Such tent-dwellers seem lighter of heart than the men of Turkish towns and villages, merrier perhaps for having less between them and the sky. There is this to be said for tent-life in a warm clime—it exhilarates, like the casting off of clothing; and perhaps for this reason civilised men of other climes have so much hankering for it, despite its insecurity and its plague of blowing dust, and the noonday heat and the cold in the dawn. But the canvas booth is not meant for house-dwellers who carry with them much furniture and many scattered possessions, and would sit high and stand upright. It should be low to cheat the wind, and empty of all that may gather dust—a mere canvas burrow, such a shelter from draught and sun and dew as suits the simplicity and the poverty of minds in which want of occupation and variety in life leaves no void to be filled by the morbid introspection dear to civilised solitaries.
The woman took no part in the discourse, nor did she share the meal with her husband after his guests were satisfied. But having tendered him the bowl with the gentlest motion of one palm towards her breast, in obedience to an immemorial instinct of reverence for the male, she sank on her heels to coax the fire and croon over the ashes, throwing now and again a question at us, till some pastoral duty called her outside the tent. It was perfect domestic accord. Man and woman without friction, question or strife, evidently sufficed together for all the necessary functions of existence. She, in her constant performance of physical labours, had probably never known the woes of either her toiling or her idle Western sisters: for her no sexual cravings unappeased, no assumption of the manly part, no fear of loneliness in middle life or age. If she must be obedient in all things, even to stripes, the inexorable opinion of a simple society would protect her from physical tyranny. For in the nomad’s tent the rod is held a fool’s weapon, and shame is on him who can rule his household with no other, or fails to pay in a multitude of punctilious ways due honour to his wife.
* * * * *
I must have fallen into uneasy sleep, for, when roused by the cold, as much as by insect legions, I found the talk ceased and the talkers slumbering, feet to fire. A sea-wind, rising gustily, fanned an intermittent glow in the heart of the embers, and their dusky gleam revealed the old Yuruk a moment, lying supine, with his head on the lap of his dame, who sat stark asleep against the tent-pole. Seen thus, the two looked less like human beings than gnomes, or survivors of some primaeval race which worshipped other gods. And so, in a sense, they were. Though the Yuruks profess Islam, Allah has not the best of their private allegiance; and under his name they revere, without ritual or articulate creed, some private tribal god, with whom they feel the possibility of more intimate communion. The All-Father of the Arabs has no more chased the petty gods of place and tribe out of the Nearer East than He of the Hebrews. He has been accepted, indeed, as a strictly constitutional monarch, or rather, perhaps, as a Judge of Appeal who may resolve now and then those age-long feuds in which tribal gods involve their human kin; but, for the rest, accepted only in so far as he prescribes no duty but towards himself. He is an immaterial Allah, without parts or earthly semblance, not because he is a spirit, but because he is a shadow. Nothing of that real sense of the omnipresence and omnipotence of a Divine Being, which seems to possess the most stolid of settled Moslems and elevates their creed at its best into one of the purest forms of monotheism conceivable, is present to the wanderers. They are as careless of Allah as, they take it, he is careless of them. When he first made the world, say Bedawis, he ordered Creation during six days, and, very weary on the seventh, was composing himself to sleep, when a man stood before him and said: “Thou hast apportioned the world, but to us given nothing. Behold us still in the desert!” And the Creator looked and saw the Bedawis indeed forgotten in the Waste; but he would not disturb what he had done. “This I give you,” he replied; “since ye dwell in what is no man’s, ye may take what is any man’s. Go your way.” And his way from that hour has the Bedawi gone, careless of Creation and Creator.
It was deep night still, and the moon, sinking to the sea-rim, threw an image of the tent-door across the fire, bleaching the glow of the wood embers. Little by little the pale light crept up the old dame’s face. She opened her eyes suddenly as a waking animal, shuffled her knees sideways from under the man’s shoulders, gently lowered his head to a saddlebag, and yawning, left the tent. I heard her gathering fuel without, with which presently she made up the fire. Then she went down towards the fold, where a continuous jangle told of uneasy udders and prescience of coming day.
The fresh warmth to my feet made me drowsy again, and when I woke once more, the dusk of dawn was in the tent, but the dame had not returned. Still milking and tending the herd, she at least showed little enough of that indolent habit with which we credit the East.
I scrambled to my feet, stiff with cramp and cold, and stood in the tent-door. The great wolf-dogs, who had bayed me over night, recognised a temporary adoption into the family by sidling silently out of range, and settling watchful again on the gossamers. During the chill hours a false impalpable sea had streamed inland, and, filling the hollow where Pátara lay, had submerged all but the higher dunes; but above its smoky limit, the true sea could be seen swelling to the horizon in palest tints of mauve and green. The profile of a shaggy range, beyond the Xanthus river, grew harder and harder against the brightening sky, rib after rib detaching itself on the ample slopes; and led upwards along its crest towards the parent chain of Taurus, my eyes caught the first flush of day on a pinnacle of snow. The old Yuruk stretched himself once or twice, rose, spat, pushed through the door, and, leaving his dame to set milk and cheese before us, strode off without a word of farewell.
* * * * *
The Yuruk guide of yesterday led us out northward through a triple Roman archway, and along a street of tombs. The Xanthus river rushed a mile or two to our left, red with the melted snows of Ak Dagh, and the rudely paved path wound over spongy swards and across soft reedy channels towards the neck of the plain. One would have known it for a poisonous place, even had it not earned ill-fame by killing two of Fellows’ men. After an hour or two we reached a bridge, and beyond the outlet of the eastern swamp, entered a region of scattered fields, gnarled olives, and solitary farms, holdings of the “Turks” of Gunuk, who are sons of the old Lycians, county gentlemen in a small way, sportsmen always, and brigands now and then. Every man we met went armed, and the Bey, at whose house we dismounted under the steep of Xanthus, kept a guard of three.
