasant circle in the maḳ'ad, and in a four days' acquaintance there was never an incident that caused me to regret my choice. He was a man with features all out of drawing, his nose was crooked, his mouth was crooked, you would not have staked anything upon the straight setting of his eyes; his manner was particularly gentle and obliging, his conversation intelligent, and he was full of good counsel and resource. We had not ridden very far along the lip of the hills, I gazing at the eastern plain as at a Promised Land that my feet would never tread, before Fāiz began to develop a plan for leaving the mules and tents behind at Umm Ruweik and making a dash across the Ṣafa to the Ruḥbeh, where lay the great ruin of which the accounts had fired my imagination. In a moment the world changed colour, and Success shone from the blue sky and hung in golden mists on that plain which had suddenly become accessible.

THE WALLS OF ḲANAWĀT

Our path fell rapidly from Ṣāleh, and in half an hour we were out of the snow and ice that had plagued us for the last day and night; half an hour later when we reached the Wādi Buṣān, where the swift waters turned a mill wheel, we had left the winter country behind. Ṣāneh, the village on the north side of the Wādi Buṣān, looked a flourishing place and contained some good specimens of Ḥaurān architecture—I remember in particular a fine architrave carved with adouble scroll of grapes and vine leaves that fell on either side of a vase occupying the centre of the stone. It was at Ṣāneh that we came onto the very edge of the plateau and saw the great plain of the Ṣafa spread out like a sea beneath us. The strange feature of it was that its surface was as black as a black tent roof, owing to the sheets of lava and volcanic stone that were spread over it. At places there were patches of yellow, which I afterwards discovered to be the earth on which the lumps of tufa lay revealed by their occasional absence, and these the Arabs call the Beiḍa, the White Land, in contradistinction to the Ḥarra, the Burnt Land of lava and tufa. In the Ṣafa the White Land is almost as arid as the Burnt, though generally the word Beiḍa means arable, for I heard Fāiz shout to the muleteers: "Come off the Beiḍa!" when the mules had strayed into a field of winter wheat. The literary word for desert bears a puzzling resemblance to this other, as for instance in Mutanabbi's verse.

"Al tail w'al khail w'al beida ta'rafuni:Night and my steed and the desert know me—And the lance thrust and battle, and parchment and the pen."

ḲANAWĀT, THE BASILICA

The Ṣafa ran out to a dark mass of volcanoes, lying almost due north and south, but we were so high above them that their elevation was not perceptible. Beyond them again we could see a wide stretch of Beiḍa which was the Ruḥbeh plain. To the east and south on the immenselydistant horizon a few little volcanic cones marked the end of the Ḥaurān outcrop of lava and the beginning of the Ḥamād, the waterless desert that reaches to Baghdad. To the north were the hills round Dmer, and still further north the other range bounding the valley ten miles wide that leads to Palmyra, and these ran back to the slopes of Anti-Libanus, snowcapped, standing above the desert road to Ḥomṣ. We turned east to Shibbekeh, a curious place built above a valley the northern bank of which is honeycombed with caves, and north to Sheikhly and Rāmeh on the southern brink of a very deep gully, the Wādi esh Shām, down which are the most easterly of the inhabited villages, Fedhāmeh and Ej Jeita. The settlements on this side of the Mountain have an air of great antiquity. The cave villages may have existed long before Nabatæan times; possibly they go back to the prehistoric uncertainties of King Og, or the people whom his name covered, when whole towns were quarried out underground, the most famous example being Dera'a in the Ḥaurān plain south of Mezērib. We left Mushennef to the west, not without regrets on my part that I had not time to revisit it, for mirrored in its great tank is one of the most charming of all the temples of the Jebel Druze, not excepting the magnificent monuments of Ḳanawāt. El Ajlāt, north of the Wādi esh Shām, is perched on top of a tell high enough to touch the February snow line, and another valley leads down from it to the Ṣafa—I heard of a ruin and an inscription in its lower course but did not visit them. We got to Umm Ruweik about four o'clock, and pitched tents on the edge of the mountain shelf, where I could see through my open tent door the whole extent of the Ṣafa.

