The Circe of the deserts

by Paule Henry-Bordeaux

And here is the substance:

Fatalla and Lascaris, under the name of Sheik Ibrahim (decidedly Europeans have a weakness for this pseudonym), set out for Homs in February 1810, ostensibly to sell their red cotton and their glass-ware, in reality to prepare ways for Napoleon when his armies, on the march for the Indies, should cross the desert. A Bedouin of the name of Hassan conducted them to Palmyra, where they made the acquaintance of Mahannah and Nasr. They remained some time with this tribe, returned to Palmyra, passed the winter at Damascus at the house of M. Chabassau (evidently the eternal Dr. Chaboceau), and in the spring of 1811 tried their chance with the Drayhy—the celebrated destroyer of the Turks—and gained his friendship. There remained the Wahabis, who would certainly oppose the success of the French project. Lascaris drew up against them a treaty of alliance with all the Bedouins of the desert. He scoured the country so far as beyond the Tigris; Fatalla lent his eloquence to the cause, and the treaty was covered with signatures. More than 500,000 Bedouins allied themselves thus to them. In the spring of 1813, a battle which lasted more than forty days was fought at the gates of Hama, between 150,000 Wahabis and 80,000 Bedouins and Turks. The Wahabis were defeated. Then Fatalla accompanied the Drayhy to the terrible Ebu-Sihoud, King of the Wahabis, and contributed to reconcile the two. Lascaris, his mission accomplished, started for Constantinople, where he arrived in April, 1814, just to hear of Napoleon's defeats and the fruitlessness of his efforts. Grievously stricken by this unexpected blow, he reached Cairo under an English passport, and died in misery. Mr. Salt, the English consul, plundered his clothes and his manuscripts.

Lascaris would, then, have performed the greater part of his circuits among the nomads before the arrival of the doctor. Well, during the journey which they accomplished together, the first asserted that he had never seen Palmyra, at a time when, according to Fatalla, he had been there twice in the course of the year 1810. Affair of tactics perhaps to baffle a rival.

But what is of more importance, is that neither Mahannah-el-Fadel nor the principal chiefs encountered recognised the famous Sheik Ibrahim. Ought we, then, to imagine a prodigious watchword given by Lascaris to the entire desert? It is impossible.

Elsewhere improbabilities embellish agreeably the histories of Fatalla. Nasr, he recounts, was killed in 1811 in the wars between the Drayhy and Mahannah. Zaher, son of the Drayhy, brought him down with a lance-thrust, then "cut his body in pieces, placed it in a basket and sent it to Mahannah's camp by a prisoner whose nose he had cut off." Well, a year later, this unfortunate young man, in wonderfully good health, paid a visit to Lady Hester, then at Damascus, to dissuade her from going to Palmyra. Lascaris had a short memory; he had already forgotten the encampment near Karyatein in January, 1813, from which he accompanied Nasr to search for provisions in the village. Both returned, besides, with an empty bag.

It is Nasr again who, in the spring of 1813, escorted Lady Hester to Palmyra and behaved himself in a horrible and brutal manner. Two years later, Mahannah wrote to "the Queen," who was settled at Mar-Elias, to beg her to intervene with the Pacha of Damascus in favour of Nasr, who had wrought great havoc in the full granaries of the Governor of Hama. This dead man clung to life tenaciously! As for the relations of Lascaris with Lady Hester, they are very whimsical and demand some rectifications.

Fatalla pretends that it is in the spring of 1812 that he learned of the arrival of a princess, daughter of the King of England, in Syria, where she was displaying a royal luxury. She had overwhelmed with magnificent presents Mahannah-el-Fadel and had made him escort her to Palmyra, where she had distributed her bounty with profusion and had acquired a formidable party amongst the Bedouins, who had proclaimed her queen. Lascaris felt very much alarmed at this news, believing that he saw in it an intrigue to ruin his plans.

At this period, Lady Hester had scarcely disembarked from Egypt and was on the way to Jerusalem. The Palmyra project, if it existed already, was still informal and secret.

But Fatalla does not confine himself to one error. According to his version, Lascaris received an invitation from Lady Hester to go to her at Hama, as well as his wife, who had remained at St. Jean d'Acre. This invitation annoyed him the more, inasmuch as for three years he had avoided giving her news, leaving her in ignorance of the place of his residence and of his intimacy with the Bedouins. He conveyed to his wife, by special courier, the order to refuse. It was too late; Madame Lascaris, alarmed about this phantom husband, had already accepted. This model household was reunited then under the benevolent auspices of Lady Hester, who, after having essayed in vain by adroit questions to obtain from him some explanation in regard to his relations with the Bedouins, assumed at the end a tone of authority which afforded Lascaris a pretext for a rupture. He sent his wife back to Acre and left Lady Hester, having fallen out completely with her.

It is not after Lady Hester's expedition to Palmyra, but before, that Lascaris places the episode. The proofs accumulate to annul Fatalla's evidence. On November 3, 1812, the doctor visited Lascaris and his martial spouse. In her expedition to Mahannah-el-Fadel, Lady Hester took both husband and wife. And her invitation to Hama cannot reunite the Lascaris, since they were not separated. Then, in January, 1813, there is the arrival in Mahannah's camp of Madame Lascaris, of the famous Fatalla and of the bales of merchandise. As for the tone of authority which Hester assumes in endeavouring to thwart the secret mission which Lascaris had received from Napoleon, the doctor, who wrote his journal methodically every day, shows the improbability of it. And his lack of imagination, that ingenuousness which causes him to record all the incidents of the journey without understanding them, is the surest guarantee of his veracity.