Читать бесплатно онлайн книгу Amurath to Amurath
автор Gertrude Bell

О книге Цитаты6 Читают4 На полках Бесплатный фрагмент

Contents.

List of Illustrations
(In certain versions of this etext [in certain browsers] clicking on the image will bring up a larger version.)
Index

(etext transcriber's note)

AMURATH TO AMURATH

HUNTING CAMPS IN WOOD AND WILDERNESS

By H. Hesketh Prichard, author of “Through the Heart of Patagonia,” etc. Illustrated in Colour and Black-and-white by E. G. Caldwell, Lady Helen Graham, and from numerous Photographs. In one Volume. Crown 4to, price 15s. net.

A VOICE FROM THE CONGO

By Herbert Ward. With many Illustrations. In one Volume. Demy 8vo, price 10s. net.

THE HEART OF THE ANTARCTIC

(Popular Edition.)

By Sir Ernest Shackleton, C.V.O. Fully Illustrated with Coloured and Black-and-white Illustrations, and a Map. In one Volume. Crown 8vo, price 6s. net.

ON AND OFF DUTY IN ANNAM

By Gabrielle M. Vassal. With many Illustrations from Photographs. In one Volume. Demy 8vo, price 10s. net.

London: William Heinemann, 21 Bedford Street, W.C.

THE MONASTERY OF RABBÂN HORMUZD.

AMURATH
TO AMURATH

BY
GERTRUDE LOWTHIAN BELL
Author of “The Desert and the Sown,” &c.

ILLUSTRATED

LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN
MCMXI

We wither away but they wane not, the stars that above us rise; The mountains remain after us, and the strong towers when we are gone. Labîd ibn Rabî’ah.

PREFACE

Dear Lord Cromer,

When I was pursuing along the banks of the Euphrates the leisurely course of oriental travel, I would sometimes wonder, sitting at night before my tent door, whether it would be possible to cast into shape the experiences that assailed me. And in that spacious hour, when the silence of the embracing wilderness was enhanced rather than broken by the murmur of the river, and by the sounds, scarcely less primeval, that wavered round the camp fire of my nomad hosts, the task broadened out into a shape which was in keeping with the surroundings. Not only would I set myself to trace the story that was scored upon the face of the earth by mouldering wall or half-choked dyke, by the thousand vestiges of former culture which were scattered about my path, but I would attempt to record the daily life and speech of those who had inherited the empty ground whereon empires had risen and expired. Even there, where the mind ranged out unhindered over the whole wide desert, and thought flowed as smoothly as the flowing stream—even there I would realize the difficulty of such an undertaking, and it was there that I conceived the desire to invoke your aid by setting your name upon the first page of my book. To you, so I promised myself, I could make clear the intention when accomplishment lagged far behind it. To you the very landscape would be familiar, though you had never set eyes upon it: the river and the waste which determined, as in your country of the Nile, the direction of mortal energies. And you, with your profound experience of the East, have learnt to reckon with the unbroken continuity of its history. Conqueror follows upon the heels of conqueror, nations are overthrown and cities topple down into the dust, but the conditions of existence are unaltered and irresistibly they fashion the new age in the likeness of the old. “Amurath an Amurath succeeds” and the tale is told again.

Where past and present are woven so closely together, the habitual appreciation of the divisions of time slips insensibly away. Yesterday’s raid and an expedition of Shalmaneser fall into the same plane; and indeed what essential difference lies between them? But the reverberation of ancient fame sounds more richly in the ears than the voice of modern achievement. The banks of the Euphrates echo with ghostly alarums; the Mesopotamian deserts are full of the rumour of phantom armies; you will not blame me if I passed among them “trattando l’ombre come cosa salda.”

And yet there was a new note. For the first time in all the turbulent centuries to which those desolate regions bear witness, a potent word had gone forth, and those who had caught it listened in amazement, asking one another for an explanation of its meaning. Liberty—what is liberty? I think the question that ran so perplexingly through the black tents would have received no better a solution in the royal pavilions which had once spread their glories over the plain. Idly though it fell from the lips of the Bedouin, it foretold change. That sense of change, uneasy and bewildered, hung over the whole of the Ottoman Empire. It was rarely unalloyed with anxiety; there was, it must be admitted, little to encourage an unqualified confidence in the immediate future. But one thing was certain: the moving Finger had inscribed a fresh title upon the page. I cannot pretend to a judicial indifference in this matter. I have drawn too heavily upon the good-will of the inhabitants of Asiatic Turkey to regard their fortunes with an impartial detachment. I am eager to seize upon promise and slow to be overmastered by disappointment. But I should be doing an equivocal service to a people who have given me so full a measure of hospitality and fellowship if I were to underestimate the problems that lie before them. The victories of peace are more laborious than those of war. They demand a higher integrity than that which has been practised hitherto in Turkey, and a finer conception of citizenship than any which has been current there. The old tyranny has lifted, but it has left its shadow over the land.

The five months of journeying which are recounted in this book were months of suspense and even of terror. Constitutional government trembled in the balance and was like to be outweighted by the forces of disorder, by fanaticism, massacre and civil strife. I saw the latest Amurath succeed to Amurath and rejoiced with all those who love justice and freedom to hear him proclaimed. For ’Abdu’l Ḥamîd, helpless as he may then have been in the hands of the weavers of intrigue, was the symbol for retrogression, and the triumph of his faction must have extinguished the faint light that had dawned upon his empire.

The confused beginnings which I witnessed were the translation of a generous ideal into the terms of human imperfection. Nowhere was the character of the Young Turkish movement recognized more fully than in England, and nowhere did it receive a more disinterested sympathy. Our approval was not confined to words. We have never been slow to welcome and to encourage the advancement of Turkey, and I am glad to remember that we were the first to hold out a helping hand when we saw her struggling to throw off long-established evils. If she can win a place, with a strong and orderly government, among civilized states, turning her face from martial adventure and striving after the reward that waits upon good administration and sober industry, the peace of the world will be set upon a surer basis, and therein lies our greatest advantage as well as her own. That day may yet be far off, but when it comes, as I hope it will, perhaps some one will take down this book from the shelf and look back, not without satisfaction, upon the months of revolution which it chronicles. And remembering that the return of prosperity to the peoples of the Near East began with your administration in Egypt, he will understand why I should have ventured to offer it, with respectful admiration, to you.

Gertrude Lowthian Bell.

Rounton, Oct. 1910.

NOTE

The greater part of Chapter IV appeared in the Quarterly Review, and half of Chapter VIII in Blackwood’s Magazine; I have to thank the editors of these journals for giving me permission to reprint my contributions to them. I am indebted also to the editor of the Times for allowing me to use, in describing the excavations at Babylon and at Asshur, two articles written by me which were published in the Times. The Geographical Society has printed in its journal a paper in which I have resumed the topographical results of my journey down the Euphrates. The map which accompanies this book is based upon the map of Asiatic Turkey, recently published by that society, and upon a map of the Euphrates from Tell Aḥmar to Hît which was drafted to illustrate my paper.

Mr. David Hogarth, Mr. L. W. King, Mr. O. M. Dalton and Professor Max van Berchem have furnished me with valuable notes. To Sir Charles Lyall, who has been at the pains to help me with the correcting of the proofs, I tender here my grateful thanks for this and many another kindness.

CHAP. PAGE I

ALEPPO TO TELL AḤMAR

1 II

TELL AḤMAR TO BUSEIRAH

35 III

BUSEIRAH TO HÎT

77 The Parthian Stations of Isidorus of Charax 108 IV

HÎT TO KERBELÂ

115 The Palace of Ukheiḍir 147 V

KERBELÂ TO BAGHDÂD

159 VI

BAGHDÂD TO MÔṢUL

198 The Ruins of Sâmarrâ 231 VII

MÔṢUL TO ZÂKHÔ

247 VIII

ZÂKHÔ TO DIYÂRBEKR

289 IX

DIYÂRBEKR TO KONIA

327 INDEX

Z 361

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Fattûḥ had ordered the boatmen to pull or punt the boat over to the west bank during our absence; the river was rising and the arm that we had crossed with difficulty in the morning might have been impassable by nightfall. The boat was surrounded when we arrived by every one in the district who happened to have business on the opposite bank, and recognized in our passage an unusually favourable opportunity for getting over for nothing. As soon as we had embarked, some twenty persons and four donkeys hustled in after us and were like to swamp us, but Fattûḥ rose up in anger and ejected half of them, pitching the lean and slender Arab peasants over the gunwales and into the water at haphazard until we judged the boat to be sufficiently lightened. Those who were allowed to remain earned their passage, for when we presently ran aground on the head of the island—as it was obvious to the most inexperienced eye that we must—they leapt out and wading waist high in the stream, pushed us off. So we galloped home beside the swiftly-flowing river, aglint with the sunset, and found the camp fire lighted and the cooking pots a-simmer, and Tell Aḥmar settling down to its evening meal and to rest.

My tents were pitched outside the city wall, at the extreme limit of the Roman empire, a frontier line which you must travel far to find. Did Julian, with the ominous news from Gaul in his hand, feel any misgiving when he ordered the building of the bridge over which his army was to pass to the irrevocable destruction that Sallust predicted in his letters? “No human power or virtue,” says Ammianus Marcellinus, “can prevent that which is prescribed by Fate.” Impending disaster, long since fallen, leapt again from his pages and stood spectral upon the banks of the Khâbûr.

“God forbid!” replied Fattûḥ modestly. “And now,” he proceeded, “let me bring your Excellency an omelet, for I am sure that you must be hungry.” But I understood this exaggerated solicitude to be no more than a covert slur upon the culinary powers of Mr. X.’s servant, who had provided us with an abundant lunch during Fattûḥ’s absence, and not even so voracious a consul as I could face a second meal. Fattûḥ retired in some displeasure to inform the muleteers that they would journey to Baghdâd and Kerbelâ and there rejoin us, please God.

Semiramidis Fossa was no doubt a canal; Chesney saw traces of an ancient canal below Zelebîyeh. The distance from Thillada to Basilia is not given by Isidorus. Ritter would allow 5 sch. and Herzfeld 7 sch. (Memnon, 1907, p. 92); according to my reckoning both these distances are too long. I marched from Khmeiḍah to Zelebîyeh in 3 hrs. 40 min., which implies a distance of not more than 3 sch. For the fourteenth station, Allan, Umm Rejeibah is the only possible site I saw. It is true that I reached it in 3 hrs. from Zelebîyeh, whereas Isidorus puts it 4 sch. from Basilia, but I cut straight across the hills, and if I had followed the river (i. e. from the mouth of the canal, Semiramidis Fossa) the time needed would have been considerably longer. The fifteenth station, Biunan, was conjectured by Ritter to lie opposite Deir. I saw no traces of ruins upon the left bank, though Sachau speaks of the remains of two bridges (Reise, p. 262), and I should be more inclined to look for Biunan at a nameless site mentioned by Moritz (op. cit., p. 36). The difference is not in any case of importance, for the site seen by Moritz is immediately below Deir. He would have it to be Phaliga, which is doubtless Pliny’s Phaliscum, but that suggestion is difficult to reconcile with Isidorus’s 14 sch. from Basilia to Phaliga, which brings Phaliga much nearer to Circesium. Moreover, Isidorus states that Nabagath is near Phaliga—so near that he does not trouble to give any other indication of the distance between the two stations—and as Nabagath on the Aburas cannot be other than Buseirah, Phaliga too must be close to the Khâbûr mouth. I did not see the site mentioned by Moritz because I neglected to follow the river closely immediately below Deir; if it be, as I suppose, Biunan, I cannot attempt to identify the site of Phaliga. The seventeenth station, Nabagath, is, as has been said, Circesium-Ḳarḳîsîyâ-Buseirah. The eighteenth, Asikha, I would identify with the Zeitha of Ptolemy and Ammianus Marcellinus, and with the mounds I saw at Jemmah. For the nineteenth station, Dura, I know no other site than the very striking tell of Abu’l Ḥassan, the biggest mound upon this part of the river. Müller has suggested that the mound may represent Ptolemy’s Thelda (in his edition of Ptolemy’s Geography, p. 1003). Ammianus Marcellinus also mentions “a deserted town on the river” called Dura. The army of Julian reached it in two days’ march from Zeitha, at which place the emperor had made an oration to his soldiers after sacrificing at Gordian’s tomb. Now two days’ march from Zeitha-Jemmah would bring the army to Werdî-Irzî, which is no doubt the place called by Xenophon Corsote and described by him as “a large deserted city.” It is perhaps worthy of observation that, in spite of its being deserted, Cyrus provisioned his army at Corsote and that Julian’s army found at Dura, though it too was deserted, “quantities of wild deer, so that the soldiers and sailors had plenty of food.” My own impression on the spot was that Ammianus Marcellinus’s Dura must be Irzî. The tower tombs were certainly erected before the middle of the fourth century, therefore they were in existence when Julian passed; moreover, they were far more numerous and conspicuous than they are at present, since almost all of them have now fallen into ruin. It is difficult to see how Irzî could have failed to attract the attention of Ammianus Marcellinus, and Dura is the one place mentioned by him between Zeitha and ’Ânah. But the Dura of Isidorus, the nineteenth station, has to be placed at Abu’l Ḥassan, not at Irzî, since his twentieth station, Merrhan, necessarily falls at Irzî, and I can only conjecture that, as in Julian’s time both places were ruined and deserted, Ammianus Marcellinus made a confusion between them, or was wrongly informed, and transferred the name of Dura (Abu’l Ḥassan) to Merrhan (Irzî). For the twenty-first station, Giddan, I can offer no suggestion. Jabarîyeh will scarcely fit, as it is but 13 hrs. 15 min. from ’Ânah, and Giddan was 17 sch. from Anatho, but it must be admitted that all the distances between the stations from Merrhan to ’Ânah seem to be too long according to my caravan time. The twenty-second station, Belesibiblada, was placed by Chesney at Ḳal’at Bulâḳ, and I saw no better site for it, though I took only 9 hrs. and 25 min. to reach it from Irzî, and the distance given by Isidorus is 12 sch. Ritter would place at Ḳal’at Bulâḳ Ptolemy’s Bonakhe. I do not see any way of identifying with certainty the island station, the twenty-third, which was 4 sch. from ’Ânah. There are many islands in the stream above ’Ânah. One of them, Ḳarâbileh, is reported to have ruins upon it; it was about four hours’ journey from ancient ’Ânah, and may therefore be identical with the twenty-third station, which is placed at a distance of 4 sch. from Anatho. Anatho, the twenty-fourth station, Isidorus expressly states to be on an island; it was therefore the successor to the Assyrian fortress which I believe to have existed on the island of Lubbâd. Xenophon does not mention it; nor does Ptolemy, unless his Bethanua may be taken for ’Ânah as Ritter believed (Vol. XI. p. 716). Rawâ may possibly be the Phathusa of Zosimos, but I would rather place Phathusa on the left bank, opposite and below the island of Lubbâd, where there are many mounds and ruins. I did not follow the river below ’Ânah very closely, but the ruins I saw near Ḥadîthah help to justify the presumption that Olabus was situated there. Chesney wished to identify Izannesopolis with the ruins of a castle between Baghdâdî and Hît. I did not go to the spot, and my caravan time between Ḥadîthah and Hît is therefore rather misleading, for if I had followed the river so as to visit the ḳaṣr, the journey would have taken more than the seventeen and a half hours which I have recorded. Isidorus’s 16 sch. from Izannesopolis to Aeipolis can scarcely be correct, and Kiepert’s emendation (6 instead of 16) may well be accepted.

“My lady,” said he, “God knows. ’Alî says that they

Whether that age be immediately before the Mohammadan conquest, or whether it fall shortly after the conquest, during the Umayyad period, I do not think we are as yet in a position to determine. It is to be borne in mind that the ruins of the palace bear witness to two different dates of building. The eastern annex and probably the edifice outside the enclosing wall to the north are an addition to the original plan and must be of a slightly later date.

With this I returned to the roses and green lawns of the Residency garden, to dream of brightly-robed women and far-travelled pilgrims, of the clash and contest of creeds, and of truth, which lies somewhere concealed behind them all.

“Môṣul is an evil city,” said Fattûḥ to the zaptieh.

I followed my caravan back to the Môṣul highway and so across the hills to Zâkhô. We climbed up the pass by as good a road as any in Turkey, but while we were rejoicing over its excellence, it broke off short and left us to find our way down the opposite side of the pass as best we might along a bridle-path strewn with boulders. So we came down into the valley of the Khâbûr and saw before us the snowy wall of the Kurdish Alps (Fig. 180). At the gate of the pass stands Zâkhô, “old and isolated,” as Ainsworth says, and it would be difficult to better the phrase.[173] The more ancient part of the village is built upon an island in the Khâbûr. The right arm of the river is spanned by a masonry bridge, the left arm washes round the castle, a fortress which must have had a long and checkered history, though I can find no record of it.[174] The masonry is of many different periods. The finest and probably the oldest part is an octagonal tower which juts out into the stream on the south-east side. The outer walls are all fairly well preserved and make an imposing appearance, but the interior is terribly ruinous. In the upper part of the building there is a large hall with windows opening on to the river. The engaged columns which support the interior pointed arches of these windows are covered with a delicate tracery of carving very like Seljuk work of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. This part of the castle cannot be dated later than the fourteenth century, but the foundations and the octagonal tower must be considerably older. Last of all the Turkish garrison has supplemented the ancient work with wretched structures of rubble and mortar, and these, too, have fallen into ruin and have been given over to the storks, who nest contentedly among them. In Zâkhô lies buried the first missionary to Kurdistân, the Dominican Soldini, who died here in 1779. The quarter that stands upon the right bank of the Khâbûr is mainly Christian and contains, I believe, two small churches of no very great age, but my curiosity was quenched before I reached them, by a violent thunderstorm which drove me back to my tents. It swept down the valley from Amadîyeh, and rolling away, left the mountains so magically beautiful that I could give no further thought to any architecture but that of their white pinnacles and spires.

Even this hasty survey of Diyârbekr was sufficient to convince me that the treasures which it contains are still unexplored. Of its many mosques only the Ulu Jami’ has been so much as photographed, though the square minarets scattered over the town are probably an indication of an early date. Once or twice as I walked in the bazaars I looked through gateways into the courts of splendid khâns, where the walls were decorated with contrasted patterns in limestone and basalt, and stripes of black and white masonry are used in many of the houses and mosques. The final history of Amida must wait upon a much more careful investigation of the town than any which has yet been undertaken.

PAGE THE MONASTERY OF RABBÂN HORMUZD Frontispiece 1. ALEPPO, THE CITADEL To face 10 2. ALEPPO, HITTITE LION IN CITADEL ”10 3. BASALT EAGLE IN THE FRENCH CONSULATE ”10 4. ALEPPO, JÂMI’ ESH SHAIBÎYEH, CORNICE ”11 5. FIRDAUS, MEDRESSEH OF EL MALIK EẒ ẒÂHIR ”11 6. ALEPPO, JÂMI’ EL ḤELAWÎYEH ”12 7. FIRDAUS, A TOMB ”12 8. ALEPPO, A MAMLÛK DOME ”13 9. ALEPPO, A MAMLÛK DOME ”13 10. KHÂN EL WAZÎR ”14 11. KHÂN ES SABÛN ”14 12. WINDOW OF A TURBEH, FIRDAUS ”15 13. GATE OF CITADEL, ALEPPO ”15 14. ALEPPO, THE GREAT MOSQUE ”26 15. TELL AḤMAR FERRY ”26 16. TELL AḤMAR ”27 17. CARCHEMISH FROM THE BIG MOUND ”27 18. TELL AḤMAR, HITTITE STELA ”30 19. TELL AḤMAR, EARTHENWARE JAR ”30 20. SERRÎN, NORTHERN TOWER TOMB ”31 21. SERRÎN, SOUTHERN TOWER TOMB ”31 22. SERRÎN, NORTH TOWER TOMB, PLAN AND ELEVATION SHOWING MOULDINGS 36 23. INSCRIPTION IN CAVE NEAR SERRÎN 40 24. WIFE AND CHILDREN OF A WELDEH SHEIKH To face 46 25. PLAN OF MUNBAYAH 45 26. MUNBAYAH, WATER GATE To face 47 27. NESHABAH, TOWER TOMB ”47 28. MAḤALL ES ṢAFṢÂF 49 29. ḲAL’AT JA’BAR To face 50 30. ḲAL’AT JA’BAR, MINARET ”50 31. ḲAL’AT JA’BAR, HALL OF PALACE ”51 32. ḲAL’AT JA’BAR, BRICK WALL ABOVE GATEWAY ”51 33. ḤARAGLAH 53 34. ḤARAGLAH, VAULT To face 52 35. RAḲḲAH, EASTERN MINARET ”52 36. RAḲḲAH, PLAN OF MOSQUE AND SECTIONS OF PIERS 57 37. RAḲḲAH, MOSQUE FROM EAST To face 53 38. RAḲḲAH, ARCADE OF MOSQUE, FROM NORTH ”53 39. RAḲḲAH, CAPITALS OF ENGAGED COLUMNS, MOSQUE{xiv} ”56 40. RAḲḲAH, PALACE ”56 41. RAḲḲAH, DETAIL OF STUCCO ORNAMENT, PALACE ”57 42. RAḲḲAH, DOMED CHAMBER IN PALACE ”57 43. RAḲḲAH, BAGHDÂD GATE FROM EAST ”58 44. RAḲḲAH, INTERIOR OF BAGHDÂD GATE ”58 45. RAḲḲAH, BAGHDÂD GATE RECONSTRUCTED 59 46. ḤALEBÎYEH To face 59 47. IRZÎ, TOWER TOMB 83 48. IRZÎ, TOWER TOMB To face 84 49. NAOURA OF ’AJMÎYEH ”84 50. THE INHABITANTS OF RAWÂ ”85 51. ’ÂNAH FROM THE ISLAND OF LUBBÂD ”94 52. ’ÂNAH, A FISHERMAN ”95 53. HÎT, PITCH-SPRING ”95 54. HÎT ”104 55. HÎT, THE SULPHUR MARSHES ”104 56. MINARET ON ISLAND OF LUBBÂD ”105 57. MINARET AT MA’MÛREH ”105 58. MADLÛBEH ”105 59. MA’MÛREH, MINARET 106 60. HÎT, THE BITUMEN FURNACES To face 108 61. THE EUPHRATES AT HÎT ”108 62. THE WELL AT KEBEISAH ”109 63. ’AIN ZA’ZU ”109 64. ḲAṢR KHUBBÂZ AND RUINS OF THE TANK ”118 65. ḲAṢR KHUBBÂZ, THE GATEWAY ”118 66. ḲAṢR KHUBBÂZ, A VAULTED CHAMBER ”119 67. THEMAIL ”119 68. ḲAṢR KHUBBÂZ 120 69. THEMAIL 130 70. MUḤAMMAD EL ’ABDULLAH To face 134 71. KHEIḌIR, MA’ASHÎ AND SHEIKH ’ALÎ ”134 72. BARDAWÎ 136 73. BARDAWÎ FROM SOUTH-WEST To face 135 74. BARDAWÎ, EAST END OF VAULTED HALL ”135 75. SHETÂTEH, SULPHUR SPRING ”138 76. ḲAṢR SHAM’ÛN, OUTER WALL ”138 77. UKHEIḌIR FROM NORTH-WEST ”139 78. UKHEIḌIR, INTERIOR FROM SOUTH-EAST ”139 79. UKHEIḌIR, GROUND PLAN 149 80. UKHEIḌIR, THE BATH 150 81. UKHEIḌIR, SECOND STOREY 152 82. UKHEIḌIR, THIRD STOREY 152 83. UKHEIḌIR, NORTH-EAST ANGLE TOWER To face 142 84. UKHEIḌIR, STAIR AT SOUTH-EAST ANGLE ”142 85. UKHEIḌIR, INTERIOR OF SOUTH GATE ”142 86. UKHEIḌIR, CHEMIN DE RONDE OF EAST WALL ”143 87. UKHEIḌIR, NORTH GATE, FROM OUTSIDE ”143 88. UKHEIḌIR, FLUTED DOME AT A ”146 89. UKHEIḌIR, FLUTED NICHE, SOUTH-EAST CORNER OF COURT D{xv} To face 146 90. UKHEIḌIR, GREAT HALL ”147 91. UKHEIḌIR, COURT D AND NICHED FAÇADE OF THREE-STOREYED BLOCK ”148 92. UKHEIḌIR, VAULT OF ROOM I ”149 93. UKHEIḌIR, ROOM I ”149 94. UKHEIḌIR, CUSPED DOOR OF COURT S ”150 95. UKHEIḌIR, CORRIDOR Q ”150 96. UKHEIḌIR, VAULTED END OF P, SHOWING TUBE ”150 97. UKHEIḌIR, VAULTED CLOISTER O´ ”150 98. UKHEIḌIR, GROIN IN CORRIDOR C ”151 99. UKHEIḌIR, SQUINCH ARCH ON SECOND STOREY ”151 100. UKHEIḌIR, NORTH SIDE OF COURT M ”152 101. UKHEIḌIR, SOUTH-EAST ANGLE OF COURT S ”152 102. UKHEIḌIR, WEST SIDE OF B³ ”153 103. UKHEIḌIR, DOOR LEADING FROM V TO W, SEEN FROM SOUTH ”153 104. BABYLON, THE LION ”170 105. BABYLON, ISHTAR GATE ”171 106. BABYLON, ISHTAR GATE ”171 107. CTESIPHON, FROM EAST ”180 108. CTESIPHON, FROM WEST ”180 109. CTESIPHON, REMAINS OF VAULT ON WEST SIDE OF SOUTH WING ”181 110. GUFFAHS OPPOSITE THE WALL OF SELEUCIA ”184 111. BAGHDÂD, THE LOWER BRIDGE ”184 112. BAGHDÂD, TOMB OF SITT ZOBEIDEH ”185 113. BAGHDÂD, INTERIOR OF SPIRE, SITT ZOBEIDEH ”185 114. BAGHDÂD, BÂB EṬ ṬILISM ”190 115. BAGHDÂD, DETAIL OF ORNAMENT, BÂB EṬ ṬILISM ”190 116. BAGHDÂD, MINARET IN SÛḲ EL GHAZL ”191 117. WÂNEH, IMÂM MUḤAMMAD ’ALÎ 202 118. WÂNEH, IMÂM MUḤAMMAD ’ALÎ To face 202 119. ḲÂDISÎYAH FROM SOUTH-EAST ”202 120. SÂMARRÂ, RUINED MOSQUE FROM SOUTH ”203 121. SÂMARRÂ, FROM MALWÎYEH ”203 122. SÂMARRÂ, RUINED MOSQUE, INTERIOR OF SOUTH WALL ”203 123. ABU DULÂF, FROM EAST ”212 124. ABU DULÂF, INTERIOR, LOOKING NORTH ”212 125. NAHRAWÂN CANAL ”213 126. IMÂM DUR ”213 127. IMÂM DUR 215 128. TEKRÎT FERRY To face 216 129. COFFEE-MAKING, SHEIKH ’ASKAR ”216 130. TEKRÎT, THE ARBAÎN ”217 131. KHÂN KHERNÎNA, MIḤRÂB ”217 132. KHÂN KHERNÎNA, DETAIL OF FLAT VAULT ”218 133. KHÂN KHERNÎNA, VAULT, SHOWING TUBE ”218 134. KHÂN KHERNÎNA, SETTING OF DOME ”219 135. TELL NIMRÛD ”219 136. ḲAL’ÂT SHERGÂT, THE ZIGURRAT AND RUINS OF NORTH WALL ”222 137. SÂMARRÂ, MOSQUE 232 138. SÂMARRÂ, INTERIOR OF SOUTH GATE, RUINED MOSQUE{xvi} To face 223 140. SÂMARRÂ, RUINED MOSQUE, SMALL DOOR IN WEST WALL ”223 141. SÂMARRÂ, RUINED MOSQUE, SOUTH-WEST ANGLE TOWER ”232 142. SÂMARRÂ, RUINED MOSQUE, WINDOW IN SOUTH WALL ”232 139. SÂMARRÂ, MOSQUE, DETAIL OF PIER, SOUTH DOOR 233 143. SÂMARRÂ, RUINED MOSQUE, BIG DOOR IN NORTH WALL To face 233 144. SÂMARRÂ, EL ’ASHIḲ, WEST END OF NORTH FAÇADE ”233 145. EL ’ASHIḲ 236 146. SÂMARRÂ, EL ’ASHIḲ FROM NORTH To face 238 147. SÂMARRÂ, EL ’ASHIḲ FROM SOUTH ”238 148. EL ’ASHIḲ, DETAIL OF NICHING ON NORTH FAÇADE 238 149. ṢLEBÎYEH 239 150. SÂMARRÂ, ṢLEBÎYEH To face 239 151. SÂMARRÂ, ṢLEBÎYEH, SETTING OF DOME ”239 152. SÂMARRÂ, BEIT EL KHALÎFAH 240 153. SÂMARRÂ, BEIT EL KHALÎFAH To face 240 154. SÂMARRÂ, BEIT EL KHALÎFAH, DETAIL OF VAULT OF SIDE CHAMBER ”240 155. BEIT EL KHALÎFAH, FRAGMENT OF STUCCO DECORATION ON ARCH 241 156. SÂMARRÂ, BEIT EL KHALÎFAH, STUCCO DECORATION To face 241

