"The Suez Caravanserai, whose cloistered court has received so many generations of Thelemi monks, is now occupationless as Othello—
'A dismal hostel in a dismal land.'
Like the Town, it must fare south with bag and baggage, and the fine old building will become warehouses—possibly an usine when the gold mines of Midian come to be worked. For some years, however, it will accommodate travellers to 'Sinai,' Petra, and long Desert. Moreover, there is now no climate in Lower Egypt like that of 'Suez the Sanitarium;' it has none of the wet reeking heat of Alexandria, or the raw rheumatic damp of Cairo, which tree-planting, street-flooding, and irrigation have so soon changed from good to bad. It is a treat to breathe the ozoned air of Gulf and Desert, a sensation sui generis like the flavour of Nile-water. Those who seek the Cairo-climate of 1852 must find it at Thebes or at Philæ.
"At the Suez Hôtel I found Colonel (now Sir Charles) Warren and his party. They had lately arrived from Ismailíyeh, whither they had been driven by the illness of one of the subalterns; a fiery march of a hundred and twenty miles without water had caused a sunstroke. Here, too, were Mr. and Miss Charrington, and Messieurs Gill and Houndle, and Captain Stephenson of H.M.S. Carysfort occasionally put in an appearance. Having all one and the same occupation and preoccupation, we discussed the chances pro and con most anxiously. The general conclusion was that the deaths were 'not proven.' At the same time the cumulative circumstantial evidence was strong against hope of saving life; also the negative proof that of the many Bedawi witnesses daily examined not one could state that he had heard of a survivor. And yet there was still a bare chance. For some weeks a white man had been reported to be wandering about the wilderness. At Ghazzah (Gaza), the turbulent, half-Bedawi town in Southern Syria, a Fellah, Mohammed bin Khaysh, had mentioned the rumour to some Christian acquaintances as lately as November 10th. He refused to communicate with the Rev. Mr. Schapira, the Church Missionary there stationed; but his story appeared credible enough. The white man, looking talkhán (sick and sorry), had fallen in with a wandering tribe (name not specified) near El-'Akabah, and had accosted one of them, saying after Arab-fashion, 'Ana fi 'irzak'—'I am under thy protection!' When the search became hot, the white man, who may have been the dragoman or the servant, was carried inland, but where, deponent could not specify. Also at Ghazzah an English-made gun had been brought in, showing direct communication with the plunderers.
"And here it may be well to note that the original and universally accepted account of the murder was a mere fabrication. It stated that the captives 'had been led by the Governor of Nakhil' (the Fort El-Nakhl, midway between Suez and El-'Akabah) 'to the edge of a precipice, and had there been offered the alternative of throwing themselves over or of being shot. Professor Palmer covered his eyes with his hand and leapt, and Messieurs Gill and Charrington chose the other alternative, and were shot.' This romance, which utterly ignored the two servants, dragoman and cook, was the invention of some 'Own Correspondent,' telegraphed from Cairo on October 26th. Being of the category circumstantial and picturesque, it at once found its way into the newspapers of the civilized world; and it caused sore doubts to rise in the minds of all experts. No wonder that Colonel Warren was displeased by the publication of the silly tale.
"The next account appeared in El-Ahrám (Les Pyramides) of November 8th. The details were literally correct; it mentioned the guide Abú Sufíh; the attack in the Wady Sadr; the destruction of the whole party, including the servants, and the disappearance of the £3000 in gold. I had hoped to see the extract reprinted by the Egyptian Gazette, but Le Phare had been beforehand, and professional sensitiveness left the public in ignorance.
"Mr. Walter Besant, in his biographical sketch of Professor Palmer (Athenæum, November 11th) preceding his detailed memoir, declared that he would be grateful for any information likely to make it more complete. I therefore make no apology for intruding my few personal reminiscences upon the reader.