Sheikh Ghishghāsh was all smiles. Certainly I could ride out to the Ruḥbeh if I would take him and his son Aḥmed and Fāiz with me. He scoffed at the idea of a larger escort. By the Face of the Truth, the Ghiāth were his servants and his bondmen, they would entertain us as the noble should be entertained and provide us with luxurious lodgings. I dined with Ghishghāsh (he would take no refusal), and concluded thathe was an easy tempered, boastful, and foolish man, extremely talkative, though all that he said was not worth one of Fāiz's sentences. Fāiz fell into comparative silence in his company, and Aḥmed too said little, but that little was sensible and worth hearing. Ghishghāsh told great tales of the Ṣafa and of what it contained, the upshot of which was that beyond the ruins already known there was nothing till you travelled a day's journey east of the Ruḥbeh; but that there you came to a quarry and a ruined castle like the famous White Ruin of the Ruḥbeh which we were going to see, but smaller and less well preserved. And beyond that stretched the Ḥamād, with no dwellings in it and no rujm—even the bravest of the Arabs were forced to desert it in the summer owing to the total lack of water. My heart went out to the mysterious castle east of the Ruḥbeh, unvisited, I believe, by any traveller; but it was too distant a journey to be accomplished on the spur of the moment without preparation. "When you next return, oh lady——." Yes, when I return. But I shall not on a future, occasion rely on the luxurious entertainment of the Ghiāth.

ḲANAWĀT, DOORWAY OF THE BASILICA

ḲANAWĀT, A TEMPLE

After consultation I decided that Mikhāil and Ḥabīb should accompany us, the latter at his special request. He would ride his best mule, he said, and she could keep pace with any mare and carry besides the rugs and the five chickens which we took with us to supplement the hospitality of the Ghiāth. I had a fur coat strapped behind my saddle and, as usual, a camera and a note-book in my saddle-bags. We rode down the steep slopes of the hills for an hour, three other Druze horsemen joining us as we went. I presently discovered that the sheikhs had added them to the stipulated escort, but I made no comment. One of the three was a relative of Ghishghāsh, his name Khittāb; he had travelled with Oppenheim and proved to be an agreeable companion. We passed through the ploughland of Ghishghāsh's village and then down slopes almost barren, though they yielded enough pasturage for his flocks of sheep shepherded by Arabs, and at the foot of the hill we entered a shallow stony valley wherein was a tiny encampment surrounded by more herds that quarried their dinner among the boulders. After an hour of the valley, which wound between volcanic rocks, we came out onto the wide desolation ofthe Ṣafa. It is almost, but not quite, flat. The surface breaks into low gentle billowings, just deep enough to shut out the landscape from the horseman in the depression, so that he may journey for an hour or more and see nothing but a sky-line of black stones a few feet above him on either side. The billowings have an ordered plan; they form continuous waterless valleys, each one of which the Arabs know by a name. Valley and ridge alike are covered with blocks of tufa, varying from six inches across to two feet or more, and where there is any space between them you can perceive the hard yellow soil, the colour of sea sand, on which they lie. An extremely scanty scrub pushes its way between the stones, ḥamād and shīḥ and ḥajeineh, and here and there a tiny geranium, the starry garlic and the leaves of the tulip, but generally there is no room even for the slenderest plants, so closely do the stones lie together. They are black, smooth and edgeless, as though they had been waterworn; when the sun shines the air dazzles above them as it dazzles above a sheet of molten metal, and in the summer the comparison must hold good in other respects, for the pitiless heat is said to be almost unendurable. It would be difficult to crossthe Ṣafa if it were not for the innumerable minute paths that intersect it. At first the rider is not aware of them, so small and faint they are, but presently as he begins to wonder why there is always just enough space before him for his horse to step in, he realises that he is following a road. Hundreds of generations of passing feet have pushed aside the tufa blocks ever so little and made it possible to travel through that wilderness of stones.

