The Circe of the deserts

by Paule Henry-Bordeaux

And when Lady Hester, grown old, without soldiers, without money, in her ruined castle of the Lebanon, engaged in a savage and perpetual struggle with her terrible enemy, the Emir Bechir, will cry to an officer who was laying down his pistols and his sabre at the door of Tier room: "Take up thine arms! Dost thou think then that I am afraid of thee or thy master? I do not know what fear is. It is for him and those who serve him to tremble. And let not his son the Emir Khalil dare to place his foot here. I will kill him; it will not be my people who will shoot him; I will kill him myself with my own hand"; is it not easy to imagine that Zenobia would have used the same violence of language?

And of which might a biographer have written: "Her chastity was vaunted like her courage and she knew not love save for glory." Of Zenobia or of Lady Hester?

Only, only there always arrives a moment in which comparison stops; here it falls into an abyss. Zenobia was Queen. She ruled a people; she defended at once her country and her warlike renown. She had an object—an object of conquests to create an empire.

Lady Hester was a tourist. She conducted into the vast world the idle fancies of an empty heart. She defended her reputation of eccentric woman by vengeance, by bravado and by ennui. When a woman begins to know that she is eccentric, she is speedily unendurable. As for political designs, did Lady Hester think of resuming on her own account the project of a Palmyrian empire. Bruce insinuated it, not without some irony. Perhaps he did not feel an inclination to play to the life the part of a Longinus, delivered up by Zenobia without remorse, condemned to death and walking to execution with a resigned serenity! Who knows if she will not reveal herself another Zenobia, thought he, musing, and if she were not destined to bring back Palmyra to its former splendour?

Perhaps will she form a matrimonial connection—the expression is his—with Ebu Sihoud, the King of the Wahabis. Oh! evidently, he was not represented as a very amorous object. He had a harsh look, a bronzed skin, and a black beard and disposition, but he was undoubtedly the richest monarch in the whole world. After the sack of 1806, strings of camels had left Mecca, carrying to Derayeh, the white Wahabi capital, defended by its thick woods of palm-trees and its ramparts of piled-up date-stones, all the presents which the faithful disciples of Mohammed had sent to the prophet's tomb since the beginning of the Hegira. Throne of massive gold incrusted with pearls and diamonds, the gift of a gorgeous King of Persia who had done much killing, crowns enriched with precious stones, lamps of silver and emerald, diamonds of the size of walnuts. That is sufficient to tempt the most sensible of young women, even if the prospective husband possesses a savage character and a sanguinary reputation. And for a sportswoman, what attraction in the sight of the royal stables? Eighty white mares with skins shining like silver, ranged in a single row, so incomparable and so exactly alike that one could not recognise one from the other, and one hundred and twenty others of different coats and admirably shaped!

As so many less celebrated households, Ebu Sihoud and Hester Stanhope, sacrificing love to ambition, would join hands, would bring a great revolution into religion and politics and shake the throne of the Sultan to its base.

Would a general be required? By Jupiter! General Oakes was distinctly marked out. How agreeable it would be to him to learn the art of war under the orders of a chief so distinguished! And these Wahabis! Ah! what a magnificent people! Like the barbarians rolling in hordes, with women, children and baggage, over the wreck of the Roman Empire, they formed an immense army, which was transported from one desert to another with dizzy rapidity. These shepherds were warriors with all their souls. Let Turkey take care! Despite the victories of Mahomet Ali, they extended their empire from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea. Bruce divined the prophecy that a warrior of Ebu Sihoud had proclaimed several years before: "The time approaches in which we shall see an Arab seated on the throne of the Caliphs. We have long enough languished under the yoke of a usurper!"

But the night enveloped the recollections, and Bruce went to bed, abandoning the phantoms of Aurelian, Zenobia and the Wahabis to the thin crescent moon which was streaking with silver the sadness of the ruins.

Lady Hester, having learned of the gossip of all fashionable Palmyra on the subject of the treasures which she was reputed to seek, adopted a radical means of getting rid for ever of such a belief. She called for her horse, and the sheik of the village followed her on foot. The poor little tired-out man, little curious to admire the ruins amidst which he had always lived, trotting behind, perspiring and puffing, demanded mercy and confessed himself beaten. Surrounded by children and women skipping like slougheis and running under the horses' hoofs to point out the best way across the network of ruins, the travellers reached the Saracen castle, whose flayed-alive walls dominated Palmyra. They leant their elbows on the remains of the ramparts. At their feet, slept the buried queen of the desert. These endless rose-coloured columns appeared at a distance the plaything of some child giant forgotten on the sand. Soon tired, the child has walked on his fragile constructions, and the arcades and the temples have fallen in; some sections of the walls which have escaped this joyous massacre alone remain. Feathery palm-trees and pale banana-trees, like green favours which little fingers have thrown to earth, spring up at random.

At the warm sulphur springs of Ephca, Lady Hester attended the bath of a young married Bedouin woman. In former times, the girls of Palmyra, "proud and tender at the same time, born of the mingling of the races of Greece and Asia, passed for the most beautiful of the East." The beauty of the women had survived empires, palaces and temples, and the sheiks of the desert came continually to the ruins of Tadmore in search of wives, for whom they paid very dearly.