Our way next morning took us past Ḳubbeh to Mughârah, which we reached in three hours. Here we left the river and climbing the low, rocky hill to the east, found ourselves in a stony and thinly populated country bounded by another ridge of eastern hill. After twenty-five minutes’ riding we saw the hamlet of Ḳayyik Debû about half-a-mile to the left of the track, and in another quarter of an hour we reached a few deserted houses. Four hours from Tell Aḥmar

We could not see the river from Serrîn, but next morning I rode down to it and looked across to the splendid walls of Ḳal’at en Nejm. The castle, seated upon a rocky spur, encloses the steep slopes with its masonry until it seems like a massive buttress of the hill, as ageless and no less imperishable than the rock itself. We turned away from this stern ghost of ancient wars and rode from the Euphrates up a bare valley wherein we came upon a great cave, inhabited by a few Arabs. It contained three large chambers,

If it had been possible to cross the Euphrates I would have examined the high tell of Sheikh ’Arûd which had been all day the fixed point for my compass, but though there was a boat to be had, the intolerable wind continued till nightfall and made the passage impracticable. The mental exasperation produced by wind when you are living and

Before we reached Ḳal’at Ja’bar we galloped up into the low hills to see a rock-cut tomb. Through a hole in the ground we let ourselves down into a chamber 5·10 m. × 7·00 m., with nine arcosolia set round it, each containing from four to six loculi (Fig. 27). On one of the long sides there was a small rectangular niche between the arcosolia. Ibrahîm called the place Maḥall es Ṣafṣâf and assured me that it was the only cavern known to him in these hills. From here he took me down to a mound named Tell el Afrai, which lies about a quarter of a mile from the river. On the landward side

On the following day a dense mist hung over the valley. An hour from Kahf ez Zaḳḳ the path left the Euphrates at a spot called Maḥârîz where there are said to be ruins, but owing to the fog I could see nothing of them.[43] Three-quarters of an hour later we returned to the river and rode under low cliffs in which there were caves; my guide called the place Ḳdirân, which is, I suppose, Kiepert’s Ghirân. Here again we left the water’s edge, and half-an-hour later the fog melted away and revealed a monotonous green plain with the camels of the Weldeh pasturing over it. In summer it is a favourite camping-ground of the ’Anazeh. At Billânî, three and a half hours from our starting-point, we rejoined the Euphrates. Billânî is visible from afar by reason of a number of bare tree-trunks set in the ground to mark the Arab graves which are grouped about the resting-place of some holy man. The ancient sanctity of the place is still attested by numerous shafts of columns among the graves, but seventy years ago Chesney could make out a small octagonal temple.[44] It was a fine site for temple or for tomb. The river comes down towards it through many channels in the shape of a great fan, gathers itself into a single stream, broad and deep, and so sweeps under the high bank on which the fragments of the shrine are scattered, and beyond it round a wide bend clothed with thickets of tamarisk and thorn and blackberry. Through these thickets we rode for two hours and a half, and

It is tempting to suppose that in the eastern ruin field we have the site of the oldest city, Nicephorium-Callinicum-Raḳḳah, that the columns were derived from Hellenistic or Byzantine buildings and re-used in a mosque of which nothing now remains but the square minaret.[47] I think it not

improbable that the semi-circular enclosure represents Manṣûr’s foundation, Râfiḳah, though it does not follow that any of the existing ruins, except perhaps parts of the wall, belong to his time. They are nevertheless of great importance in the history of Mohammadan art. The mosque is surrounded by a wall of sun-dried brick broken by round bastions (Fig. 36). In the centre of the ṣaḥn, or court, there is a small ziyârah recently rebuilt, and in the north-east corner the round brick minaret springs from a square stone base composed of ancient materials (Fig. 37). The upper part of the minaret is decorated with bands of brick dog-tooth ornament. One of the great arcades which enclosed the ṣaḥn still stands on the south side (Fig. 38).[48] An inscription over the central arch states that the mosque was repaired by the Atabeg Nûr ed Dîn in 1166, and I conjecture that the minaret is of his building.[49] The mosque is of the true Mesopotamian type, of which the most famous examples are the two mosques at Sâmarrâ and the mosque of Ibn Ṭûlûn at Cairo. With all these it shows the closest structural affinities, and it may be assumed that Nûr ed Dîn retained the original plan when he repaired the building. The stucco capitals of the engaged columns on the piers belong to the same family as the elaborate stucco ornaments of Ibn Ṭûlûn, which date from the latter half of the ninth century, and in both cases the decorative motives employed are probably Mesopotamian in origin (Fig. 39). Stucco decorations are also the main feature of the group of palace ruins near the east wall. The most noticeable of these is a rectangular tower-like structure (Fig. 40), where the chamber on the ground-floor shows bold stucco ornament on which are traces of colour (Fig. 41). On the walls of another chamber of the palace, which was covered with a dome set upon squinch arches, there is a row of arched niches, the arch being cusped on the inside. Below the niches is a brick dog-tooth string-course (Fig. 42). The squinches contain a primitive stalactite motive. There are two other small rooms, both of which are roofed with an oval dome (3·87 m. × 3·32 m.

A pleasant four hours’ march, mostly through tamarisk thickets that were full of ducks, pigeons and jays, brought us to the ferry opposite Abu Kemâl. When we had pitched our tents near the reed-and mud-built village of Werdî, Fattûḥ and Selîm went across to buy corn and Ḥmeidî to report our arrival and ask for fresh zaptiehs. The village of Abu Kemâl has recently been removed to a distance of about a mile from the right bank, because the current has undermined the foundations of the original village, which now stands deserted and in ruin. But it is chiefly on the left bank that the river has played tricks with the land. Within the circuit of a great bend in the channel, the ground for three miles or so is extremely low, and is partially submerged when the stream comes down in flood. The low ground is bounded on its eastern side by a rocky ridge which crosses the desert from a point a little to the south of the Khâbûr, passes behind what I suppose to be the course of the Dawwarîn, and terminates in the bold bluffs of Irzî above the Euphrates, at the lower limit of the Werdî bend. When the river is exceptionally high it covers the whole area up to the hills; my informant, one ’Isâ, an Arab of the Bu Kemâl, remembered having once seen this occur; but in ordinary seasons it merely overflows a narrow belt and fills a canal that lies immediately under the eastern hills. The canal is fed by two branch canals from the river and joins the Euphrates under the bluff of Irzî. The river rises “at the time of the flowering of pomegranates,” said ’Isâ, “for unto all things is their season,” that is, about the middle of April; but the big canal under the hills was still half full of water when I saw it in March, and the crops were irrigated from it by jirds. It is known locally as the Werdîyeh, but I was informed that it was in fact the lower end of the Dawwarîn which joins the Euphrates here and not at Ṣâliḥîyeh.[59] The site of Werdî is generally believed to be that of Xenophon’s Corsote, “a large deserted city which was entirely surrounded by the Mascas.” The river Mascas was a plethron (100 ft.) in breadth; the army of Cyrus stayed there three days and the soldiers furnished themselves with provisions.[60] By the Mascas, Xenophon is understood to have meant a loop canal, and I think it probable that the canal was not merely a small loop enclosing the bend of the river, but that it is represented to this day by the Dawwarîn and the irrigation system connected with it.

Fattûḥ needed a day to complete his preparations, and I to see the pitch wells of Hît which lie some distance from the town. I did not see them all, but from the accounts I heard they would appear to be five in number. The largest is called the Marj (the Meadow); it is an hour and a quarter north-east of Hît and is said to be inexhaustible. The pitch is better in quality here than elsewhere, and the peasants can, when they choose, get 2,000 donkey-loads from it daily. The next in importance is at Ma’mûreh, but it is not worked. The pitch flows out over the desert and dries into an asphalt pavement about half-a-mile square. Further south is a small spring, Lteif, from which they get twenty loads a day, and near the town there is a fourth well which yields fifty loads a day (Fig. 53). The fifth well is on the other side of the Euphrates, at ’Atâ’ut; the average yield from it is twenty loads a day.

The walls of Khubbâz are built of stones, either unworked or very roughly squared, set in a thick bed of coarse mortar.

The mound of Themail is crowned by a fort built of mud and unshaped stones (Fig. 68). It has a single door and round bastions at the angles of the wall, like Khubbâz, but the figure described by the walls is far from regular, and there is no trace of construction within. The existing building looked to me like rough Bedouin work, though I suspect that it has taken the place of older defences (Fig. 69). A copious sulphur spring rises below it and flows into the cornfields of the Deleim. With a supply of water so plentiful Themail must always have been a place worth holding. We stayed for an hour to lunch, Muḥammad’s kinsmen supplementing our fare with a bowl of sour curds. Fawwâz was all for spending the night here, for there would be no tents at ’Asîleh, where we meant to camp, and the noonday stillness was broken by a loud altercation between him and the indignant Fattûḥ. I paid no attention until the case was brought to me for decision—the final court of appeal should always be silent up to the moment when an opinion is requested—and then said that we should undoubtedly sleep at ’Asîleh.

The interest of these speculations had caused me to forget that we were still in the desert. Our guide caught us up at Murrât, whither we had galloped recklessly, and explained that he had had some difficulty in allaying the suspicions of a small encampment of the Amarât half-hidden in the valley. The men, seeing us hurrying past, had taken us for robbers and were preparing to shoot at us. At a soberer pace we turned back along the valley. It was marshy in places, intersected by little streams from the springs, and covered with a white crust of salts—sabkhah, the Arabs call such regions—on which nothing grew but a malignant-looking thorny shrub, thelleth, useless to man and beast. The water of the springs was “heavy,” Muḥammad told me, like the water of Raḥḥâlîyeh. Half-an-hour’s ride down the valley we crossed the Raḥḥâlîyeh-Shetâteh road at a point where there were traces of good masonry. Another half-hour ahead stood the mound of Bardawî, our objective. Being in good spirits we devoted the interval to song. Muḥammad gave us his ode to the motor, and I obliged with “God save the King,” translated into indifferent Arabic for the benefit of the audience.

The palace consists of a rectangular fortification wall set with round bastions, with larger round bastions at the angles, and of an oblong building surrounded on three sides by a court, together with a small annex in the eastern part of the court (Fig. 79). That part of the oblong building which adjoins the northern fortification wall is three storeys high; the remainder of the palace is one storey high. Outside the enclosing fortification wall there is a structure composed of fourteen vaulted parallel chambers, with a small open court at the southern end. To the west of the small court and of the first five chambers lies a larger court with round bastions on its western side. Between each of these bastions there is a door and either one or two groups of windows, each group consisting of three narrow lights. I noticed foundations of masonry which ran down from near the northern end of this

To return to the north gate. On either side of the small domed chamber, A, long vaulted corridors, Q Q´, lead to the outer court (Fig. 96). A door on the south side of corridor Q communicates with a small court, R, with chambers to north and south of it and vaulted cloisters to east and west. A group of vaulted chambers is placed between court R and the great hall B. West of hall B there is a smaller group of vaulted chambers. In the south wall of corridor Q´, two doors lead into an open court surrounded on three sides by a vaulted cloister, the vault of which has now fallen except for fragments in the south-east and south-west corners. These fragments are adorned with stucco decorations. I have suggested (in the Hellenic Journal, loc. cit.) that this court may be a mosque of a primitive type. (See, too, Der Islâm, vol. i. part ii. p. 126, where Dr. Herzfeld points out that a chamber somewhat similarly placed in the palace of Mshatta may also be a mosque.)

The soldiers of Musheidah, though they were unexceptionable as hosts, were inefficient as guides. When I announced that I wished to ride by the old Tigris bed they exclaimed in horror that it was unsafe to leave the high road. At this Fattûḥ laughed outright, and remarking that we had travelled over many a worse desert, laid hands upon a peasant who happened to be listening to the discussion, and engaged him to accompany me for the day. The peasant (his name was Ḳâsim) was an Arab of the Benî ’Amr, and he was full of the recent history of the land. All this district had been granted by the Sultan Murâd to the Ma’amreh, the Benî ’Amr, to have and to hold in perpetuity, “and we possess his ’Irâdeh signed by his hand,” said Ḳâsim. But about twenty years ago, ’Abdu’l Ḥamîd, seeing it to be valuable property, ousted the Arabs, sold half the land to a man of Baghdâd and turned the other half into Senîyeh (royal estates).[106] The Benî ’Amr were thus left destitute, “and by God who created the heavens and the earth,” declared Ḳâsim, “I have nothing

As we reached the village of Dûr, an hour further to the north, we met a number of the inhabitants coming out along the road, and all were armed with rifles. We stopped and asked them whither they were bound, and they in turn inquired of us whether we had seen anything of a caravan of merchandise from Sâmarrâ. It was due to arrive at Dûr that morning and they felt some anxiety as to its safety, since the desert was much disturbed. There are no soldiers posted on the left bank of the Tigris, and every man must protect his own property. But we, having come only from Abu Dulâf, could not reassure them. On the outskirts of Dûr the plain is once more tossed into ruin-mounds, probably of the Mohammadan period. The village stands upon an old site; Dûr is mentioned by Ammianus Marcellinus in his account of Jovian’s retreat. It is remarkable only for the shrine of the Imâm Dûr (Fig. 126), Muḥammad ibn Mûsa ibn Ja’far ibn ’Alî ibn Ḥussein—his genealogy goes back to a respectable Shî’ah ancestry, and I read it on an inscription cut upon a marble slab by the door. Moreover, while we waited for the mullah to appear with the key, one of the villagers busied himself with scraping away the whitewash which covered the lower part of the inscription, and we deciphered the date, 871 of the Hijrah, which is 1466 A.D.[124] While we were thus engaged the

The ruined mosque at Sâmarrâ has an interior measurement of 240 × 157·60 m., the greater length being from

Next in importance to the mosque is the castle or palace on the opposite bank of the Tigris, known as the ’Ashiḳ (Fig. 145).[133] The first time I visited it we crossed in a guffah from a point a little below the town where there is usually a bridge of boats. The bridge had been swept away by the floods and the guffah landing was very bad. It was a full hour’s

ride up the river to El ’Ashiḳ, but I was rewarded for my trouble by finding indubitable traces of a masonry bridge in the low ground almost exactly opposite a curious little building called Ṣlebîyeh. My attention was called to the bridge by seeing men digging out the brick piers and arches for building material. The peasants told me that when the river is low, piers can be seen in the bed of the stream and that the bridge ran in the direction of the Beit el Khalîfah. I give this information for what it is worth. Ya’ḳûbî mentions a bridge of boats (ed. de Goeje, p. 263); it is not impossible that pontoons may have been thrown across the deepest and swiftest part of the river and connected with the high ground on the west bank, which is at some distance from the stream, by a series of masonry arches of which I saw the remains. The piers and arches would therefore have stood on ground which was under water in time of high flood. This is exactly the arrangement of the modern bridge at Môṣul. The castle of the ’Ashiḳ consists of a great enclosure, 123 metres from north to south and 85 metres from east to west, surrounded by a wall with round bastions which are set upon a rectangular base (Fig. 146). All the buildings that may have stood within the wall have vanished, but adjoining the north wall there are remains of a gatehouse consisting of five parallel chambers opening on to a corridor or platform. The chambers and the corridor are built upon a substructure of vaults. Under the corridor the vaults run from east to west, except in the central part where the vault running from north to south is a continuation of the vault under the central chamber. Under the five chambers all the vaults run from north to south.[134] The vaults are built of flat tiles laid in slices against the head-wall without centering. They have the usual small set forward from the wall, but in one case, perhaps in more than one, there is a slight divergence from the customary arrangement. From the spring of the vault the tiles are laid horizontally for the first sixteen or seventeen courses, projecting forward so as to form a shallow curve;

above these horizontal courses the tiles are laid upright and in slices; they form an ovoid curve more abrupt than the curve of the lower part of the vault. The fourth of the upper chambers, reckoning from east to west, is the best preserved. It shows the remains of a doorway, 1·85 m. wide, covered on the same principle as the small doors of the mosques, i.e. without lintel or arch. A moat or trench runs all round the castle and passes to the north of the gatehouse. A bridge, of which small trace remains, connected the gatehouse with a rectangular outpost. To the north and east of this outpost there are fragments of a wall and towers which encompassed a rectangular area.[135] The most interesting feature in the ruins is the niche decoration between the bastions of the north wall (Fig. 148). The niches have been in part filled up—no doubt they were found to be too dangerous a weakness to the wall—but their scheme is clearly apparent (Fig. 144). Each niche consisted of a high cusped arch above a rectangular recessed panel which enclosed in turn a smaller arched niche. High up on the wall, near the western angle tower, there are traces of an upper order of niches. There is some indication that the niches were continued in the first north bay of the west wall, but the remainder of this wall, together with the whole of the east wall, is completely ruined. The disadvantage of these deep niches is evident in the south wall where the niche has been broken through at its weakest point and has now the appearance of a door. In the two central towers on this side there seemed to have been small flat-roofed chambers (Fig. 147). The building materials used in the castle are burnt and sun-dried brick. The foundations of the

When I went to the ’Ashiḳ for the second time I sent a guffah up the river to above Lekweir and dropped down-stream to the ruins of the castle, whence we floated down to the camp. On this most pleasant expedition I took occasion to examine Lekweir. It lies about an hour’s ride above Sâmarrâ, and unlike all the other ruins, it is in the low ground by the water’s edge. Its complete destruction is perhaps due to its having been at the mercy of the flooded river. Great blocks of fallen brickwork lie upon the bank and in the stream, while a massive brick wall forms a sort of quay. A large building must have adjoined this quay, for the ground is tossed into mounds for a considerable distance and the mounds are strewn with broken brick and with fragments of thin marble slabs, pink, green and greyish-white in colour.