THE TEMPLE, MASHENNEF

We rode by the depression called the Ghadir el Gharz, and at the end of two hours we met one in rags, whose name was Heart of God. He was extremely glad to see us, was Heart of God, having been a friend of the family for years (at least eighty years I should judge), and extremely surprised when he discovered me in the cavalcade. There his surprise ceased, for when he heard I was English it conveyed nothing further to him, his mind being unburdened with the names and genealogies of the foreigner. He told us there was water close at hand and that Arab tents were not more than two hours away, and bade Ghishghāsh go in peace, and might there be peace also upon the stranger with him. In the matter of the tents he lied, did Heart of God, or we misunderstood him; but we found the water, a muddy pool, and lunched by it, sharing it with a herd of camels. Water in the Ṣafa there is none fit to drink according to European canons, and for that matter there is none in the Jebel Druze. There are no springs in the hills; the water supply is contained in open tanks, and the traveller may consider himself fortunate if he be not asked to drink a liquid in which he has seen the mules and camels wallowing. Under the most favourable conditions it is sure to be heavily laden with foreign ingredients which boiling will not remove, though it renders them comparatively innocuous. The tea made with this fluid has a body and a flavour of its own; it is the colour of muddy coffee and leaves a sediment at the bottom of the cup. Mikhāil carried an earthenware jar of boiled water for me from camp to camp, and having brought him to use this precaution by refusing to drink of the pools and tanks we might meet by the way, I had no difficulty in continuing the system in the Ṣafa. He and the Druzes and the muleteers drank whatthey found, whether in the Mountain or in the Ṣafa, and they did not appear to suffer from any ill effect. Probably the germs contained in their careless draughts were so numerous and so active that they had enough to do in destroying one another.

We rode on and on over all the stones in the world, and even Ghishghāsh fell silent or spoke only to wonder where the tents of the Ghiāth might be. Khittāb opined that when we reached the Ḳantarah, the Arch, we should catch sight of them, and I pricked up my ears at a name that seemed to imply some sort of construction. But the Ḳantarah was nothing more than a rise in the ground, a little higher than the rest and no less stony. There are many such; leading up to the crest of most of them is a track by which the Arabs creep on their stomachs to look out for foes, hidden themselves behind the small black pile that has been erected as a permanent bastion on the summit. In summer the Ṣafa is swept with raiders. Big tribes like the 'Anazeh ride through to deal a sudden blow at some enemy to the south or north, harrying the Ghiāth as they pass, and since there are exceedingly few places where water is to be found in the unparalleled heat of the stony waste, the raiders and such men of the Ghiāth as are still in the plain have no choice but to frequent at dusk the same muddy holes, and the days and nights of the Ghiāth are dogged in consequence by constant terror till the great tribes go east again to the Ḥamād. There was no sign of tents to be seen from the Ḳantarah, and it began to seem probable that we should spend a waterless night among the stones under the clear frosty sky, when about an hour before sunset Khittāb exclaimed that he could see the smoke of camp fires to the north-west. We rode a good way back, making a semicircle of our course, and got to the tents at nightfall after a journey of nine hours. With the goats and camels who were returning home after a laborious day's feeding we stumbled in over the stones, and very miserable the little encampment looked, though it had been so eagerly desired. A couple of hundred pounds would be a handsome price for all the worldly goods of all the Ghiāth; they have nothingbut the black tents and a few camels and the coffee-pots, and if they had more it would be taken from them in a midsummer ghazu. They live by bread alone—shirāk, the thin flaps that are like brown paper—and for the whole length of their days they wander among the stones in fear of their lives, save for the month or two when they come up to the Jebel Druze for the pasturage.