"On July 11, 1870, when we were in summer quarters at Bludán, Anti-Libanus, I suddenly found two Englishmen camping with a gypsy-tent below the garden. These were Palmer and C. F. Tyrwhitt-Drake, brown and sunburnt by travel in the service of the 'Sinai Survey Expedition' led by Captain (now Sir Charles) Wilson. They proved the most pleasant of companions during a trip to Ba'albak, to the sources of the Litani (not Leontes), and to the unvisited crests of the northern Lebanon. We parted at the Cedars, promising ourselves to meet again, and we did live and travel together often afterwards. How little we thought that within four years one would find a grave at Jerusalem, the victim of its fatal climate; and that the other would return to seek death on the scene of his old labours!
"Of Palmer I remarked that he was a born linguist, a rarity among all races except, perhaps, the Armenian. He had the linguistic instinct, an insight which required only to hear or to be shown a tongue. He mastered it as a musical genius learns an instrument; he picked up words, sentences, and idioms like a clever child with the least possible study of grammar and syntax. The truth is, he was supra grammaticans. During his energetic winter wanderings he had collected a whole vocabulary of Bedawi words, and he evidently revelled, like the late Percy Smythe, Lord Strangford, in his exceptional power of appreciating dialectic differences. He read and wrote Arabic like English, and he took delight in surprising the people by out-of-the-way phrases, by peculiar forms of blessing and unblessing, and by the rhymed prose of the 'Thousand Nights and a Night.' He kept also for times of need a vocabulary which terrified the superstitious: this served his turn amongst the vagrant bandits of Petra and the Nejeb, or South Country. He then knew something of Hindostani, which he afterwards cultivated, and which assisted him in so mastering the Romani (Gypsy) dialect, that he printed metrical translations in Mr. Leland's volume. Although he had learned Persian in London and at Cambridge, he spoke it as well as I could, and he had acquired the pure Shirázi twang. Lamenting his ignorance of German and the Scandinavian tongues, which he mastered at a later period, he proposed to devote three years to Arabia, Persia, and Egypt. Diis aliter visum! His last volume, 'Hindūstāni, Persian, and Arabic,' one of 'Trübner's Collection of Simplified Grammars,' a series which will suffer by his loss, lies before me; and I note with sorrow that his translation of Háfiz, a taste for which he had carefully trained himself, will lack the delicate final touches.
"Returning to England in the summer of 1870, Palmer published his valuable reports, memoirs, and papers in the organ of the Palestine Exploration Fund. He also printed, in two volumes (Bell and Daldy, 1871), 'The Desert of the Exodus,' a popular account of his two walking journeys, in company with Tyrwhitt-Drake, and without dragoman or servants, which occupied parts of 1869 and 1870. He had not then learnt that the so-called 'Sinai' is simply a modern forgery, dating probably after the second century A.D.; that the Jewish nation never knew where the true 'Mountain of the Law' was; that it is differently placed by St. Paul and his contemporary Josephus, who describes it after the fashion of Sinbad the Sailor; that the first Mount Sinai (Jebel Sarbál) was invented by the Copts, the second (Jebel Musa) by the Greeks, the third (also Jebel Musa) by the Moslems, and the fourth (Jebel Safsáfeh) by Dr. Robinson the American; that the Exodists would naturally travel by the present Haj highway from Suez to El-'Akabah; and that learned Jews now incline to the belief that the real Tor Síná lay somewhere in the Tíh Desert north of the great Pilgrimage-line. Jebel Aráif has, as far as we know, the strongest claims. Moreover, Palmer insisted upon translating, with the vulgar, 'Tíh' by 'Wilderness of the Wanderings,' when it means a wilderness where man may wander. Much friendly banter upon these points passed between us as often as we met in Syria and London, and, finally, he seemed to agree in opinion with me. I may note that his details concerning the Bedawi of the 'Phárán Peninsula,' as it is called by my late friend, Dr. Charles Beke, require copious revision; and it is to be hoped that Colonel Warren will correct them and supply the deficiencies.