We have been questioning Hamdán about his tribe, the Sherarât, and he gives the following as their principal sections:—
| El Hueymreh | Sheykh | El Hawi. |
| El Helesseh | ,, | Ibn Hedayaja. |
| El Khayâli | ,, | Zeyd el Werdi. |
| Shemalat | ,, | Fathal el Dendeh. |
The Sherarât have no horses, but breed the finest dromedaries in Arabia. Their best breed is called Benat Udeyhan, (daughters of Udeyhan). With a Bint Udeyhan, he says, that if you started from where we now are at sunset, you would be to-morrow at sunrise at Kâf, a distance of a hundred and eighty miles. A thief not long ago stole a Sherâri delúl at Mezárib, and rode it all the way to Haïl in seven days and nights!
January 5.—A long wearisome ride of twenty-two miles, always expecting to see Jôf, and always disappointed. The ground broken up into fantastic hills and ridges, but on a lower level than yesterday, descending in fact all day. Every now and then we caught sight of the Wady Sirhán far away to the right, with blue hills beyond it, but in front of us there seemed an endless succession of rocky ridges. At last from the top of one of these there became visible a black outline, standing darkly out against the yellow confusion of sandstone hills and barren wadys, which we knew must be the castle of Marid. It looked a really imposing fortress, though dreary enough in the middle of this desolation. Towards this we pushed on, eager for a nearer view. Then we came to a natural causeway of white rock, which Awwad and Hamdán both affirmed to be a continuation of the Roman road from Salkhad. We should have liked to believe this, but it was too clear that the road was one made by nature. Along this we travelled for some miles till it disappeared. All of a sudden we came as it were to the edge of a basin, and there, close under us, lay a large oasis of palms, surrounded by a wall with towers at intervals, and a little town clustering round the black castle. We were at Jôf.
CHAPTER VI.
And Laban said to him, “Surely thou art my bone and my flesh.” And he abode with him the space of a month.—Book of Genesis.
The Jôf oasis—We are entertained by Ibn Rashid’s lieutenant—A haunch of wild cow—Dancing in the castle—Prayers—We go on to Meskakeh.
Jôf is not at all what we expected. We thought we should find it a large cultivated district, and it turns out to be merely a small town. There is nothing at all outside the walls except a few square patches, half an acre or so each, green with young corn. These are watered from wells, and irrigated just like the gardens inside the walls, with little water-courses carefully traced in patterns, like a jam tart. The whole basin of Jôf is indeed barely three miles across at its widest, and looks, what it no doubt is, the empty basin of a little inland sea. How, or when, or why, it was originally dried up, is beyond me to guess (one can only say with Mohammed, it is “min Allah”); but the proofs of its pelagic origin are apparent everywhere. It looks lower than the rest of the Wady Sirhán, with which it probably communicates; and we thought at first that it might have been the last water-hole, as it were, of the sea when it dried up. But this is not really the case, as its lowest part is exactly on a level with all the hollows of the wady. Its wells are between 1800 and 1900 feet above the sea. They are shallow, only a few feet from the surface, and the water is drawn by camels pulling a long rope with a bucket, which empties itself as it reaches the surface into a kind of trough. The town, with its gardens, all encircled by a mud wall ten feet high, is about two miles long from north to south, and half a mile across. The rest of the plain is nearly a dead flat of sand, with here and there a patch of hard ground, sandy clay, where the water collects when it rains, and salt is left when it dries up.
Wherever a well has been sunk, a little garden has been made, fenced in with a wall, and planted with palms. There are perhaps a dozen of these outlying farms occupying two or three acres each. In one place there are four or five houses with their gardens together, which have the look of a village. The whole of the basin, except these oases, is dazzlingly white, showing the palm groves as black patches on its surface. Jôf itself contains not more than six hundred houses, square boxes of mud, clustering, most of them, round the ruin of Marid, but not all, for there are half a dozen separate clusters in different parts of the grove. Many of these houses have a kind of tower, or upper storey, and there are small towers at irregular intervals all round the outer wall. The chief feature of the town, besides Marid, is a new castle just outside the enceinte, inhabited by Ibn Rashid’s lieutenant. It stands on rising ground, and is an imposing building, square, with battlemented walls forty feet high, flanked with round and square towers tapering upwards twenty feet higher than the rest. It has no windows, only holes to shoot from; and each tower has several excrescences like hoods (machicoulis) for the same purpose.