We scattered, being a large party, and Ghishghāsh, my servants and I went to the house of the sheikh, whose name was Understanding. His two sons, Muḥammad and Ḥamdān, lighted a fire of thorn and camel dung that smoked abominably, and we sat round and watched the coffee making. Muḥammad, being the eldest, officiated. He was skilful in the song of the pestle, and beat out a cheerful tattoo upon the mortar. His face was dark and thin and his white teeth shone when he smiled; he was dressed airily in dirty white cotton garments, a cotton kerchief fell from the camel's hair rope on his head down on to his bare breast, and he spoke in a guttural speech which was hard to follow. Our dinner was of shirāk and dibs; the Ghiāth are too poor to kill a sheep for their guest, even when he is a personage so important as Ghishghāsh. He, foolish man, was in his element. He preened himself and swelled with pride, combed out his long moustache before the admiring gaze of his hosts and talked without ceasing until far into the night, silly talk, thought I, who longed to be allowed to sleep. I had a rug to cover me and my saddle for a pillow, and I lay in a corner by the sāḥah, the division against the women's quarter, and at times I listened to a conversation which was not particularly edifying, and at times I cursed the acrid, pungent smoke. Towards the middle of the night I was awakened by the moon that shone with a frosty brilliance into the tent. The fire had burnt down and the smoke had blown out; the Arabs and the Druzes were lying asleep round the cold hearth; a couple of mares stood peacefully by the tent pole and gazed with wise eyes upon their masters within, and beyond them a camel lay chumping among the black stones. The strange and silent beauty of a scene as old as the world caught at the heart and spurred the fancy even after sleep had fallen upon it again.

Before dawn Mikhāil had succeeded in making me a cup of tea over the fitful blaze of the thorns, and as the sun rose we got into the saddle, for we had far to go. "God's bright and intricate device" had clothed the black plain in exquisite loveliness. The level sun towards which we were riding cast a halo of gold round every stone, the eastern ranges of volcanoes stood in clear cut outline against the cloudless sky, and to the north-west the snows of Anti-Libanus and Hermon gleamed incredibly bright above the glittering blackness of the foreground. One of the Arabs was added to our party as a guide; 'Awād was his name. He rode a camel, and from that point of vantage conversed with us in a raucous shout, as though to bridge the immense distance between rākib and fāris, a camel rider and one who rides a mare. We were all shivering as we set out in the chill dawn, but 'Awād turned the matter into a jest by calling out from his camel: "Lady, lady! do you know why I am cold? It is because I have four wives in the house!" And the others laughed, for he had the reputation of being a bit of a Don Juan, and such funds as he possessed went to replenishing his harem rather than his wardrobe.

I think we must speedily have re-entered the Ghadīr el Gharz. After two hours' riding we crossed some rising ground to the south-west of the Tulūl es Ṣafa, the line of volcanoes, and cantered across a considerable stretch of stoneless yellow ground, Beiḍa, till we came to the southern end of the lava bed. The lava lay on our left hand like a horrible black nightmare sea, not so much frozen as curdled, as though some hideous terror had arrested the flow of it and petrified the lines of shrinking fear upon its surface. But it was long long ago that a mighty hand had lifted the Gorgon's head before the waves of the Tulūl es Ṣafa. Sun and frost and æons of time had splintered the original forms of the volcanoes, rent the lava beds, shattered the precipices and obliterated the features of the hills. One or two terebinths had found a foothold in the crevices, but when I passed they were still bare and grey and did nothing to destroy the general sense of lifelessness.

As we rode round these frontiers of death I became aware that we werefollowing a track almost as old as the hills themselves, a little thread of human history leading us straight through that forbidding land. 'Awāḍ kept talking of a stone which he called El 'Ablā, a word that denotes a white rock visible from afar, but I was so much used to names signifying nothing that I paid no attention until he stopped his camel and shouted:

"Oh lady! here it is. By the Face of God, this is El 'Ablā."

