Mr. and Lady Adelaide Law arrived in Damascus, and I took her to Lady Ellenborough and to Abd el Kadir. It was her father, Lord Londonderry, whose diplomacy with Louis Napoleon delivered this great hero from imprisonment in the Château d'Amboise, and he received her with effusion. Later on came Lord Stafford (present Duke of Sutherland), Mr. Crawley, and Mr. Barty Mitford.
We go to Palmyra, or Tadmor in the Desert.
We were soon installed, and bought horses, and I began to study Arabic. The first thing Richard determined to do was to go to Tadmor. This journey was an awfully difficult thing in those days, though I am not aware whether it is now. First of all, six thousand francs used to be charged by the El Mezrab, who were the tribe who escorted for that journey. It was the tribe of Lady Ellenborough and her Bedawin husband, and she was more Bedawin than the Bedawi. There was no water, that is, only two wells the whole way, and only known to them. The difficulties and dangers were great; they travelled by night and hid by day. You may say that camels were about ten days on the road, and horses about eight days. The late Lady Ellenborough was the third of a small knot of ladies, of whom I had hoped to make the fifth—Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Lady Hester Stanhope, Lady Ellenborough, and the Princesse de la Tour d'Auvergne.
Lady Ellenborough was married to a Bedawin, brother to the Chief, and second in command of the tribe of El Mezrab, a small branch of the great Anazeh tribe. She aided the tribe in concealing the wells and levying blackmail on Europeans who wished to visit Palmyra, which brought in considerable sums to the tribe, whose demand was six thousand francs a head (£240). Richard was determined to go, and we had not the money to throw away; he asked me whether I would be willing to risk it, and I said, what I always did, "Whither thou goest, I will go." Lady Ellenborough was in a very anxious state when she heard this announcement, as she knew it was the death-blow to a great source of revenue to the tribe. She was very intimate with us, and distantly connected by marriage with my family, and she would have favoured us, if she could have done it without abolishing the whole system. She did all she could to dissuade us; she wept over our loss, and she told us that we should never come back—indeed, everybody advised us to make our wills; finally, she offered us the escort of one of her Mezrabs, that we might steer clear of the Bedawi raids, and be conducted quicker to water, if it existed. Richard made me a sign to accept the escort, and we did.
From our earliest married days, one of his peculiarities (used rather, I suspect, for training me to observe him, and to understand his wants) would be that he would not tell me directly to do a thing, but I used to find in a book I was reading, or some drawer that I opened every day, or in his own room, marked by a weight, a few words of what he wanted, conveying no direct order, and yet I knew that it was one. I grew quite accustomed to this, and used regularly to visit the places where I was likely to find them, and if I missed there was a sort of "Go seek" expression on his face, that told me that I had not hunted properly, and I knew (by another expression) when I had succeeded. I used to call these "African spoors." We could almost talk before outsiders in this way, without speaking a word out loud.
On the same principle, he used to teach me to swim without my arms, and afterwards to swim without my legs, using either one or the other, but not both, in case of falling out of a steamer and being entangled.
I mention this, because we always talked before people without their perceiving it, and he told me in this way exactly what to say to her; but we provided ourselves with seventeen camels, laden with water, in case of accident. We had each two horses, and everything necessary for tenting out, and were armed to the teeth. We had a very picturesque breakfast, affectionate farewells—the Mushir and the whole cavalcade to see us out of the town. We cleared Damascus and its environs by a three hours' march; then Richard, according to his custom, called a halt, and we camped out and picketed, because, he said, it would be so easy to send back for anything, if aught were missing.
We eventually reached Da'as Agha, the Chief of Jerúd, who has a hundred and fifty fighting men. These little villages in the middle of a desert are sometimes very acceptable for the renewal of provisions. This Jerúd was a large one, and was surrounded with salt and gypsum. After this there was only one more village, Atneh, till the Great Karryatayn, in the heart of the desert. Here we were told of some underground curiosities, and we stopped to dig, and discovered an old catacomb. The women only wear one garment; they are covered with coins, and bits of stone made into necklaces and charms against the evil eye. After this we had a long desert ride, and were caught in a dust-storm. A dust-storm is no joke; you may lie down and perhaps make your horse lie, and cover yourself up with rugs, but if it is a bad storm, like a snowstorm, you may be buried. Richard advised our galloping through it, laying the reins on the horses' necks, and letting them go where they would, for, he said, they would know a great deal more than we should; so, covering our faces up in our kuffíyyehs—for, as far as heads and shoulders went, we dressed like natives—we gave our horses their heads, and they went at a rattling pace, and about three hours took us out of the storm. Richard and I were alone; all the rest lagged behind. When the horses once got out of the storm (they seemed to understand all about it—one was desert bred and took the lead), they relapsed into a walk till they got cool. We then went by the compass in the direction we meant to take, and were joined eventually by our followers.
We now had to sleep in our clothes, revolvers and guns at our sides, and make our men take turn to watch, in case of an attack from a ghazú, or Bedawi raid, and we took off the camels' bells. A ghazú may pass you in the night, and if you are quite silent, and a foal does not whinny, nor a dog bark, you are all right; but those are the two things you have to dread. I ought to have said that, though we accepted the escort, we were not hoodwinked. I kept taking stock of our Mezrab between Damascus and our first halt, and I thought he had an uncanny and amused look; so I rode up to Richard, and told him, in a language that was not understood, what I thought. Richard gave a grim smile, as Ouida says, "under his moustache," and said, "Yes, I have thought all that out too. Mohammed Agha, come here."