The only other edifice which has escaped complete destruction is the Beit el Khalîfah (the House of the Khalif) (Fig. 152).[136] It is a triple-vaulted hall standing above the Tigris (Fig. 153.)[137] The central hall was no doubt the audience chamber of the palace; it corresponds to the great hall at Ctesiphon. The two wings are divided into a small ante-chamber, covered with a semi-dome set on squinches (Fig. 154), and a larger room roofed with a barrel vault. The vaults are all slightly pointed and all are built on the

157. SÂMARRÂ, BEIT EL KHALÎFAH, FRAGMENT OF RINCEAUX WORKED IN MARBLE ”241 158. SÂMARRÂ, BEIT EL KHALÎFAH, STUCCO DECORATION ”241 159. STUCCO DECORATIONS, SÂMARRÂ 242 160. SÂMARRÂ, STUCCO DECORATION To face 242 161. SÂMARRÂ, STUCCO DECORATION ”242 162. SÂMARRÂ, FRAGMENT OF POTTERY ”242 163. SÂMARRÂ, FRAGMENT OF POTTERY ”242 164. ABU DULÂF 244 165. ABU DULÂF, ARCADE To face 243 166. ABU DULÂF, NICHED PIER OF NORTHERN ARCADE ”243 167. MÔṢUL ”248 168. MÂR AHUDÂNÎ 258 169. MÔṢUL, MAR JIRJIS To face 249 170. MÔṢUL, MÂR TÛMÂ ”249 171. MÔṢUL, MÂR TÛMÂ ”258 172. MÔṢUL, MÂR SHIM’UN ”258 173. MÔṢUL, PLASTER WORK IN ḲAL’AT LÛLÛ ”258 174. MÔṢUL, TOMB OF THE IMÂM YAḤYÂ ”259 175. ḲARAḲÔSH, DECORATION ON LINTEL OF MÂR SHIM’ÛN 264 176. ASSYRIAN RELIEFS AT BAVIÂN To face 272 177. ’ALÎ BEG ”273 178. THE KHÂTÛN AT THE DOOR OF SHEIKH ’ADÎ ”273 179. SHEIKH ’ADÎ ”274 180. ZÂKHÔ 275 181. BRIDGE OVER THE KHÂBÛR ”275 182. ḤASANAH, ASSYRIAN RELIEF ”290 183. SHAKH, ASSYRIAN RELIEF ”290 184. NOAH’S ARK ”291 185. JEZÎRET IBN ’UMAR, GATE OF FORTRESS ”296 186. JEZÎRET IBN ’UMAR, BRIDGE ”296 187. JEZÎRET IBN ’UMAR, FOUNTAIN OF MOSQUE{xvii} To face 297 188. JEZÎRET IBN ’UMAR, RELIEFS ON BRIDGE ”297 189. PARTHIAN RELIEF, ḲAṢR GHELLÎ ”289 190. PARTHIAN RELIEF, FINIK ”298 191. THE HILLS OF FINIK ”299 192. STELA AT SÂREH ”306 193. ḲAL’AT ḤÂTIM ṬÂI, CHAPEL ”306 194. MÂR AUGEN ”307 195. THE BISHOP OF MÂR MELKO ”314 196. KHÂKH, THE NUN ”314 197. NARTHEX OF MÂR GABRIEL ”315 200. KHÂKH, CHURCH OF THE VIRGIN ”315 198. KEFR ZEH, MÂR ’AZÎZÎYEH; PARISH CHURCH 315 199. ṢALÂḤ, MÂR YA’ḲÛB; MONASTIC TYPE 316 201. KHÂKH, CHURCH OF THE VIRGIN 318 202. KHÂKH, CHURCH OF THE VIRGIN, CAPITALS To face 318 203. KHÂKH, CHURCH OF THE VIRGIN, DOME ON SQUINCH ARCHES ”318 204. THE CHELABÎ ”319 205. FORDING THE TIGRIS BELOW DIYÂRBEKR ”319 206. DIYÂRBEKR, MARDÎN GATE ”322 207. DIYÂRBEKR, YENI KAPU ”322 208. DIYÂRBEKR, CHEMIN DE RONDE, NORTH WALL ”323 209. DIYÂRBEKR, COURT OF ULU JÂMI’ ”323 210. ARGHANA MA’DEN ”328 211. GÖLJIK ”328 212. KHARPÛT, THE CASTLE ”329 213. IZ OGLU FERRY ”329 214. MALAṬIYAH ESKISHEHR ”336 215. VALLEY OF THE TOKHMA SU ”336 216. TOMB AT OZAN ”337 217. OZAN, TOMB 341 218. THE GORGE AT DERENDEH To face 340 219. TOMB NEAR YAZI KEUI ”340 220. TOMARZA, CHURCH OF THE PANAGIA FROM SOUTH-EAST ”341 221. TOMARZA, CHURCH OF THE PANAGIA, SETTING OF DOME ”341 222. TOMARZA, WEST DOOR OF NAVE, CHURCH OF THE PANAGIA ”346 223. SHAHR, DOORWAY OF SMALL TEMPLE ”346 224. FATTÛḤ ”347 225. ON THE ROAD TO SHAHR ”347 226. SHAHR, TEMPLE-MAUSOLEUM, UPPER AND LOWER STOREYS 348 227. SHAHR, TEMPLE-MAUSOLEUM To face 348 228. SHAHR, THE CHURCH ON THE BLUFF ”348 229. AVSHAR ENCAMPMENT ”349 230. ḲAIṢARÎYEH, THE CITADEL ”349 231. MOUNT ARGAEUS FROM NORTH-WEST ”354 233. NIGDEH, TOMB OF HAVANDA ”355 234. NIGDEH, TOMB OF HAVANDA, DETAIL OF WINDOW ”355 232. TOMB OF HAVANDA 356

MAP OF TURKEY IN ASIA [unavailable]

To face 370

Mesopotamian system, without centering and with a small corbelling forward from the wall. Under this outset there are a series of square holes as if for beams, though it is scarcely conceivable that beams can have been laid across the halls at this point. Round wooden poles were certainly used in the body of the walls; the wood has perished leaving the round hole which it occupied. The windows (or doors?) of the chambers on either side of the triple hall were covered without lintel or arch in the manner already described. The decoration of the palace must have been mainly of stucco, worked in relief or frescoed. Lying upon the ground were small fragments of plaster bearing a frescoed pattern of a simple kind, a row of circles outlined in red and yellow; a small piece of moulded stucco is still attached to the inside of the arch over the opening of the central chamber (Fig. 155) and I picked up other pieces (Fig. 158). While I was at work a peasant came to me and inquired whether I would like to see a picture which he had just unearthed. I went with him to a trench close at hand, where he had been digging for bricks, and found a beautiful piece of plaster work adhering to a wall (Fig. 156). It was doomed to instant destruction that the bricks behind it might be removed. I inquired whether such decorations were frequently discovered, and promised a reward for any piece that was brought to me, with the result that before I left I had been provided with four other examples. Three showed variants of a continuous pattern (Fig. 159 and Fig. 160), while the third was worked with a fret motive (Fig. 161). To the east of the triple hall there are some underground chambers hollowed out of the rock. They have been explained in various manners and fully described by Viollet. Here as elsewhere in Sâmarrâ the rock begins immediately below the surface of the ground. It is a conglomerate of pebbles in a bed of lime, exceedingly hard to work and covered with so thin a layer of earth that no cultivation is possible. The cornfields and vineyards of the Abbâsid Sâmarrâ lay on the opposite bank of the Tigris in the low alluvial soil beneath the ridge on which stand Ḥuweiṣilât, the ’Ashiḳ and Ṣlebîyeh. Near the underground chambers of the Beit el Khalîfah there are considerable mounds, and in some places fragments of building which appertained to the palace. The walls are of sun-dried brick and the rooms have been covered with domes and semi-domes resting on squinch arches.

None but the theologian would essay a valuation of the relative orthodoxy of converted and unconverted, but the archæologist must hold no uncertain opinion as to their merits. The unification, so far as it has gone, of the two ancient Churches with Rome is an unmitigated misfortune. The Chaldæans and the Syrians, instigated perhaps by their pastors, have been so eager to obliterate the memory of their former heterodoxy that they have effaced with an unsparing hand all, or nearly all, Syriac inscriptions older than the date of their regeneration, and in Môṣul it is rare to find any written stone earlier than the end of the seventeenth century. This is the more provoking as several of the churches are of great architectural interest, and it is much to be regretted that the epigraphic record of their history should not have been preserved. So far as I could judge, the oldest parts of the oldest churches may probably be dated in the twelfth or thirteenth centuries. All have been considerably remodelled; some were entirely rebuilt after the siege of Môṣul by Nâḍir Shah in 1743 and others have been rebuilt in recent years.[145] Moreover there are several which would seem to have been first founded as late as the eighteenth century. But whatever may be their date, they all exhibit the same simple plan, a plan which I believe to be essentially Mesopotamian and more ancient by many centuries than the existing churches. It is that of the barn church, the church with two aisles and a nave, covered by parallel barrel vaults so equal in height as not to admit of a clerestorey.[146] The nave and aisles are invariably cut off from the sanctuary by a wall—it is too substantial to be called an iconostasis—broken by three large doors. This complete separation is not typical of primitive ecclesiastical architecture; it results, as a rule, from a development of the ritual; but it appears to be here a part of the original plan. The sanctuary is almost invariably divided into three parts, corresponding to the nave and aisles, and, as a rule, the central altar is covered by a dome set upon squinch arches. The church of Mâr Ahudânî will serve as a typical example (Fig 168); it is now in the hands of the Chaldæans. A flight of steps leads down to it from the street, and the fact that it lies so far below the modern level is one of the indications of its antiquity. The stair opens into a small atrium with a cloister to east and west. The church is to the south of the atrium and there is no means of approach to it from any other side. The present atrium is comparatively modern and the church shows many signs of reconstruction and repair. The doorway from the nave to the sanctuary is richly decorated with Arabic inscriptions, with

In the courtyard were a pair of peacocks, in honour, no doubt, of the Angel Peacock, who rules the age of 10,000 years in which we live, and is the symbol of him who must not be named. His bronze effigy is carried by the Ḳawwâls, the higher priesthood of the Yezîdîs, when they journey among the scattered communities of the sect, and to whatever dangers they may be exposed, it is said that the image has never been allowed to fall into the hands of infidels.[162] The Yezîdî women are neither secluded nor veiled, and when ’Alî Beg took me to see his wife we found her in the midst of her household, male and female, giving orders for my entertainment. She was a handsome woman dressed in a robe of purple cotton, with a black velvet cap placed over the muslin veil which was wrapped about her head and under her chin, but did not conceal her face. On her wrists she wore heavy gold bracelets set with turquoises. She talked nothing but Kurdish, so that my greetings and my gratitude were conveyed to her through the beg’s secretary, a Chaldæan from Alḳôsh. Few Yezîdîs can either read or write, such knowledge being forbidden to them, and I doubt whether the beg himself had any acquaintance with letters. In the women’s quarters I knitted an instant friendship with ’Alî Beg’s small son, Sa’îd Beg, and though we had no common language in which to express our feelings, our intimacy advanced silently by leaps and bounds while he sat upon the largest of my camp-chairs and watched me eat the sumptuous meal with which his father had provided me. When I had finished there was enough and to spare of rice and mutton, bread and semolina pudding and sour curds to satisfy all my servants and soldiers. Meantime the beg had made preparations for my visit to Sheikh ’Adî, whither two Yezîdî horsemen and all my four zaptiehs were ordered to accompany me, lest we should meet with Kurdish robbers in the hills. ’Alî Beg with a dignified retinue of elders, one of whom was a ḳawwâl who had that day returned from

The house of St. Gabriel of Kartmîn was, during the Middle Ages, the most famous and the richest of Jacobite establishments. It is said to have been founded in the reign of Arcadius (395-408) and rebuilt under Anastasius (491-518), and I see no reason to doubt that the great church of Mâr Gabriel is, as it now stands, a work of the early sixth century. There are two other churches within the existing monastic precincts, one dedicated to the Virgin, the other to the Forty Martyrs, but neither of these is as old as that which is dedicated to the tutelary saint (Fig. 197). A large area of ruins beyond the walls gives some indication of the former magnificence of the monastery which gained, as early as the days of Justinian, a reputation for holiness second only

to Jerusalem. It bore at that period the name of St. Stephen; St. Gabriel was bishop of the monastery during the reign of Heraclius. When the Arab invaders drove out the forces of the Byzantine empire, he obtained from the Khalif ’Umar ibn u’l Khaṭṭâb rights of jurisdiction over all Christians in the Ṭûr ’Abdîn, for which reason the monastery is sometimes called after him, Deir Mâr Gabriel, and sometimes after the khalif, Deir ’Umar. It was despoiled by Tîmûr towards the close of the fourteenth century, and many a harrying it must have endured from the Kurds before it sank into its present state of poverty and decay. One monk and a single nun, well stricken in years, were its sole occupants at the time of my visit. The church of Mâr Gabriel is built upon a plan which I conjecture to be monastic as distinguished from parochial. The two types, which are quite unlike each other, are also unlike all churches known to me outside the Ṭûr ’Abdîn. The parish church (Fig. 198), which has no domestic buildings attached to it, or nothing but a few chambers for the lodging of clerks, follows invariably the plan that I have described at Bâ Sebrîna; at Mâr Gabriel, and in the other monastic churches (Fig. 199), the atrium and narthex lie to the west, the vaulted nave is placed with its greater length running from north to south, and three doors in the east wall communicate with a triple sanctuary. From what prototypes did the Christian architects of the Ṭûr ’Abdîn derive the singular feature of the nave lying with its greater length at right angles to the main axis of the building? I can only suggest that they may have preserved the ancient scheme of the Babylonian temple and palace hall, which was retained by the Assyrians in their palaces, but not in their temples; and if this be so, the monastic churches of the Ṭûr ’Abdîn are the last representatives of the oldest Oriental architecture. The walls and vault of the nave of Mâr Gabriel are devoid of ornament, but the vault of the central sanctuary is adorned with mosaics. The accumulated soot of centuries of candle-smoke has not entirely obscured the glory of its golden ground, of the great jewelled cross laid over the centre of the vault, and the twisted vine scrolls with which it is encircled. It is said that similar mosaics once covered the whole church and were destroyed by the soldiers of Tîmûr.

The next day was devoted to three churches which I visited and planned on the way to Khâkh, Mâr Yâ’ḳûb at Ṣalâḥ, Mâr Kyriakos at Arnâs and Mâr ’Azîzîyeh at Kefr Zeh. I doubt whether there exists anywhere a group of buildings

But it was not. Perhaps there are no ruins where we crossed the Akcheh Dâgh, or perhaps in the excitement of the road the zaptieh forgot them as completely as I did. Our path would have done credit to the most sensational of journeys. It led us over wild and rocky hills and down into gorges incredibly deep and narrow, and when we stopped to draw breath at the bottom of one of these breakneck descents, we saw the track in front of us climbing mercilessly up the opposite precipice. We came to the bottom of the first valley at 11.45, about an hour from Arga; Deveh Deresi is its name. At the top of the next ridge the splendid gorge of the Levandi Chai opened at our feet. With many warning cries to the baggage animals and much tugging at the taut bridles of our own mounts (for these passages had to be performed on foot) we reached the stream at 1.20 near to the Kurdish village of Levandiler. A steep climb brought us in another hour to the high village of Chatagh; a quarter of an hour beyond it we topped the pass and rode down by easy gradients to Levent. Here, surrounded by magnificent rocky hills, we pitched camp. Our hosts were men of the Kizil Bâsh, a sect whose head-quarters are in the Dersîm. Their creed, which is much contemned by the Moslems—and not in words alone—is said to waver between Paganism, Christianity, Manichæanism and Shî’ism, touched with some memories of ancient Anatolian cults. I did not attempt to unravel these mysteries during the evening I spent at Levent, but contented myself with inviting the headmen of the village to a coffee-party, on which simple human basis relations of the most cordial nature were established. The night was sharply cold, and we set out next morning, with numb fingers, to scramble down into the valley below Levent and up to the opposite ridge, which we reached in one hour. Above us towered the rocky plateau of the Ḳal’ah Dâgh, flanked on every side by cliffs, and below lay the wide and fertile valley of the Tokhma Su (Fig. 215). The caravan pursued its way westward, but I turned east, by Kurd Keui and Saman, and touched the river at Ozan, four hours from Levent, where my zaptieh had promised me a ruin. “Ishté bu,” said the headman of the village, pointing across the poppy-fields, “here it is;” and he turned away to gather us a dish of ripe mulberries, while I stood in amazement before the Ionic columns and carved garlands of a little tomb that might have graced the Appian Way (Fig. 216 and Fig. 217). There are no inscriptions upon it, nor anything to tell whose bones were laid within the vaulted chamber; I sent a greeting across the ages to the shade of him who had brought

We left Tomarza at ten o’clock and journeyed into the hills by way of Suvagen, which we reached at 12.40. Almost immediately after we had left the village, we entered a gorge, and our path climbed up through the pine-woods to Kokur Ḳayâ, a small yaila near the top of the pass known as Ḳara Bel. Here we pitched camp at five in the afternoon, close under the snow-wreaths that clung to the northern side of a rocky chain of peaks. Until sunset the clear fresh notes of a cuckoo filled the alp, and all that he had to say was worth hearing; but I wondered whether he enjoyed the society of his brother the kite, whose thin rippling cry dropped down from the rocks above him. I did not take my camp over the pass to Comana, but set out next day with Fattûḥ and a zaptieh and such simple provisions as might enable us to spend a night away from our tents if we found it necessary. Before we started I covenanted with the zaptieh, who was unusually pious, that prayers should be suspended for the day, the previous day’s journey having been seriously upset by the occurrence of the ’aṣr (the hour of afternoon prayer), though every one knows that there is a special dispensation with regard to travellers.

We set out from Ḳaiṣarîyeh a diminished party, Ḥâjj ’Amr and Selîm having found work with a caravan of muleteers and returned with them across the mountains to Aleppo. The first day’s drive took us round the foot of Argæus to Yeni Khân, a solitary inn, not marked in Kiepert, which lies two hours to the north of Ḳaraḥiṣâr. The mighty buttresses of Argæus, rising out of the immense flats of the Anatolian plateau, are as imposing as the flanks of Etna rising from the

AMURATH TO AMURATH

CHAPTER I

ALEPPO TO TELL AḤMAR

Feb. 3—Feb. 21

A small crowd had gathered round one of the booths in the saddlery bazaar, and sounds of controversy echoed down the vaulted ways. I love to follow the tortuous arts of Oriental commerce, and moreover at the end of the dark gallery the February sun was shining upon the steep mound of the citadel; therefore I turned into the saddlers’ street, for I had no other business that afternoon than to find the road back into Asia, back into the familiar enchantment of the East. The group of men round the booth swayed and parted, and out of it shouldered the tall figure of Fattûḥ.

“May God be exalted!” said he, stopping short as he caught sight of me. “It is well that your Excellency should witness the dealings of the saddlers of Aleppo. Without shame are they. Thirty years and more have I lived in Aleppo, and until this day no man has asked me to give two piastres for a hank of string.” He cast a withering glance, charged with concentrated animosity, upon the long-robed figure that stood, string in hand, upon the counter.

“Allah!” said I warily, for I did not wish to parade my ignorance of the market value of string. “Two piastres?”

“It is good string,” said the saddler ingratiatingly, holding out what looked like a tangled bundle of black wool.

“Eh wah!” intervened a friend. “ ’Abdullah sells nought but the best string.”

I took a seat upon a corner of the counter and Fattûḥ came slowly back, shaking his head mournfully, as one who recognizes but cannot amend the shortcomings of mankind. The whole company closed in behind him, anxious to witness the upshot of the important transaction upon which we were engaged. On the outskirts stood one of my muleteers like a man plunged in grief; even the donkey beside him—a recent purchase, though acquired at what cost of eloquence only Fattûḥ can know—drooped its ears. It was plain that we were to be mulcted of a farthing over that hank of string.

Fattûḥ drew a cotton bag out of his capacious trousers.

“Take the mother of eight,” said he, extracting a small coin.

“He gives you the mother of eight,” whispered one of the company encouragingly to the saddler.

“By God and the Prophet, it cost me more! Wallah, it did, oh my uncle!” expostulated the saddler, enforcing his argument with imaginary bonds of kinship.

Fattûḥ threw up his eyes to the vault as though he would search heaven for a sign to confound this impious statement; with averted head he gazed hopelessly down the long alley. But the vault was dumb, and in all the bazaar there was no promise of Divine vengeance. A man touched his elbow.

“Oh father,” he said, “give him the mother of ten.”

The lines of resolution deepened in Fattûḥ’s face. “Sir, we would finish!” he cried, and fumbled once more in the cotton bag. The suspense was over; satisfaction beamed from the countenances of the bystanders.

“Take it, oh father, take it!” said they, nudging the saddler into recognition of his unexampled opportunity.

The hank of string was handed over to Ḥâjj ’Amr, who packed it gloomily into the donkey’s saddle bags, already crammed to overflowing with the miscellaneous objects essential to any well-ordered caravan on a long journey. Fattûḥ and Ḥâjj ’Amr had been shopping since dawn, and it was now close upon sunset.

I climbed down from the counter. “With your leave,” said I, saluting the saddler.

“Go in peace,” he returned amicably. “And if you want more string Fattûḥ knows where to get it. He always deals with me.”

The crowd melted back to its avocations, if it had any, and the excitement caused by our commercial dealings died away.

“Oh Fattûḥ,” said I, as we strolled down the bazaar with the donkey. “There is great labour in buying all we need.”

Fattûḥ mopped his brow with a red handkerchief. “And the outlay!” he sighed. “But we got that string cheap.” And with this he settled his tarbush more jauntily, kicked the donkey, and “Yallah, father!” said he.

If there be a better gate to Asia than Aleppo, I do not know it. A virile population, a splendid architecture, the quickening sense of a fine Arab tradition have combined to give the town an individuality sharply cut, and more than any other Syrian city she seems instinct with an inherent vitality. The princes who drew the line of massive masonry about her flanks and led her armies against the emperors of the West, the merchants who gathered the wealth of inner Asia into her bazaars and bartered it against the riches of the Levant Company have handed down the spirit of enterprise to the latest of her sons. They drive her caravans south to Baghdâd, and east to Vân, and north to Konia, and in the remotest cities of the Turkish empire I have seldom failed to find a native of Aleppo eager to provide me with a local delicacy and to gossip over local politics. “Here is one who heard we were from Aleppo,” says Fattûḥ with an affected indifference. “His brother lives in the next street to mine, and he has brought your Excellency some apples. But they are not like the apples of Aleppo.” Then we exchange a greeting warm with fellow-citizenship and the apples are flavoured with good-will, even if they cannot be expected to vie with the fruit of our own countryside.

It was at Aleppo that I made acquaintance with the Turkey which had come into being on July 24, 1908. Even among those whose sympathies were deeply engaged on behalf of the new order, there were not many Europeans who, in January 1909, had any clue to public opinion outside Constantinople and Salonica. The events of the six stirring months that had just elapsed had yet to be heard and apprehended, and no sooner had I landed in Beyrout than I began to shed European formulas and to look for the Asiatic value of the great catchwords of revolution. In Aleppo, sitting at the feet of many masters, who ranged down all the social grades from the high official to the humblest labourer for hire, I learnt something of the hopes and fears, the satisfaction, the bewilderment, and the indifference of Asia. The populace had shared in the outburst of enthusiasm which had greeted the granting of the constitution—a moment of unbridled expectation when, in the brief transport of universal benevolence, it seemed as if the age-long problems of the Turkish empire had been solved with a stroke of the pen; they had journeyed back from that Utopia to find that human nature remained much as it had been before. The public mind was unhinged; men were obsessed with a sense of change, perplexed because change was slow to come, and alarmed lest it should spring upon them unawares. The relaxation of the rule of fear had worked in certain directions with immediate effect, but not invariably to the increase of security. True, there was a definite gain of personal liberty. The spies had disappeared from official quarters, and with them the exiles, who had been condemned by ’Abdu’l Ḥamîd, on known or unknown pretexts, to languish helplessly in the provincial capitals. Everywhere a daily press had sprung into existence and foreign books and papers passed unhindered through the post. The childish and exasperating restrictions with which the Sultan had fettered his Christian subjects had fallen away. The Armenians were no longer tied to the spot whereon they dwelt; they could, and did, travel where they pleased. The nâmûsîyeh, the identification certificate, had received the annual government stamp without delay, and without need of bribes. In every company, Christian and Moslem, tongues were unloosed in outspoken criticism of official dealings, but it was extremely rare to find in these freely vented opinions anything of a constructive nature. The government was still, to the bulk of the population, a higher power, disconnected from those upon whom it exercised its will. You might complain of its lack of understanding just as you cursed the hailstorm that destroyed your crops, but you were in no way answerable for it, nor would you attempt to control or advise it, any more than you would offer advice to the hail cloud. Many a time have I searched for some trace of the Anglo-Saxon acceptance of a common responsibility in the problems that beset the State, a sense the germs of which exist in the Turkish village community and in the tribal system of the Arab and the Kurd; it never went beyond an embryonic application to small local matters, and the answers I received resembled, mutatis mutandis, that of Fattûḥ when I questioned him as to the part he had played in the recent general election. “Your Excellency knows that I am a carriage-driver, what have I to do with government? But I can tell you that the new government is no better than the old. Look now at Aleppo; have we a juster law? wallah, no!”

