When we came home again, we found that Mohammed had been to make the last arrangements with Jóhar for our journey. The great man had raised objections at one point of the negotiations, but these had been settled by a dahab or gold piece, and he has now agreed to send a man with us, a professional guide for crossing the Nefûd. It seems that there are two lines by which Haïl may be reached, one of thirteen and the other of ten days’ journey. The first is better suited, they say, for heavy laden camels, as the sand is less deep, but we shall probably choose the shorter route, if only for the sake of seeing the Nefûd at its worst. For the Nefûd has been the object of our dreams all through this journey, as the ne plus ultra of desert in the world. We hear wonderful accounts of it here, and of the people who have been lost in it. This ten days’ journey represents something like two hundred miles, and there are only two wells on the way, one on the second, and another on the eighth day. The guide will bring his own camel, and carry a couple of waterskins, and we have bought four more, making up the whole number to eight. This will have to suffice for our mares as well as for ourselves, and we shall have to be very careful. We have laid in a sufficient stock of dates and bread, and have still got one of the kids left to start with in the way of meat, the other has just been devoured as I have said, and cannot be replaced. Provisions of every kind are difficult to procure at Meskakeh; it was only by the exercise of a little almost Turkish bullying that Jóhar has been able to get us a camel load of corn.
The rain is over and the moon shining. All our preparations are made for crossing the Nefûd, and in a few hours we shall be on our way. We shall want all our strength for the next ten days.
CHAPTER VIII.
“We were now traversing an immense ocean of loose reddish sand, unlimited to the eye, and heaped up in enormous ridges running parallel to each other from north to south, undulation after undulation, each swell two or three hundred feet in average height, with slant sides and rounded crests furrowed in every direction by the capricious gales of the desert. In the depths between the traveller finds himself as it were imprisoned in a suffocating sand pit, hemmed in by burning walls on every side; while at other times, while labouring up the slope, he overlooks what seems a vast sea of fire, swelling under a heavy monsoon wind, and ruffled by a cross blast into little red hot waves.”—Palgrave.
Mohammed in love—We enter the red sand desert—Geology of the Nefûd—Radi—The great well of Shakik—Old acquaintance—Tales of the Nefûd—The soldiers who perished of thirst—The lovers—We nearly remain in the sand—Land at last.
January 12.—We left the farm this morning in a thick fog, among the benedictions of the Ibn Arûks. They have treated us kindly, and we were sorry to say good-bye to them, especially to Turki and Areybi, although we are a little disappointed in our expectations of the family in general. In spite of their noble birth and their Nejdean traditions, they have the failings of town Arabs in regard to money, and it was a shock to our feelings that Nassr, our host, expected a small present in money at parting, nominally for the women, but in reality, no doubt, for himself. No desert sheykh, however poor, would have pocketed the mejidies. The boys too asked for gifts, the elder wanted a cloak, because one had been given to his brother, the younger, a jíbbeh, because he already had a cloak; and other members of the household came with little skins full of dates or semneh in their hands, in the guise of farewell offerings, and lingered behind for something in return. All this of course was perfectly fair, and we were pleased to make them happy with our money; but it hardly tallied with the fine sentiments they had been in the habit of expressing, in season and out of season, about the duties of hospitality. Such small disappointments, however, must be borne, and borne cheerfully, for people are not perfect anywhere, and a traveller has no right to expect more abroad than he would find at home. In England we might perhaps not have been received at all, while here our welcome had been perfectly honest at starting, whatever the afterthought may have been. So Wilfrid solemnly kissed the relations all round, and exchanged promises of mutual good-will and hopes of meeting; I went in to the harim to say good-bye to the rest of the family, and fortunately was not expected to kiss them all round; and then we set out on our way.
