Lady Blunt writes of it: “Jôf is not at all what we expected. We thought we should find it a large cultivated district, and it turns out to be merely a small town. There is nothing at all outside the walls except a few square patches, half an acre or so each, green with young corn,” etc.
How true is it that no two travellers see things with the same eyes. Doubtless both these distinguished travellers are reasonably correct in their descriptions, but summed up their impressions from opposite stand-points in a topographical sense; a common enough mistake in Asia, where the name of a place often indicates, equally accurately, a large scope of country and the central spot in it. In Central Asia, for example, there is Merv, which is the name of a city, and also of the large fertile oasis in which it is situated; also Herat, meaning a broad area of oases, with a population of probably half a million people, in which the fortress-city Herat stands, no less than the city itself.
Important political changes had taken place since Palgrave’s visit. The rule of the Wahabees had been overthrown in Jôf, and the only representatives of staple authority found there were a Sheykh and six soldiers, who represented the authority of Mohammed ibn Rashid, Emir of Jebel Shammar, with his seat of government at Hail.
From Jôf the travellers proceeded toward Hail, crossing the dreaded Nefood, of which they give a very interesting, and far less gloomy, account than did Palgrave. They, however, crossed it in January, while Palgrave crossed it in midsummer; so that, in the case of the Nefood, as with Jôf, the apparently conflicting accounts are doubtless both fairly accurate, the one describing the desert in winter, the other in summer. On January 12th, the travellers found themselves on the edge of the desert.
“At half-past three o’clock we saw a red streak on the horizon before us, which rose and gathered as we approached it, stretching out east and west in an unbroken line. It might at first have been taken for an effect of mirage, but on coming nearer we found it broken into billows, and but for its red color not unlike a stormy sea seen from the shore, for it rose up, as the sea seems to rise, when the waves are high, above the level of the land. Somebody called out ‘Nefûd,’ and though for a while we were incredulous, we were soon convinced. What surprised us was its color, that of rhubarb and magnesia, nothing at all like what we had expected. Yet the Nefûd it was, the great red desert of Central Arabia. In a few minutes we had cantered up to it, and our mares were standing with their feet in its first waves.
“January 13th.—We have been all day in the Nefûd, which is interesting beyond our hopes, and charming into the bargain.” After taking issue with Mr. Palgrave, who, Lady Blunt thinks, overlooked its brighter side, the narrator continues her own observations thus:
“The thing that strikes one first about the Nefûd is its color. It is not white like the sand dunes we passed yesterday, nor yellow as the sand is in parts of the Egyptian desert, but a really bright red, almost crimson in the morning, when it is wet with dew. The sand is rather coarse, but absolutely pure, without admixture of any foreign substance, pebble, grit, or earth, and exactly the same in tint and texture everywhere. It is, however, a great mistake to suppose it barren. The Nefûd, on the contrary, is better wooded and richer in pasture than any part of the desert we have passed since leaving Damascus. It is tufted all over with ghada bushes, and bushes of another kind called yerta, which at this time of the year, when there are no leaves, is exactly like a thickly matted vine.
“There are, besides, several kinds of camel pasture, especially one new to us, called adr, on which they say sheep can feed for a month without wanting water, and more than one kind of grass. Both camels and mares are therefore pleased with the place, and we are delighted with the abundance of firewood for our camps. Wilfrid says that the Nefûd has solved for him at last the mystery of horse-breeding in Central Arabia. In the hard desert there is nothing a horse can eat, but here there is plenty. The Nefûd accounts for everything. Instead of being the terrible place it has been described by the few travellers who have seen it, it is in reality the home of the Bedouins during a great part of the year. Its only want is water, for it contains but few wells; all along the edge it is thickly inhabited, and Radi tells us that in the spring, when the grass is green after rain, the Bedouins care nothing for water, as their camels are in milk, and they go for weeks without it, wandering far into the interior of the sand desert.”
In the desert of sand the travellers found many curious hollows, which the native guide called fulj. Some of these holes were a quarter of a mile in diameter, and as much as 230 feet deep. They were chiefly of horse-hoof shape. They took observations, and at one point on the desert found the elevation to be 3,300 feet above sea-level. After seven days in the Nefûd, the last two of which tried the endurance of men and beasts, the party reached the oasis of Jobba, which is described as being one of the most curious, as also most beautiful, places in the world.
“Its name Jobba, meaning a well, explains its position, for it lies in a hole or well in the Nefûd; not indeed in a fulj, for the basin of Jobba is quite on another scale, and has nothing in common with the horse-hoof depressions I have hitherto described. It is, all the same, extremely singular, and quite as difficult to account for geologically as the fuljes. It is a great bare space in the ocean of sand, from four to five hundred feet below its average level, and about three miles wide; a hollow, in fact, not unlike that of Jôf, but with the Nefûd round it instead of sandstone cliffs. That it has once been a lake is pretty evident, for there are distinct water marks on the rocks, which crop up out of the bed just above the town; and, strange to say, there is a tradition still extant of there having been formerly water there. The wonder is how this space is kept clear of sand. What force is it that walls out the Nefûd and prevents encroachments? As you look across the subbkha, or dry bed of the lake, the Nefûd seems like a wall of water which must overwhelm it; and yet no sand shifts down into the hollow, and its limits are accurately maintained.”