After consultation I decided that Mikhāil and Ḥabīb should accompany us, the latter at his special request. He would ride his best mule, he said, and she could keep pace with any mare and carry besides the rugs and the five chickens which we took with us to supplement the hospitality of the Ghiāth. I had a fur coat strapped behind my saddle and, as usual, a camera and a note-book in my saddle-bags. We rode down the steep slopes of the hills for an hour, three other Druze horsemen joining us as we went. I presently discovered that the sheikhs had added them to the stipulated escort, but I made no comment. One of the three was a relative of Ghishghāsh, his name Khittāb; he had travelled with Oppenheim and proved to be an agreeable companion. We passed through the ploughland of Ghishghāsh's village and then down slopes almost barren, though they yielded enough pasturage for his flocks of sheep shepherded by Arabs, and at the foot of the hill we entered a shallow stony valley wherein was a tiny encampment surrounded by more herds that quarried their dinner among the boulders. After an hour of the valley, which wound between volcanic rocks, we came out onto the wide desolation of the Ṣafa. It is almost, but not quite, flat. The surface breaks into low gentle billowings, just deep enough to shut out the landscape from the horseman in the depression, so that he may journey for an hour or more and see nothing but a sky-line of black stones a few feet above him on either side. The billowings have an ordered plan; they form continuous waterless valleys, each one of which the Arabs know by a name. Valley and ridge alike are covered with blocks of tufa, varying from six inches across to two feet or more, and where there is any space between them you can perceive the hard yellow soil, the colour of sea sand, on which they lie. An extremely scanty scrub pushes its way between the stones, ḥamād and shīḥ and ḥajeineh, and here and there a tiny geranium, the starry garlic and the leaves of the tulip, but generally there is no room even for the slenderest plants, so closely do the stones lie together. They are black, smooth and edgeless, as though they had been waterworn; when the sun shines the air dazzles above them as it dazzles above a sheet of molten metal, and in the summer the comparison must hold good in other respects, for the pitiless heat is said to be almost unendurable. It would be difficult to cross the Ṣafa if it were not for the innumerable minute paths that intersect it. At first the rider is not aware of them, so small and faint they are, but presently as he begins to wonder why there is always just enough space before him for his horse to step in, he realises that he is following a road. Hundreds of generations of passing feet have pushed aside the tufa blocks ever so little and made it possible to travel through that wilderness of stones.

THE TEMPLE, MASHENNEF

We rode by the depression called the Ghadir el Gharz, and at the end of two hours we met one in rags, whose name was Heart of God. He was extremely glad to see us, was Heart of God, having been a friend of the family for years (at least eighty years I should judge), and extremely surprised when he discovered me in the cavalcade. There his surprise ceased, for when he heard I was English it conveyed nothing further to him, his mind being unburdened with the names and genealogies of the foreigner. He told us there was water close at hand and that Arab tents were not more than two hours away, and bade Ghishghāsh go in peace, and might there be peace also upon the stranger with him. In the matter of the tents he lied, did Heart of God, or we misunderstood him; but we found the water, a muddy pool, and lunched by it, sharing it with a herd of camels. Water in the Ṣafa there is none fit to drink according to European canons, and for that matter there is none in the Jebel Druze. There are no springs in the hills; the water supply is contained in open tanks, and the traveller may consider himself fortunate if he be not asked to drink a liquid in which he has seen the mules and camels wallowing. Under the most favourable conditions it is sure to be heavily laden with foreign ingredients which boiling will not remove, though it renders them comparatively innocuous. The tea made with this fluid has a body and a flavour of its own; it is the colour of muddy coffee and leaves a sediment at the bottom of the cup. Mikhāil carried an earthenware jar of boiled water for me from camp to camp, and having brought him to use this precaution by refusing to drink of the pools and tanks we might meet by the way, I had no difficulty in continuing the system in the Ṣafa. He and the Druzes and the muleteers drank what they found, whether in the Mountain or in the Ṣafa, and they did not appear to suffer from any ill effect. Probably the germs contained in their careless draughts were so numerous and so active that they had enough to do in destroying one another.

