“Babel was Nimrod’s hunting box, and then
A town of gardens, walls, and wealth amazing,
Where Nabuchodonosor, king of men,
Reigned till one summer’s day he took to grazing.”Byron.
“. . . Oh how wretched
Is that poor man that lives on princes’ favours.”
Shakespeare.
Mohammed loses his head—A ride with the Emir—The mountain fortress of Agde—Farewell to Haïl—We join the Persian Haj—Ways and manners of the pilgrims—A clergyman of Medina.
I have hinted at a mystification in which we found ourselves involved a few days after our arrival at Haïl, and which at the time caused us no little anxiety. It had its origin in a piece of childishness on Mohammed’s part, whose head was completely turned by the handsome reception given him as an Ibn Arûk by the Emir, and a little too, I fear, by our own spoiling. To the present day I am not quite sure that we heard all that happened, and so forbear entering upon the matter in detail; but as far as we could learn, Mohammed’s vanity seems to have led him to aggrandise his own position in the eyes of Ibn Rashid’s court, by representing us as persons whom he had taken under his protection, and who were in some way dependent on him; boasting that the camels, horses, and other property were his own, and our servants his people. This under ordinary circumstances might have been a matter of small consequence, and we should not have grudged him a little self-glorification at our expense, conscious as we were of having owed the success of our journey hitherto, mainly to his fidelity. But unfortunately the secondary rôle which he would thus have assigned to us, made our relations with the Emir not only embarrassing, but positively dangerous. Our reception at first had been cordial to a degree that made it all the more annoying to find, that when we had been four days at Haïl, we no longer received the attentions which had hitherto been paid us. The presents of game ceased, and the lamb, with which we had hitherto been regaled at dinner, was replaced by camel meat. Instead of two soldiers being sent to escort us to the palace, a slave boy came with a message. On the fifth day we were not invited to the evening party, and on the sixth Wilfrid, calling at the palace, was told curtly that the Emir was not at home. We could not imagine the cause of this change, and Mohammed, usually so cheerful and so open-hearted, had become moody and embarrassed, keeping almost entirely with the servants in the outer house. Hanna, the faithful Hanna, began to hint darkly that things were not well, and Abdallah and the rest of the Mussulman servants seemed unwilling to do their duty. We remembered that we were among Wahhabi fanatics, and we began to be very much alarmed. Still we were far from guessing the real reason, and it was not till we had been a week at Haïl that Wilfrid, happening to meet the Emir’s chief slave Mubarek, learned from him how matters stood. It was no use being angry; indeed Mohammed’s conduct was rather childish than disloyal, and the dénouement would have not been worth mentioning except as an illustration of Arab manners and ways of thought, and also as explaining why our stay at Haïl was cut shorter than we had originally intended it to be; and why, instead of going on to Kasim, we joined the Persian pilgrimage on their homeward road to Meshhed Ali.
Matters of course could not rest there, and on returning home from his interview with Mubarek, Wilfrid upbraided Mohammed with his folly, and then sent to the palace for Mufurraj, the master of ceremonies, and the same dignified old gentleman who had received us on our arrival, and having explained the circumstances bade him in his turn explain them to the Emir. The old man promised to do this, and I have no doubt kept his word, for that very evening we were sent for once more to the palace, and received with the old cordiality. It is, too, I think very creditable to the arrangements of the Haïl court, that no explanations of any sort were entered into. Mohammed, though put in his proper place, was still politely received; and only an increase of amiable attentions made us remember that we had ever had cause to complain. As to Mohammed, I am bound to say, that once the fumes of his vanity evaporated, he bore no kind of malice for what we had been obliged to do, and became once more the amiable, attentive and serviceable friend he had hitherto been. Ill-temper is not an Arab failing. Still the incident was a lesson and a warning, a lesson that we were Europeans still among Asiatics, a warning that Haïl was a lion’s den, though fortunately we were friends with the lion. We began to make our plans for moving on.
