SALAHÍYYAH, DAMASCUS IN THE OASIS—THE DESERT BEYOND.
Richard's day, as I said, was divided into reading, writing, studying, and attending to his official work. There was one kind of duty within the town, another without the town, to scour mountain and desert, to ride hard, and to know everything that is going on in the country, and personally, not through dragomans only. His talents were particularly Eastern, and of a political and diplomatic kind; his knowledge of Eastern character was as perfect as his languages. He was as much needed out of the town as in it, and very often when they thought he was far away, he was amongst them, and they wondered how he knew things. I interested myself in all his pursuits, and I was a most fortunate woman that he allowed me to be his companion, his secretary, and his aide-de-camp. I looked after our house, servants, stables, and animals. I did a little gardening. I helped my husband, read and wrote, studied Arabic, received and returned visits, saw and learnt Damascus through, till I knew it like my own pocket, looked after the poor and sick of my village and its environs. Sometimes I galloped over the plains, and sat in the Bedawi tents, sometime went up all the mountains. Summer times I smoked narghílehs by the waterside in a neighbour's garden. Sometimes I went to pass two or three days with a harem. Our lives were wild, romantic, and solemn. After sunset the only sounds were the last call to prayer on the Minaret top, the howling of the wild dogs, the cries of the jackals in the burial-ground outside the village, the bubbling of the fountains, the hootings of the owls in the garden, the soughing of the wind through the mountain gorges, and the noise of the water-wheel in a neighbour's orchard. There was often a free fight in the road below, to steal a mare, or to kill. We have often gone down to take some poor wretch in, and bind up his sabre-cuts.
I used to have a large reception every Friday, and not only of the Europeans, but the Authorities as well as the natives of every tongue, race, and creed, who used to assemble in our Divan for narghílehs, sherbet, and coffee. It used to begin at sunrise, and go on till sunset. How I look back to those romantic days when the assembled party, being afraid to remain in our quarters after the sun was down, used to file down through the orchards and gardens to the safe shelter of the Damascus gates at sunset, and the mattresses and cushions of the divans were spread on the housetop, backed by the romantic Jebel Kaysún, with a bit of desert sand between it and us, and on all the other three sides a view over Damascus, and its surrounding oasis, and the desert beyond!
Then the supper was prepared on the roof, and there remained with us the two most interesting and remarkable characters of Damascus, the two who never knew what fear meant—the famous Abd el Kadir and Lady Ellenborough, known there as the "Hon. Jane Digby el Mezrab." Abd el Kadir was a dark, handsome, thoroughbred-looking man, with dignified bearing and cool self-possession. He dressed in snowy white, both turban and burnous. Not a single ornament except his jewelled arms, which were splendid. If you saw him on horseback you would single him out from a million; he had the seat of a gentleman and a soldier. He was every inch a Sultan. His mind was as beautiful as his face. He spoke the perfection of Arabic, he was a true Moslem, and he and Richard were both Master-Sufi. All readers will know his history. He was the fourth son of the Algerine Marabout Abd el Kadir Mahi ed Din, and was born in 1807. You all remember his hopeless struggles for the independence of Algeria, his capture, his imprisonment in France from 1847 to 1852—a treacherous act, and a tarnish to the French Government. Lord Londonderry earnestly entreated Louis Napoleon to set him free, which he did, going to the prison himself to let him out, and treating him with the greatest honour. He pensioned him and sent him to Damascus, where he was surrounded by five hundred faithful Algerines. He divided his time into prayer, study, business, and very little sleep. He loved the English, but he was loyal to Louis Napoleon. When the massacre in 1860 took place, he used to sleep at his own door, lest any poor Christian wretch should knock and petition to be saved from slaughter, and for fear his Algerines, being Moslems, should turn a deaf ear; and he saved many, sending guards down to the convents of women, and to his friends.
A Most Interesting and Remarkable Woman.
Our other friend was the Hon. Jane Digby, of the family of Lord Digby, married to Lord Ellenborough, and divorced. She made her home in Damascus, and eventually married a Bedawin Shaykh (Mijwal el Mezrab), the tribe of Mezrab being a branch of the great Anazeh. She was a most beautiful woman, though at the time I write she was sixty-one, tall, commanding, and queen-like. She was grande dame au bout des doigts, as much as if she had just left the salons of London and Paris, refined in manner and voice, nor did she ever utter a word you could wish unsaid. My husband said she was out and out the cleverest woman he ever met; there was nothing she could not do. She spoke nine languages perfectly, and could read and write in them. She painted, sculptured, was musical. Her letters were splendid; and if on business, there was never a word too much, nor a word too little. She had had a most romantic, adventurous life, and she was now, one might say, Lady Hester Stanhope's successor. She lived half the year in a romantic house she had built for herself in Damascus, and half her life she and her husband lived in his Bedawi tents, she like any other Bedawin woman, but honoured and respected as the queen of her tribe, wearing one blue garment, her beautiful hair in two long plaits down to the ground, milking the camels, serving her husband, preparing his food, giving him water to wash his hands and face, sitting on the floor and washing his feet, giving him his coffee, his sherbet, his narghílehs, and while he ate she stood and waited on him, and glorying in it; and when in Damascus they led semi-European lives. She looked splendid in Oriental dress, and if you saw her as a Moslem woman in the bazar you would have said she was not more than thirty-four years of age. She was my most intimate friend, and she dictated to me the whole of her biography, beginning 15th March, 1871, and ending July 7th.
After I left a report came home that she was dead. I answered some unpleasant remarks in the Press about her, throwing a halo over her memory, in which I stated that I being the possessor of the biography, no one had a right to say anything about her except myself. She reappeared again, having only been detained in the desert by the fighting of the tribes. Her relatives attacked her for having given me the biography, and she, under pressure, denied it in print through one of the missionaries, and then wrote and asked me to give it back to her; but I replied that she should have had it with the greatest pleasure, only having "given me the lie" in print, I was obliged for my own sake to keep it, and she eventually died. I have got it now, but I shall never publish it.