January 8.—A cloudy, almost foggy morning, and a shower of rain. We wished Dowass and his soldiers good-bye, and they really seemed sorry to part with us. They are extraordinarily good-tempered, honest people, and have treated us with great kindness. Dowass’s last attention to me was the present of an enormous treng as big as a large cocoanut. The trengs are sour not sweet lemons, but they have a rind an inch thick, sweet enough to be eaten though very woolly.
Meskakeh, where we have come to-day, is about twenty miles from Jôf, and there is a well-beaten track between the two places. We were a rather numerous party, as several Jôfi came with us for company, and we have Areybi ibn Arûk, Nassr’s son, and another Arûk, a cousin of his, and a man with a gun who is by way of going on with us to Haïl. All the party but ourselves were on foot, for the Jôfi never ride, having neither horses nor camels nor even donkeys. One of the men had with him an ostrich eggshell slung in a sort of network, and used like a gourd to hold water. He told me that ostriches are common in the Nefûd, which is now close by. The scenery all the way was fantastic, sometimes picturesque. First we crossed the punchbowl of Jôf to the other side, passing several ruined farms, the ground absolutely barren, and the lowest part of it covered with salt. The whole of this depression is but a mile across. Then our road rose suddenly a hundred feet up a steep bank of sand, and then again a hundred and sixty feet over some stony ridges, descending again to cross a subbkha with a fringe of tamarisks just now in flower, then tracts of fine ironstone gravel, undistinguishable from sheep’s droppings. About two hours from Jôf is a large water-hole, which the Jôfi call a spring, the water about eight feet below ground. In the wadys where water had flowed (for it rained here about a month ago), there were bright green bulbous plants with crocus flowers, giving a false look of fertility. In other places there were curious mushroom rocks of pink sandstone topped with iron, and in the distance northwards several fine masses of hill, Jebel Hammamíyeh or the pigeon mountains being the most remarkable. These may have been a thousand feet higher than Jôf. Far beyond, to the north-east and east, there ran a level line of horizon at about an equal height, the edge of the Hamád, for all the country we have been crossing is within the area of the ancient sea, which, we suppose, must have included the Wady Sirhán, Jôf and Meskakeh.
On one of the rocks I noticed an inscription, or rather pictures of camels and horses, cut on a flat surface about five feet across. We could not, however, under the circumstances, copy it.
Meskakeh, though not the seat of Jóhar’s government, is a larger town than Jôf—seven hundred houses they say, and palm gardens at least twice as extensive as the other’s. The position of the two towns is much the same, a broad hollow surrounded by cliffs of sandstone, but the Meskakeh basin is less regular, and is broken up with sandhills and outlying tells of rock. Meskakeh, like Jôf, has an ancient citadel perched on a cliff about a hundred feet high, and dominating the town. The town itself is irregularly built, and has no continuous wall round its gardens. There are many detached gardens and groups of houses, and these have not been ruined as those of Jôf have been by recent wars. Altogether, it has an exceedingly flourishing look, not an acre of irrigable land left unplanted. Everything is neat and clean, the walls fresh battlemented, and every house trim as if newly built. The little square plots of barley are surrounded each by its hedge of wattled palm branches, and the streets and lanes are scrupulously tidy. Through these we rode without stopping, and on two miles beyond, to Nassr’s farm. We are now in the bosom of the Ibn Arûk family, after all no myth, but a hospitable reality, receiving us with open arms, as if they had been expecting us every day for the last hundred years. They know the Ibn Arûk ballad and Mohammed’s genealogy far better than he knows it himself, so for the time at least we may hope to be in clover, and if after all we get no further, we may feel that we have travelled not quite in vain.
CHAPTER VII.
“And Leah was tender eyed but Rachel was beautiful.”—Book of Genesis.
The Ibn Arûks of Jôf—Mohammed contracts a matrimonial alliance—Leah and Rachel.—We cheapen the bride’s dower—A negro governor and his suite—A thunder-storm.
We stayed three days with Nassr and his sons, and his sons’ wives and their children, in their quiet farm house. It was a rest which we much needed, and proved besides to be an interesting experience, and an excellent opportunity of learning more of Arab domestic life than we had done on our previous journeys. Not that the Ibn Arûks of Meskakeh are in themselves of any particular interest. Like their relations of Tudmur, they have been too long settled down as mere townspeople, marrying the daughters of the land, and adopting many of the sordid town notions, but they were honest and kind-hearted, and the traditions of their origin, still religiously preserved, cast an occasional gleam of something like romance on their otherwise matter of fact lives. Nassr, the best of the elder generation, resembled some small Scottish laird, poor and penurious, but aware of having better blood in his veins than his neighbours—one whose thought, every day in the year but one, is of how to save sixpence, but who on that one day shows himself to be a gentleman, and the head of a house. His sons were quiet, modest, and unpretending, and, like most young Arabs, more romantically inclined than their father. They even had a certain appreciation of chivalrous ideas; especially Turki, the elder, in whom the Bedouin blood and Bedouin traditions predominated almost to the exclusion of commercial instincts, while in his brother Areybi, these latter more than counterbalanced the former. We liked both the brothers, of course preferring Turki, with whom Wilfrid made great friends.
Mohammed is less distantly related to these people than I had supposed. His ancestor, Ali ibn Arûk, was one of the three brothers who, in consequence of a blood feud, or, as Wilfrid thinks more likely, to escape the Wahhabi tyranny of a hundred years ago, left Aared in Nejd, and came north as far as Tudmur, where Ali married and remained. Another brother, Abd el-Kader ibn Arûk, had stopped at Jôf, settled there, and became Nassr’s grandfather. As to the third, Mutlakh, the descendants of the two former know nothing of his fate, except that, liking neither Tudmur nor Jôf he returned towards Nejd. Some vague report of his death reached them, but nobody can tell when or how he died. Nassr came from Jôf to Meskakeh not many years ago.
Nassr is now the head of the family, at least of that branch of it which inhabits the Meskakeh oasis. But there lives in an adjoining house to his, his first cousin, Jazi ibn Arûk, brother to our friend Merzuga, and father to two pretty daughters. These, with a few other relations, make up a pleasant little family party, all living in their outlying farm together.