In some respects they had indeed a yet more laggard justice than in “the days of tyranny”—so we spoke of the years that were past—or perhaps it would be truer to say a yet more laggard administration. The dislocation of the old order was a fact considerably more salient than the substitution for it of another system. The officials shared to the full the general sense of impermanence that is inevitable to revolution, however soberly it may be conducted; they were uncertain of the limits of their own authority, and as far as possible each one would shuffle out of definite action lest it might prove that he had overstepped the mark. In the old days a person of influence would occasionally rectify by processes superlegal a miscarriage of the law; the miscarriages continued, but intervention was curtailed by doubts and misgivings. The spies had been in part replaced by the agents of the Committee, who wielded a varying but practically irresponsible power. How far the supremacy of the local committees extended it was difficult to judge, nor would a conclusion based upon evidence from one province have been applicable to another; but my impression is that nowhere were they of much account, and that the further the district was removed from the coast, that is, from contact with the European centres of the new movement, the less influential did they become. Possibly in the remoter provinces the local committee was itself reactionary, as I have heard it affirmed, or at best an object of ridicule, but in Syria, at any rate, the committees existed in more than the name. Their inner organization was at that time secret, as was the organization of the parent society. They had taken form at the moment when the constitution was proclaimed, and had undergone a subsequent reconstruction at the hands of delegates from Salonica, who were sent to instruct them in their duties. I came across one case where these delegates, having been unwisely selected, left the committee less well qualified to cope with local conditions than they found it, but usually they discharged their functions with discretion. The committees opened clubs of Union and Progress, the members of which numbered in the bigger towns several hundreds. The club of Aleppo was a flourishing institution lodged in a large bare room in the centre of the town. It offered no luxuries to the members, military and civilian, who gathered round its tables of an evening, but it supplied them with a good stock of newspapers, which they read gravely under the shadow of a life-sized portrait of Midhat Pasha, the hero and the victim of the first constitution. The night of my visit the newly formed sub-committee for commerce was holding its first deliberations on a subject which is of the utmost importance to the prosperity of Aleppo: the railway connection with the port of Alexandretta. To this discussion I was admitted, but the proceedings after I had taken my seat at the board were of an emotional rather than of a practical character, and I left with cries of “Yasha Inghilterra!” (“Long live England!”) in my ears. I carried away with me the impression that whatever might be the future scope of its activities, the committee could not fail, in these early days, to be of some educational value. It brought men together to debate on matters that touched the common good and invited them to bear a part in their promotion. The controlling authority of the executive body was of much more questionable advantage. Its members, whose names were kept profoundly secret, were supposed to keep watch over the conduct of affairs and to forward reports to the central committee: I say supposed, because I have no means of knowing whether they actually carried out what they stated to be their duties. They justified their position by declaring that it was a temporary expedient which would lapse as soon as the leaders of the new movement were assured of official loyalty to the constitution, and arbitrary as their functions may appear it would have been impossible to assert that Asiatic Turkey was fit to run without leading-strings. But I do not believe that the enterprise of the committees was sufficient to hamper a strong governor; and so far as my observation went, the welfare of each province depended, and must depend for many a year to come, upon the rectitude and the determination of the man who is placed in authority over it.

Underlying all Turkish politics are the closely interwoven problems of race and religion, which had been stirred to fresh activity by exuberant promises. Fraternity and equality are dangerous words to scatter broadcast across an empire composed of many nationalities and controlled by a dominant race. Under conditions such as these equality in its most rigid sense can scarcely be said to exist, while fraternity is complicated by the fact that the ruling race professes Islâm, whereas many of the subordinate elements are Christian. The Christian population of Aleppo was bitterly disheartened at having failed to return one of their own creed out of the six deputies who represent the vilayet. I met, in the house of a common friend, a distinguished member of the Christian community who threw a great deal of light on this subject. He began by observing that even in the vilayet of Beyrout, though so large a proportion of the inhabitants are Christian, the appointment of a non-Moslem governor would be impossible; so much, he said, for the boast of equality. This is, of course, undeniable, though in the central government, where they are not brought into direct contact with a Moslem population, Christians are admitted to the highest office. He complained that when the Christians of Aleppo had urged that they should be permitted to return a representative to the Chamber, the Moslems had given them no assistance. “They replied,” interposed our host, “that it was all one, since Christians and Moslems are merged in Ottoman.” I turned to my original interlocutor and inquired whether the various communions had agreed upon a common candidate.

“No,” he answered with some heat. “They brought forward as many candidates as there are sects. Thus it is in our unhappy country; even the Christians are not brothers, and one church will not trust the other.”

I said that this regrettable want of confidence was not confined to Turkey, and asked whether, if they could have commanded a united vote, they would have carried their candidate. He admitted with reluctance that he thought it would have been possible, and this view was confirmed by an independent witness who said that a Christian candidate, carefully chosen and well supported, would have received in addition the Jewish vote, since that community was too small to return a separate representative.

As for administrative reform, it hangs upon the urgent problem of finance. From men who are overworked and underpaid neither efficiency nor honesty can be expected, but to increase their number or their salary is an expensive business, and money is not to be had. How small are the local resources may be judged from the fact that Aleppo, a town of at least 120,000 inhabitants, possesses a municipal income of from £3,000 to £4,000 a year. Judges who enjoy an annual salary of from £60 to £90 are not likely to prove incorruptible, and it is difficult to see how a mounted policeman can support existence on less than £12 a year, though one of my zaptiehs assured me that the pay was sufficient if it had been regular. In the vilayet of Aleppo and the mutesarriflik of Deir all the zaptiehs who accompanied me had received the arrears due to them as well as their weekly wage, but this fortunate condition did not extend to other parts of the empire.

The plain man of Aleppo did not trouble his head with fiscal problems; he judged the new government by immediate results and found it wanting. I rode one sunny afternoon with the boy, Fattûḥ’s brother-in-law, who was to accompany us on our journey, to the spring of ’Ain Tell, a mile or two north of the town. Jûsef—his name, as Fattûḥ was careful to point out, is French: “I thought your Excellency knew French,” he said severely, in answer to my tactless inquiry—Jûsef conducted me across wet meadows, where in spring the citizens of Aleppo take the air, and past a small mound, no doubt artificial, a relic perhaps of the constructions of Seif ed Dauleh, whose palace once occupied these fields. Close to the spring stands a mill with a pair of stone lions carved on the slab above the door, the heraldic supporters of some prince of Aleppo. They had been dug out of the mound together with a fine basalt door, like those which are found among the fourth and fifth century ruins in the neighbouring hills; the miller dusted it with his sleeve and observed that it was an antîca. A party of dyers, who were engaged in spreading their striped cotton cloths upon the sward, did me the honours of their drying-ground—merry fellows they were, the typical sturdy Christians of Aleppo, who hold their own with their Moslem brothers and reckon little of distinctions of creed.

“Christian and Moslem,” said one, “see how we labour! If the constitution were worth anything, the poor would not work for such small rewards.”

“At any rate,” said I, “you got your nâmûsîyeh cheaper this year.”

“Eh true!” he replied, “but who can tell how long that will last?”

“Please God, it will endure,” said I.

“Please God,” he answered. “But we should have been better satisfied to see the soldiers govern. A strong hand we need here in Aleppo, that the poor may enjoy the fruits of their toil.”

“Eh wah!” said another, “and a government that we know.”

Between them they had summed up popular opinion, which is ever blind to the difficulties of reform and impatient because progress is necessarily slow footed.

We passed on our return the tekîyeh of Abu Bekr, a beautiful Mamlûk shrine with cypresses in its courtyard, which lift their black spires proudly over that treeless land. The brother of the hereditary sheikh showed me the mosque; it contains an exquisite miḥrâb of laced stone work, and windows that are protected by carved wooden shutters and filled with old coloured glass. Near the mosque is the square hall of a bath, now fallen into disrepair. Four pendentives convert the square into an octagon, and eight more hold the circle of the dome—as fine a piece of massive construction as you would wish to see. The sheikh and his family occupied some small adjoining rooms, and the young wife of my guide made me welcome with smiles and lemon sherbet. From the deep embrasure of her window I looked out upon Aleppo citadel and congratulated her upon her secluded house set in the thickness of ancient walls.

“Yes,” she replied, eagerly detailing the benefits of providence, “and we have a carpet for winter time, and there is no mother-in-law.”

Aleppo is the Greek Berœa, but the town must have played a part in the earlier civilizations of North Syria. It lies midway between two Hittite capitals, Carchemish on the Euphrates, and Cadesh on the Orontes, in the heart of a fertile country strewn with mounds and with modern mud-built villages. The chief town of this district was Chalcis, the modern Kinnesrîn, a day’s journey to the south of Aleppo, but with the development of the great Seleucid trade-route between Seleucia on the Tigris and Antioch on the Orontes, which Strabo describes as passing through Hierapolis, Aleppo, being on the direct line to Antioch, must have gained in importance, and it was perhaps for this reason that the little Syrian village saw the Seleucid foundations of Berœa. The Arabic name, Ḥaleb, retains a reminiscence

Fig. 1.—ALEPPO, THE CITADEL.

Fig. 2.—ALEPPO, HITTITE LION IN

CITADEL.

Fig. 3.—BASALT EAGLE IN THE

FRENCH CONSULATE.

Fig. 4.—ALEPPO, JÂMI’ ESH SHAIBÎYEH, CORNICE.

Fig. 5.—FIRDAUS, MEDRESSEH OF EL MALIK EẒ ẒÂHIR.

of the original local appellation, which never slipped out of memory and finally conquered the Greek Berœa. Mohammadan tradition recognizes the fact that Ḥaleb was the ancient name of the city in the foolish tale which connects it with the cows of Abraham, the root of the word Ḥaleb being the verb signifying to milk, and the Emperor Julian knew that Berœa was the same as Chaleb. Aleppo is not without evidences of a remote antiquity. Every archæologist in turn has tried his hand at the half obliterated Hittite inscription which is built, upside down, into the walls of the mosque of Ḳiḳân near the Antioch gate; among the ruins of the citadel are two roughly worked Hittite lions (Fig. 2; Mr. Hogarth was the first to identify them), and I found in the French Consulate a headless eagle carved in basalt which belongs to the same period (Fig. 3). The steep escarpment of the castle mound is akin to the ancient fortified sites of northern Mesopotamia. Julian mentions the acropolis of Berœa. It was protected in a later age by a revetment of stone slabs, most of which were stripped away by Tîmûr Leng when he overwhelmed the town in 1401 and laid it in ruins. I know of only one building in Aleppo the origin of which can be attributed with certainty to the pre-Mohammadan period, the Jâmi’ el Ḥelâwîyeh near the Great Mosque (Fig. 6). It has been completely rebuilt; the present dome, resting on pendentives, with a tambour broken by six windows, belongs to one of the later reconstructions, but the beautiful acanthus capitals must be ascribed to the fifth century on account of their likeness to the capitals in the church of St. Simeon Stylites, a day’s journey north-west of Aleppo. The great school of architecture which they represent affected the builders of Islâm through many a subsequent age, and you will find the Mamlûks still flinging the leaves of the wind-blown acanthus about the capitals in their mosques. In the tenth century Aleppo was the chief city of the Ḥamdânid prince Seif ed Dauleh, a notable patron of the arts. It was he who built the south gate in the walls, the Bâb Kinnesrîn, and rebuilt the Antioch Gate after its destruction by Nicephorus Phocas; he repaired the citadel, set the shrine of Ḥussein upon the hill-side west of the town, and erected his own splendid dwelling outside the walls to the north. His palace was ravaged before his death, his gates and mosques have been rebuilt, and there remains for the period before Saladin little or nothing but the mosque inside the citadel, built in 1160 by Nûr ed Dîn, the greatest of the Syrian atabegs, and the Jâmi’ esh Shaibîyeh near the Antioch Gate, which, in spite of its ruined condition, is one of the loveliest monuments of the art of Islâm in the whole town of Aleppo (Fig. 4).[1] Along the top of the wall and carried uninterruptedly round the square minaret, runs a Cufic inscription, cut in a cavetto moulding. Below it is a band of interlacing rinceaux, unsurpassed in boldness and freedom of design, and above it a heavy cymatium, borne on modillions and adorned with rinceaux. The classical outline of the cornice, together with the exquisite Oriental decoration, give it a singular hybrid beauty. This mosque apart, the finest buildings are due to the Ayyûbids, and chiefly to El Malik eẓ Ẓâhir, the son of Saladin, who ruled in Aleppo at the end of the twelfth century. Beyond the walls to the south of the city, in the quarter of Firdaus, the descendants of Saladin held their court, and though their palaces have disappeared—how much more we should know of Mohammadan architecture if each successive conqueror had not ruined the house of his predecessor!—the suburb is still resplendent with mosques and tombs. Here stands the Medresseh of El Malik eẓ Ẓâhir, with an arcade borne on capitals that retain a reminiscence of classical form though they are hung with a garland of leaves that are closer to the Sasanian than to the Greek (Fig. 5).[2] Near it is the mosque of Firdaus built by the king’s widow when she was regent for her son. Over the miḥrâb of this mosque is a bold entrelac decoration which is to be found also in the shrine of Ḥussein, a building that

Fig. 6.—ALEPPO, JÂMI’ EL ḤELAWÎYEH.

Fig. 7.—FIRDAUS, A TOMB.

Fig. 8.—ALEPPO, A MAMLÛK DOME.

Fig. 9.—ALEPPO, A MAMLÛK DOME.

owes its present form to El Malik eẓ Ẓâhir.[3] The mosque of Eṣ Ṣâliḥîn shelters a gigantic footprint of Abraham, and about it lie the tombs of the pious who sought a resting-place near the site sanctified by the patriarch—tombstones worthy of a museum, carved with Cufic inscriptions and with vine scrolls and bunches of grapes. And falling now into unheeded decay are other memorials of the dead, their walls covered with delicate tracery and their windows filled with an exquisite lacework of stone (Fig. 7). They were great builders these princes of Islâm, Ayyûbid and Mamlûk, and in nothing greater than in their mastery of structural difficulties. The problem of the dome, its thrust and its setting over a square substructure, received from them every possible solution; they bent the solid stone into airy forms of infinite variety (Fig. 8 and Fig. 9). Their splendid masonry satisfied the eye as does the wall of a Greek temple, and none knew better than they the value of discreet decoration. The restraint and beauty of such treatment of the wall surface as is to be found in the Khân el Wazîr (Fig. 10) or the Khân es Sabûn (Fig. 11) bear witness to a master hand. The grace and ordered symmetry of these façades are as devoid of monotony as are the palace walls of the early Venetian renaissance, to which they are closely related, and here as in Venice the crowning beauty of colour is added to that of form and proportion. But it is colour of the sun’s own making; the sharp black outline of a window opening, the half tones of a carved panel lying upon the smooth brightness of the masonry soberly enhanced by the occasional use of a darker stone, either in courses or in alternate voussoirs. If you are so fortunate as to have many friends in Aleppo, you will find that the domestic architecture is no less admirable, and drinking your coffee under panelled ceilings rich with dull golds and soft deep reds, you will magnify once again the genius of the artificers of Asia.

The walls and gates of the city, though they are not so well preserved as those of Diyârbekr, are fine examples of mediæval fortification. To the north a prosperous quarter lies beyond the older circuit and the heraldic lions of the Mamlûks look down upon streets crowded with traffic. Armorial bearings played a large part in the decorative scheme of the Mohammadan builders. The type characteristic of Aleppo is a disk projecting slightly from the wall, carved with a cup from the base of which spring a pair of leaves. Upon the cup there are strange signs which are said to have been imitated from Egyptian hieroglyphs, a motive introduced by the Mamlûks; but I have noticed a variety of coats of the same period, such as the whorl which fills the disk upon the Bâb el Maḳâm, and the pair of upright pot-hooks, set back to back, upon the Jâmi’ el Maḳâmât in the Firdaus quarter. These disks, together with bands of inscriptions, are the sole ornaments placed upon the city gates.

The sombre splendour of the architecture of Aleppo is displayed nowhere better than in the Bîmâristân of El Malik eẓ Ẓâhir, which was built as a place of confinement for criminal lunatics and is still used for that purpose. The central court terminates at the southern end in the lîwân of a mosque covered with an oval dome; before it lies the ceremonial water-tank, if any one should have the heart to wash or pray in that house of despair. A door from the court leads into a stone corridor, out of which open rectangular stone chambers with massive walls rising to a great height, and carrying round and oval domes. Through narrow window slits, feeble shafts of light fall into the dank well beneath and shiver through the iron bars that close the cells of the lunatics. They sit more like beasts than men, loaded with chains in their dark cages, and glower at each other through the bars; and one was sick and moaned upon his wisp of straw, and one rattled his chains and clawed at the bars as though he would cry for mercy, but had forgotten human speech. “They do not often recover,” said the gaoler, gazing indifferently into the sick man’s cell, and I wondered in my heart whether there were any terms in which to reckon up the misery that had accumulated for generations under El Malik eẓ Ẓâhir’s domes.

Fig. 10.—KHÂN EL WAZÎR.

Fig. 11.—KHAN ES SABÛN.

Fig. 12.—WINDOW OF A TURBEH, FIRDAUS.

Fig. 13.—GATE OF CITADEL, ALEPPO.

Like the numismatic emblem of a city goddess, Aleppo wears a towered crown. The citadel lies immediately to the east of the bazaars. A masonry bridge resting on tall narrow arches spans the moat between a crenelated outpost and the great square block of the inner gatehouse. Through a worked iron door, dated in the reign of El Malik eẓ Ẓâhir, you pass into a vaulted corridor which turns at right angles under an arch decorated with interlaced dragons (Fig. 13), and ends at another arched doorway on which stand the leopards of Sultan Baybars, who rebuilt the castle in the thirteenth century. Above the entrance is a columned hall, grass-grown and ruined; passages lead down from it into vaulted chambers which would seem to have been repaired after Tîmûr had sacked Aleppo. Some of the blocks used in the walls here are Jewish tombstones dated by Hebrew inscriptions in the thirteenth century, and since it is scarcely possible that Baybars should have desecrated a cemetery of his own day, they must indicate a later period of reconstruction. The garrison was supplied with water from a well eighty metres deep which lies near the northern edge of the castle mound. Besides the well-hole, a stair goes down to the water level, near which point vaulted passages branch out to right and left. Tradition says that the whole mound is raised upon a substructure of masonry, but tradition is always ready with such tales, and the only inscription in the passages near the well is Cufic. At the northern limit of the enclosure stands a high square tower, up which, if you would know Aleppo, you must climb. From the muedhdhin’s gallery the town lies revealed, a wide expanse of flat roof covering the bazaars, broken by dome and minaret, by the narrow clefts of streets and the courts of mosque and khân. The cypresses of Abu Bekr stand sentinel to the north; from that direction Tîmûr entered through the Bâb el Ḥadîd. In the low ground beyond the Antioch Gate, the armies of the Crusaders lay encamped; the railway, an invader more powerful than Baldwin, holds it now. Turn to the east, and as far as the eye can see, stretch rolling uplands, the granary of North Syria, and across them wind the caravan tracks that lead into inner Asia. There through the waste flows the Euphrates—you might almost from the tower catch the glint of its waters, so near to the western sea does its channel approach here.

I have never come to know an Oriental city without finding that it possesses a distinctive personality much more strongly accentuated than is usually the case in Europe, and this is essentially true of the Syrian towns. To compare Damascus, for example, with Aleppo, would be to set side by side two different conceptions of civilization. Damascus is the capital of the desert, Aleppo of the fertile plain. Damascus is the city of the Arab tribes who conquered her and set their stamp upon her; Aleppo, standing astride the trade routes of northern Mesopotamia, is a city of merchants quick to defend the wealth that they had gathered afar. So I read the history that is written upon her walls and impressed deep into the character of her adventurous sons.

At Aleppo the current of the imagination is tributary to the Euphrates. With Xenophon, with Julian, with all the armies captained by a dream of empire that dashed and broke against the Ancient East, the thoughts go marching down to the river which was the most famous of all frontier lines. So we turned east, and on a warm and misty February morning we passed under the cypresses of Abu Bekr and took the road to Hierapolis. It was a world of mud through which we journeyed, for the rains had been heavy, and occasionally a shower fell across our path; but rain and mud can neither damp nor clog the spirit of those who are once more upon the road, with faces turned towards the east. The corn was beginning to sprout and there were signs too of another crop, that of the locusts which had swarmed across the Euphrates the year before, and after ravaging the fields had laid their eggs in the shallow earth that lies upon the rocky crest of the ridges between cornland and cornland. Whenever the road climbed up to these low eminences we found a family of peasants engaged, in a desultory fashion, in digging out the eggs from among the stones. Where they lay the ground was pitted like a face scourged with smallpox, but for every square yard cleared a square mile was left undisturbed, and the peasants worked for the immediate small reward which the government paid for each load of eggs, and not with any hope of averting the plague that ultimately overwhelmed their crops. It comes and goes, for what reason no man can tell, lasting in a given district over a term of lean years, and disappearing as unaccountably as it came: perhaps a storm of rain kills the larvæ as they are hatching out, perhaps the breeding season is unfavourable—God knows, said Ḥâjj ’Alî, the zaptieh who accompanied me. The country is set thick with villages, of which Kiepert marks not the tenth part—and even those not always rightly placed. We passed his Sheikh Najar, and at Sheikh Ziyâd I went up to see the ziyârah, the little shrine upon the hill-top, but found there nothing but a small chamber containing the usual clay tomb. We left Serbes on the right—it was hidden behind a ridge—and took a track that passed through the village of Shammar. Not infrequently there were old rock-cut cisterns among the fields and round the mounds whereon villages had once stood. At Tell el Ḥâl, five hours from Aleppo, a modern village lies below the mound, and by the roadside I saw part of the shaft of a column, with a moulded base, while several more fragments of columns were set up as tombstones in the graveyard. An hour before we reached Bâb we caught sight of the high minaret of the ziyârah above it. It is a flourishing little place with a bazaar and several khâns, in one of which I lodged. The heavy rain-clouds that had hung about us all day were closing down as evening approached, but I had time to climb the steep hill to the west of the village, where a cluster of houses surrounds the ziyârah of Nebî Ḥâshil—so I heard the name, but Abu’l Fidâ calls it the Mashhad of ’Aḳil ibn Abî Ṭâlib, brother of the Khalif ’Alî[4]—an old shrine of which the lower part of the walls is built of rusticated stones. The tomb itself was closed, but I went to the top of the minaret and had a fine view of the shallow fruitful valley of the Deheb, which, taking its source near Bâb and the more northerly Tell Batnân, runs down to the salt marshes at the foot of Jebel el Ḥaṣṣ. Across the valley there is a notable big mound with a village at its foot, the Buzâ’â of the Arab geographers, “smaller than a town and larger than a village,” said Ibn Jubeir in the twelfth century. The ancient Bathnæ where Julian rested under “a pleasant grove of cypress trees” is represented by Buzâ’â and its “gate” Bâb. He compares its gardens with those of Daphne, the famous sanctuary of Apollo near Antioch, and though the gardens and cypresses have been replaced by cornfields, it is still regarded by the inhabitants of Aleppo as an agreeable and healthy resort during the hot months of summer. Perhaps we may carry back its history yet earlier and look here for the palace of Belesys, the Persian governor of Syria, at the source of the river Dardes, which Xenophon describes as having “a large and beautiful garden containing all that the seasons produce.”[5] Cyrus laid it waste and burned the palace, after which he marched three days to Thapsacus on the Euphrates; but the Arab geographers place Bâlis (which some have conjectured to have occupied the site of the Persian palace) two days from Aleppo, and the position of Thapsacus has not been determined with any certainty. If it stood at Dibseh, as Moritz surmises,[6] Cyrus could well have reached it in three marches from Bâb, and I am inclined to think that Xenophon’s account identifies the satrap’s pleasaunce with the garden of Bathnæ. In Kiepert’s map the relative distances between Aleppo and Bâb and Bâb and Manbij are not correct. I rode the two stages in almost exactly the same time (seven and a quarter hours), and the caravan took nine hours each day, whereas the map would have the march to Manbij a good two hours longer than the march to Bâb.[7]

A stormy wind, bringing with it splashes of rain, swept us next morning over the wet uplands. About an hour from Bâb we were joined by a Circassian wrapped in a thick black felt cloak, which, with the white woollen hood over an astrachan cap, skirted coat with cartridges ranged across the breast, and high riding-boots, is the invariable costume of these emigrants from the north. His name was Maḥmûd Aghâ. His father had left the Caucasus after the Russians took the country and had gone with all his people to Roumelia, where they settled down and built houses. And then the Russians seized that land also, and again they left all and came to Manbij, and the Sultan gave them fields on his own estates. “But if the Russians were to come here too,” he concluded, with the anxious air of one who faces an ever-present danger, “God knows where we should go.”

“Their frontier is far,” said I reassuringly.

“Please God,” said he.

I asked him about the recent elections and found that he took a lively interest in the politics of the day. He knew the names of the deputies who had been returned for the vilayet of Aleppo, and said that a thousand people had given their votes in the Manbij district, though there should have been many more if all had been on the register. But they would not trouble to have their names placed upon it.

“Wallah, no,” observed Ḥâjj ’Alî. “Do you think that the fellaḥîn of all these villages wish to vote? If they knew that their name was written down by the government, they would take to their heels and flee into the desert, leaving all that they have. So great would be their fear.”

This was a new view of the duties and privileges of citizenship, and once more I had to shift my ground and look at representative institutions through the eyes of the Syrian peasant.

“Then none of the Arab vote?” I asked, when I had accomplished this revolution of the mind. The Arab are the Bedouin.

“God forbid!” replied Ḥâjj ’Alî. “Where is Aleppo and where their dwelling-place!”

“We are all equal now before the law,” said Maḥmûd Aghâ inconsequently (but he was thinking of townsfolk, not of the Arab), “and all will be given an equal justice. We shall not wait for months at the door of the serâyah before we are given a hearing—and then only with bribes.”

“I have heard that all are equal,” said I, “and that Christian and Moslem will serve together in the army. What think you?”

“Without doubt the Christians may serve,” he answered, “but they cannot command.”

