[40] In the fourth chapter of Ruth—“Boaz said unto the reapers—The Lord be with you: and they answered him the Lord bless you.” This is exactly the salutation of the Christians to this day: Allah mâkûm: Barak Allah. The salutation of the Mahometans is different: that is Salám alëikûm, Peace be unto you—and the reply is Alëikûm el salám—unto you be peace. The observance of this rule is so strict that if, in entering a room where Mahometans alone are seated, a Christian should presume to make use of the Mahometan salutation, they would not reply to him. We may infer that, when Mahomet first established his new religion, he endeavoured to draw a line between his proselytes and the Jews and Christians. Thus their day of worship was neither instituted on Saturday nor Sunday, but on Friday: so he appears to have appropriated a mode of salutation to them. Circumcision he did not get rid of, because he claimed to be a descendant of the patriarchs who had instituted or adopted it.
[41] They are used for this purpose in some places even now. If the reader happens to have in his library Dr. Clarke’s Travels in Syria, he may amuse himself by reading the Doctor’s lucubrations on these holes, which are (as much of his conjectural learning is) somewhat ridiculous; yet, as such, they were more read than the dictates of common sense would have been.
[42] Mûly is explained by prince, captain, lord, or patron.
[43] Yahyah Bey, of the house of Adam; the principal people of the place were branches of this family.
[44] Besides, she had to fear the attacks of the Faydân, a powerful Bedouin tribe, at war with the Anizys, and whose superiority had been established in a recent battle, of which mention has been already made.
[45] Her ladyship’s real motive for not going to Aleppo was the fear of the Aleppo tetter, which attacks strangers, and often disfigures the face.—See Russell’s Aleppo.
[46] The butter generally used throughout Syria is made by the Bedouin women in the spring, and brought in skins, on camels, for sale to the principal villages and towns on the confines of the Desert, whence it is carried to all the inhabited country, and every good housewife lays in a store for the year. To do this, the butter must have, of course, a great deal of salt in it; and, as butter is only used in cookery, its salt flavour does not deteriorate it. But the great difficulty Lady Hester had to contend with was to procure fresh butter for breakfast, and she consequently had to teach her maids to make it, without a churn, and without all the requisites for such a purpose. This was a fatiguing business with servants, who never showed any anxiety to learn.
[47] This dance was just such as is represented in the plates to Mr. Belzoni’s work on Egypt, published 1820; and I think he has mistaken a funereal ceremony for a dance of recreation.
[48] The ancient Salaminias.
[49] I should conjecture Jarryat Theap, were it somewhat more south, to be the Centum Putei. It is proper to observe, that little reliance can be placed on the names of places in this journey. They are spelt as they sounded to my ears when pronounced by the Bedouins, and were written down at the time. But, when it is considered that the Bedouins give entirely different sounds to the letters of the alphabet from what is customary in the towns, it is impossible not to have committed many errors where the words in Arabic were unknown to me.