Slowly but surely the ground now began to rise, and the sand to grow firmer. A caravan of camels glided stealthily by, bells tinkling, pilgrims reciting the Kurán, and the drivers singing to their camels a deeply melodious song called Hodi, which has on them the effect of a goad, urging them on to a brisk unchanging pace. To this accompaniment a camel will cover a great distance without stopping, the general belief being that the camel gets drunk with the sweet burden of the Hodi song.
Overnight, long after sunset, my Harbi driver himself began to sing aloud in the gathering darkness, asking God to protect him from the goblins of the wilderness, and always in a lugubrious minor key, as if he was going to weep. But ever and anon we heard an original song set to the music of the desert, wild as the wastes, elusive as the winds, as revealing and obscure as the tuneless solitudes from whose heart it would seem to spring—a song that broke through melody, and added its tameless burden to the music of the spheres. On cultured Europeans these untutored outbursts would have an uncanny effect, causing the centuries to roll back to the days of their barbarian ancestry, and awakening within them, perhaps, one of those haunting dream-memories of birth far back in the misty past, of an anterior existence in keeping with the strains of incoherent minstrelsy when men, labouring under the burdens of consciousness, sang as the spirit moved them, knowing nothing of the laws of counterpoint and harmony. Such a song was sung by Seyyid ’Alí as we left Heddah, a song written by a famous Sufí writer—
“My sorrow is Sorrow; my companion is Sorrow; my mate is Sorrow;
Where’er I go there’s none to care for me but Sorrow;
My Sorrow does not let me sleep alone at night;
Well done, my mate! bravo, my mate! hurrah, my Sorrow!”
The surrounding hills caught the intonation in their ragged arms and flung it back into the dim-lit sea of eddying sand, echoing and re-echoing the word “Sorrow!” Then my own Arab driver, carried beyond himself, raised his voice in the self-same song, and soon the whole caravan burst out, crying, “Well done, my mate! bravo, my mate! hurrah, my Sorrow,” the hills repeating the last word. Wagner, the one master who has given us the music of the sea and the stars, of the winds and the streams, and of all the vague yearnings that torment the human heart, would have understood us, would perhaps have played the part of echo on his return to civilisation, would certainly have joined in the chorus of that wild Arabian air attuned to Arabia’s barren though luminous solitudes.
Here, at Heddah, a more than usually serious quarrel arose between Seyyid ’Alí and Nassir on the subject of the national virtues of their respective countries. It would certainly have ended in a free fight, had not I, awaking from a snooze at the uproar, turned to the pugnacious Arab, who had accused the Persian of hypocrisy, and said in a tone of gentle reproof: “Yá Nassir, is it true that a Persian is double-faced?” For the space of a minute he eyed the supercilious Seyyid, deliberating; then he turned to me. “I wish he were only double-faced,” he replied, “for then I should know how to deal with him. But Satan has given him as many as two thousand faces, and it is beyond the power of any one man to see them all in his lifetime.” I pursued the inquiry, saying, “Oh, Nassir, supposing you were asked to describe the Persian character, how would you sum it up?” This time he turned his flashing eyes on me. “Character comes from conscience,” he answered; “but a Persian has none.” My guide spat derisively on the sand, muttering, “Courtesy is unknown to these people;” then he addressed me in his own language, saying: “But, yá-Moulai, there’s truth in what the burnt-father said, the Almighty Mason having put so many constituents into the clay of a Persian that it is very difficult to analyse it. Our countryman has as many coils and colours as a serpent. He is the essence of politeness and native refinement. He is the personification of jealousy and envy. Conceit and hypocrisy are embodied in him, and so also are generosity and amour propre.”
The mere sound of the mellifluous Persian drove Nassir beside himself. Raising his stout Arab club, which the Persians call Hájí Yemút or the Pilgrim Slayer, he vowed that he would teach the guide a lesson in courtesy; and then, suddenly bethinking himself that any act of violence on his part would be sure to affect his pocket in the matter of bakhshísh, he turned a contemptuous back upon his adversary, and said to me, smiling all over his face: “This club of mine has many qualifications. It is useful in urging my ass to mend its pace, it gives me support when I am tired, and shelter from the sun when I am sleepy”—here he stuck it in the sand, and tied at the top a strip of cloth on a crossbar—“it serves as a line on which to dry my washed clothes, as an altar when it is the hour for me to pray, as a leaping-pole when a mountain torrent stems my path; and, may Allah be praised, it is my surest defence against all my enemies, be they men or beasts, and so, when I die, God forbid, I will leave it as an inheritance to my son.”
Midnight saw us again on the way, and, in the course of our ride over the gravelly ground that rose ever higher the nearer we approached the mountains, we overtook a big caravan that was preceded by a couple of heralds, who bore aloft the green banner of the Faith, whereon was inscribed the Muhammadan watchword. “There is no God but God, and Muhammad is His Messenger.” Then came the cavalcade of pilgrims, the rear being brought up by a string of camels, and other beasts of burden, heavily laden with tents and water-skins, or mashks, with kitchen utensils and provisions. Like ourselves, these men were latecomers, but being overburdened they were soon left far in the rear by us, indeed they could not hope to reach Mecca before noon on the following day, whereas we were bent on sighting the Holy City ere the rising of the sun.