Our course lay due south over the sand hills we saw yesterday, and presently these shut out Meskakeh and its palm groves from our view, and we were once more reduced to our own travelling party of eight souls, with Radi our new guide, and fairly on the road to Haïl. These sand dunes are not really the Nefûd, and are much like what may be seen elsewhere in the desert, in the Sahara for instance, or in certain parts of the peninsula of Sinai. They are very picturesque, being of pure white sand, from fifty to a hundred feet high, with intervening spaces of harder ground, and are covered with vegetation. The ghada here grows quite into a tree, with fine gnarled trunks, nearly white, and feathery grey foliage. We met several shepherds with their flocks, sent here to graze from the town, and parties of women gathering firewood. Mohammed amused us very much all the morning, talking with these wood gatherers. He had managed to get a glimpse of his bride elect and her sister before starting, and fancies himself desperately in love, though he cannot make up his mind which of the two he prefers. Sometimes it is Muttra, as it ought to be, and sometimes the other, for no better reason, as far as we can learn, than that she is taller and older, for he did not see their faces. His conversations to-day with the wood gatherers shewed a naïveté of mind neither of us suspected. He would ride on whenever he saw a party of these women, and when we came up was generally to be found in earnest discussion with the oldest and ugliest of them on the subject of his heart. He would begin by asking them whether they were from Meskakeh, and lead round the conversation to the Ibn Arûk family, and if he found that the women knew them, he would vaguely ask how many daughters there were in Jazi’s house, and whether married or unmarried. Then he would hint that he had heard that the eldest one was very beautiful, and ask cautiously after the youngest, ending always by the disclosure that he himself was an Ibn Arûk from Tudmur, and that he was engaged to whichever of the two unmarried ones the old women had seemed to favour in their descriptions. By this process he had quite lost his head about both sisters, sometimes fancying that he was the happiest of men, and sometimes that Jazi had passed off the less valuable of his daughters upon him. On such occasions he would turn to me and beg me to repeat for the hundredth time my description of Muttra’s merits, which consoled him until he met somebody else to raise new doubts in his mind.
After about eight miles of travelling through the sand dunes, we came out rather suddenly on the village of Kara, the last that we shall see for many a day. It is commanded by a rocky mound, with a ruin on it, and contains seventy or eighty houses; the palm grove surrounding it is remarkable for the palms and ithel trees. The fog had cleared off, and the sun was hot enough to make us glad to sit down for a few minutes under the mud wall which encloses the oasis. Some villagers came out, and we had a little chat about Kara and its sheykh, while our mares were being watered from a well close by. They told us we should find a Roala camp not far upon our way, for the camels from it were watered from this very well. Formerly Kara, like Jôf and Meskakeh, was a fief of the Ibn Shaalans, and they still pay a small tribute to Sotamm, but in return they make the Bedouins pay for the water they use. There is no danger of being attacked by the Roala or anyone else, for we are in Ibn Rashid’s country now, where highway robbery is not allowed. The villagers were very hospitable in their offers of entertainment if we would remain at Kara, but there was nothing in the place sufficiently interesting to detain us, so we went on. It contains, like Jôf and Meskakeh, a ruined castle on a low tell, but the ruins are now not much more than the foundations of old stone walls made without cement.
Not long after leaving the village, we came upon a party of Roala, with several hundred camels coming in to Kara for water. They were unarmed, and travelling as peaceably as peasants would in Italy. They told us their camp was out of our way, and too far off for us to reach to-night, but that we should find Beneyeh ibn Shaalan, a cousin of Sotamm’s, near the well of Shakik our watering place for to-morrow. It argued well for the security of the country, to find parties of villagers, as we presently did, out in the sand dunes many miles beyond Kara, with all these Bedouins about. But really there seem to be law and order in Ibn Rashid’s government. After travelling on for another two hours and a half in broken ground, we came at last to a steep acclivity which proved, when we had mounted it, to be the further edge of the Meskakeh depression, and above it we found ourselves on a gravelly plain. The view from this edge, looking back, was very interesting, and gave us at once an idea of the geography of the whole country, the great basin of Meskakeh with its tells and sand hills, the long ridge of hill under which the oasis stands, the range of Jebel Hammamiyeh too, all mere islands in the basin, which seems moreover to include Jôf as well as the eastern villages in its main circuit. Wilfrid has little doubt now that Meskakeh and Jôf are really only the tail as it were of the Wady Sirhán or rather its head, for the whole must be in shape something like a tadpole, and this point its nose.