By Desert Ways to Baghdad

by Louisa Jebb Wilkins

"Pas possible, mademoiselle," he said.

Ibrahim stood in the stable door, smoking complacently, and our muleteers were squabbling violently over the roping of a box.

It was at this moment that I stepped up to Ibrahim and showed him my watch. He looked at me with a startled expression, his jaw dropped, and he turned hastily on the muleteers. But it was not till later that I learnt how his inmost susceptibilities had been roused. One is at a decided disadvantage with no knowledge of a suitable language, but by dint of gesticulating with my riding-whip and pointing at everybody in turn, I managed, at the end of another half-hour, to get the araba and the men under way, and mounting my own horse rode behind them to the hotel. In another five minutes we had sallied out on our road. X and I rode ahead with Ibrahim and Calphopolos and the two Zaptiehs, then came the araba with our baggage and the muleteers, then Constantin with bulging saddle-bags suggesting the intrusion of various forbidden cooking utensils.

Our road ran unshaded and dusty through the outskirts of Brusa, with Mount Olympus towering above us. Bit by bit we left behind the staring tourists, the staring native children, the unconcerned stall-keepers displaying their wares of Brusa silk and printed cottons from England; then we passed the country people riding in on mules with their vegetables and chickens; we passed the little cultivated patches and got amongst the larger fields, stretching away on each side of the road. "Tutun," said Ibrahim, pointing at them with his riding-whip. I looked at him inquiringly. He tapped his cigarette and pointed again at the field.

"Tutun," he repeated. "Tobacco, you understand, mademoiselle, tobacco—such as he is now smoking." Calphopolos always would insist on explaining the obvious. The day got hotter and the road got dustier. At midday we skirted a willow plantation, and a stream gurgled through the damp green patch, inviting us to come in and rest. We crawled out of the sun under the low willow bushes, and the men tied the horses to the stronger branches. This first lunching place will always remain indelibly printed on my memory: the slices of brown bread thickly spread with solid cream; the watermelons and the grapes; the men grouped about amongst the willows, eating great hunches of bread and cheese; the horses breaking loose and straying about, browsing the finer herbage which sprang up through the dried and yellow tufts of older grass; the joy of being out of the sun and the dust; the cool sound of the water in the brook; the sense of rest and freedom, the sense of having really escaped at last.... On recalling this lunch with X, after many adventures had made it seem very remote, I found that she retained equally vivid recollections of it. I heard her murmur reflectively to herself, "And we thought it was always going to be like that!"

Then we had reluctantly left it all, the unwilling horses were pulled and dragged away, snatching at last bites, and we rode off on the dusty road again, until we reached the village near which we had arranged to camp. We had ridden round and chosen this site in the middle of the mysterious hillocks, which shut us out so effectually from everything except the stars.

We were destined to spend many more such nights in camp; but perhaps none can give you exactly the same thrill as the one on which for the first time you sleep out in the open.

It is full of surprises; you expect it to be quiet, and you find the darkness and stillness is full of noise. Nothing escapes you: the breathing of men and animals, the crackling of the fire, the rustling of leaves and grass: there seems to be a continuous movement very close to you. You sit up many times expecting to see something in your tent; it all makes you very wakeful. You drop off into a disturbed sleep very late, and are awakened before sunrise by the stir in the camp. You are positive you have not slept all night and that strange people have been prowling round you in the dark.

Yet as one lay in this semi-wakeful state of excitement and mystery, one's strongest impression was that of wanting protection merely against a few primitive forces; with the wild beasts we shared the dangers of cold and hunger and attacks from man. Slowly and painfully you have crawled out of the net in which you have all this time been unconsciously enveloped, and emerging stripped and bewildered grope about for what is actually going to serve and protect you in this primeval state of battling against the primitive forces of nature; a state, moreover, where protection against the dictates of an organised society is no longer needed. To those who are confronted with this problem for the first time, it is almost impossible to walk straight out of the net and have an impartial look round. Tradition still clings to us in little bits, and we grope hopelessly about, wondering what will be an essential and what will not.

Looking back now on these first few days of preparation for our journey in the wilderness, I realise that by far the hardest part of the journey was this initial disentanglement from the forces of tradition. If you are about to alter fundamentally your method of living, you must take care that you are discarding all those accessories which are due to tradition; you must either adopt those evolved by the tradition of the races among which you are about to travel, or you must bring abstract science to bear on the question of how to provide for your immediate wants under the changed conditions. A bare tent in a country where weather is still an interesting topic is a safe place for such reflections; the realities of the situation make one strictly practical. On getting out of bed our clothes were damp with dew and the grass was cold to our bare feet; at the next town we bought the strip of carpet, the idea of which we had rejected at Constantinople.