We rode on and on over all the stones in the world, and even Ghishghāsh fell silent or spoke only to wonder where the tents of the Ghiāth might be. Khittāb opined that when we reached the Ḳantarah, the Arch, we should catch sight of them, and I pricked up my ears at a name that seemed to imply some sort of construction. But the Ḳantarah was nothing more than a rise in the ground, a little higher than the rest and no less stony. There are many such; leading up to the crest of most of them is a track by which the Arabs creep on their stomachs to look out for foes, hidden themselves behind the small black pile that has been erected as a permanent bastion on the summit. In summer the Ṣafa is swept with raiders. Big tribes like the 'Anazeh ride through to deal a sudden blow at some enemy to the south or north, harrying the Ghiāth as they pass, and since there are exceedingly few places where water is to be found in the unparalleled heat of the stony waste, the raiders and such men of the Ghiāth as are still in the plain have no choice but to frequent at dusk the same muddy holes, and the days and nights of the Ghiāth are dogged in consequence by constant terror till the great tribes go east again to the Ḥamād. There was no sign of tents to be seen from the Ḳantarah, and it began to seem probable that we should spend a waterless night among the stones under the clear frosty sky, when about an hour before sunset Khittāb exclaimed that he could see the smoke of camp fires to the north-west. We rode a good way back, making a semicircle of our course, and got to the tents at nightfall after a journey of nine hours. With the goats and camels who were returning home after a laborious day's feeding we stumbled in over the stones, and very miserable the little encampment looked, though it had been so eagerly desired. A couple of hundred pounds would be a handsome price for all the worldly goods of all the Ghiāth; they have nothing but the black tents and a few camels and the coffee-pots, and if they had more it would be taken from them in a midsummer ghazu. They live by bread alone—shirāk, the thin flaps that are like brown paper—and for the whole length of their days they wander among the stones in fear of their lives, save for the month or two when they come up to the Jebel Druze for the pasturage.

We scattered, being a large party, and Ghishghāsh, my servants and I went to the house of the sheikh, whose name was Understanding. His two sons, Muḥammad and Ḥamdān, lighted a fire of thorn and camel dung that smoked abominably, and we sat round and watched the coffee making. Muḥammad, being the eldest, officiated. He was skilful in the song of the pestle, and beat out a cheerful tattoo upon the mortar. His face was dark and thin and his white teeth shone when he smiled; he was dressed airily in dirty white cotton garments, a cotton kerchief fell from the camel's hair rope on his head down on to his bare breast, and he spoke in a guttural speech which was hard to follow. Our dinner was of shirāk and dibs; the Ghiāth are too poor to kill a sheep for their guest, even when he is a personage so important as Ghishghāsh. He, foolish man, was in his element. He preened himself and swelled with pride, combed out his long moustache before the admiring gaze of his hosts and talked without ceasing until far into the night, silly talk, thought I, who longed to be allowed to sleep. I had a rug to cover me and my saddle for a pillow, and I lay in a corner by the sāḥah, the division against the women's quarter, and at times I listened to a conversation which was not particularly edifying, and at times I cursed the acrid, pungent smoke. Towards the middle of the night I was awakened by the moon that shone with a frosty brilliance into the tent. The fire had burnt down and the smoke had blown out; the Arabs and the Druzes were lying asleep round the cold hearth; a couple of mares stood peacefully by the tent pole and gazed with wise eyes upon their masters within, and beyond them a camel lay chumping among the black stones. The strange and silent beauty of a scene as old as the world caught at the heart and spurred the fancy even after sleep had fallen upon it again.

Before dawn Mikhāil had succeeded in making me a cup of tea over the fitful blaze of the thorns, and as the sun rose we got into the saddle, for we had far to go. "God's bright and intricate device" had clothed the black plain in exquisite loveliness. The level sun towards which we were riding cast a halo of gold round every stone, the eastern ranges of volcanoes stood in clear cut outline against the cloudless sky, and to the north-west the snows of Anti-Libanus and Hermon gleamed incredibly bright above the glittering blackness of the foreground. One of the Arabs was added to our party as a guide; 'Awād was his name. He rode a camel, and from that point of vantage conversed with us in a raucous shout, as though to bridge the immense distance between rākib and fāris, a camel rider and one who rides a mare. We were all shivering as we set out in the chill dawn, but 'Awād turned the matter into a jest by calling out from his camel: "Lady, lady! do you know why I am cold? It is because I have four wives in the house!" And the others laughed, for he had the reputation of being a bit of a Don Juan, and such funds as he possessed went to replenishing his harem rather than his wardrobe.

I think we must speedily have re-entered the Ghadīr el Gharz. After two hours' riding we crossed some rising ground to the south-west of the Tulūl es Ṣafa, the line of volcanoes, and cantered across a considerable stretch of stoneless yellow ground, Beiḍa, till we came to the southern end of the lava bed. The lava lay on our left hand like a horrible black nightmare sea, not so much frozen as curdled, as though some hideous terror had arrested the flow of it and petrified the lines of shrinking fear upon its surface. But it was long long ago that a mighty hand had lifted the Gorgon's head before the waves of the Tulūl es Ṣafa. Sun and frost and æons of time had splintered the original forms of the volcanoes, rent the lava beds, shattered the precipices and obliterated the features of the hills. One or two terebinths had found a foothold in the crevices, but when I passed they were still bare and grey and did nothing to destroy the general sense of lifelessness.