Three days of easy travelling brought us to Kerbela, for we did not care to push on fast, and four days more to Bagdad. One incident only of our route need be mentioned. As we were passing the neighbourhood of Birs Nemrud, the reputed tower of Babel, we stopped for the night at some tents belonging to the Messaoud, a half felláhin tribe of the left bank of the Euphrates, where they were growing barley on some irrigated land. The Sheykh, Hajji et-Teyma was away, but his son Fuaz entertained us, and after dinner related the history of Nimrod, the founder of the tower. Nimrod, he said, was an impious man, and thought that the sun was God. And in order to make war on him he built this tower, but finding that he could not reach him thus, he had a platform constructed with a pole in the middle, and to each corner of the platform he chained an eagle, and on the pole he hung a sheep, and the eagles wishing to reach the sheep, flew up with the platform and Nimrod who was standing on it. And when Nimrod thought himself near enough, he shot an arrow at the sun. And God to punish him destroyed the tower. The Yezidis worship Nimrod and Shaytan there to this day.
Beyond Kerbela our road lay through cultivated land till we reached the Euphrates, which we crossed by the bridge of boats at Musseyib. Then we found ourselves among Babylonian mounds, canals, and abandoned fields, the unvarying features of Irak. These brought us at last to Bagdad, where by a strange fatality we arrived once more in floods of rain, and where, again, we were welcomed in the hospitable four walls of the Residency. On the 6th of March we slept once more in beds, having been without that luxury for almost three months.
Here, therefore, ends our pilgrimage to Nejd, which, in spite of some difficulties and some hardships, was accomplished successfully without any really disagreeable incident, and here, if we had been wise, our winter’s adventures would have ended too. We had been lucky beyond our expectations in seeing and doing all we had proposed as the objects of our journey, and hardly a day of the eighty-four we had spent in Arabia had been uninteresting or unromantic. What followed was neither profitable nor agreeable, and might well have been left undone.
At Bagdad our party necessarily broke up. Among the letters awaiting us at the Consulate, was one for Mohammed ibn Arûk which obliged his instant return to Tudmur. Great events had occurred there in his absence, and for a moment we felt a pang of regret at having kept him so long away from his duties and his interests at home. The politics of Tudmur are a little complicated. Mohammed’s father, Abdallah, is not the legitimate Sheykh of the town, the true head of the Ibn Arûk family there being his cousin Faris. Abdallah, however, has for some years past enjoyed Government support, and is the Turkish nominee. The town has consequently been divided into two factions, [107] headed respectively by Faris and Mohammed, the latter representing his father, who is too old for such quarrels, and as long as the Turks were supreme at Tudmur, Mohammed’s party had it all their own way. Not, however, that either faction wished any good to the Sultan, for during the Russian war Mohammed was one of the foremost in refusing the contingent demanded of the Tudmuri for the Turkish army, but family quarrels are fierce among the Arabs, and they take advantage of all the help they can get alike from friend or enemy. So Mohammed supported Turkish policy in his native town, and was in turn supported by the Turks. But after the surrender of Plevna, and the destruction of the Sultan’s army in the Balkans, Tudmur was abandoned to its own devices, and Faris once more asserted his right to the sheykhat, though parties were so evenly balanced that nothing serious for some time occurred, and only on one occasion Faris and Mohammed exchanged shots, without serious result. It was in defiance of remonstrances on the part of his father and all his friends that Mohammed had come with us, and the moment he was gone war had broken out. A messenger, it appears, had arrived to recall him not a week after he started with us from Damascus, and now another letter announced that blood had been shed. This was sufficient reason for our journey together coming to an end, and Mohammed, though piously ready to accept accomplished facts with an “Allah kerim,” was evidently in a hurry to be off. Even if we had wished it, we could not ask him to go further with us now. But we did not wish it. The episode of his foolish behaviour at Haïl, forgive it as we would, had left a certain gêne between us, which he was conscious of as well as ourselves, and, though he had done much since then to atone for it, we all felt that it was best to part. Still there was something mournful in his leaving us on so forlorn an errand, and he, as Arabs do, shed tears, owning that he had behaved in that instance ungratefully to us, and protesting his devotion. We on our side made him as comfortable as we could with letters of recommendation to Valys and Consuls, whose protection he might have need of, and with what arms and ammunition we could spare. And so he and Abdallah, and Awwad the robber, went their way on four of our delúls, which we gave them for the journey, and we saw them no more.
We had hoped to induce Hanna to go on with us, for he in all our difficulties had never failed us, and with his cousin the Tawíl had helped us loyally when others had been cross or unwilling—but Hanna was home-sick, and the Tawíl would not desert him. So one day they joined a caravan of muleteers on the point of starting for Mosul, and left us with many tears and blessings; and the little army with which we had crossed the desert was finally dispersed. [109]
PART II.
OUR PERSIAN CAMPAIGN.
CHAPTER I.
“Duo illum sequor? In Persas.”—Plautus.
“Halas! diséit-elle, faut-il que je périsse sous les pattes d’une araignée, moi qui viens de me tirer des griffes d’un lion?”—Fables d’Ésope.
New plans and new preparations—We leave Bagdad for Persia—Wild boar hunting in the Wudian—A terrible accident—We travel with a holy man—Camps of the Beni Laam—An alarm.