3. If there were a better government existing, the traveller would expect that government to provide good roads and bridges, and to establish military posts for guarding them. This expense would be defrayed from tolls, or some such mode of taxation, and so the fee or duty would be only removed from one receiver to another. This is done at present, and probably has been for many centuries, at the Jis’r benât Ya’koob, between Safed and Damascus.
One cannot be surprised at the peasantry of Wadi Moosa exacting a toll from travellers on entering the valley of Petra, to see the wonders of antiquity which are attracting the attention of the most remote nations; remembering, too, the position of the place, viz., in a hollow, surrounded by
crags and hills, where no Turkish rulers have ever been.
In like manner, we shall only be in a condition to remonstrate on paying ghuf’r in the shape of presents to the Adwan beyond Jordan, when we are able to find our way to Ammân and Jerash without them, or to keep off the Beni Sukh’r and ’Anezeh, either by our own right hand or by means of the Turks. [339]
Finally, it must be borne in mind that the Turkish government itself pays ghuf’r to the Eastern Bedaween for allowing the Hadj pilgrims to pass from Damascus to Mecca.
B. On the Fellahheen, or peasants of Wadi Moosa.
The most experienced travellers that have visited Petra, have remarked that these men are of a different race from the Bedaween Arabs around them. They are ugly, bad in expression of countenance, and have a reputation for cruelty and treachery.
Laborde says, that the Alaween looked upon them “with contempt and fear.” Lord Lindsay says, that Shaikh Hhussain, from ’Akabah, “was in fear all the time of being there.” Irby and Mangles were told by the Jehâleen that these
Fellahheen murdered thirty Moslem pilgrims from Barbary, the year before their visit.
Dr Wilson stayed among them longer, I believe, than any other European, and he did not like them, yet found them gradually improve under civil treatment, which always, like some other things,