In three and a half hours we reached the village of Arîmeh, where there are two Roman milestones that have been copied by Mr. Hogarth. He dates them A.D. 197, in which year the Emperor Septimius Severus, whose name is inscribed upon them, probably completed the road. I suspect that it followed the Seleucid trade route mentioned by Strabo. There are not more than a dozen houses at Arîmeh, but the ancient settlement was more important. Cut stones lie about the modern hovels, and behind them are ruined foundations, among which we found the fragment of a bas-relief, a pair of shod feet and another foot beside them: I did not judge it to be earlier than the Roman period. A large stone block built into the wall of one of the courtyards bore a much worn foundation inscription of El Malik eẓ Ẓâhir, his name and the words “he built it” being alone decipherable. We rode on to Hierapolis across a hollow plain, all cultivated, the sacred domain of the Syrian goddess “whom some call Nature herself, the cause that produces the seed of all things.”[8] When we passed over the ground it was still a chiflik, the private property of ’Abdu’l Ḥamîd, wrested by him bit by bit during the last thirty years from its owners, the half-settled Arabs. With all the rest of his landed estates it was appropriated after his deposition in April by the State, and if it is put up for sale there will be no lack of customers in Aleppo, for the merchants are eager to lay field to field, and I have heard them complain of the difficulty of buying land near home, since all was held by the Sultan. We rode between the air-holes of underground canals, of which there were a great number bringing water to Hierapolis. The old line of the city walls is clearly marked, though the Circassian colony, which grows in numbers and prosperity in spite of the antagonism of the neighbouring Arabs, is rapidly digging out the stones and using them in the construction of houses. Just within the walls, as we approached from the west, is a large pond, surrounded by masonry, the remains of the stairs by which the worshippers descended into the pool of Atargatis that they might swim to the altar in its midst. Lucian declares that the pool wherein were kept the sacred fish was over 200 cubits deep, but his informants must have exaggerated, inasmuch as Pocock, who visited Hierapolis in 1787, mentions that the pool was dry, and does not speak of so remarkable a hole as Lucian’s estimate would imply. Maundrell, who saw it in 1699, describes it as a deep pit containing a little water, but choked by the walls and columns of great buildings that had stood all about it. East of the pool there is a modern mosque erected by ’Abdu’l Hamîd on the site of a foundation of El Malik eẓ Ẓâhir. Nothing remained of the earlier building, I was told, but a ruined minaret,[9] which has now gone. In the ṣaḥn, the court, I saw three inscriptions of El Malik eẓ Ẓâhir which had belonged to his mosque. Below the pavement of the ṣaḥn, said the guardian of the mosque, a second pavement had been found which he believed to have been that of a Christian church; there were one or two columns lying about here, and an acanthus capital which was certainly pre-Mohammadan and probably pre-Christian. Manbij was at one time a bishopric; the earlier travellers mention several ruined churches which have now vanished, and Ibn Khurdâdhbeh, one of the first of the Arab geographers, remarks that “there is no wooden building fairer than the church at Manbij, for it has arches of jujube wood”[10]—an observation which is repeated with wearisome iteration by many of his successors.

The pool and the mosque stand for the two periods of former splendour, the pagan and the Mohammadan. Bambyce—to give it the classicized form of its ancient local name[11]—must have been a shrine of some importance when the Seleucids rechristened it Hierapolis, but, as at Aleppo, the older word was never forgotten, and Strabo in the first century calls it by both names. His account is suggestive of the conditions that prevailed in the Seleucid empire. “The road for merchants,” says he, “going from Syria to Seleucia and Babylon, lies through the country of the Scenitæ and through the desert belonging to their territory. The Euphrates is crossed in the latitude of Anthemusia, a place in Mesopotamia.[12] Above the river, at a distance of four schœni, is Bambyce, where the Syrian goddess Atargatis is worshipped. After crossing the river the road runs through a desert country on the borders of Babylonia, to Scenæ. From the passage across the river to Scenæ is a journey of five-and-twenty days. There are on the road owners of camels who keep resting-places which are well supplied with water from cisterns, or transported from a distance. The Scenitæ exact a moderate tribute from merchants, but do not molest them: the merchants therefore avoid the country on the banks of the river and risk a journey through the desert, leaving the river on the right hand at a distance of nearly three days’ march. For the chiefs of the tribes living on both sides of the river are settled in the midst of their own peculiar domains, and each exacts a tribute of no moderate amount for himself.”[13] It is evident that the Alexandrids never succeeded in subduing the Arab tribes, who pushed up in a wedge along the Euphrates between their Mesopotamian and their Syrian provinces, and Strabo has here left us a description of the pre-Parthian line of traffic. Where it crossed the river it would be hazardous to pronounce. The two most famous passages of the middle Euphrates were at Birejik and at Thapsacus: at the former Seleucus Nicator built a bridge,[14] and Crassus, in the first century before Christ, found a bridge at Birejik and crossed with all the omens against him, even the eagle of the first standard turning its head backwards when it was brought down to the river. But between these two points the Euphrates can easily be crossed in boats at many places,[15] and in the numerous Roman expeditions against the Sasanians, when Hierapolis came to be used as a convenient starting-point for eastern campaigns, the passage seems usually to have been made lower down than Birejik, more nearly opposite Hierapolis, and the Mesopotamian road ran thence by Thilaticomum and through the desert to Bathnæ in Osrhœne.[16] Julian marching from Hierapolis presumably took this shorter road, for he was anxious to reach Mesopotamia before intelligence of his movements should have come to the enemy,[17] and it has been conjectured that he threw his bridge of boats across the river from Cæciliana, a place mentioned in the Peutinger Tables and identified tentatively with Ḳal’at en Nejm.[18] There is, however, a ferry just below the mouth of the Sajûr river which during the last few years has been used regularly by caravans and carriages going to Urfah, the ancient Edessa, in preference to the longer road by Birejik. This route had long been abandoned on account of the insecurity of the deserts through which it passes. Before the granting of the constitution some advance had been made towards order, and since the overthrow of Ibrahîm Pasha, the Kurd, in the autumn of 1908, it has become as safe as can reasonably be expected. The landing-place on the east bank is at Tell Aḥmar, a tiny hamlet which has inherited the site of a very ancient city. Here perhaps Strabo’s road crossed the river;[19] here Julian may have constructed his pontoon bridge, and it is not improbable that for the first four or five hundred years of the Christian era it was the customary point of passage for travellers from Hierapolis to Edessa.[20] Thapsacus, which lies lower down than Cæciliana-Ḳal’at en Nejm, was of earlier importance. Xenophon crossed there, and nearly a hundred years later, Darius, fleeing headlong eastwards with his broken army after the battle of Issus, with Alexander headlong at his heels, passed over the river at Thapsacus.[21]

Julian saw Manbij in the last days of its pagan glory, and for him, as for Crassus before him, the omens of Hierapolis were unfavourable, for as he entered the gates of “that large city, a portico on the left fell suddenly while fifty soldiers were passing under it, and many were wounded, being crushed beneath the vast weight of the beams and tiles.”[22] A couple of hundred years later its estate was so much diminished that no attempt was made to defend it against Chosroes, who held it to ransom, and then treacherously sacked it. Procopius says that the space enclosed by the wide circuit of the walls was at that time a desert, and since it was far too large to be defended by the scanty remnants of the population, Julian drew in the walls to a smaller compass.[23] After the Mohammadan conquest, Hârûn er Rashîd made Manbij one of the fortresses of his frontier province, el ’Awâṣim, the Strongholds; it passed from hand to hand in the wars carried on by the Greek emperors and the Crusaders against the khalifs, and finally remained in the possession of the latter. Under the house of Saladin it enjoyed a second period of prosperity, and the inscriptions near the mosque show that El Malik eẓ Ẓâhir, that great builder, must have expended some of his skill upon it. Ibn Jubeir found it rich and populous, with large bazaars and a strong castle. But its fortifications could not protect it against Hûlâkû, who took and sacked it in 1259, and sixty years later Abu’l Fidâ found most of its walls and houses in ruins. It never recovered from this disaster, but sank gradually into the featureless decay from which the Circassian colony is engaged in rescuing it.

The khânjî and all others interested in our arrival being happily engaged in receiving the news of the day from Fattûḥ, I slipped away alone and walked round the western and southern line of the ruined city wall. The space within is covered by shapeless heaps of earth, with cut stones and fragments of columns emerging from them. Towards the north-east corner, where the ground rises, the hollow of the theatre is clearly marked just inside the wall, and beyond it a large depression probably indicates the site of the stadium. The rain-clouds scudded past upon the wind; little and solitary, a Circassian shepherd boy came wandering in over the high downs, driving his flock of goats across the ruins of the wall and through the theatre, where they stopped to graze in shelter from the furious blast. I followed them half across the wasted city and turned aside to pay my respects to the tomb of a holy man, a crumbling mosque, with the graves of the Faithful about it. The Circassian who has his dwelling in the courtyard hastened to open the shrine and to relate the story of Sheikh ’Aḳil. He lived in the days of Tîmûr Leng, and enjoyed so great a reputation that when the conqueror was preparing to besiege the town, he thought fit to warn the sheikh of his intentions. Sheikh ’Aḳil begged him to hold aloof for three days, and having obtained this respite, he counselled the inhabitants to destroy all that might tempt to pillage. They followed his advice, and Tîmûr, finding nothing but smoking ruins, passed the city by, while the populace escaped with their lives. So ran the Circassian’s tale: I give it for what it is worth. Meantime the baggage had come in and the horses were being watered at the sacred pool, amid anxious cries from the muleteers, who had heard rumours of its fabulous depth: “Oh father, look to yourself! may God destroy your dwelling! no further!” Besides Ḥâjj ’Amr, who had travelled with me before, Fattûḥ had engaged two others, both Christians, Selîm and Ḥabîb, the latter a brother of his own. These three, with Jûsef, accompanied me during all the months of the journey, and I never heard a word of complaint from them, neither had I cause to complain.

I had intended to ride next day to Carchemish, sending the caravan across the ford to Tell Aḥmar, where I meant to join it in the evening, but the khânji and Maḥmûd Aghâ, who had dropped in to see that we were comfortably lodged, dissuaded me, saying that if the wind rose, as it had done that evening, the ferry boats would not come over from Tell Aḥmar and I should be left on the river bank with my camp on the opposite side. I was reluctant to give up my scheme, and Fattûḥ backed me with the observation that the passage was easy and need not be taken into account.

“Oh my brother,” Maḥmûd admonished him, “it is the Euphrates!” And we were all silenced.

Early in the morning, I left Manbij with Jûsef and Ḥâjj ’Alî, and rode past a bewildering number of villages unmarked by Kiepert (I noted Mangâbeh and Wardâna on our left hand, and after them ’Ain Nakhîleh on our right) to the

[1] It is dated in the year 545 A.H., i. e. A.D. 1150.

[2] The Persian influence had probably filtered through Egypt, for similar leaf motives are to be found in Cairo, for example in a fine bit of woodwork in the Museum: Herz Bey, Catalogue Raisonné, fig. 24. The prototype must be looked for in the plaster decorations of Ibn Ṭûlûn.

[3] M. Saladin believes this entrelac to be of Damascene origin. Manuel d’Art Musulman, i. p. 115.

[4] Ed. Reinaud, p. 267. He wrote in A.D. 1321.

[5] Anabasis, Bk. I. ch. iv, 10.

[6] Zur antiken Topographie der Palmyrene, p. 31.

[7] Mr. Hogarth also noticed that Bâb is marked out of its true place: Annual of the British School at Athens, XIV. p. 185.

[8] Plutarch: In Crass.

[9] Sachau saw it: Reise in Syrien und Mesopotamien, p. 148.

[10] Ed. de Goeje, p. 162. He wrote in A.D. 864.

[11] Manbij is the name used in literary Arabic, but it is noticeable that in the colloquial the word approaches more nearly to the earliest form, being pronounced Bumbuj.

[12] Eskî Serûj according to Chapot: La frontière de l’Euphrate, p. 306.

[13] Geography, Bk. XVI. ch. i. 27.

[14] Ritter: Erdkunde, Vol. VII. p. 961.

[15] Procopius makes the same observation: De Bell. Per., II. 20.

[16] It is so given in the Antonine Itinerary: Hierapoli—Thilaticomum—Bathnas—Edissa.

[17] Ammianus Marcellinus, Bk. XXIII. ch. ii. 7.

[18] Chapot, op. cit. p. 281.

[19] Chapot believes that the passage was effected at a point north of Cæciliana, which would fit in with Tell Aḥmar: op. cit. p. 254, note 5.

[20] Mr. Hogarth suggests that the Abbess Ætheria crossed at Tell Aḥmar on her way to Edessa: loc. cit. p. 183.

[21] Birejik and the Tell Aḥmar passage (whatever may have been its ancient name) and Thapsacus do not exhaust the number of recorded routes, for Chosroes, in his first expedition against Justinian, crossed at Obbanes, somewhere about the modern Meskeneh, and on his third expedition he built a bridge of boats near Europus, which is perhaps the modern Jerâblus. (Mr. Hogarth doubts the accepted identification of Jerâblus with Europus: Annals of Arch. and Anthrop., Vol. II. p. 169.) During the Mohammedan period other points are mentioned. Ibn Khurdâdhbeh, writing in the ninth century, makes the road from Aleppo to Babylon cross at Bâlis, the ancient Barbalissos (ed. de Goeje, p. 74), but Iṣṭakhrî, a hundred years later, says that Bâlis, though it was once the Syrian port on the Euphrates, had fallen into decay since the days of Seif ed Dauleh, and was little used by merchants (ed. de Goeje, p. 62). In the twelfth century, and perhaps earlier, its place had been taken by Ḳal’at en Nejm, where Nûr ed Dîn, who died in 1145, built a great fortress, famous during the wars against the Crusaders. The bridge there was called Jisr Manbij (“the bridge of Manbij”), but it cannot have been constructed by Nûr ed Dîn, for Ibn Jubeir, writing about the year 1185 a description of his journey from Ḥarrân (Carrhae) to Manbij, says that he “crossed the river in small boats, lying ready, to a new castle called Ḳal’at en Nejm” (Gibb Memorial edition, p. 248). In Yâḳût’s day (circa 1225) the caravans from Ḥarrân to Syria always crossed here.

[22] Ammianus Marcellinus, Bk. XXIII. ch. ii. 6.

[23] The Buildings of Justinian (Palest. Pilgrims’ Text Society), p. 66.

Fig. 14.—ALEPPO, THE GREAT MOSQUE.

Fig. 15.—TELL AḤMAR FERRY.

Fig. 16.—TELL AḤMAR.

Fig. 17.—CARCHEMISH FROM THE BIG MOUND.

Sajûr valley, which we reached near Chat. We had left the carriage track and now followed the windings of the Sajûr by a path narrow at best and none the better for the recent rains. A man on a donkey jogged along behind us, and I caught fragments of his conversation with Ḥâjj ’Alî. He asked the meaning of the word ḥurrîyeh (liberty), a question to which he received no very definite answer. He did not press the point, but remarked that for his part he knew nothing of the new government, but this he knew, that no one in these villages had done military service (I suppose on account of the exemption that was extended to all who dwelt upon the Sultan’s domains) and no one was written down “ ‘and el ḥukûmeh” (on the official register). He prayed God that this fortunate estate might not suffer change. In three hours from Manbij we reached Osherîyeh, turned a bit of rising ground and came in sight of the Euphrates, flowing beneath white cliffs. If I had been instructed in the proper ceremonies I should have wished to offer up a sacrifice or raise a bethel stone, but failing these I paid the only tribute that can be accorded in an ungracious age and photographed it. Ḥâjj ’Alî drew bridle and watched the proceeding.

“I see it for the first time,” said I apologetically.

“Eh yes,” he replied, “this is our Euphrates,” and he turned an indulgent eye upon the rolling waters that are charged with the history of the ancient world.

The path dropped down into the valley and ran under cliffs which are honeycombed with chambered caves, made, or at least deepened, by the hand of man. The water was low at this season, and where we joined the river it was divided into two arms by a long island. Half-an-hour further down the arms met, and lower still another little island, which is covered after the snows begin to melt in the northern mountains, was set in the wide stream. Here was the ferry (Fig. 15). A company of bedraggled camels and camel-drivers waited on the sands while the cumbrous boats were dragged up from the point to which they had been washed by the current. The ferrymen had been weatherbound at Tell Aḥmar, and the caravans had spent a weary two days by the river’s edge. They had eaten misery, sighed the camel-drivers; wallah, no bread they had had, no fire and no tobacco; but with the patient deference of the East they stood aside when the first boat came lumbering up and observed that the Consul Effendi had best cross while the air was still. We drove our horses into the ferry boat, and by a most unnautical process, connected with long poles, our craft was run ashore upon the island, over which we ploughed our way and found a second boat ready to take us across the smaller channel. We landed in Mesopotamia at the village of Tell Aḥmar, which takes its name from the high mound, washed by Euphrates, under which it lies (Fig. 16). Jûsef spread out my lunch on the top of the tell, and we watched the caravan embark from the opposite bank and were well pleased to have accomplished the momentous passage in good order, with all our eagles pointing the right way.

I lingered on the mound, making acquaintance with a world which was new to me, but immeasurably old to fame. The beautiful empty desert stretched away east and north and south, bathed in the soft splendour of the February sun, long gentle slopes and low bare hills, and the noble curves of the Euphrates bordering the waste. Near the river and scattered over the first two or three miles of country to the east of it, there are a number of isolated mounds which represent the site of very ancient settlements.[24] Of these Tell Aḥmar is by far the most important. The ridge of silted earth which marks the line of the walls encloses three sides of a parallelogram, the river itself defending the fourth side. Strewn about the village are several stone slabs carved in relief with Hittite figures; outside one of the gates in the east wall are the broken remains of a Hittite stela, and before the second more southerly gate lie two roughly carved lions with inscriptions of Shalmaneser II.[25] By the time I had finished lunch Ḥâjj ’Alî had selected a villager to serve me as guide to the wonders of Tell Aḥmar, and we set off together to inspect the written stones. My new friend’s name was Ibrahîm. As we ran down to Shalmaneser’s lions he confided to me that for some reason, wholly concealed from him, wallah, he was not beloved of the Ḳâimmaḳâm of Bumbuj, and added that he proposed to place himself under my protection, please God.

“Please God,” said I, wondering to what misdeeds I might, in the name of my vassal, stand committed.

The fragments of the Hittite stela were half buried in the ground, and I sent Ibrahîm to the village, bidding him collect men with picks and spades to dig them out. The monument had been a four-sided block of stone with rounded corners, covered on three sides with an inscription and on the fourth with a king in low relief standing upon a bull (Fig. 18). When we had disengaged the bull from the earth the villagers fell to discussing what kind of animal it was, and Ibrahîm took upon himself to pronounce it a pig. But Ḥâjj ’Alî, who had been tempted forth from the tents to view the antîca, intervened decisively in the debate.

“In the ancient days,” said he, “they made pictures of men and maidens, lions, horses, bulls and dogs; but they never made pictures of pigs.”

This statement was received deferentially by all, and Ibrahîm, with the fervour of the newly convinced, hastened to corroborate it.

“No, wallah! They never made pictures of pigs.”

The whole village turned out to help in the work of making moulds of the inscriptions, those who were not actively employed with brush and paste and paper sitting round in an attentive circle. There is little doing at Tell Aḥmar, and even the moulding of a Hittite inscription, which is not to the European an occupation fraught with interest, affords a welcome diversion—to say nothing of the prospect of earning a piastre if you wait long enough. But on the third day, wind and rain called a halt, and guided by the sheikh of the neighbouring village of Ḳubbeh I explored the river-bank. Half-an-hour below Tell Aḥmar, among some insignificant ruins, we found a small Hittite inscription cut on a bit of basalt, and close to it a block of limestone carved with a much effaced relief. A few minutes further to the east a lion’s head roughly worked in basalt lay upon a mound. The head is carved in the round, but we dug into the mound and uncovered a large block on which the legs were represented in relief. We rode on to Ḳubbeh, where the inhabitants are Arabic-speaking Kurds, and found in the graveyard the fragment of a Latin inscription in well-cut letters—

C O M F

L O N G

H F R

V I A S

We left the hamlet of Ja’deh a little to the right, and an hour further down passed the village of Mughârah, beyond which the eastern ridge of high ground draws in towards the river. In a small valley, just before we reached the slopes of the hill, I saw the remains of some construction that looked like a bridge built of finely squared stones, and on the further side a graveyard with a couple of broken stone sarcophagi in it. The sheikh said that after rain he had found glass and gold rings here. He insisted on my inspecting some caves by the water’s edge where he was positive we should find writing, and I went reluctantly, for a series of disillusions has ended in destroying the romantic interest that once hung about caves. These were no better than I had expected, and the writing was a cross incised over one of the entrances. The rain had stopped and we rode on to the big mound of Ḳara Kazâk (Kiepert calls it Kyrk Kazâk), at the foot of which there is a considerable area covered with cut and moulded stones, and massive door-jambs still standing upright with half their height buried in the earth. I should say that it was the site of a town of the Byzantine period. When we returned to

Fig. 18.—TELL AḤMAR. HITTITE STELA.

Fig. 19.—TELL AḤMAR. EARTHENWARE JAR.

Fig. 21.—SERRÎN, NORTHERN TOWER TOMB.

Fig. 22.—SERRÎN, SOUTHERN TOWER TOMB.

camp Ibrahîm brought me two fragments of a large earthenware jar decorated round the top with a double line raised and notched in the clay (Fig. 19). In the band between were set alternately a head in high relief and a semi-circle of the notched clay. The heads were finely worked, the eyes rather prominent and the cheeks round and full—a type which recalled that of the stone heads carved upon the walls of the Parthian palace at Hatra. Whether it were Parthian or not, the jar was certainly pre-Mohammadan.

The night closed in cloudless and frosty, and I resolved to risk the caprices of the river and ride up next morning to Carchemish, for it is impossible to lie within half-a-day’s journey of a great capital and yet make no effort to see it. Before dawn we sent a messenger up the river and charged him to bring us a boat to a point above the camp, that we might land on the west bank of the Euphrates above its junction with the Sajûr, a river which we were told was difficult to cross. In half-an-hour Fattûḥ and I reached Tell el ’Abr (the Mound of the Ford), where there is a small village, and on going down to the river found, to our surprise, that the boat was there before us—but not ready; that would have been too much to expect. I left Fattûḥ to bale out the water with which it was filled and went off to inspect Tell el Kumluk, a quarter of an hour away if you gallop. Here there was no village, but only a large graveyard with broken columns used as tombstones. By the time I returned to the river the boat had been made more or less seaworthy, but a sharp little wind had risen, the swift current of the Euphrates was ruffled, and the boatmen shook their heads and doubted whether they would dare to cross. We did not leave the decision to them, but hurried the horses into the leaking craft and pushed off. The stream swept us down and the wind held us close to the east bank, but with much labour and frequent invocation of God and the Prophet we sidled across and ran aground on the opposite shore. Our troubles were not yet over, for our landing-place turned out to be a big island, and there was still an arm of the river before us. The stream had risen during the rain of the previous day and was racing angrily through the second channel, but we plunged in and, with the water swirling round the shoulders of our horses, succeeded in making the passage. We shook ourselves dry and turned our faces to Carchemish. The road under the bluffs by the river-side was impassable, and we climbed up a gorge into the rocky country that lies along the top of the cliff. At one point we saw a mass of ruins, door-jambs and squared stones, which Kiepert—I know not on what ground—calls Kloster Ruine. In that bare land we met a cheerful old man driving a donkey and carrying a rifle. “Whither going in peace?” said he. “To Carchemish,” we answered (only we called it Jerâblus), and I fell to considering how often the same question had met with the same answer when the stony path was full of people from the Tell Aḥmar city going up and down to learn the news of the capital and bring back word of the movements of Assyrian armies and the market price of corn. Fattûḥ, elated by the conquest of the river, bubbled over with talk, simple tales of his beloved Aleppo, of the ways of its inhabitants great and small, and of his many journeys to Killîz and ’Ain Tâb, Urfah, Diyârbekr, and Baghdâd.

“Your Excellency knows that I was the first man to take a carriage to Baghdâd, for there was no road then, but afterwards they made it. And as for my carriage, Zekîyeh has lined it inside and filled it with cushions, so that the gentry may lie at ease while I drive them. And have I told you how I got Zekîyeh?”