It was no more nor less than a well stone. It bore the groove of the rope worn a couple of inches deep into it, and must have served a respectable time, since this black rock is extremely hard, but there was no modern well within miles of it. Close at hand was a big heap of stones and then another and another, two or three in every quarter of a mile, and when I looked closely I perceived that they were built, not thrown together. Some of them had been opened by Arabs seeking for treasure, and where the topmost layers had been thus removed a square shallow space lay revealed in the centre of the mound, carefully constructed of half-dressed blocks. 'Awāḍ said that as far as he knew nothing had ever been found in these places, whatever they might have contained formerly. Clearly the mounds were made to mark the line of that ancient road through the wilderness. 'Awāḍ stopped again a few hundred yards further at some black rocks almost flush with the ground, and they were like the open pages of a book in which all the races that had passed that way had written their names, in the queer script that the learned call Safaitic, in Greek, in Cufic, and in Arabic. Last of all the unlettered Bedouin had scrawled their tribe marks there.

"By Shuraik son of Naghafat son of Na'fis (?) son of Nu'mān," so ran one of them; and another: "By Būkhālih son of Ṭhann son of An'am son of Rawāḳ son of Būkhālih. He found the inscription of his uncle and he longed after him and . . . ." And there was another in a label which I did not copy sufficiently well to admit of its being deciphered with certainty. Probably it contains two names connected by "ibn," "son of."Above the names are seven straight lines which, according to Dussaud's ingenious suggestion, may represent the seven planets.[7]The Greek letters spelt the word Hanelos, which is John, a Semitic name written possibly by its owner in the foreign script that he had learnt while he served under the Roman eagles; the Cufic sentences were pious ejaculations calling down a blessing on the traveller who had paused to inscribe them. So each man according to his kind had left his record and departed into the mists of time, and beyond these scratches on the black rocks we know nothing of his race, nor of his history, nor of the errand that brought him into the inhospitable Ghadīr el Gharz. As I copied the phrases they seemed like the murmur of faint voices from out the limbo of the forgotten past, and Orpheus with his lute could not have charmed the rocks to speak more clearly of the generations of the dead. All the Ṣafa is full of these whisperings; shadows that are nothing but a name quiver in the quivering air above the stones, and call upon their God in divers tongues.

ḲAL'AT EL BEIḌA

I copied in haste, for there was no time to lose that day. The Druzes stood round me impatiently, and 'Awāḍ shouted, "Yallah, yallah! ya sitt," which being interpreted means, "Hurry up!" We rode on to the eastern limit of the Ṣafa, turned the corner of the lava bed, and saw the yellow plain of the Ruḥbeh before us. I know, because I have observed it from the Jebel Druze, that it stretches for a great distance to the east; but, when we reached it, it seemed no wider than half a mile, and beyond it lay a wonderful lake of bluish misty water. The little volcanoes far away to the east rose like islands out of the sea, and were mirrored in the water at their feet; yet as we rode towards that inland flood, its shores retreated before us, for it was but a phantom sea whereat the phantom hosts of the Ṣafa may fitly assuage their thirst. Then on the brink of the lava hills we caught sight of a grey tower, and in the plain below it we saw a domed and whitewashed shrine, and these were the Khirbet el Beiḍa and the Mazār of SheikhSerāk. Sheikh Serāk inherits his position as guardian of the Ruḥbeh from Zeus Saphathenos, who is in turn the direct heir to the god El, the earliest divinity of the Ṣafa. His business is to watch over the crops, which in good years the Arabs sow round his soul's dwelling place; he is respected by Moslem and by Druze alike, and he holds a well-attended yearly festival which had fallen about a fortnight before I came. The shrine itself is a building of the Ḥaurān type, with a stone roof supported on transverse arches. Over the doors there is a carved lintel taken from the ruins of the White Castle.

