The level of the Nefûd had been rising all day, and at one o’clock we were 3300 feet above the sea. From this point we had a large view southwards, sand, all sand still for many a mile; but close before us the group of islands we had so long been steering for, the rocks of Jobba. The nearest was not two miles off. We could see nothing of the oasis, for it was on the other side of the hills; but we could make out a wide space bare of sand, which looked like a subbkha, and beyond this a further group of rocks of exceedingly fantastic outline, rising out of the sand. It was like a scene on some great glacier in the Alps. Beyond again, lay a faint blue line of hills. “Jebel Shammar. Those are the hills of Nejd,” said Radi. They were what we have come so far to see.
We made haste now to get to the rocks, and reached them at half-past three. They were of the same character as Aalem, sand and ironstone. There Wilfrid took a map, and I a sketch, and we waited till the camels came up; a doleful string they were as we looked down from the top of our rocky hill at them passing below. Shenuan and Amúd toiled on with only their saddles, and the poor black delúl, absolutely bare and hardly able to walk, was fifty yards behind, urged along by Abdallah. We still had some miles to go to get to Jobba, but on harder ground and all down hill; and Mohammed proposed that we three should ride on, and prepare a place for the camels in the village. On our way we saw what we thought was a cloud of smoke moving from west to east, and the tail of it passed over us. We found it was a flight of locusts in the red stage of their existence, which the people here prefer for eating, but we did not care to stop now to gather them, and rode on. It was nearly sunset when we first saw Jobba itself, below us at the edge of the subbkha, with dark green palms cutting the pale blue of the dry lake, and beyond that a group of red rocks rising out of the pink Nefûd; in the foreground yellow sand tufted with adr; the whole scene transfigured by the evening light, and beautiful beyond description.
CHAPTER IX.
“They went till they came to the Delectable Mountains, which mountains belong to the Lord of that hill of which we have spoken.”
Pilgrim’s Progress.
Jobba—An unpleasant dream—We hear strange tales of Ibn Rashid—Romping in the Nefûd—A last night there—The Zodiacal light—We enter Nejd—The granite range of Jebel Shammar.
Jobba is one of the most curious places in the world, and to my mind one of the most beautiful. Its name Jobba, or rather Jubbeh, meaning a well, explains its position, for it lies in a hole or well in the Nefûd; not indeed in a fulj, for the basin of Jobba is on quite another scale, and has nothing in common with the horse-hoof depressions I have hitherto described. It is, all the same, extremely singular, and quite as difficult to account for geologically as the fuljes. It is a great bare space in the ocean of sand, from four hundred to five hundred feet below its average level, and about three miles wide; a hollow, in fact, not unlike that of Jôf, but with the Nefûd round it instead of sandstone cliffs. That it has once been a lake is pretty evident, for there are distinct water marks on the rocks which crop up out of its bed just above the town; and, strange to say, there is a tradition still extant of there having formerly been water there. The wonder is how this space is kept clear of sand. What force is it that walls out the Nefûd and prevents encroachment? As you look across the subbkha or dry bed of the lake, the Nefûd seems like a wall of water which must overwhelm it, and yet no sand shifts down into the hollow, and its limits are accurately maintained.
The town itself (or village, for it has only eighty houses) is built on the edge of the subbkha, 2860 feet above the sea, and has the same sort of palm gardens we saw at Jôf, only on a very small scale. The wells from which these are watered are seventy-five feet deep, and are worked, like all the wells in Arabia, by camels. The village is extremely picturesque, with its little battlemented walls and its gardens. At the entrance stand half a dozen fine old ithel-trees with gnarled trunks and feathery branches. The rocks towering above are very grand, being of purple sandstone streaked and veined with yellow, and having an upper facing of black. They are from seven hundred to eight hundred feet high, and their bases are scored with old water marks. Wilfrid found several inscriptions in the Sinaïtic character upon them. Jobba is backed by these hills, and by a strip of yellow sand, like the dunes of Ithery, on which just now there are brilliantly green tufts of adr in full leaf. Beyond the subbkha the rocks of Ghota rising out of the Nefûd remind one of the Aletsch Glacier, as seen from the Simplon Road.
So much for the outer face of Jobba. The interior is less attractive. The houses are very poor, and less smartly kept than those of Kâf and Ithery. I can hardly call them dirty, for dirt in this region of sand is almost an impossibility. It is one of the luxuries of the Nefûd that no noxious insects are found within its circuit. The Nefûd and, indeed, Nejd, which lies beyond it, are free from those creatures which make life a torment in other districts of the East. Even the fleas on our greyhounds died as soon as they entered the enchanted circle of red sand. But Jobba would be dirty if it could; and its inhabitants are the least well-mannered of all the Arabs we saw in Nejd. The fact is, the people are very poor and have no communication with the outer world, except when the rare travellers between Haïl and Jôf stop a night among them. At the time of our passage through Jobba, the Sheykh had lately died, and his office was being held by a young man of two or three and twenty, who had no authority with his fellow-youths, a noisy, good-for-nothing set. Ibn Rashid has no special lieutenant at Jobba, and the young Sheykh Naïf was unsupported by any representative of the central government, even a policeman. The consequence was that though entertained hospitably enough by Naïf, we were considerably pestered by his friends, and made to feel not a little uncomfortable. I quote this as a single instance of incivility in a country where politeness is very much the rule.
The style of our entertainment at Naïf’s house requires no special mention, as it differed in no respect from what we had already received elsewhere. There was a great deal of coffee drinking, and a great deal of talk. Wherever one goes in Arabia one only has to march into any house one pleases, and one is sure to be welcome. The kahwah stands open all day long, and the arrival of a guest is the signal for these two forms of indulgence, coffee and conversation, the only ones known to the Arabs. A fire is instantly lighted, and the coffee cups in due course are handed round. One curious incident, however, of our stay at Jobba must be related.