About a mile from Ma’mûreh there is a still more remarkable ruin known as Madlûbeh. It is a large, irregularly shaped area marked off from the desert by heaps of stones half buried in sand. Standing among these heaps, and no doubt in their original position, there are a number of large monolithic slabs placed as if they were intended to form a wall ([Fig. 59]). Many of these must have fallen and been covered with the sand if the enclosure were at any time continuous, and perhaps the heaps are composed partly of buried slabs. Two stand in line with a narrow space between like a door (one of them was 5 m. long × 1·3 m. thick, and it stood 2 m. out of the ground); in another there was a small rectangular cutting that suggested a window-hole on the upper edge (it was 10 m. long × 1·3 m. thick, and stood about 3 m. out of the ground). The stones were carefully dressed on all sides. They may have formed the lower part of a wall of which the upper part was of sun-dried brick or rubble, but at what age they were placed in those wilds a cursory survey would not reveal.
When I returned to the khân, Fattûḥ greeted me with the intelligence that the Deleimî had broken his engagement. Nâif admitted that for ordinary risks the money we had offered would have been sufficient, but Kheiḍir lay in the land of his blood enemies, the Benî Ḥassan, and he would not go. Perhaps he hoped to force us to a more liberal proposal, but in this he was disappointed. A bargain is a bargain, and we fell back upon my boast that the English have but one word. In this dilemma Fattûḥ suggested that he should see what could be done with the Mudîr, and having a lively confidence in Fattûḥ’s diplomacy, I entrusted him with my passports and papers, of which I kept a varied store, and gave him plenipotentiary powers. He returned triumphant.
“Effendim,” said he, “that Mudîr is a man.” This is ever the highest praise that Fattûḥ can bestow, and my experience does not lead me to cavil at it. “When he had read your buyuruldehs he laid them upon his forehead and said, ‘It is my duty to do all that the effendi wishes.’ I told him,” interpolated Fattûḥ, “that you were a consul in your own country. He will give you a zaptieh to take you to Kebeisah, and if you command, the zaptieh shall go with you to Ḳal’at Khubbâz, returning afterwards to Hît. And it cannot be that we shall fail to find a guide and camels at Kebeisah, which is a palm-grove in the desert; for all the dwellers in it know the way to Kheiḍir. As for the caravan, another zaptieh will take it to Baghdâd.”
“Aferîn!” said I. “There is none like you, oh Fattûḥ.”
“God forbid!” replied Fattûḥ modestly. “And now,” he proceeded, “let me bring your Excellency an omelet, for I am sure that you must be hungry.” But I understood this exaggerated solicitude to be no more than a covert slur upon the culinary powers of Mr. X.’s servant, who had provided us with an abundant lunch during Fattûḥ’s absence, and not even so voracious a consul as I could face a second meal. Fattûḥ retired in some displeasure to inform the muleteers that they would journey to Baghdâd and Kerbelâ and there rejoin us, please God.
We explored the village of Hît before nightfall, and a more malodorous little dirty spot I hope I may never see. “Why,” says the poet, concerning some unknown wayfarer, “did he not halt that night at Hît?” and it is strange that Ibn Khurdâdhbeh, who quotes the question, should have been at a loss for the answer. Possibly he had no personal knowledge of Hît. On the top of the hill there is a round minaret, similar in construction to the minaret of Ma’mûreh, but I saw no other feature of interest. The sun was setting as we came down to the palm-groves by the river. The fires under the troughs of molten bitumen sent up their black smoke columns between the trees ([Fig. 60]); half-naked Arabs fed the flames with the same bitumen, and the Euphrates bore along the product of their labours as it had done for the Babylonians before them. So it must have looked, this strange factory under the palm-trees, for the last 5,000 years, and all the generations of Hît have not altered by a shade the processes taught them by their first forefathers.
THE PARTHIAN STATIONS OF ISIDORUS OF CHARAX
The only modern record of the road along the left bank of the Euphrates from Raḳḳah to Deir is the rather meagre account given by Sachau; Moritz travelled down the left bank from Deir to Buseirah, but I know of no published description of the road from Buseirah to ’Ânah. It has not
