Deprived of my companion, I resolved to waste no time in the Red Sea, but to return to Egypt with the utmost expedition. The boy Mohammed having laid in a large store of grain, purchased with my money, having secured all my disposable articles, and having hinted that, after my return to India, a present of twenty dollars would find him at Meccah, asked leave, and departed with a coolness for which I could not account. Some days afterwards Shaykh Nur explained the cause. I had taken the youth with me on board the steamer, where a bad suspicion crossed his mind. Now, I understand, said the boy Mohammed to his fellow-servant, your master is a Sahib from India; he hath laughed at our beards.
[p.272] He parted as coolly from Shaykh Nur. These worthy youths had been drinking together, when Mohammed, having learned at Stambul the fashionable practice of Bad-masti, or liquor-vice, dug his fives into Nurs eye. Nur erroneously considering such exercise likely to induce blindness, complained to me; but my sympathy was all with the other side. I asked the Hindi why he had not returned the compliment, and the Meccan once more overwhelmed the Miyan with taunt and jibe.
It is not easy to pass the time at Jeddah. In the square opposite to us was an unhappy idiot, who afforded us a melancholy spectacle. He delighted to wander about in a primitive state of toilette, as all such wretches do; but the people of Jeddah, far too civilised to retain Moslem respect for madness, forced him, despite shrieks and struggles, into a shirt, and when he tore it off they beat him. At other times the open space before us was diversified by the arrival and the departure of pilgrims, but it was a mere rechauffe of the feast, and had lost all power to please. Whilst the boy Mohammed remained, he used to pass the time in wrangling with some Indians, who were living next door to us, men, women, and children, in a promiscuous way. After his departure I used to spend my days at the Vice-Consulate; the proceeding was not perhaps of the safest, but the temptation of meeting a fellow-countryman, and of chatting shop about the service was too great to be resisted. I met there the principal merchants of Jeddah; Khwajah Sower, a Greek; M. Anton, a Christian from Baghdad, and others.[FN#11]And I was introduced to Khalid Bey, brother of Abdullah bin Saud, the Wahhabi. This noble Arab once held the
[p.273] official position of Mukayyid al-Jawabat, or Secretary, at Cairo, where he was brought up by Mohammed Ali. He is brave, frank, and unprejudiced, fond of Europeans, and a lover of pleasure. Should it be his fate to become chief of the tribe, a journey to Riyaz, and a visit to Central Arabia, will offer no difficulties to our travellers.
I now proceed to the last of my visitations. Outside the town of Jeddah lies no less a personage than Sittna Hawwa, the Mother of mankind. The boy Mohammed and I, mounting asses one evening, issued through the Meccan gate, and turned towards the North-East over a sandy plain. After half an hours ride, amongst dirty huts and tattered coffee-hovels, we reached the enceinte, and found the door closed. Presently a man came running with might from the town; he was followed by two others; and it struck me at the time they applied the key with peculiar empressement, and made inordinately low conges as we entered the enclosure of whitewashed walls.
The Mother is supposed to lie, like a Moslemah, fronting the Kaabah, with her feet northwards, her head southwards, and her right cheek propped by her right hand. Whitewashed, and conspicuous to the voyager and traveller from afar, is a diminutive dome with an opening to the West; it is furnished as such places usually are in Al-Hijaz. Under it and in the centre is a square stone, planted upright and fancifully carved, to represent the omphalic region of the human frame. This, as well as the dome, is called Al-Surrah, or the navel. The cicerone directed me to kiss this manner of hieroglyph, which I did, thinking the while, that, under the circumstances, the salutation was quite uncalled-for. Having prayed here, and at the head, where a few young trees grow, we walked along the side of the two parallel dwarf walls which define the outlines of the body: they are about six paces apart, and between them, upon Eves
[p.274] neck, are two tombs, occupied, I was told, by Osman Pasha and his son, who repaired the Mothers sepulchre. I could not help remarking to the boy Mohammed, that if our first parent measured a hundred and twenty paces from head to waist, and eighty from waist to heel, she must have presented much the appearance of a duck. To this the youth replied, flippantly, that he thanked his stars the Mother was underground, otherwise that men would lose their senses with fright.
Ibn Jubayr (twelfth century) mentions only an old dome, built upon the place where Eve stopped on the way to Meccah. Yet Al-Idrisi (A.D. 1154) declares Eves grave to be at Jeddah. Abd al-Karim (1742) compares it to a parterre, with a little dome in the centre, and the extremities ending in barriers of palisades; the circumference was a hundred and ninety of his steps. In Rookes Travels we are told that the tomb is twenty feet long. Ali Bey, who twice visited Jeddah, makes no allusion to it; we may therefore conclude that it had been destroyed by the Wahhabis. Burckhardt, who, I need
[p.275] scarcely say, has been carefully copied by our popular authors, was informed that it was a rude structure of stone, about four feet in length, two or three feet in height, and as many in breadth; thus resembling the tomb of Noah, seen in the valley of Al-Bukaa in Syria. Bruce writes: Two days journey from this place (? Meccah or Jeddah) Eves grave, of green sods, about fifty yards in length, is shown to this day; but the great traveller probably never issued from the town-gates. And Sir W. Harris, who could not have visited the Holy Place, repeats, in 1840, that Eves grave of green sod is still shown on the barren shore of the Red Sea. The present structure is clearly modern; anciently, I was told at Jeddah, the sepulchre consisted of a stone at the head, a second at the feet, and the navel-dome.
The idol of Jeddah, in the days of Arab litholatry, was called Sakhrah Tawilah, the Long Stone. May not this stone of Eve be the Moslemized revival of the old idolatry? It is to be observed that the Arabs, if the tombs be admitted as evidence, are inconsistent in their dimensions of the patriarchal stature. The sepulchre of Adam at the Masjid al-Khayf is, like that of Eve, gigantic. That of Noah at Al-Bukaa is a bit of Aqueduct thirty-eight paces long by one and a half wide. Jobs tomb near Hulah (seven parasangs from Kerbela) is small. I have not seen the grave of Moses (south-east of the Red Sea), which is becoming known by the bitumen cups there sold to pilgrims. But Aarons sepulchre in the Sinaitic peninsula is of moderate dimensions.