“Upon my head!” said Fattûḥ blandly. “Three guides wish to accompany your Excellency.”
“Praise be to God,” said I. “Bid them enter.”
“It would be well to see each separately,” observed Fattûḥ, “for they do not love one another.”
We interviewed them one by one, with an elaborate show of secrecy, and each in turn spent his time in warning us against the other two. Upon these negative credentials I had to come to a decision, and I made my choice feeling that I might as logically have tossed up a piastre. It fell upon a man of the Deleim, a tribe to whom we were not well disposed, but since the country through which we were to pass was mainly occupied by their tents, it seemed wiser to take a guide who claimed cousinship with their sheikhs. He was to find an escort of five armed horsemen and to bring us to Kheiḍir in return for a handsome reward, but we undertook to engage our own baggage camels. One of the drawbacks to this arrangement was that no camels were to be got at Hît, and I felt the more persuaded that we had struck a bad bargain when Nâif came back and said:
“How do I know that you will keep your word? Perhaps to-morrow you will choose another guide.”
“The English have but one word,” said I; it is a principle that should never be abandoned in the East. We struck hands upon it and Nâif left us “in the peace of God.”
Fattûḥ needed a day to complete his preparations, and I to see the pitch wells of Hît which lie some distance from the town. I did not see them all, but from the accounts I heard they would appear to be five in number. The largest is called the Marj (the Meadow); it is an hour and a quarter north-east of Hît and is said to be inexhaustible. The pitch is better in quality here than elsewhere, and the peasants can, when they choose, get 2,000 donkey-loads from it daily. The next in importance is at Ma’mûreh, but it is not worked. The pitch flows out over the desert and dries into an asphalt pavement about half-a-mile square. Further south is a small spring, Lteif, from which they get twenty loads a day, and near the town there is a fourth well which yields fifty loads a day ([Fig. 53]). The fifth well is on the other side of the Euphrates, at ’Atâ’ut; the average yield from it is twenty loads a day.
Near the asphalt beds of Ma’mûreh, about an hour south-west of Hît, lie the ruins of a village clustered round a minaret ([Fig. 57]). All the buildings were constructed of small unsquared stones set in mortar; the minaret was plastered on the outside and seemed to have been built of large blocks of stone and mortar, firmly welded together before they had been placed in position. The round tower, narrowing upwards and decorated at the top with a zigzag ornament, was placed upon a low octagonal structure which in turn rested upon a square base ([Fig. 58]). I climbed the winding stair that I might survey the country through which Nâif was to take us. It was incredibly desolate, empty of tent or village save where to the west the palm-groves of Kebeisah made a black splash upon the glaring earth. The heavy smoke of the pitch fires hung round Hît, and the sulphur marshes shone leprous under the sun—a malignant landscape that could not be redeemed by the little shrines which were scattered like propitiatory invocations among the gleaming salts.