“No,” said I mendaciously; I have travelled with Fattûḥ before, and have not been left unaware of the episodes that led to his betrothal, but reminiscences that take the listener into the heart of Eastern life bear repetition. The lady of Fattûḥ’s choice was fourteen when he first set eyes on her; he went straight to her father and made a bid for her hand, but the girl was very fair and the father asked a larger dowry than Fattûḥ could give. “Fortunately,” continued Fattûḥ ingenuously, “he had an illness of the eyes, and I said to him: ‘There is in Aleppo a doctor who loves me, and will cure you for my sake.’ But he answered: ‘God give you wisdom! none can cure me save only God.’ And I mounted him in my carriage, and drove him to that doctor, and look you, he healed him so that he saw like a youth. Then he said, ‘There is none like Fattûḥ, and I will give him my daughter even without a dowry.’ So I bought her clothes and a gold chain and all that she desired, for I said, ‘She shall have nought but what I give her.’ And since we married I have given her gold ornaments and dresses of silk, and when we return from this journey I will take her on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. And indeed she loves me mightily, and I her,” said Fattûḥ, bringing his idyll to a satisfactory conclusion. I have seen Zekîyeh in all the bravery of her silk gowns and gold ornaments, and I do not think she has ever had cause to regret the day when Fattûḥ mounted her father in his carriage.

We rode fast, and in a couple of hours came down to the Euphrates again, and so over the low ground for another hour till we reached a tell by the river with a village close to it. This village and tell, as well as the large mound half-an-hour away to the north-west, and the farm near it, are all called Jerâblus,[26] and probably local tradition is right in drawing no distinction between the widely separated mounds, the whole area between them having been, in all likelihood, occupied by the houses and gardens of the Hittite capital. Until you come to Babylon there is no site on the Euphrates so imposing as the northern mound of Carchemish (Fig. 17). It was the acropolis, the strongly fortified dwelling-place of king and god. At its north-eastern end it rises to a high ridge enclosed on two sides in a majestic sweep of the river. From the top of this ridge you may see the middle parts of the strategic line drawn by the Euphrates from Samosata to Thapsacus, strung with battlefields whereon the claims of Europe and Asia were fought out; while to the west stretch the rich plains that gave wealth to Carchemish, to Europus, and to Hierapolis. They are now coming back into cultivation as the merchants of Aleppo acquire and till them, or enter into an agricultural partnership with their Arab proprietors, and if the Baghdâd railway is brought this way, as was confidently expected, the returns from them will be doubled or trebled in value. The northern mound is covered with the ruins of the Roman and Byzantine city, columns and moulded bases, foundations of walls set round paved courtyards, and the line of a colonnaded street running across the ruin field from the high ridge to a breach that indicates the place of a gate in the southern face of the enclosing wall. A couple of carved Hittite slabs, uncovered during Henderson’s excavations and left exposed at the mercy of the weather, bear witness to the antiquity of the site. It has long been desolate, but there is no mistaking the greatness of the city that was protected by that splendid mound.

CHAPTER II

TELL AḤMAR TO BUSEIRAH

Feb. 21—March 7

The water of the Euphrates is much esteemed by the inhabitants of its banks. It is, I think, an acquired taste; the newcomer will be apt to look askance at the turgid liquid that issues from the spout of his teapot and to question whether a decoction of ancient dust can be beneficial to the European constitution. Fattûḥ, being acquainted with my idiosyncrasies in the matter of drinking water, accepted without a murmur the sacrilegious decree that that which was destined for my flask must be boiled; whereby, though we did not succeed in removing all solid bodies, we reduced them to a comparative harmlessness. But if it cannot be described as a good table river, the Euphrates is the best of travelling companions, and the revolution of the seasons will never again bring me to the last week of February without setting loose a desire for the wide reaches of the stream and the open levels of the desert through which it flows, the sharp cold of nightfall, the hoar frost of the dawn, and the first long ray of the sun striking a dismantled camp. “There is no road,” said Fattûḥ, “like the road to Baghdâd: the desert on one hand and the water on the other.”

Fig. 20.—SERRÎN, NORTH TOWER TOMB, PLAN AND ELEVATION SHOWING MOULDINGS.

we pitched camp on the further bank of a small stream near the village of Serrîn, for I wished to examine two towers which stand upon the crest of a high ridge about half-an-hour to the east. They are called by the Arabs the Windmills, but in reality they are tower tombs. The more northerly, which is the best preserved, is 4·20 m. square and two storeys high (Fig. 20). The walls of the lower storey rise in solid masonry to a height of about six metres and are crowned by a plain course of projecting stones, which serves as cornice (Fig. 21). On the east and west sides, just below the cornice, there is a pair of gargoyles, much weathered. They represent the head and fore-quarters of lions. A little below the pair of heads on the west side is a Syriac inscription, dated in the year 385 of the Seleucid era, i. e. A.D. 74, which states that the tomb was built by one Manu for himself and his sons.[27] The second storey is decorated with fluted engaged columns, four on either side, the outer pair forming the angles. The bases of these columns rest upon a course of masonry adorned with three fasciæ: it is to be noted that the mouldings are not carried straight through to the angles, but are returned one within the other like the mouldings of a door lintel. The Ionic capitals carry a plain Ionic entablature consisting of an architrave with fasciæ, which are here taken through to the corners, a narrow frieze and a cyma of considerable projection. Probably the whole was surmounted by a stone pyramid. There are two burial chambers, one in each storey. The lower chamber can be entered by a door in the east wall which was originally closed by a large block of stone. The entrance to the upper chamber, high up in the east wall between the columns, was closed in the same fashion, and the block of porphyry which sealed it is still intact.[28] Pognon, who has given the best description and illustrations of the monument, mentions five other examples of tower tombs crowned with pyramids, one of them being the southern tower at Serrîn. The well-known tower tombs of Palmyra and the Ḥaurân are not capped by a pyramid, nor is the face of their walls broken at any point by engaged columns. I believe the type illustrated at Serrîn to be compounded of the simple tower tomb and the canopy, or cyborium, tomb.[29] The cyborium tomb exists in an infinite number of variations in Syria, in the mountain district near Birejik (whence M. Cumont has supplied me with four examples, three of them as yet unpublished[30]), in Asia Minor and in the African Tripoli. Sometimes the columns stand free,[31] sometimes they are engaged in the walls,[32] sometimes they are represented only by engaged angle piers,[33] sometimes by free standing angle piers,[34] and occasionally column and pier have dropped away and the plain wall alone remains,[35] but the pyramidal roof is an almost constant feature, which, even in the simplest of these tombs, recalls the original canopy type. In the hill side near the tower I noticed several rock-cut mausoleums, now half-choked with stones and earth, and the hill was no doubt the necropolis of a town lying in the low ground that stretches down to the modern village by the stream.[36] The second tower, of which only the south wall remains, is situated on the southern end of the ridge, half-an-hour’s ride from the first (Fig. 22). It differs slightly in detail from the other. In the lower storey a shallow engaged pier stands at either angle, while in the upper storey, in place of the porphyry block, there is an arched niche between the two central engaged columns. The fasciæ returned at the corners reappear, but the columns are not fluted. The hill top commands a wide view over country which appears to be entirely desert. My guide, who was a Christian from Aleppo, an agent of the Liquorice Trust for the Serrîn district, said that there was no settled population to the east of us, and that the few Arab encampments which were visible upon the rolling steppe were those of the Benî Sa’îd, a subdivision of the Benî Faḥl. As we sat in the sunshine under the tower, Jirjî related tales of his neighbours, the Arab sheikhs, for whom he entertained, as the townsman will, feelings that ranged between contempt and fear—contempt for their choice of a black tent in the desert as a dwelling-place, and fear inspired by the authority which they wielded from that humble abode. But chiefly his simple soul was exercised by the swift downfall of Ibrahîm Pasha, who for so many years had been, as the fancy prompted him, the scourge or the mighty protector of all the inhabitants of northern Mesopotamia, a man with whom the government had to make terms, while the great tribes stood in awe of him and the lesser tribes fled at the whisper of his name. Jirjî, like many another, refused to believe that he was dead, and entertained us with wild surmises as to the manner of his possible return from the unknown refuge where he lay in hiding. “God knows he was a brave man,” said he. “Oh lady, do you see Ḳal’at en Nejm yonder?” And he pointed west, where across the Euphrates the walls and bastions of the fortress crowned the precipitous bank. “There he forded, he and eight hundred men with him, when he hastened back from Damascus to his own country, hearing that the government was against him. They swam the river with their horses and rested that night at Serrîn. But the Pasha was grave and silent: God’s mercy upon him, for he befriended us Christians.” Ḥâjj ’Alî shook his head. “He wrecked the world,” said he. “Praise God he is dead.” Somewhere between the two opinions lies the truth. I suspect that though the way in which his overthrow was accomplished left much to be desired, the Millî Kurds, of whom he was the chief, had gained under his bold leadership a pre-eminence in lawlessness which no government was justified in countenancing. But since he is dead, peace to his memory, for he knew no fear.

Fig. 23.—INSCRIPTION IN CAVE NEAR SERRÎN.

the opening of which had been fenced in by the latest inhabitants with screens made of rushes. Upon one of the walls I found a curious inscription written in characters not unlike those seen by Sachau in a cave near Urfah[37] (Fig. 23). The Arab women with their children in their arms clamoured round me, and I distributed among them what small coins I had with me, without satisfying the claims of all. One scolding wench ran after us up the valley vociferating her demand that ten paras should be given to her swaddled babe. We had not ridden far before Jûsef’s horse slipped and fell upon a smooth stone, dismounting his rider, who was at no time too certain of his seat. “Allah!” ejaculated Ḥâjj ’Alî; “it was the woman’s curse that brought him down.” But the malediction had missed fire, or perhaps it was only ten paras’ worth of damnation, for Jûsef and his horse scrambled up together unhurt. At the head of the valley we came out on to a green sward. The rains on this side of the river had been scanty and the grass had scarcely begun to grow, but already there were a few encampments of the Faḥl in sheltered places which later in the season would be set thick with the black tents of the ’Anazeh, who do not come down to the river until the rain pools are exhausted in their winter quarters. The thin blue smoke of the morning camp fires rose out of the hollows and my heart rose with it, for here was the life of the desert, in open spaces under the open sky, and when once you have known it, the eternal savage in your breast rejoices at the return to it. As we rode near the tents a man galloped up to us and begged for a pinch of tobacco. He was clothed in a ragged cotton shirt and a yet more ragged woollen cloak, but Ḥâjj ’Alî looked after him as he turned away and observed, “His mare is worth £200.”

In three hours from Serrîn we caught up the baggage animals at the last village we were to see until we reached Raḳḳah. Mas’ûdîyeh is its name. On a mound close to the river Oppenheim found three mosaic pavements, parts of which are still visible, but the most beautiful of the three has been almost destroyed and nothing remains of it but a simple geometrical border of diagonal intersecting lines.[38] Beyond Mas’ûdîyeh we crossed a long belt of sand, lying in a bend of the river; we left a small mound (Tell el Banât) a mile to the east, climbed a ridge of bare hill and dropped down into a wide stretch of grass country, empty, peaceful and most beautiful. It was enclosed in a semicircle of hills that stood back from the river, and from out of the midst of it rose an isolated peak known to the Arabs as Ḳuleib. This land is the home of the Weldeh tribe, and not far from the Euphrates we found a group of their tents pitched between green slopes and the broad reaches of sand which give the spot its name, Rumeileh, the Little Sands. It was the encampment of Sheikh Ṣallâl, and no sooner had we arrived than the sheikh’s son, Muḥammad, came out to bid us welcome and invite us to his father’s tent. The two zaptiehs and I took our places round the hearth while Muḥammad roasted and pounded the coffee beans, telling us the while of the movements of the great tribes, where Ḥâkim Beg of the ’Anazeh was lying, and where Ibn Hudhdhâl of the Amarât, and similar matters of absorbing interest. Sheikh Ṣallâl was in reduced circumstances by reason of a recent difference of opinion with the government. His brother had been enlisted as a soldier and had subsequently deserted, whereupon the government had seized Ṣallâl’s flocks and clapped the sheikh into gaol, and finally he had sold “the best mare left to us, wallah!” for £T37 and with the money procured his own release.

“Eh billah!” said Ḥâjj ’Alî, shaking his head over the confused tale in which, as is usual in these episodes, the wrongdoing seemed to be shared impartially by all concerned. “Such is the government!”

“And now, oh lady,” pursued the sheikh, “we have neither camels nor sheep, for the government has eaten all.”

“How do you live?” said I, looking round the circle of dark, bearded faces by the camp fire.

“God knows!” sighed the sheikh, and turning to Ḥâjj ’Alî he asked him what was this new government of which he heard, and liberty, what was that?

“Liberty?” said Ḥâjj ’Alî, evading the question; “how should there be liberty in these lands? Look you, they talk of liberty, but there is no change in the world. In Aleppo many men are murdered every week, and who knows what they are doing, those envoys whom we sent to Constantinople?”

In spite of his misfortunes Sheikh Ṣallâl designed to entertain me at dinner and had set aside for that purpose an ancient goat. My attention was attracted to it by the sound of bleating in the women’s quarters and I was just in time to save its life, expending myself, however, in protestations of gratitude. Muḥammad ibn Ṣallâl took me round the encampment before the light failed and pointed out the foundations of a number of stone-built houses. Behind my tents the summits of some grassy mounds were ringed round with circles of great stones, of the origin of which he knew nothing. I counted five of them; in the largest lay foundations of small rectangular chambers.

As we walked back to the tents Muḥammad said reproachfully:

“Oh lady, you have not laughed once, not when I showed you the ruins, nor when I told you the name of the hills.”

I hastened to amend my ways, and thus encouraged he enumerated a string of ruined sites in the neighbourhood and accepted an invitation to serve us as guide next morning. He prepared himself for the journey by slipping on four cartridge belts, one over the other, although our whole road lay in the Weldeh country, and the worst enemy we encountered was a raging wind which sent the Euphrates sands whirling about us and obscured the landscape near the river. In about an hour we climbed up on to the higher ground of the grass plain at a point called Shems ed Dîn, where among a heap of cut stones I found fragments of an entablature carved with dentils and palmettes. Perhaps the ruins were the remains of a tower tomb. At Tell eẓ Ẓâher, an hour further south, we saw heaps of unsquared building-stones. Above this site stood Sheikh Sîn, a steep hill which we ascended, but found no trace of construction on it. I sent my zaptieh down to stop the baggage and bid Fattûḥ camp at the mound of Munbayah near the river, and with Muḥammad turned inland to a hill called by him Jernîyeh, some five miles to the east. Muḥammad rode across the downs at a hand gallop in the teeth of the wind, and I behind him, too much buffeted by the storm to call a halt. The immediate reason for our haste, as I presently discovered, was a couple of pedlars from whom he desired to buy soap, a commodity of which he stood in great need. The two men were Turks; they greeted me with effusion as a fellow alien in those wastes, and at parting pressed upon me a handful of raisins with their blessings. We galloped on faster than before and arrived breathless at Jernîyeh which lifts its solitary head a hundred feet or more above the surrounding plain. On the summit are three large mounds into which the Arabs had dug and uncovered fine cut stones; I conjecture that there may have been here watch towers or tower tombs belonging to the town of which the ruins lie below, to the south of the hill. These ruins comprise a large low mound ringed round with a wall and a ditch, and a considerable area covered with remains of buildings made of unsquared stones. Occasionally the plan of house or court was marked out upon the grass and Muḥammad showed me several deep cisterns—altogether a very remarkable ruin field though it is not named on Kiepert’s map. On our way back to the river we climbed Tell el Ga’rah and found the foundations of a fort on the top of it. Here we picked up a much-weathered Byzantine coin and a quantity of sherds of glazed Arab pottery, blue and green and purple. Munbayah, where my tents were pitched—the Arabic name means only an elevated spot—has been conjectured to be the Bersiba of Ptolemy’s catalogue of place names. It is an irregularly-shaped double enclosure, resting on one side on the river (Fig. 25). The line of the walls is marked by high grass mounds, but here and there a bit of massive polygonal masonry, large stones laid without mortar, crops out of the soil. The outer enclosing wall is not continued along the north side, but ends in a heap of earth and stones which looks like the ruins of a tower or bastion. To the south there is a clearly-marked gate in the outer wall, corresponding with a narrower opening in the inner line of fortification; another gate leads out to the north, and facing the river there are traces of a broad water gate, protected on either side by a wall that drops down the slope towards the stream (Fig. 26). Twenty minutes further down the bank lies another mound, Tell Sheikh Ḥassan. There are vestiges of construction by the water’s edge between the two mounds, and south of Tell Sheikh Ḥassan the ground is broken by a large stretch of ruin mounds, among which I saw a rude capital. In another half-hour down stream, at ’Anâb, there is again an enclosure of grassy heaps strewn with stones. For a distance of about three miles, therefore, the left bank of the river would seem to have been inhabited and guarded, though possibly at different dates. Jernîyeh and Munbayah are by far the most interesting sites which I saw on the little-known stretch of the river between Tell Aḥmar and Ḳal’at Ja’bar; it is useless to conjecture in what way, if at all, they were connected with each other, but in both places I should like to clear away the earth and see what lies beneath.

FIG. 25.

trying to work out of doors, passes belief. The blast seizes you by the hand as you would hold your compass steady, dances jigs with your camera and elopes with your measuring tape, and when after an exhausting struggle you return vanquished to your tent, it is only to find your books and papers buried in sand. Moreover, commissariat arrangements were complicated by the interruption of communications with the opposite side of the river. Fortunately I had foreseen that there would be little food for man or beast on the left bank, where no travellers pass, and contrary to my habits had laid in a provision of tinned meats, for which we had reason to be thankful. The baggage animals were lightly loaded and could carry four days’ corn besides their packs; when this ran short Fattûḥ went foraging in every Arab encampment, but occasionally the horses were without their full allowance, for at this time of the year the Arabs themselves are very scantily supplied. We soon learnt to place no reliance on assurances, however emphatic, that the next sheikh down the river would be well furnished, and as our road led us into regions that had suffered more and more severely from the lack of rain, we gave up all hope of ekeing out our corn with the grass which never grew that year. The corn, too, became dearer, until at Baghdâd it touched famine prices. On the upper parts of the river there is no fuel and we carried charcoal for cooking purposes; but when the tamarisk bushes began to appear, about a day’s march north of Raḳḳah, the muleteers boiled their big rice pot over a fire of sticks and the zaptiehs warmed their hands in the sharp chill of the early morning at the heap of embers that had been kept alive all night. The zaptiehs are supposed to feed themselves, but except on the rare occasions when we were on a high road, they shared the meals of my servants. I would find them sitting in the dark round the steaming dish served up by Ḥâjj ’Amr, and with them the Arab who had been our guide that day, or one who had dropped in towards supper time to give us information of the road, or any aged person considered by Fattûḥ to be worthy of our hospitality. We held many a frugal feast

[24] A few of these may have preserved a certain importance in a later age: Tell el Ghânah, directly to the east of Tell Aḥmar, has been conjectured to be Thilaticomum (possibly incorrectly: Regling, Beiträge zur alten Geschichte, 1902, Vol. I. p. 474) and Tell Bada’ah to be Aniana, the first being mentioned in the Antonine Itinerary and the second by Ptolemy.

[25] Mr. Hogarth (at whose request I visited Tell Aḥmar) has published the carved slabs and the stela in the Annals of Archæology and Anthropology, Vol. II. No. 4. He saw them when he was at Tell Aḥmar in 1908.

[26] Jerâblus or Jerâbîs, the names are used indiscriminately. The former is thought by Nöldeke to be an Arabic plural of Jirbâs (mentioned by Yâḳût as opposite Ḳinnesrin, Dictionary, Vol. II. p. 688) and the latter as Arabicized from Europus.

[27] The inscription is given by Pognon: Inscriptions de la Mésopotamie, p. 17. The tomb was visited by Oppenheim, and is mentioned by him in Tell Halaf (1st number, 10th year of Der alte Orient), and in his Griechische und lateinische Inschriften. (Byzantinische Zeitschrift, 1905, p. 7.)

[28] Oppenheim thought it was the end of a sarcophagus, but Pognon’s guide climbed into the upper chamber and found it to be nothing but a block of stone closing the entrance.

[29] For the cyborium tomb, see Heisenburg: Grabeskirche und Apostelkirche, Vol. I. ch. xvi.

[30] A photograph of the fourth, the Ziareh of Khoros at Cyrrhus, was published by Chapot in Le Tour du Monde, April 8, 1905, p. 162.

[31] Mylasa: published by the Dilettanti Society; Tripoli: Nouvelles Archives des Missions, Tome XII. fas. 1; Dana: De Vogüé, La Syrie Centrale, plate 78.

[32] Tomb of Absalom, Jerusalem.

[33] Gereme: Rott, Kleinasiatische Denkmäler, p. 171; El Bârah: De Vogüé, op. cit. pl. 75.

[34] M. Cumont’s monuments are of this type and I have seen a fine example at Barâd in N. Syria, also as yet unpublished except for a photograph given by me in The Desert and the Sown, p. 287.

[35] Maden Sheher: published by Sir W. Ramsay and myself in The Thousand and One Churches, p. 230.

[36] The name which has been suggested for the site is Baisampse, a place mentioned by Ptolemy. There are a considerable number of cut stones on the mound near the village.

[37] It was re-copied by Pognon and published by him in Inscrip. de la Mésopotamie, p. 82. The similarity between some of the characters in the two inscriptions is striking.

[38] It appears in the extreme right-hand top corner of his Fig. 22, Inschrif. aus Syrien und Mesopot.

Fig. 24.—WIFE AND CHILDREN OF A WELDEH SHEIKH.

Fig. 26.—MUNBAYAH, WATER GATE.

Fig. 28.—NESHABAH, TOWER TOMB.

under the stars where the waters of the Euphrates roll through the wild.

During the next day’s ride we followed the course of the river closely, save where the grassy edge of the desert was separated from the water by a tract of sand and stones covered in time of flood, and therefore devoid of all trace of settled habitation. The tents of the Weldeh were scattered along the banks and occasionally a small bit of ground had been scratched with the plough and sown with corn. At one point we saw the white canvas tent of a man from Aleppo who was engaged in negotiating an amicable partnership with the Weldeh sheikhs. The majestic presence of the river in the midst of uncultivated lands, which, with the help of its waters, would need so little labour to make them productive, takes a singular hold on the imagination. I do not believe that the east bank has always been so thinly peopled, and though the present condition may date from very early times, it is probable that there was once a continuous belt of villages by the stream, their sites being still marked by mounds. Half-an-hour from ’Anâb we passed Tell Jifneh, with remains of buildings about it; in another hour and a half there were ruins at Ḥallâweh, and forty minutes further we came to a big mound called Tell Murraibet. From this point the grass lands retreated from the Euphrates, leaving place for a wide stretch of sand and scrub opposite Old Meskeneh. Kiepert marks two towers on some high ground to the east, but they must have fallen into ruin since Chesney’s survey, for I could not see them. Six hours from Bersiba we reached in heavy rain the tents of Sheikh Mabrûk and pitched our camp by his, so that we might find shelter for our horses under his wide roof. We were about opposite Dibseh, which was perhaps the famous ford of Thapsacus. Mabrûk told me that in summer, when the water is low, camels can cross the river just above Dibseh; at Meskeneh a ferry boat is to be had, but at no other point until you come to Raḳḳah.

Next morning a young man from the sheikh’s tent, cousin to Mabrûk (all the unmarried youths of the sheikh’s family are lodged in his great house of hair) rode with us to Ḳal’at Ja’bar. He told me of a ruin called Mudawwarah (the Circle), an hour and a half away to the east: it may represent one of Kiepert’s towers, but according to Ibrahîm’s account nothing is now to be seen but a heap of stones. We rode out of the camp with a troop of women and children driving donkeys into the hills, where they collect brushwood.

“Last year,” said my companion, “they dared not stray from the tents, lest the horsemen of Ibrahîm Pasha should attack them and seize the donkeys. Wallah! the children could not drive out the goats to pasture, and every man sat with his loaded rifle across his knees and watched for the coming of raiders. For indeed he took all, oh lady; he robbed rich and poor; he held up caravans and killed the solitary traveller.”

“Eh wah!” said the zaptieh, “and the soldiers of the government he killed also. He was sultan in the waste.”

“But now that he is gone,” continued Ibrahîm, “we are at rest. And as soon as we heard of his death we blessed the government, and all the men of the Weldeh rode out and seized the flocks that he had captured from us, and more besides. And behold, there they pasture by the river.” And he pointed to some sheep grazing under the care of a couple of small boys.

“Then all the desert is safe now?” said I.

“Praise God!” he answered, “for the ’Anazeh are our friends. We have no foes but the Shammar, and their lands are far from us.”