ḲAL'AT EL BEIḌA

But I could scarcely stay while my men assembled here, so eager was I to see the Ḳal'at el Beiḍa—Khirbeh or Ḳal'ah, ruin or castle, the Arabs call it either indifferently. I left the Druzes to pay such respects as were due to Zeus Saphathenos or whoever he might be, and cantered off to the edge of the lava plateau. A deep ditch lay before the lava, so full of water that I had to cross it by a little bridge of planks; Ḥabīb was there watering his mule, that admirable mule which walked as fast as the mares, and, entrusting my horse to him, I hastened on over the broken lava and into the fortress court. There were one or two Arabs sauntering through it, but they paid as little attention to meas I did to them. This was it, the famous citadel that guards a dead land from an unpeopled, the Ṣafa from the Ḥamād. Grey white on the black platform rose the walls of smoothly dressed stones, the ghostly stronghold of a world of ghosts. Whose hands reared it, whose art fashioned the flowing scrolls on door-post and lintel, whose eyes kept vigil from the tower, cannot yet be decided with any certainty. Hanelos and Shuraik and Būkhālih may have looked for it as they rounded the corner of the Wādi el Gharz, and perhaps the god El took it under his protection, and perhaps the prayers of the watchman were turned to some distant temple, and offered to the deities of Greece and Rome. A thousand unanswered, unanswerable, questions spring to your mind as you cross the threshold.

De Vogüé and Oppenheim and Dussaud have described the Khirbet el Beiḍa, and any one who cares to read their words may know that it is a square enclosure with a round tower at each corner, a round bastion between the towers and a rectangular keep against the south wall; that its doorways are carved with wonderful flowing patterns, scrolls and leaves and flowers, with animals striding through them; and that it isprobably an outlying fortress of Rome, built between the second and fourth centuries. The fact remains that we are not certain of its origin, any more than we are certain of the origin of the ruins near it at Jebel Sēs, or of Mshitta, or of any of the buildings in the western desert. There are resemblances between them all, and there are marked differences, just as there are resemblances between Ḳal'at el Beiḍa and the architecture of the Ḥaurān, and yet what stonecutter of the Mountain would have let his imagination so outstrip the classic rule as did the man who set the images of the animals of the desert about the doors of the White Castle? There is a breath of something that is strange to neighbouring art, a wilder, freer fancy, not so skilled as that which created the tracery of Mshitta, cruder, and probably older. It is all guess work; the desert may give up its secrets, the history of the Ṣafa and the Ruḥbeh may be pieced together from the lettered rocks, but much travel must be accomplished first and much excavation on the Syrian frontiers, in Hira perhaps, or in Yemen. I would only remark that the buildings at Ḳal'at el Beiḍa cannot as they stand belong to one and the same period. The keep is certainly a later work than the curtain walls of the fort. While these are built with mortar, like the Roman camp at Ḳasṭal and the fortress at Muwaḳḳar, the keep is of dry masonry resembling that which is universal in the Ḥaurān, and in its walls are set carved stones which were assuredly not executed for the positions they occupy. Even the decoration about the main door of the keep is of borrowed stones; the two superimposed carved blocks of the lintel do not fit each other, and neither fits the doorway. But the only conclusion I venture to draw is, that the two suggestions of origin that have been made by archaeologists, the one that the place was a Roman camp, the other that it was the Ghassānid fortress, may both be true.

The edge of the lava plateau lies a few feet above the plain. Along this natural redoubt are other buildings besides the White Castle, but none of them are of the same architectural interest. Their walls are roughly made of squared tufa blocks laid dry, whereas the castle is of a greystone, and part of it is constructed with mortar. The only building of any importance that I visited lay a little to the north and had been roofed after the Ḥaurān manner with stone slabs laid on transverse arches. At intervals along the lava bed there were small towers like sentry boxes guarding the approach to the castle, and these, too, were of dry masonry.

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