I have said little as yet about the Persian pilgrimage which, encamped just outside the walls of Haïl, had all along been a main feature in the goings on of the place. On a certain Tuesday, however, the Emir sent us a message that he expected us to come out riding with him, and that he would meet us at that gate of the town where the pilgrims were. It was a fortunate day for us, not indeed because we saw the pilgrims, but because we saw what we would have come the whole journey to see, and had almost despaired of seeing,—all the best of the Emir’s horses out and galloping about. We were delighted at the opportunity, and made haste to get ready. In half an hour we were on our mares, and in the street. There was a great concourse of people all moving towards the camp, and just outside the town we found the Emir’s cavalcade. This for the moment absorbed all my thoughts, for I had not yet seen any of the Haïl horses mounted. The Emir, splendidly dressed but barefooted, was riding a pretty little white mare, while the chestnut Krushieh followed him mounted by a slave.
All our friends were there, Hamúd, Majid and the two boys his brothers, with a still smaller boy, whom they introduced to us as a son of Metaab, the late Emir, all in high spirits and anxious to show off their horses and their horsemanship; while next the Emir and under his special protection rode the youth with the tragical history, Naïf, the sole remaining son of Tellál, whose brothers Mohammed had killed, and who, it is whispered, will some day be called on to revenge their deaths. Mubarek too, the white slave, was there, a slave in name only, for he is strikingly like the princely family in feature and is one of the richest and most important personages in Haïl. The rest of the party consisted of friends and servants, with a fair sprinkling of black faces among them, dressed in their best clothes and mounted on the Emir’s mares. Conspicuous on his beautiful bay was Hamúd, who, as usual, did us the honours, and pointed out and explained the various persons and things we saw. It was one of those mornings one only finds in Nejd. The air brilliant and sparkling to a degree one cannot imagine in Europe, and filling one with a sense of life such as one remembers to have had in childhood, and which gives one a wish to shout. The sky of an intense blue, and the hills in front of us carved out of sapphire, and the plain, crisp and even as a billiard table, sloping gently upwards towards them. On one side the battlemented walls and towers of Haïl, with the palace rising out of a dark mass of palms almost black in the sunlight; on the other the pilgrim camp, a parti-coloured mass of tents, blue, green, red, white, with the pilgrims themselves in a dark crowd, watching with curious half-frightened eyes the barbaric display of which we formed a part.
Presently the Emir gave a signal to advance, and turning towards the south-west, our whole party moved on in the direction of a clump of palm-trees we could see about two miles off. Hamúd then suddenly put his mare into a gallop, and one after another the rest of the party joined him in a sham fight, galloping, doubling, and returning to the Emir, who remained alone with us, and shouting as though they would bring the sky about their ears. At last the Emir could resist it no longer, and seizing a jerid or palm stick from one of the slaves, went off himself among the others. In a moment his dignity and his town manners were forgotten, and he became the Bedouin again which he and all his family really are. His silk kefiyehs were thrown back, and bare-headed with his long Bedouin plaits streaming in the wind and bare-legged and bare-armed, he galloped hither and thither; charging into the throng, and pursuing and being pursued, and shouting as if he had never felt a care, and never committed a crime in his life.
We found ourselves alone with a strange little personage whom we had already noticed riding beside the Emir, and who seemed even more out of place in this fantastic entertainment than ourselves. I hope at least that we looked less ridiculous than he did. Mounted on a sorry little kadish, and dressed in the fashion of European children fifty years ago, with a high waisted coat, well pleated at the skirt, trousers up to his knees, and feet shod with slippers, a little brown skull cap on his head, and a round shaven face, sat what seemed an overgrown boy, but what in reality was a chief person from among the Persian pilgrims. It was Ali Koli Khan, son of the great Khan of the Bactiari, who for his father’s sake was being treated by the Emir with all possible honour. He, with the rest of the Haj, was now on his way back from Mecca, and it was partly to impress him with the Emir’s magnificence that the present party had been arranged.
We did not long stay alone, for in a few minutes the galloping ceased, and we then went on sedately as before, and in due time arrived at the palm trees, which, it turned out, were the Emir’s property, and contained in a garden surrounded by a high wall. Here we were invited to dismount, and a carpet having been spread under the trees, we all sat down. Slaves were soon busy serving a luncheon of sweetmeats,—boys were made to climb the lemon trees, and shake down the fruit, and coffee was handed round. Then all the party said their prayers except ourselves and the Persian, who, as a Shiah, could not join in their devotions, and we mounted again and rode home. This time we too joined in the galloping, which speedily recommenced, our mares fully enjoying the fun, and in this way we scampered back to Haïl.