Fig. 27.—MAḤALL ES ṢAFṢAF.

it is protected by a dyke forming a loop from the Euphrates. At one time the water must have filled this moat, but the upper end has silted up and the channel is now dry. Out of the mound, which is unusually large, the rains had washed a number of big stones, some of them squared. We were now close to the two towers of Ḳal’at Ja’bar, one being a minaret that rises from the centre of the fortress, while the other, known to the Arabs as Neshabah, stands upon an isolated hill to the north-west[39] (Fig. 28). Of the Neshabah tower nothing remains but a rectangular core of masonry (unworked stones set in thick mortar) containing a winding stair which can be approached by a doorway about four metres from the ground. Below the door there is a vaulted niche which looks like the remains of a sepulchral chamber. All the facing stones have fallen away, but the core is ridged in a manner that suggests the former existence of engaged columns, and I believe that Neshabah is a tower tomb older than the castle, rather than the outlying watchtower of an Arab fort.[40] The buildings at Ḳal’at Ja’bar are mainly of brick, though some stone is used in the walls and bastions that surround the hill-top (Fig. 29). The entrance is strongly guarded; from the outer gate-house a long narrow passage, hewn out of the rock, leads into the interior of the castle. Among the ruins within the walls are a vaulted hall and parts of a palace composed of a number of small vaulted chambers. The construction of the small vaults struck me as having stronger affinities with Byzantine than with the typical Mesopotamian systems, and I should not assign to them a very early date. The palace had also contained a hall of some size, but only the south wall is standing (Fig. 31). It is broken by a deep recess, possibly a miḥrâb, with a doorway on either side, and the upper part is decorated with a row of flat trifoliate niches. In the centre of the castle a round minaret rises from a massive square base (Fig. 30). Towards the top of the minaret there is a double band of ornamental brickwork with a brick inscription between. I could not decipher the inscription, owing to its great height, but the characters were not Cufic, and the round shape of the minaret makes it improbable that it should be earlier than the twelfth century. Beyond the minaret is a vaulted cistern. The shelving north-west side of the hill is defended by a double ring of brick towers, but on the south-east side, where the rocks are precipitous, there is little or no fortification. The brick walls of the buildings above the gate-way are decorated with string courses and bands of diamond-shaped motives, the diamonds set point to point or enclosed in hollow squares (Fig. 32).

The history of the castle is not easy to disentangle from the accounts left by the Arab geographers. An earlier name for it was Dausar, but even this does not seem to have been applied before the seventh century, though Idrîsî, writing in the twelfth century, ascribes its foundation to Alexander. He is the first author who mentions Dausar and he gives no authority for his statement as to its origin. Opposite Dausar, on the right bank of the Euphrates, stretches the battlefield of Ṣiffîn, where in A.D. 657 the Khalif ’Alî met the forces of the Umayyad Mu’âwiyah. Tradition has it that ’Alî entrusted his ally Nu’mân, a prince of the house of Mundhir, with the defence of these reaches of the Euphrates, and that a servant of the latter, Dausar by name, built the castle which was called after him. It took its present name from an Arab of the Ḳusheir, from whose sons it was wrested (in A.D. 1087)

Fig. 29.—ḲAL’AT JA’BAR.

Fig. 30.—ḲAL’AT JA’BAR, MINARET.

Fig. 31.—ḲAL’AT JA’BAR, HALL OF PALACE.

Fig. 32.—ḲAL’AT JA’BAR, BRICK WALL ABOVE GATEWAY.

by the Sultan Malek Shah, the Seljuk.[41] It was held by the Franks of Edessa during the first Crusade and captured by the Atabeg Nûr ed Dîn towards the middle of the twelfth century. It passed into the hands of the Ayyûbids, and in Yâḳût’s time (1225) was held by Ḥâfiẓ, the nephew of Saladin. Benjamin of Tudela says that he found a colony of 2,000 Jews settled at Ja’bar, which was then a much-frequented ferry.[42] I did not observe any signs of habitation outside the castle, except a few caves in the rocks to the south; but half-an-hour further down the river, on a bluff called Kahf (Chahf in the Bedouin speech) ez Zaḳḳ, there are traces of houses which may represent the Jewish settlement. In Abu’l Fidâ’s day (fourteenth century) the castle of Ja’bar was ruined and abandoned. The greater part of the existing buildings might well have been erected by Nûr ed Dîn, and failing further evidence it is to him that I should ascribe them.

Under Kahf ez Zaḳḳ we found the tents of Ḥamrî, one of the principal sheikhs of the Weldeh, a sturdy white-bearded man in the prime of age, with the fine free bearing of one long used to command. He sat in the sunshine and watched the pitching of our camp, ordering the young men of the tribe to bestir themselves in our service, one to gather brushwood, another to show the muleteers the best watering-place on the muddy river-bank, a third to fetch eggs and sour curds, and when he had seen to our welfare, he strode back to his tent and bade me follow. The coffee was ready when I arrived, and with the cups the talk went round of desert politics and the relation of this sheikh with that all through the Weldeh camps. The glow of sunset faded, night closed down about the flickering fire of thorns, a crescent moon looked in upon us and heard us speaking of new things. Even into this primeval world a rumour had penetrated, borne on the word Liberty, and the men round the hearth fell to discussing the meaning of those famous syllables, which have no meaning save to those who have lost that for which they stand. But Sheikh Ḥamrî interposed with the air of one whose years and experience gave him the right to decide in matters that passed the common understanding.

“How can there be liberty under Islâm?” said he. “Shall I take a wife contrary to the laws of Islam, and call it liberty? God forbid.” And we recognized in his words the oldest of the restrictions to which the human race has submitted. “God forbid,” we murmured, and bowed our heads before the authority of the social code.

Fig. 34.—ḤARAGLAH, VAULT.

Fig. 35.—RAḲḲAH, EASTERN MINARET.

Fig. 37.—RAḲḲAH, MOSQUE FROM EAST.

Fig. 38.—RAḲḲAH, ARCADE OF MOSQUE, FROM NORTH.

then camped under a mound called Tell ’Abd ’Alî, not far from a couple of very poor tents of the Afâḍleh, with the river a mile away. The night was exquisitely still, but from time to time an owl cried with a shrill note like that of a shepherd-boy calling to his flocks.

Fig. 33.—ḤARAGLAH.

Our camp proved to be but two hours’ ride from Raḳḳah. A little more than half-way between the two places we reached the enigmatic ruin which is known to the Arabs as Ḥaraglah, a name which may be a corruption of Heraclea. It consists of a rectangular fortress, almost square, with a series of small vaulted chambers forming the outer parts of the block and, as far as I could judge, larger vaulted chambers filling up the centre (Fig. 33). At the four angles there are round towers. The building as it now stands is merely a substructure, a platform resting on vaults, on which stood an upper storey that has disappeared. The masonry is mostly of unsquared stones laid in a bed of very coarse mortar mixed with small stones, but the vaults are of brick tiles, and it is noticeable that these tiles are not laid in the true Mesopotamian fashion, whereby centering could be dispensed with (i. e. in narrow slices leaning back against the head-wall), but that the double ring of tiles is treated like the voussoirs of a stone arch and must have been built on a centering (Fig. 34). This structure would be enough to show that the work does not belong to the Mohammadan period. The fortress is ringed round by an outer wall, now completely ruined. Beyond it to the south runs a dyke, and beyond the dyke, some 500 m. south-east of the central fort, there is another mound on which I saw cut stones larger than the stones used at Ḥaraglah. Still further to the south lies a third mound, Tell Meraish, with a second dyke to the south of it. The two dykes appeared to be loop canals from the Euphrates and must therefore have formed part of an extensive system of irrigation; probably there had once been a considerable area of cultivation under the protection of the fortress.[45]

So we came to Raḳḳah and there joined forces with the army of Julian, who had marched down from Carrhæ and the head waters of the Belîkh 1,500 years ago and more—the account of the march given by Ammianus Marcellinus is, however, irreconcilable with the facts of geography, for he says that Julian reached Callinicum in one day from the source of the river Belias, whereas it is at least a two days’ journey. Callinicum was not the earliest town upon the site of Raḳḳah, though the record of history does not go back further than to its immediate predecessor, Nicephorium, which some say was founded by Alexander and others by Seleucus Nicator. When Julian stopped there to perform the sacrifice due at that season to Cybele, Callinicum was a strong fortress and an important market. Chosroes, a couple of hundred years later, finding it insufficiently guarded, seized and sacked it. Justinian rebuilt the fortifications, but in A.D. 633, according to Abu’l Fidâ, it fell to the Mohammadan invaders. In A.D. 772 the Khalif Manṣûr strengthened the position with a second fortified city, Râfiḳah (the Comrade), built, it is said, upon the same round plan as Baghdâd, which was another city of his founding. Hârûn er Rashîd built himself a palace either in Raḳḳah or in Râfiḳah, and used the place as his summer capital. In the subsequent centuries the older foundations fell into ruin and the Comrade, which continued to be a flourishing town, usurped its name, so that in Yâkût’s day (1225) the original Raḳḳah had disappeared, but Râfiḳah was known as Raḳḳah. Here is fine matter for confusion among the Arab geographers, and they do not fail to make the most of it. White Raḳḳah, Black Raḳḳah, Burnt Raḳḳah, and no less than two Middle Raḳḳahs figure upon their pages, and it is impossible to determine whether any or none of these titles stands for Râfiḳah, or which of them denotes the old Raḳḳah. But by 1321 when Abu’l Fidâ wrote, all the Raḳḳahs were reduced to uninhabited ruin (perhaps by the Mongol hordes of Hûlâgû), and it only remains for the traveller to collect the names of sites, which his Arab guide will furnish with an alacrity that runs ahead of accuracy, and apply them as he thinks best to the list of recorded towns. And lest I should fail to add my quota to the tangled nomenclature, I will hasten to state that at a distance of an hour and ten minutes east of the ruins that lie about the modern village, I rode over a large stretch of ground on which there were traces of habitation and was told that its name was Brown Raḳḳah—(Raḳḳat es Samrâ)—and on further inquiry I learnt that nearer to the Euphrates there was a similar area called Red Raḳḳah—(Raḳḳat el Ḥamrâ)—but as I neglected to visit the spot I need not do more than mention that Kiepert marks Black Raḳḳah—(Raḳḳat es Saudâ)—at about the place where it must be.

To come to matters less controvertible, the modern Raḳḳah consists of two villages, of which the westernmost has recently been erected by a Circassian colony upon high broken ground that certainly indicates the existence of an older settlement. Beyond it to the east there is a large semi-circular enclosure, the straight side turned towards the Euphrates and lying at a distance of about a mile from that river. The walls are built of sun-dried brick alternating with bands of burnt brick, and set at regular intervals with round bastions. There are clear traces of a moat or ditch and of a second, less important, wall beyond it. The Arab village lies in the south-west corner of this enclosure, near the centre are the ruins of a mosque with a round minaret, on the east side the remains of a large building, probably a palace, and at the south-east corner part of a gate called the Baghdâd gate. Still further east there is yet another ruin field. Towards the middle of it rises a square minaret standing in a rectangular space which has been enclosed by walls of sun-dried brick, no doubt a mosque (Fig. 35). The minaret is of brick, but it rests upon a square base formed of large blocks of marble. The brickwork is broken by six horizontal notched rings, the uppermost surmounting a wide band of ornamental brick. The notches in the brick were obviously intended to contain some other material, possibly wood, which has now perished. There are numerous fragments of columns in the neighbourhood of the minaret. The only other buildings are, north of the minaret, a small domed ziyârah, which local tradition would have to be the tomb of Yaḥyâ el Barmakî, who, as well as his more famous son Ja’far, was vizir to Hârûn er Rashîd, and not far from the Baghdâd gate a similar shrine, known as the Ziyârah of Uweis el Ḳaranî. Uweis fell in A.D. 657 in one of the engagements fought on the Euphrates between ’Alî and Mu’âwiyah, but his tomb is of no great interest except in so far as it is composed of older materials. Over the doorway is an inscription which states that “this fortress and shrine were repaired by Sultan Suleimân, son of Selîm Khân,” who reigned from 1526-1574.[46] It is obvious that the stone must have been brought from elsewhere, since the inscription cannot refer to the insignificant structure on which it is placed. In the adjoining graveyard there are many fragments of columns, presumably taken from the mosque, and some much battered capitals, one of them worked with acanthus leaves. I saw, too, a small marble double column of the type so common in the early Christian churches of Asia Minor.

Fig. 39.—RAḲḲAH, CAPITALS OF ENGAGED COLUMNS, MOSQUE.

Fig. 40.—RAḲḲAH, PALACE.

Fig. 41.—RAḲḲAH, DETAIL OF STUCCO ORNAMENT, PALACE.

Fig. 42.—RAḲḲAH, DOMED CHAMBER IN PALACE.

Fig. 36.—RAḲḲAH, PLAN OF MOSQUE AND SECTIONS OF PIERS.

Fig. 43.—RAḲḲAH, BAGHDÂD GATE FROM EAST.

Fig. 44.—RAḲḲAH, INTERIOR OF BAGHDÂD GATE.

Fig. 46.—ḤALEBÎYEH.

and 4·02 m. × 2·03 m.); in both cases the dome is very shallow and the rectangular substructure is adapted to the oval by means of wooden beams laid across the angles. Everywhere wooden beams were used in conjunction with brick, and it is to be borne in mind that though the country round Raḳḳah is now entirely devoid of trees, all the Arab geographers speak of the well-wooded gardens and groves of fruit-trees that surrounded the town. In the tower-like building and in the Baghdâd gate bands of wood were laid in the face of the wall, but the wood has perished, leaving the space it occupied to tell of its former presence, as in the eastern minaret. The cusp motive can be seen in the blind arcade on the exterior of the Baghdâd gate (Fig. 43). In the interior there is a bay to the south which appears to have been covered by a barrel vault, and may have been balanced by a similar bay to the north of the doorway, for the blind arcade on the outside of the gatehouse breaks off abruptly at the northern end and must certainly have been carried further (Fig. 44). This would allow for a northern bay corresponding to the bay that still appears south of the door. The vaulting of the gate has fallen, but from the indications that are left it appears certain that while the south bay was covered by a barrel vault the central space was occupied by a groin (Fig. 45).[50]

Fig. 45.—RAḲḲAH, BAGHDÂD GATE, RECONSTRUCTED.

The whole of the two areas of ruin are strewn with potsherds of the Mohammadan period, and over the greater part of the walled city the ground is honeycombed with irregular holes and trenches, the excavations of peasants in search of the now celebrated Raḳḳah ware. A few years ago their labours were rewarded by a large find of unbroken pieces, many of which made their way through the hands of Aleppo dealers to Europe, and though such a stroke of good fortune is rare, perfect specimens are occasionally unearthed, and I saw a considerable number, together with one or two fragments of exquisite glass embossed with gold, during the two days I spent at Raḳḳah. In some instances the original factories and kilns have been brought to light, and it is not unusual to see bowls or jars which have been spoilt in the baking and thrown away by the potter. No exhaustive study of Raḳḳah ware has as yet been made, though it is of the utmost importance in the history of the arts of Islâm. The fabrication of it must have reached a high state of perfection during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, to which period the pieces which have been preserved are usually assigned.

At Raḳḳah matters fell out in a way which, if they had not been handled firmly, might well have wrecked my plans, for a telegram arrived from the Vâlî of Aleppo directing all whom it might concern to put a stop to my progress down the left bank of the Euphrates, on account of the disturbed condition of the desert. The Vâlî commanded that I should be turned back across the river and conveyed carefully from guardhouse to guardhouse along the high road. It was the Mudîr of Raḳḳah who was ultimately responsible for the execution of these orders, and he, honest man, was much perplexed when he discovered that one side of the Euphrates was not the same to me as the other, nor was he helped to a better understanding when I explained that I preferred the Jezîreh, the Mesopotamian bank, because no one travelled there. The Shâmîyeh, the Syrian bank, he hastened to assure me, was also chôl (wilderness), if that was what I desired, and he begged me to believe that I should find the guardhouses most commodious. Thereupon I took up the question on a different issue, and called his attention to the fact that the Vâlî, who was newly appointed to Aleppo, could not have heard how peaceful the desert had become since the death of Ibrahîm Pasha. The Mudîr admitted the truth of this observation, and we compromised by sending a telegram to the Vâlî, asking him to reconsider his decision. But the telegraphic system of the Turkish empire leaves an ample margin for the exercise of individual discretion in emergencies, and since upon the third day no reply had been received, I was spared from showing a direct disregard of official dictates, while the Mudîr, seeing my caravan set out towards the Belîkh, wisely made the best of a bad business and sent a couple of zaptiehs with me. One of them was a Circassian who had little Arabic, but the other, Maḥmûd by name, proved an agreeable and intelligent fellow-traveller, well informed, and a keen politician.

It is exactly two hours’ ride from Raḳḳah to the Belîkh. Our path lay between stretches of marsh, which must always have existed hereabout, for the word Raḳḳah means a swamp. Where we crossed the Belîkh it was a muddy brook, almost all the water having been drawn off for irrigation purposes, and the bridge was merely a few bundles of brushwood laid upon some poles. I sent the caravan down the bank of the Euphrates and taking one of my zaptiehs with me, turned slightly inland towards a group of hills called Jebel Munâkhir, the Nebs. In about two hours we reached a small outlying limestone tell on the top of which there were traces of masonry. Jebel Munâkhir, a mile or so from the tell, is an extinct volcano, and the lava beds extend almost to the tell. We climbed to the summit of the mountain and found the crater to be a distinctly marked basin with broken sides. On one of the peaks there is a ziyârah, a square enclosure made of undressed stones piled together without mortar, and a small tomb-chamber of the same construction. I looked carefully for any trace of ancient work, but my search was rewarded only by finding clumps of pale blue irises growing among the rocks. The west massif of Jebel Munâkhir, on which we were standing, rises several hundred feet above the level of the plain, and we had an extensive view over the unknown desert to the north. About three miles to the east lay another but smaller block of hill called Jebel Munkhar esh Sharḳî, the Eastern Neb, and on the horizon, almost due north, we could see some rising ground which my guide, an Arab of those parts, stated to be Jebel ’Uḳala.[51] Below it there are wells, and another well, Abu Tuṭah, lies between it and the Belîkh. Between Jebel Munâkhir and Jebel ’Abdu’l ’Azîz (which I could not see) there is a low ridge of hill, Jebel Beiḍâ. All through this desert country there are small wells of water (jubb is the Arabic word) sufficient to supply the ’Anazeh, who pasture their flocks here during the spring; I saw a few of their encampments, but the greater part of the tribe was still in winter quarters further to the east and south. The tents along the river were those of the ’Afaḍleh—’Ajeil el Ḥamrî is the chief sheikh of the tribe, but I did not happen to meet him. An hour’s ride from the hills we reached a large encampment at a spot called Ḳubûr ej Jebel, near the Euphrates. The name means the Graves of the Mountain, but I could not hear of any tombs in the neighbourhood. Our own tents were pitched an hour further down on some grassy mounds by the river far from any Arabs; Meiḍa, my guide called the place. In the low ground between Ḳubûr ej Jebel and Meiḍa, but above flood-water level, we crossed an area ringed round with a notable deep ditch. Somewhere near my camp Julian must have received his Arab reinforcements. On leaving Nicephorium, he marched along the bank of the Euphrates, “and at night he rested in a tent, where some princes of the Saracen tribes came as suppliants bringing him a golden crown and adoring him as master of the world, and of their own nations.... While he was addressing them,” pursues Ammianus Marcellinus,[52] “a fleet arrived as large as that of the mighty lord Xerxes; ... they threw a bridge over the broadest part of the Euphrates. The fleet consisted of one thousand transports bringing provisions and arms, and fifty ships of war, and fifty more for the construction of bridges....” At this point a hubbub arose in the servants’ tents; the golden crowns and the battleships went tumbling on to the grass, and I ran out just in time to see a troop of little shadowy forms hurrying in the moonlight across the sands by the water’s edge. They were wild pig, the only herd we encountered.

It is essential to have a local man by you if you would ascertain local names (even then the nomenclature is apt to be confusing), and accordingly I took an Arab with me next morning. We rode in five minutes to a grassy mound by the river, Khirbet Hadâwî, in another quarter of an hour to Khirbet ed Dukhîyeh, and in twenty minutes more to Jedeideh. At none of these places did I see any trace of construction, but at Abu Sa’îd, ten minutes further, there is an ’Anazeh mazâr with graves round it marked by fragments of columns and small basalt mills for grinding corn. It would be interesting to know from what period these mills date; I saw quantities of them in the burial-grounds between Munbayah and Tell Murraibet, but none of the Arabs know what they are, and when they find them they use them as tombstones. At Abu Sa’îd we turned away from the river and rode inland in a north-easterly direction. The great bare levels were more than usually enchanting that morning; the hot sun beat upon them, a sharp little wind, the very breath of life, swept across them, and all the plain was aromatic with sweet-scented plants. Presently we passed a few ’Anazeh tents, and I stopped and gave the aristocracy of the desert a respectful salutation. An inmate of the tents, hearing my greeting, picked up his spear, mounted his mare and bore us company for a mile or two; I do not know what dangers he expected to encounter or whether the spear was merely for sheref (honour), but when time hangs as heavy as it does in an Arab tent, you may as well put in the hours by carrying a spear about the countryside as in any other manner. We engaged in an exceedingly desultory conversation, in the course of which he called out to me:

“Lady, my mare is sick.”

“God cure her,” said I.

“Please God!” he returned. “It is her mind—her mind is sick.” But I could suggest no remedy for that complaint, whether in man or beast.

When he left us, the zaptieh and I began to talk of the prospects of good administration under the new order. Maḥmûd was by birth a Turk, a native of Kars, whence he had migrated when it fell into the hands of the Russians. His long acquaintance with the Arabs had only served to enhance in his estimation the Turkish capacity for government, and the granting of the constitution had raised it yet higher. “The Turks understand politics,” said he, “and look you, the constitution was from them. But as for the Arabs, what do they know of government?” He placed great confidence in the Young Turks, and said that every one except the effendis was in favour of the dastûr (the constitution). “The effendis fear liberty and justice, for these are to the advantage of the poor. But they, being corrupt and oppressors of the poor, set themselves in secret against the dastûr, and because of this we have confusion everywhere. And if one of them is sent to Constantinople as a deputy his work will not be good, for he will work only for himself. And in the vilayets there will be no justice unless the English will send into each province an overseer (mufattish) who will look to it that the dastûr is carried out. Effendim, do you see my clothes?” I examined his ragged nondescript attire; save for the torn and faded jacket it would have been difficult to recognize in it a military uniform. “Twice a year the government gives us clothes, but they never reach us at Raḳḳah. The officers in Aleppo eat them, and with my own money I bought what I wear now.”

“Are you paid?” I inquired.

“The government owes me twenty-four months’ pay,” he answered.

I asked what he thought of the scheme for enlisting Christians.

“Why not?” said he. “The Christians should help the Moslems to bear the burden of military service.” And then he added, “If there be no treachery.”

There was no need to ask him what he meant by the last phrase. I had heard too often from the lips of Christians the expression of a helpless fear that the new régime must founder in blood and anarchy, after which the nations of Europe would step in, please God, and take Turkey for themselves. This forecast was not by any means confined to the Christians, but they, of all others, should have refrained from putting it into words, for it did not encourage patriots like Maḥmûd to believe in their loyalty.

We reached our goal, Tell esh Sha’îr, in two hours and forty minutes from Abu Sa’îd, but the time in this case represents about twelve miles, since we were not riding at caravan pace. There were no buildings on the tell, but a number of large stones had been dug out of it and set up as a landmark—rijm, the Arabs call such guiding stone heaps. Two shepherds of the ’Anazeh joined us while we were at lunch, much to their material advantage, for we shared our provisions with them; from them I learnt that there had once been a well here, but that it was now choked up. They knew of no ruins in the desert beyond, and my impression is that there has never been any settled population in this region, away from the Euphrates. We struck back to the river in a south-easterly direction, and in three hours came to our camp, pitched by some Afaḍleh tents on a mound of which I have not recorded the name. It is the boundary between the kazas of Raḳḳah and of Deir, and lies about an hour’s march below a site called by Kiepert the Khân. From our camp we rode in an hour to the ruins of Khmeiḍah, where there were vestiges of a considerable town, squared stones, baked brick walls and a stone sarcophagus. An Arab on a broken-down mare joined us here, and as we rode together Maḥmûd described to me the nature of the authority exercised by the government over the tribes, and particularly the incidence of the sheep-tax.

“Effendim,” said he, “you must know that the government levies the sheep-tax from each sheikh.” Four piastres per head of sheep is the amount. “And the scribe having computed the number of sheep that belong to those tents, he calls upon the sheikh to make good the sum due, and perhaps the sheikh will have to pay 2,000 piastres. Then he levies from the men of his tents 3,000 piastres, and to the government he gives 1,800.”

