“It was not till near morning that we saw before us in indistinct row the long black lines of the immense date-groves that surround Hofhoof. Then, winding on amid rice-grounds and cornfields, we left on our right an isolated fort (to be described by daylight), passed some scattered villas, with their gardens, approached the ruined town walls, and entered the southern gate, now open and unguarded. Farther on a few streets brought us before the door of Aboo-’Eysa’s house, our desired resting-place.
“It was still night. All was silent in the street and house, at the entrance of which we now stood; indeed, none but the master of a domicile could think of knocking at such an hour, nor was Aboo-’Eysa expected at that precise moment. With much difficulty he contrived to awake the tenants; next the shrill voice of the lady was heard within in accents of joy and welcome; the door at last opened, and Aboo-’Eysa invited us into a dark passage, where a gas-light would have been a remarkable improvement, and by this ushered us into the k’hawah. Here we lighted a fire, and after a hasty refreshment all lay down to sleep, nor awoke till the following forenoon.”
CHAPTER XVI.
Palgrave’s Travels—Eastern Arabia.
“Our stay at Hofhoof was very pleasant and interesting, not indeed through personal incidents and hair-breadth escapes—of which we had our fair portion at Ri’ad and elsewhere—but in the information here acquired, and in the novel character of everything around us, whether nature, art, or man. Aboo-’Eysa was very anxious that we should see as much as possible of the country, and procured us all means requisite for so doing, while the shelter of his roof, and the precautions which he adopted or suggested, obviated whatever dangers and inconveniences we had experienced in former stages of the journey. Besides, the general disposition of the inhabitants of Hasa is very different from that met with in Nedjed, and even in Shomer or Djowf, and much better adapted to make a stranger feel himself at home. A sea-coast people, looking mainly to foreign lands and the ocean for livelihood and commerce, accustomed to see among them not unfrequently men of dress, manners, and religion different from their own, many of them themselves travellers or voyagers to Basrah, Bagdad, Bahreyn, Oman, and some even farther, they are commonly free from that half-wondering, half-suspicious feeling which the sight of a stranger occasions in the isolated, desert-girded centre. In short, experience, that best of masters, has gone far to unteach the lessons of ignorance, intolerance, and national aversion.
“Hofhoof, whose ample circuit contained during the last generation about thirty thousand inhabitants, now dwindled to twenty-three or twenty-four thousand, is divided into three quarters or districts. The general form of the town is that of a large oval. The public square, an oblong space of about three hundred yards in length by a fourth of the same in width, occupies the meeting point of these quarters; the Kôt lies on its northeast, the Rifey’eeyah on the northwest and west, and the Na’athar on the east and south. In this last quarter was our present home; moreover, it stood in the part farthest removed from the Kôt and its sinister influences, while it was also sufficiently distant from the overturbulent neighborhood of the Rifey’eeyah, the centre of anti-Wahabee movements, and the name of which alone excited distrust and uneasiness in Nedjean minds.
“The Kôt itself is a vast citadel, surrounded by a deep trench, with walls and towers of unusual height and thickness, earth-built, with an occasional intermixture of stone, the work of the old Carmathian rulers; it is nearly square, being about one-third of a mile in length by one-quarter in breadth.
“On the opposite side of the square, and consequently belonging to the Rifey’eeyah, is the vaulted market-place, or ‘Keysareeyah,’ a name by which constructions of this nature must henceforth be called up to Mascat itself, though how this Latinism found its way across the peninsula to lands which seem to have had so little commerce with the Roman or Byzantine empires, I cannot readily conjecture. This Keysareeyah is in form a long barrel-vaulted arcade, with a portal at either end; the folding doors that should protect the entrances have here in Hofhoof been taken away, elsewhere they are always to be found. The sides are composed of shops, set apart in general for wares of cost, or at least what is here esteemed costly; thus, weapons, cloth embroidery, gold and silver ornament, and analogous articles, are the ordinary stock-in-hand in the Keysareeyah. Around it cluster several alleys, roofed with palm-leaves against the heat, and tolerably symmetrical; in the shops we may see the merchandise of Bahreyn, Oman, Persia, and India exposed for sale, mixed with the manufactured produce of the country; workshops, smithies, carpenters’ and shoemakers’ stalls, and the like, are here also. In the open square itself stand countless booths for the sale of dates, vegetables, wood, salted locusts, and small ware of many kinds.
“The Rifey’eeyah, or noble quarter, covers a considerable extent, and is chiefly composed of tolerable, in some places of even handsome, dwellings. The comparative elegance of domestic architecture in Hofhoof is due to the use of the arch, which, after the long interval from Ma’an to Hasa, now at last reappears, and gives to the constructions of this province a lightness and a variety unknown in the monotonous and heavy piles of Nedjed and Shomer. Another improvement is that the walls, whether of earth or stone, or of both mixed, as is often the case, are here very generally coated with fine white plaster, much resembling the ‘chunam’ of Southern India; ornament, too, is aimed at about the doorways and the ogee-headed windows, and is sometimes attained.
“The Na’athar is the largest quarter; it forms, indeed, a good half of the town, and completes its oval. In it every description of dwelling is to be seen—for rich and poor, for high and low, palace or hovel. Here, too, but near the Kôt, has the pious policy of Feysul constructed the great mosque.