Abdallah el-Kamis, Sheykh of the village, to whom we had letters from Huseyn, received us with great politeness; and a room in his house was swept out for our use. Like all the other rooms, it opened on to the court-yard, in the middle of which was tethered a two-year-old colt. Our room had been a storing place for wood, and was without furniture of any sort, but we were delighted to find also without inhabitants. The architecture here is very simple, plain mud walls with no windows or openings of any kind except a few square holes near the roof. The roof was of ithel beams with cross rafters of palm, thatched in with palm branches. The principal room is called the kahwah or coffee room; and in it there is a square hearth at the side or in the middle for coffee-making. There is no chimney, and the smoke escapes as it can; but this is not so uncomfortable as it sounds, for the wood burnt here burns with a beautiful bright flame, giving out a maximum of heat to a minimum of smoke. It is the ratha or ghada. [85] People sit round the hearth while coffee is being made, a solemn process occupying nearly half an hour.
As soon as we arrived, a trencher of dates was brought, dates of the last year’s crop, all sticky and mashed up, but good; and later in the evening, we had a more regular dinner of burghul and boiled fowls. We are much struck with the politeness of everybody. Abdallah, our host, asked us at least twenty times after our health before he would go on to anything else; and it was not easy to find appropriate compliments in return. Everything of course is very poor and very simple, but one cannot help feeling that one is among civilized people. They have been making a great fuss with Mohammed, who is treated as a sheykh. Tudmur is well known by name, and at this distance is considered an important town. Much surprise was expressed at finding a man of his rank in the semi-menial position Mohammed holds with us, and he was put to some polite cross-questioning in the evening as to the motive of his journey. No Franjis have ever been seen at Kâf before, so the people say; and they do not understand the respect in which Europeans are held elsewhere. Mohammed, however, has explained his “brotherhood with the Beg,” and protested that his journey is one of honour, not of profit; so that we are treated with as much courtesy as if we were Arabs born. Awwad the Shammar has been of great use to us, as he is well known here, and he serves as an introduction.
Kâf is quite independent of the Sultan, though it has twice been sacked by Turkish soldiers, once under Ibrahim Pasha in 1834, and again only a few years ago, when the Government of Damascus sent a military expedition down the Wady Sirhán. We were shown the ruins of a castle, Kasr es-Saïd, on a hill above the town which the former destroyed, and we heard much lamentation over the proceedings of the latter. The inhabitants of Kâf acknowledge themselves subjects of Ibn Rashid, the Jebel Shammar chief, some of whose people were here only a few days since, taking the annual tribute, a very small sum, twenty mejidies (£4), which they are glad to pay in return for his protection. They are very enthusiastic about “the Emir,” as they call him, and certainly have no reason to wish for annexation to Syria. The little town of Kâf and its neighbour Itheri, where we now are, have commercially more connection with the north than with the south, for their principal wealth, such as it is, arises from the salt trade with Bozra. Abdallah el-Kamis seems to be well off, for he possesses several slaves, and has more than one wife. But the colt I have mentioned is his only four-footed possession; he would have come with us, he said, if he had owned a delúl. I noticed a few camels and donkeys and goats about the village.
Makbul, the Kreysheh, has gone back, and we now want to find a Sherári to take us on to Jôf. We have come on to Itheri, Kâf’s twin oasis, two and a half hours east of it, also in the Wady Sirhán. This is not marked on many of the modern maps, though Chesney has it incorrectly placed on his. We find by the barometer that they are both on the same level, so that our conjecture seems confirmed, about the Wady Sirhán having no slope. The Wady Sirhán is a curious chaotic depression, probably the bed of some ancient sea like the Dead Sea, and is here about twelve miles broad if we can judge by the hills we see beyond it, and which are no doubt the opposite cliffs of the basin. There are numerous wells both here and at Kâf, wide and shallow, for the water is only eight feet below the surface of the ground. From these the palm gardens are irrigated. There are wells too outside, all lying low and at the same level. The water is drinkable, by no means excellent. We crossed a large salt lake, now dry, where the salt is gathered for the caravans.
On our road Mohammed entertained us with tales of his birth and ancestry. The people of Kâf have heard of the Ibn Arûks, and have told Mohammed that he will find relations in many parts of Arabia besides Jôf. They say there is somebody at Bereydeh, and a certain Ibn Homeydi, whom Mohammed has heard of as a cousin. Then here at Itheri, the Sheykh’s wife is a member of the Jôf family. Everything in fact seems going just as we expected it.
