Syria, the Desert & the Sown

by Gertrude Lowthian Bell

ḲAL'AT ES SEIJAR, THE CUTTING THROUGH
THE RIDGE

And so she closed the shutter, leaving me to wonder how good manners would bid me act under these delicate conditions. At that moment a girl came to the door and opened it a hand's breadth. I gave her the letter and my card written in Arabic, murmured a few words of regret, and went away. Maḥmūd now tried to explain the matter. It was one of those long stories that you hear in the East, without beginning, without end, and without any indication as to which of the protagonists is in the right, but an inherent probability that all are in the wrong. The Smātiyyeh had stolen some of the Seijari cattle, the sons of Aḥmed had gone down into the village and killed two of the Arabs—in the castle it was said that the Arabs had attacked them and that they had killed them in self-defence—the Government, always jealous of the semi-independence of ruling sheikhs, had seized the opportunity to strike down the Seijari whether they were at fault or no; soldiers had been sent from Ḥamāh, one of Aḥmed's sons had been put to death, two more were in prison, and all the cattle had been carried off. The rest of the Seijaris were ordered not to stir from the castle, nor indeed could they do so, for the Smātiyyeh were at their gates ready and anxious to kill them if they stepped beyond the walls. They appealed to Ḥamāh for protection, and a guard of some ten soldiers was posted by the river, whether to preserve the lives of the sheikhs or to keep them the more closely imprisoned it was difficult to make out. These events dated from two years back, and for that time the Seijaris had remained prisoners at Ḥamāh and in their own castle, and had been unable to superintend the cultivation of their fields, which were running in consequence to rack and ruin. Moreover, there seemed to be no prospect of improvement in the situation. Later in the afternoon a messenger arrived saying that Aḥmed's brother, 'Abd ul Ḳādir, would be pleased to receive me and would have come himself to welcome me if he could have left the castle. I went up without Maḥmūd and heard the whole story again from the point of view of the sheikhs, which helped me to no conclusion, since it was in most essentials a different story from that which I had heard from Maḥmūd. The only indisputable point (and it was probably not so irrelevant as it seems) was that the Seijari women were wonderfully beautiful. They wore dark blue Bedouin dress, but the blue cloths hanging from their heads were fastened with heavy gold ornaments, like the plaques of the Mycenæan treasure, one behind either temple. Agreeable though their company proved to be I was obliged to cut my visit short by reason of the number of fleas that shared the captivity of the family. Two of the younger women walked down with me through the ruins of the castle, but when we reached the great outer gate they stopped and looked at me standing on the threshold.

"Allah!" said one, "you go forth to travel through the whole world, and we have never been to Ḥamāh!"

I saw them in the gateway when I turned again to wave them a farewell. Tall and straight they were, and full of supple grace, clothed in narrow blue robes, their brows bound with gold, their eyes following the road they might not tread. For whatever may happen to the sheikhs, nothing is more certain than that women as lovely as those two will remain imprisoned by their lords in Ḳal'at es Seijar.

We rode next day by cultivated plains to Ḳal'at el Mudīk, a short stage of under four hours. Although there were several traces of ruined towns—one in particular I remember at a hamlet called Sheikh Ḥadīd, where there was a mound that looked as if it might have been an acropolis—the journey would have been uninteresting but for Maḥmūd's stories. His talk ran through the characteristics of the many races that make up the Turkish empire, with most of which he was familiar, and when he came to the Circassians it appeared that he shared my aversion to them.

"Oh lady," said he, "they do not know what it is to make return for kindness. The father sells his children, and the children would kill their own father if he had gold in his belt. It happened once that I was riding from Tripoli to Ḥomṣ, and near the khān—you know the place—I met a Circassian walking alone. I said: 'Peace be upon you! Why do you walk?' for the Circassians never go afoot. He said: 'My horse has been stolen from me, and I walk in fear upon this road.' I said: 'Come with me and you shall go in safety to Ḥomṣ.' But I made him walk before my horse, for he was armed with a sword, and who knows what a Circassian will do if you cannot watch him? And after a little we passed an old man working in the fields, and the Circassian ran out to him and spoke with him, and drew his sword as though to kill him. And I called out: 'What has this old man done to you?' And he replied: 'By God! I am hungry, and I asked him for food, and he said "I have none!" wherefore I shall kill him.' Then I said: 'Let him be. I will give you food.' And I gave him the half of all I had, bread and sweetmeats and oranges. So we journeyed until we came to a stream, and I was thirsty, and I got off my mare and holding her by the bridle I stooped to drink. And I looked up suddenly and saw the Circassian with his foot in my stirrup on the other side of the mare, for he designed to mount her and ride away. And, by God! I had been a father and a mother to him, therefore I struck him with my sword so that he fell to the ground. And I bound him and drove him to Ḥomṣ and delivered him to the Government. This is the manner of the Circassians, may God curse them!"

I asked him of the road to Mecca and of the hardships that the pilgrims endure upon the way.

"By the Face of God! they suffer," said he. "Ten marches from Ma'ān to Medā'in Ṣāleḥ, ten from there to Medīna, and ten from Medīna to Mecca, and the last ten are the worst, for the Sherif of Mecca and the Arab tribes plot together, and the Arabs rob the pilgrims and share the booty with the Sherif. Nor are the marches like the marches of gentlefolk when they travel, for sometimes there are fifteen hours between water and water, and sometimes twenty, and the last march into Mecca is thirty hours. Now the Government pays the tribes to let the pilgrims through in peace, and when they know that the Ḥājj is approaching they assemble upon the hills beside the road and cry out to the Amīr ul Ḥājj: 'Give us our dues, 'Abd ur Raḥmān Pasha!' And to each man he gives according to his rights, to one money, and to another a pipe and tobacco, to a third a kerchief, and to a fourth a cloak. Yet it is not the pilgrims that suffer most, but those who keep the forts that guard the water tanks along the road, and every fort is like a prison. It happened once that I was sent with the military escort, and my horse fell sick and could not move, and they left me at one of the forts between Medā'in Ṣāleḥ and Medina till they should return. Six weeks or more I lived with the keeper of the fort, and we saw no one, and we eat and slept in the sun, and eat again, and slept, for we could not ride out for fear of the Ḥoweiṭāṭ and the Beni 'Atiyyeh who were at war together. And the man had lived there ten years and never gone a quarter of an hour from that spot, for he watched over the stores that feed the Ḥājj when it passes. By the Prophet of God!" said Maḥmūd, with a sweeping gesture of the hand from earth to sky, "for ten years he had seen nothing but the earth and God! Now he had a little son, and the boy was deaf and dumb, but his eyes saw further than any man's, and he watched all day from the top of the tower. And one day he came running to his father and pointed with his hands, and the father knew he had seen a raiding party far off, and we hastened within and shut the doors. And the horsemen drew near, five hundred of the Beni 'Atiyyeh, and they watered their mares and demanded food, and we threw down bread to them, for we dared not open the doors. And while they eat there came across the plain the raiders of the Ḥoweiṭāṭ, and they began to fight together by the castle wall, and they fought until the evening prayer, and those who lived rode away, leaving their dead to the number of thirty. And we remained all night with locked doors, and at dawn we went down and buried the dead. But it is better to live in a fortress by the Ḥājj road," he continued, "than to serve as a soldier in Yemen, for there the soldiers receive no pay and of food not enough on which to live, and the sun bums like a fire. In Yemen if a man stood in the shade and saw a purse of gold lying in the sun, by God! he would not go out to pick it up, for the heat is like the fire of hell. Oh lady, is it true that in Egypt the soldiers get their pay week by week and month by month?"