The subtle veil of beams,
as the poet of “Palm-leaves” has it. The sky is terrible in its pitiless splendours and blinding beauty while the simoon, or wind of the wild, caresses the cheek with the flaming breath of a lion. The filmy spray of sand and the upseething of the atmosphere, the heat-reek and the dancing of the air upon the baked surface of the bright yellow soil, blending with the dazzling blue above, invests the horizon with a broad band of deep dark green, and blurs the gaunt figures of the camels, which, at a distance, appear strings of gigantic birds.
There are evidently eight degrees of pilgrims. The lowest walk, propped on heavy staves; these are the itinerant coffee-makers, sherbet sellers, and tobacconists, country folks driving flocks of sheep and goats with infinite clamour and gesticulation, negroes from distant Africa, and crowds of paupers, some approaching the supreme hour, but therefore yearning the more to breathe their last in the Holy City. Then come the humble riders of laden camels, mules, and asses, which the Bedouin, who clings baboon-like to the hairy back of his animal, despises, saying:—
Honourable to the rider is the riding of the horse;
But the mule is a dishonour, and a donkey a disgrace.
Respectable men mount dromedaries, or blood-camels, known by their small size, their fine limbs, and their large deer-like eyes: their saddles show crimson sheep-skins between tall metal pommels, and these are girthed over fine saddle-bags, whose long tassels of bright worsted hang almost to the ground.
Irregular soldiers have picturesquely equipped steeds. Here and there rides some old Arab shaykh, preceded by his varlets performing a war-dance, compared with which the bear’s performance is graceful, firing their duck-guns in the air, or blowing powder into the naked legs of those before them, brandishing their bared swords, leaping frantically with parti-coloured rags floating in the wind, and tossing high their long spears. Women, children, and invalids of the poorer classes sit upon rugs or carpets spread over the large boxes that form the camel’s load. Those a little better off use a shibriyah, or short coat, fastened crosswise. The richer prefer shugduf panniers with an awning like a miniature tent. Grandees have led horses and gorgeously painted takhtrawan—litters like the bangué of Brazil—borne between camels or mules with scarlet and brass trappings. The vehicle mainly regulates the pilgrim’s expenses, which may vary from five pounds to as many thousands.
I will not describe the marches in detail: they much resemble those between Yambu and El Medinah. We nighted at two small villages, El Suwayrkiyah and El Suyayna, which supplied a few provisions to a caravan of seven thousand to eight thousand souls. For the most part it is a haggard land, a country of wild beasts and wilder men, a region whose very fountains murmur the warning words, “Drink and away,” instead of “Rest and be thankful.” In other places it is a desert peopled only with echoes, an
abode of death for what little there is to die in it, a waste where, to use an Arab phrase, “La Siwa Hu”—“There is none but He.” Gigantic sand columns whirl over the plains, the horizon is a sea of mirage, and everywhere Nature, flayed and scalped, discovers her skeleton to the gazer’s eye.
We passed over many ridges of rough black basalt, low plains, and basins white with nitrous salt, acacia barrens where litters were torn off the camels’ backs by the strong thorns, and domes and streets of polished rock. Now we travelled down dry torrent-beds of extreme irregularity, then we wended our way along cliffs castellated as if by men’s hand, and boulders and pillars of coarse-grained granite, sometimes thirty feet high. Quartz abounded, and the country may have contained gold, but here the superficial formation has long since been exhausted. In Arabia, as in the East Indies, the precious metal still lingers. At Cairo in 1854 I obtained good results by washing sand brought from the coast of the Red Sea north of Wijh. My plan for working was rendered abortive by a certain dictum, since become a favourite with the governing powers in England—namely, “Gold is getting too plentiful.”