Itheri is a still smaller place than Kâf but it boasts of an ancient building and miniature castle inside the walls, something after the fashion of the Hauran houses. This, instead of mud, the common Arab material, is built of black stones, well squared and regularly placed. On the lintel of the doorway there is or rather has been, an inscription in some ancient character, perhaps Himyaritic, which we would have copied had it been legible, but the weather has almost effaced it. [89] Here we are being entertained by Jeruan, an untidy half-witted young man, with long hair in plaits and a face like a Scotch terrier, who is the son of Merzuga, Mohammed’s cousin, and consequently a cousin himself. Though nothing much to be proud of as a relation, we find him an attentive host. His mother is an intelligent and well-bred woman, and it seems strange that she should have so inferior a son. Her other three sons, for Jeruan is the eldest of four, have their wits like other people, but they are kept in the background. Merzuga came to see me just now with a large dish of dates in her hand, and stopped to talk. Her face is still attractive, and she must have once been extremely beautiful. I notice that she wears a number of silver rings on her fingers like wedding rings.
Merzuga tells us we shall find plenty of Ibn Arûk relations at Jôf. She herself left it young and talks of it as an earthly paradise from which she has been torn to live in this wretched little oasis. Itheri is indeed a forlorn place, all except Jeruan’s palm garden. After a walk in the palm garden, in which my lameness prevented me from joining, we all sat down to a very good dinner of lamb and sopped bread—the bread tasted like excellent pastry—served us by Jeruan in person, standing according to Arab fashion when guests are eating. His mother looks well after him, and tells him what to do, and it is evident, though he has the sense to say very little, that he is looked upon as not quite “accountable” in his family. Wilfrid describes the walk in the garden as rather amusing, Mohammed and Abdallah making long speeches of compliments about all they saw, and telling Jeruan’s head man extraordinary stories of the grandeur and wealth of Tudmur. Jeruan’s garden, the only one at Itheri, contains four hundred palm trees, many of them newly planted, and none more than twenty-five years old. Amongst them was a young tree of the héllua variety, the sweet date of Jôf, imported from thence, and considered here a great rarity. At this there was a chorus of admiration. The ithel trees were also much admired. They are grown for timber, and spring from the stub when cut down, a six years’ growth being already twenty feet high.
Two men have arrived from Jôf with the welcome news that all is well between this and Jôf; that is, there are no Arabs yet in the Wady Sirhán; welcome because we have no introductions, and a meeting might be disagreeable. The season is so late and the pasture so bad, that the Wady has been quite deserted since last spring. There will be no road now, or track of any kind, and as it is at least two hundred miles to Jôf, we must have a guide to shew us the wells. Such a one we have found in a funny looking little Bedouin, a Sherári, who happens to be here and who will go with us for ten mejidies.
December 29.—There was a bitter east wind blowing when we started this morning, and I observed a peewit, like a land bird at sea, flying hither and thither under the lea of the palm trees, looking hopeless and worn out with its long voyage. Poor thing, it will die here, for there is nothing such a bird can eat anywhere for hundreds of miles. It must have been blown out of its reckoning, perhaps from the Euphrates.
Our course to-day lay along the edge of the Wady, sometimes crossing stony promontories from the upper plain, sometimes sandy inlets from the Wady. The heights of these were always pretty much the same, 2250 feet above and 1850 below—so these may be taken as the respective heights of the Hamád and of the Wady Sirhán. There are besides, here and there, isolated tells, three hundred to four hundred feet higher than either. Rough broken ground all day, principally of sand with slaty grit sprinkled over it, the vegetation very scanty on the high ground, but richer in the hollows. In one small winding ravine leading into the Wady, we found ghada trees, but otherwise nothing bigger than shrubs. There Awwad told us that two years ago he was robbed and stripped by a ghazú from the Hauran. He had lost six camels and all he possessed. The Haurani were eight in number, his own party six. I asked him how it was the robbers got the best of it. He said it was “min Allah” (from God). The Wady Sirhán seems to be a favourite place for robbers, and Awwad takes the occurrence as a matter of course. I asked him why he had left his tribe, the Shammar, and come to live so far north as Salkhad. He said it was “nasíb,” a thing fated; that he had married a Salkhad wife, and she would not go away from her people. I asked him how he earned his living, and he laughed. “I have got half a mare,” he said, “and a delúl, and I make ghazús. There are nine of us Shammar in the Hauran, and we go out together towards Zerka, or to the western Leja and take cattle by night.” He then showed us some frightful scars of wounds, which he had got on these occasions, and made Wilfrid feel a bullet which was still sticking in his side. He is a curious creature, but we like him, and, robber or no robber, he has quite the air of a gentleman. He is besides an agreeable companion, sings very well, recites ballads, and is a great favourite everywhere. At Kâf and Itheri he was hugged and kissed by the men, old and young, and welcomed by the women in every house.