Amid a general chorus of good wishes, we at last took our leave of these good people. “You,” they said to Wilfrid, “shall be our Sheykh whenever you return to us. Muttlak will not be jealous. We will make war for you on all your enemies, and be friends with your friends.” Muttlak himself has promised that there shall be a general council to-night to decide whether the tribe shall move northwards as has been proposed, or not, and that if it is decided that it shall be so, he will join us to-morrow morning, and travel with us to Meshhed to make arrangements with the intervening tribes, whose consent must first be obtained. It is strange what friendship we have made with these simple-hearted people in a few hours. We are the first Europeans they have seen, and they look upon us as beings of a superior world.
As we came back to the crest of the hill overlooking Wady Roseh, we saw away to the south a smoke rising—the Haj.
February 18.—We had walked down to the birkeh to try and stalk some ducks when the first runners of the Haj arrived, and presently the Haj itself, now swelled to double its former size, swept past us down the Wady. At the same moment Muttlak appeared on his delúl ready to go with us. This gave us great pleasure. He has got the consent of his tribe, and what is of more importance of the women of his family, to go with us to Meshhed Ali, and see what arrangements can be made with the Ánazeh Sheykhs for a migration of the Ketherin northwards. Such migrations have, I fancy, taken place in all ages among the Bedouins of Arabia; the want of pasture constantly driving them outwards from Central Arabia to the richer deserts of Syria and Mesopotamia. In this way the Shammar and the Ánazeh obtained their present inheritance of the Hamád and the Jezireh, and thus in still earlier times the Taï abandoned Nejd.
Muttlak’s equipment for the journey is of the simplest kind, the clothes in which he stands. He and a single attendant are mounted together on an old black dromedary, the Sheykh perched on the saddle, and his man kneeling behind, their only weapon a stick, and they guide the delúl with a rope passed through a hole in his nostril, a primitive arrangement. “There,” we said to Mohammed, “that is how your ancestors left Nejd.” The old man is very pious; unlike the Ánazeh and other tribes of the north, these Bedouins of Nejd say their prayers regularly, and profess the Mussulman creed, and Muttlak’s first act on dismounting this evening in camp, was to go apart with his attendant and pray. Mohammed and Abdallah still say their prayers occasionally, though with less and less fervour as the distance from Haïl grows greater. Awwad’s devotion is of a very varying quality, sometimes quite imperceptible, at others almost alarming. I have noticed that any special stress of work in loading the camels of a morning, or pitching the tents at night, is sure to call forth a burst of spiritual fervour. At such times his la-ilaha-illa-llah goes on for a prodigious length of time, and may be heard a quarter of a mile off.
Ambar, the negro emir-el-haj, has brought a polite message for us from Ibn Rashid. He came with the Haj as far as Khuddra, and then went back to Haïl, so we have lost nothing by not going with him on his intended ghazú.
Having camped early we sent Abdallah and Hanna to the Haj to find out our Persian friends there, and invite them to dine with us, as we had killed a sheep, and just before sunset they arrived, Ali Koli Khan, Huseyn Koli Khan, and Abd er-Rahim of Kermanshah. We seated them all on a carpet outside our little tent, for it is a warm evening, and then the dinner was served. But much to our vexation, for we had carefully arranged the entertainment, they refused to eat anything, first saying that they had already dined, and afterwards admitting that the Mollahs in whose company they were travelling, had forbidden their eating with us during the Haj. They were very polite, however, and made all sorts of apologies, and even took one mouthful each to avoid being positively rude. Ali said that but for his mother’s Mollah, he would have asked us to dine with him, for he has a good cook, but under the circumstances it cannot be. Huseyn, who is the son of an ex-vizier, pretended to speak French, but the only complete phrase which he had at command, and which seemed borrowed from a copy-book, was, “L’Arabe est charlatan.” This he repeated in and out of season, whenever there was a pause in the conversation. These Persians were as loud as ever in their complaints against the Arabs, and being now out of his dominions, did not spare the Emir, whom they accused of having plundered them terribly. They also had much to tell of the extortions of the hemeldaria, or contractors for the Haj.
It appears that each pilgrim, when he starts for Mecca, puts himself into the hands of an Arab contractor, generally a native of Meshhed Ali, who undertakes to provide him with transport, either in the shape of riding dromedaries, or litters, or even in some cases, mules or horses. He does this for a sum of money down, accepting all risks, and is bound to replace any animal that breaks down or dies on the road, with another at a moment’s notice. It is a very speculative business, as if all goes well with the Haj, the hemeldaria makes a fortune, whereas if things go badly, he may lose one. In some years great numbers of camels die, and then the contractors are ruined; but generally they make a very good thing out of it, as their charges are enormous. At any rate they seem very rich, and ride about themselves on the finest dromedaries in the Haj, and wear the finest clothes. There are twenty of these contractors now with the Haj, who divide the two thousand Persian pilgrims amongst them. Besides the Persians there are about a hundred Shias from Bagdad and Bussorah, but these do not mix much with the Persians, and a body-guard of about a thousand Bedouins, Ibn Rashid’s people. In all, over three thousand persons, with five thousand camels. It must be like the journey of the children of Israel to Mount Sinai.
Ali Koli Khan left Haïl with the Emir, nearly a week after we did, so we did not need to be in any hurry, but I think we were right to get clear away while we could.
February 19.—An early start before sunrise, though there were stragglers till seven o’clock. We were the last to go, but we had sent our camels on as there was good grass, and we wanted our mares to have a comfortable feed. Occasionally one of the pilgrims would come and sit down a moment by our fire to warm his hands. We have now quite left the Nefûd, and are travelling over broken stony ground. The Haj marches fast, quite three miles an hour, and there is no stopping on the way. We are halted this evening at the last of the reservoirs of Zobeydeh, the Birkeh Jemaymeh (Jemima’s pool). Here there are considerable ruins and a very large well.