“True, true,” said the Arab beside us. “Wallah, so it is.”

“And then,” pursued Maḥmûd, “another man is sent out by the government, with his clerk and half-a-dozen of us zaptiehs. And all this costs much money. And the sheikh levies another 500 piastres, and pays 150 piastres; and so it goes on till the sum is found, but the expenses of collection are heavy. And as for the tax on cultivated land, the owner gives a bribe to him who is sent to value it, and he estimates the produce at less than half the real amount. And so it is with the sheep-tax. Effendim, do you think that all the sheep are counted? No, wallah! Last year the cornlands of the Shâmîyeh between Raḳḳah and Deir paid only £800, and the sheep-tax in the Jezîreh was no more than £2,000.”

“Eh yes,” said the Arab, “but the government takes much.”

“The sheikhs take much,” returned Maḥmûd. “Oh Ma’lûl, is it not true that they levy a tax for themselves on every tent?”

“Eh wallah!” said the Arab.

“But if the men of the tents make complaint, the sheikh attacks them and slays them.”

“Allah, Allah! he knows the truth,” cried Ma’lûl in vociferous approval.

“And they have no protection,” concluded Maḥmûd.

“Eh wah!” responded the Arab, “who is there to protect us?”

So the ancient tyrannies bear sway even in the open wilderness.

Three-quarters of an hour from Khmeiḍah we passed another mound strewn with potsherds, and thirty-five minutes further down we came upon the ruins of Abu ’Atîḳ. They lie upon high rocky ground that drops steeply into an old bed of the Euphrates from which the river has retreated into a new bed a few hundred yards away. The whole area is covered with stone and brick foundations, some of them built of great blocks of hewn basalt, and the site must represent a city of no small importance. Below it the river is forced into a narrow defile where it flows between steep hills. A little valley, Wâdî Mâliḥ, joins the main stream half-an-hour from the ancient town, and it was here that we were overtaken by a breathless zaptieh from Raḳḳah who was the bearer of the answer to my telegram to the Vâlî of Aleppo. It was a refusal, politely worded, to my request that I should be permitted to travel down the left bank of the Euphrates, and with it came a covering letter from the Mudîr of Raḳḳah saying that if I did not return he would be obliged to recall the zaptiehs he had sent with me. I fear that even those who cannot properly be numbered among the criminal classes catch an infection from the lawless air of the desert, but whatever may be the true explanation of our conduct, we never contemplated for a moment the alternative of obedience, and bidding a regretful farewell to friend Maḥmûd, we went on down the defile. Maḥmûd came galloping back to give us a final word of advice. “Ride,” said he, “to Umm Rejeibah, where you will find a ḳishlâ (a guardhouse), but do not camp to-night in a solitary place, for this is the country of the Baggârah, and they are all rogues and thieves.”

The Euphrates, gathered into a single channel, flows very grandly through the narrow gorge. At first the hills slope down almost to the water’s edge, but afterwards they draw back and leave room for a tract of level ground by the stream. An hour and a half from Wâdî Mâliḥ the valley widens still more, and on the opposite bank the great castle of Ḥalebîyeh lifts its walls from the river almost to the summit of the hill, a towered triangle of which the apex is the citadel that dominates all the defile (Fig. 46).[53] Twenty minutes lower down, the Mesopotamian bank is crowned by the sister fortress of Zelebîyeh. It is a much less important building. The walls, set with rectangular towers, enclose three sides of an oblong court; the fourth side—that towards the river—must also have been walled, and it is probable that the castle approached more nearly to a square than at present appears, for the current has undermined the precipitous bank and the western part of the fortifications has fallen away. The masonry is of large blocks of stone, faced on the interior and on the exterior of the walls, while the core is mainly of rubble and mortar. There are six towers, including the corner bastions, in the length of the east wall, and between the two central towers is an arched gate. On the north and south sides there is now but one tower beyond the corner. Each tower contains a small rectangular chamber approached by an arched doorway. The court is covered with ruins, and on either side of the gate there is a deep arched recess. Under the north side of the castle hill there are foundations of buildings in hewn stone, but the area of these ruins is not large.

The name Zelebîyeh carries with it the memory of an older title; in the heyday of Palmyrene prosperity a fortress called after Zenobia guarded the trade route from her capital into Persia, and all authorities are agreed that the fortress of Zenobia described by Procopius is identical with Ḥalebîyeh. Procopius states further that Justinian, who rebuilt Zenobia and Circesium, refortified the next castle to Circesium, which he calls Annouca. The Arab geographers make mention of a small town, Khânûḥah, midway between Ḳarḳîsîyâ (Circesium) and Raḳḳah,[54] and the probable identity of Annouca and Khânûḳah has already been observed by Moritz.[55] But I think it likely that the flourishing mediæval Arab town was situated not in the confined valley below Zelebîyeh but at Abu ’Atîḳ, where the ruin field is much larger. It may be that there was a yet older settlement at Abu ’Atîḳ, and that the stone foundations there belonged to the town of Annouca which stood at the head of the defile, while the castle of the same name guarded the lower end.

We struck across the barren hills and so came down in an hour and half to Ḳubrâ, a ziyârah lying about a quarter of a mile from the river. There were no tents to be seen, whether of the Baggârah or of any other tribe, and no man from whom we could ask the way; by misfortune we happened to be that day without an Arab guide, and mindful of Maḥmûd’s parting injunctions, we began to look eagerly ahead for the ḳishlâ. Some way lower down, the Euphrates swept close under a low ridge which we were obliged to climb, and once on the top we espied Ḳishlâ el Munga’rah nestling under the further side of the slope. It had taken us two and a half hours to reach it from Zelebîyeh. The ḳishlâ, which was built ten years ago and is already falling into ruin, was garrisoned by eight soldiers. They gave us an enthusiastic welcome and helped us to pitch our tents under the mud walls of the guardhouse; visitors are scarce, and the monotony of existence is broken only by episodes connected with the lawless habits of the Baggârah. I never came into contact with the tribe, but I was told that, alone among the river Arabs, they had been the allies of Ibrahîm Pasha and were consequently gôm (foes) of the ’Anazeh and their group. Enmities of this kind are usually accompanied by overt acts, and the Baggârah had their hand against every man.

It would be difficult to exaggerate the isolation of the guardhouses which are scattered through remote parts of the Turkish empire. The garrisons receive but a scanty allowance of their pay, and a still scantier of clothing; frequently they are left unchanged for years in the midst of an ungrateful desert where the task assigned to them is too heavy for them to perform—eight men, as the soldiers at Munga’rah observed, cannot keep a whole tribe in check—and where there is no alternative occupation. Often enough I have contemplated with amazement, in some lonely ḳishlâ or ḳarâghôl, the patient Oriental acceptance of whatever fate may be allotted by the immediate or the ultimate authority; and many an hour has passed, far from unprofitably for the understanding of the East, while a marooned garrison has shown me, with a pitiful and childlike eagerness, its poor little efforts to while away the weary days—here a patch of garden snatched from the wilderness, where only a hand-to-hand struggle with the drifting sand can keep the rows of wizened onions from total extinction; there a desultory excavation in a neighbouring mound, in which if you dig far enough a glittering treasure must surely lie; a captive quail for snaring, warmly pressed upon me for my evening meal, or the small achievements in what may, for want of an exacter term, be called carpentry, with which the living-room is adorned. If you will reckon up the volume of unquestioning, if uninstructed, obedience upon which floats the ship of the Turkish State, you will wonder that it should ever run aground.

The relaxation of the men of Munga’rah was taken among the ruins that covered the top of the hill. Umm Rejeibah is a large area enclosed in a wall, clearly marked by mounds, with a ditch beyond it. On the north side an old channel of the river sweeps under the hill, and before the water left this course, it had carried away a part of the ground on which the city stood. The walls break off abruptly where the hill has fallen away, and it is therefore difficult to determine the exact shape of the enclosure. It appears to have been an irregular octagon. Towards its northern extremity the hill-top is seamed by the deep bed of a torrent draining down to the present channel of the Euphrates; it cuts through the ruins and reveals in section what is elsewhere hidden by an accumulation of soil. On the slope of its bank the soldiers had observed traces of masonry, and by digging a little way into the hill had disclosed a small circular chamber with brick walls and a white tesselated pavement. Just above the ḳishlâ, in an Arab graveyard, there are fragments of columns and basalt flour mills.

The oldest, raggedest and most one-eyed of the garrison accompanied us to Deir: I had not the heart to refuse his proffered escort, since it would enable him to spend a night in the local metropolis. The road was entirely without interest. About an hour from Deir cultivation began on the river bank in patches of cornland irrigated by rude water-wheels; jird is the Arabic word for them. We reached the ferry in six hours. The road from Aleppo to Môṣul crosses the Euphrates at Deir, and some ten years ago it was proposed to replace the ferry by a bridge. The work was actually put in hand and has advanced at the rate of one pier a year, according to my calculations; but it can scarcely be expected that this rate of progress will be maintained, since the point has been reached where the piers must be built in the bed of the stream, and construction will necessarily be slower than it was when the masons were still upon dry ground. We pitched our camp upon the left bank and there spent thirty-six hours, resting the horses and laying in provisions. The bazaars are well supplied, but Deir is not in other respects remarkable. It is first mentioned by Abu’l Fidâ, in A.D. 1331,[56] and contains, so far as I know, no vestiges of older habitation. It is built partly upon an island; the gardens of this quarter, exactly opposite my camp, were rosy with flowering fruit-trees. None but the richer sort, and such as have flocks to bring over, cross the river in the ferry boats; more modest persons are content with an inflated goat-skin. I had not seen this entertaining process, except on the Assyrian reliefs in the British Museum, and I watched it with unabated zest during the greater part of an afternoon. You blow out your goat-skin by the river’s edge, roll up your cloak and place it upon your head, tuck your shirt into your waistcloth and so embark, with your arms resting upon the skin and your legs swimming in the water. The current carries you down, and you make what progress you can athwart it. On the further side you have only to wring out your shirt, don your cloak and deflate your goat-skin, and all is done.

The Mutesarrif of Deir had recently been removed and the new man had not yet arrived, but I paid my respects to his vicegerent, the Ḳâḍî, a white-bearded old Turk, who did not regard my visit as an honour, though he promised me all I wanted in the matter of zaptiehs. The interview took place while he was sitting in the seat of judgment and was presently interrupted by a case. It was a dispute concerning a debt between a merchant and an Arab Sheikh. The sheikh came in dressed in the full panoply of the desert, black-and-gold cloak, black kerchief and white under-robe; his skin was darkened by the sun, his beard coal-black. The merchant was a shaven, white-faced townsman in a European coat. The pair were, to my fancy, symbolic of the East and the advancing West, and I backed the West, if only because the merchant had the advantage of speaking Turkish, and the Ḳâḍî was anything but proficient in Arabic. After a few moments of angry recrimination they were both dismissed to gather further evidence; but the Ḳâḍî called the sheikh back and shook his finger at him. “Open your eyes, oh sheikh,” said he. Asia, open your eyes!

I have some friends in Deir, Mohammadan gentlemen of good birth and education; to them I went for information as to passing events, no news from the outer world having reached me for a fortnight. They told me that the Grand Vizir, Kiamil Pasha, had fallen, which was true; and that the Mejlis had quarrelled with the Sultan and were about to depose him, which was only prophetic. They made me realize how different an aspect the new-born hopes of Turkey wore on the Bosphorus, or even on the Mediterranean, from that which they presented to the dwellers on the Euphrates: I had already passed beyond the zone that had been quickened by the enthusiasm of European Turkey into some real belief in the advent of a just rule. One of my friends had received an invitation to join the local committee, but he had refused to do so. “I am lord over much business,” said he, “but they are the fathers of idle talk.” All thinking men in Deir were persuaded that a universal anarchy lay before them; the old rule was dead, the new was powerless, and the forces of disorder were lifting their heads. “Yes,” said another, “revolution means the shedding of blood—and the land of the Ottomans will not escape. Then perhaps the nations of Europe will come to our aid and we shall all have peace.” I replied that the only substantial peace would be one of their own making, and that good government takes long to establish. “What benefit have I,” he protested, “if my children’s children see it?” I asked whether they had heard any rumours of an Arab movement, and they answered that there was much wild writing in the newspapers of a separate Arab assembly, and that words like these might stir up trouble and revolt. “But where is unity? Aleppo hates Deir, and Deir hates Damascus, and we have no Arab nation.” The financial position, both public and private, they pronounced to be hopeless. “I know a man,” said one, “who has land on the Euphrates that might be worth £15,000 and is worth as many piastres. He dares not put money into irrigation because he could not get protection against the tribes and his capital would bring him no return. But indeed there is not enough capital in all Deir to develop the land.” He complained that the best land was chiflik, the private property of the Sultan, and this I mention because it is a grievance that has already been remedied—may it be of good omen! The conversation left me profoundly discouraged, there was so much truth in all that I had heard, together with so complete an absence of political initiative. Thus it is through all the Asiatic provinces, and the further I went the more convinced did I become that European Turkey is the head and brains of the empire, and that if the difficult task of reform is to be carried out in Asia it can only be done from western Turkey. I believe that this has been recognized in Constantinople, for the provincial governors appointed under the new régime have been almost invariably well chosen.

On March 6 we took the road again, still following the left bank of the Euphrates. The country down these reaches of the river is, as Xenophon says, exceptionally dull: “the ground was a plain as level as the sea.” Below Deir the Euphrates has left its original channel and now runs further to the west, and there was generally a stretch of low ground, an older bed, between our road and the stream. This alluvial land is thinly populated and partly irrigated by water-wheels. Along the higher ground, which had once been the bank but is now touched only by the extreme points of the river loops, there were occasional mounds representing the villages of an earlier age. The baggage animals travelled in six and three-quarter hours to Buseirah, which lies in the angle formed by the Khâbûr and the Euphrates. The site is very ancient. Xenophon when he arrived at the Araxes (the Khâbûr) found there a number of villages stored with corn and wine, and the army rested for three days collecting provisions. Diocletian made Circesium the frontier station of the Roman empire. He fortified it with a wall, says Procopius, terminating at either end on the Euphrates in a tower, but he did not protect the side of the town along the Euphrates. The stream sapped one of the towers, the walls were allowed to fall into decay, and Chosroes in his first expedition had no difficulty in taking possession of the fortress. Justinian repaired the ruined tower with large blocks of stone, built a wall along the Euphrates, and added an outer wall to that which already existed, besides improving the baths in the town. Under the name of Karḳîsîyâ, Circesium continued to be a place of some importance during the Middle Ages. Iṣṭakhrî (tenth century) praises its gardens and fruit-trees, but the later geographers describe it as being smaller than its neighbour Raḥbah, on the opposite side of the Euphrates, and with this it fades out of history.

Extensive though not very scientific excavations were being carried on when I was at Buseirah. The peasants were engaged in digging out bricks from the old walls, ostensibly to provide materials for a bridge over the Khâbûr. I was therefore able to see more of the ruins than was revealed to former travellers, and my conviction is that I saw nothing that was older than the time of Justinian, while most of the work belonged to the Arab period. The excavations were so unsystematic that it was never possible to make out a ground plan, but in one place the peasants had dug down at least 5 m. below the upper level of the ruin heaps, and had cleared some small chambers near the northern fortification wall. The materials used in these buildings were square tiles in two sizes (42 × 45 × 3 cm. and 21 × 21 × 3 cm.) laid in mortar as wide as the tiles themselves, and small roughly-squared stones also laid in thick mortar. The lower parts of the chambers were of large tiles, the upper parts of stone. From the traces left upon the walls, the rooms would seem to have been roofed over with barrel vaults, and there were some remains of brick arched niches below the stonework. Above these rooms, which were possibly only a vaulted substructure, there were foundations of upper rooms constructed of the smaller tiles. The face of the tile walls had been covered with plaster. There were simple patterns moulded in the broad sides of tiles:

At the south-east angle of the enclosing wall stands a tower, round and domed and built entirely of the smaller tiles. The dome is slightly flattened and I believe the structure to be Mohammadan work. The Euphrates flows at a distance of about a mile from the city enclosure, but in all probability its course was once immediately under the wall, and the bed has made the same change here as it has done immediately above Circesium. The modern Buseirah must be the site of the ancient city, and I conclude that in Diocletian’s time the Euphrates flowed under the mound and that this was the side which was not fortified until Justinian’s day.

In the Arab village, which has sprung up near the south-west corner of the ruins, there are portions of a large building which the natives call the church. It is surrounded on three sides by a very thick wall, roughly built of brick and rubble, with round towers at the angles. Within the wall there are remains of a niched structure which, so far as I could judge, consisted of two domed octagonal chambers. The masonry is of brick and rubble, plastered over, and both this ruin and the outer wall seem to have been built out of older materials pillaged from other parts of the town and mixed indiscriminately together. Finally there is a substructure of brick, octagonal in plan and covered by a much flattened brick dome. The flattened dome is typically Mohammadan: I do not remember any instance where it can be assigned with certainty to an earlier period, and I am therefore led to the conclusion that the whole building cannot be older than the time of the khalifs. The area of the city is strewn with potsherds, by far the greater proportion being unmistakably Arab and closely related to the coarser sorts of Raḳḳah ware. Almost all the coins that were brought to me were Arab.

[39] I could not reconcile the topography here with Kiepert’s map. He marks a northern tower, which he calls Nesheib (doubtless my Neshabah) and places there the Mazâr of Sultan ’Abdullah. He has a second tower further to the south-east, and finally the castle itself. The second tower is non-existent, or else it represents the minaret in the castle. The only mazâr which I saw or heard mentioned is that of Sultan Selîm, a small modern building between Neshabah and the castle.

[40] It resembles the tower tombs at Irzî, which will be described later.

[41] This is Abu’l Fidâ’s account, ed. Reinaud, p. 277. He wrote in A.D. 1321. Yâḳût, a century earlier, gives the same story.

[42] Quoted by Ritter, Erdkunde, Vol. X. p. 241.

[43] Ainsworth believed this to be the site of Benjamin of Tudela’s Jewish settlement (Euphrates Expedition, Vol. I. p. 269), and he speaks of a monastic ruin here.

[44] It is so described in his map.

[45] Sachau thought that Ḥaraglah was of Hellenistic origin (Reise in Syrien und Mesopotamien, p. 245); Sarre believes that it may be Parthian, and the circular outer fortification gives colour to the suggestion (Zeitschr. der Gesell. für Erdkunde zu Berlin, 1909, No. 7).

[46] Sachau (op. cit. p. 243) gives the inscription, and my copy tallied with his.

[47] Just as the first mosque in Cairo, that of ’Amr, was built entirely on columns taken from earlier buildings, Muḳaddasî describes one of the Raḳḳah mosques as ; it would be satisfactory to imagine that he referred to the columned arcades of the mosque round the square minaret, but the phrase cannot reasonably be twisted into that or any other meaning. The square minaret is the ancient Syrian tower type; Thiersch has recently published an exhaustive study of it in his Pharos.

[48] I saw traces of two such arcades on the E., N. and W. sides of the court, and, judging from the vestiges that remain, the arcades must have been three deep to the south. The bricks of the vanished arcades have been dug out and carried away for building purposes. The outer walls are so much ruined that I could not determine the position of the gates with certainty.

[49] Professor van Berchem has published the inscription in his Arabische Inschriften, a chapter appended to the work of Professor Sarre and Dr. Herzfeld entitled Reise in Euphrat-und Tigris-Gebiet. But the publication has appeared too late for me to do more than refer to it.

[50] M. Viollet has published a short description of these ruins (Publications de l’Académie des Inscrip. et Belles-Lettres, 1909, Vol. XII. part 2). He believes the palace to have been erected by Hârûn er Rashîd.

[51] I expect that this is Sachau’s Bergland Tulaba—see Kiepert’s map.

[52] Bk. XXIII. ch. iii. 8.

[53] It was visited and planned by Sarre and Herzfeld in 1907; Sarre, Reise in Mesopotamien, in the Zeitschrift der Gesch. für Erdkunde zu Berlin, 1909, No. 7, p. 429. Sarre pronounces the greater part of the ruins to date from the time of Justinian.

[54] Ibn Ḥauḳal is, I think, the first to speak of it. Idrîsî says that it had busy markets and that much traffic went through it. They wrote respectively in the tenth and twelfth centuries.

[55] Zur antiken Topographie der Palmyrene, p. 39.

[56] The reference is not, however, certain: Moritz, op. cit. p. 35.

CHAPTER III

BUSEIRAH TO HÎT

March 7—March 18

At Buseirah we were confronted with one of the difficulties that awaits the traveller in the Jezîreh. Since there is no traffic along the left bank of the river, there are no zaptiehs to serve as escort; my two zaptiehs from Deir were to have been relieved at Buseirah, but there was only one available man there, and he feared the return journey alone, and was therefore extremely reluctant to come with us. We solved the question by carrying off Muṣṭafâ, one of the men from Deir, whereupon Ḥmeidî, the Buseirah zaptieh, consented to bear him company. Both were to return from Abu Kemâl, three days’ journey lower down. This plan suited Ḥmeidî well, for he was a doubly married man, and while one of his wives remained at Buseirah, the other dwelt at Abu Kemâl. His beat was between the two places. “And so,” he explained, “I find a wife and children to welcome me at either end.”

“That is very convenient,” said I.

“Yes,” he replied gravely.

We crossed the Khâbûr in a ferry-boat so badly constructed that loaded animals could not enter it, and in consequence all the packs had to be carried down to the river and re-loaded on the other side. I pitied Cyrus from the bottom of my heart, and regarded Julian’s bridge with feelings very different from those that had been conjured up by the moon of the previous night. The level ground on the opposite side was covered with potsherds, most of them blue and green glazed wares, and all, so far as I saw, Mohammadan. An hour later we passed over another small area strewn thickly with the same pottery, and while I was acquainting Ḥmeidî with the nature of the evidence it supplied, I took occasion to confide to him my belief that the ruin at Buseirah which they call the church dates from the Mohammadan period.

“Effendim,” he replied, “what you have honoured us by observing is quite correct. The origin of that church is Arab. It was doubtless built by Nimrod, who lived some years before Hârûn er Rashîd.”

“That is true,” said I, with a mental reservation as to parts of the statement.

Between the Khâbûr and the Euphrates, Kiepert marks an ancient canal and names it the Daurîn. According to the map it leaves the Khâbûr at a point opposite to the village of Ḥöjneh and joins the Euphrates opposite Ṣâliḥîyeh.[57] The existence of the canal cutting is well known to all the inhabitants of these parts (they call it the Nahr Dawwarîn), but they affirm that its course is much longer than is represented by Kiepert, and that it touches the Euphrates at Werdî. My route on the first day lay between the canal and the Euphrates, at a distance that varied from an hour to half-an-hour from the river, and though I did not see the Dawwarîn, its presence was clearly indicated by the line of Ḳanâts (underground water conduits) running in a general southerly direction—NNW. to SSE. to be more accurate—across ground that was almost absolutely level. The whole of this region must once have been cultivated, and it had also been thickly populated.[58] Twenty-five minutes’ ride beyond the potsherds where Ḥmeidî had sketched for me the history of Buseirah, we passed some foundations constructed out of the smaller sort of tiles which I had observed in the town. A quarter of an hour further there was a low mound called Tell el Kraḥ, covered with tiles and coloured pottery—indeed the pottery was continuous between the one patch of broken tiles and the other, and Nimrod had evidently been very busy here. The villages represented by these remains had been supplied with water from the Dawwarîn. In another hour and five minutes we reached a considerable mound, Tell Buseyiḥ; it formed three sides of a hollow square, the side turned towards the river being open. We were now close to the Euphrates and could see, about half-a-mile away, a long tract of cultivation and the village of Tiyâna on the water’s edge. We turned slightly inland from Buseyiḥ and in fifty minutes came to the mounds of Jemmah where, so far as identification is possible on a hasty survey, I would place Zeitha. “Here,” says Ammianus Marcellinus, “we saw the tomb of the Emperor Gordian, which is visible for a long way off.” Jemmah consists of a large area surrounded by a wall and a deep ditch; beyond the ditch lies broken ground where, at one point, the Arabs had scratched the surface and revealed what looked like a pavement of solid asphalt; still further away there is an Arab graveyard strewn with fragments of the smaller tiles. Except in the graveyard there are no tiles and very little pottery, none of it characteristically mediæval Mohammadan. The ditch had been fed by a water channel coming from the north-east, no doubt an arm of the Dawwarîn if it were not the canal itself. We rode from Jemmah to the Euphrates in an hour and ten minutes and found the camp pitched immediately below the village of Bustân. The baggage animals had been six hours on the march from the Khâbûr. The climate was changing rapidly as we journeyed south. The last cold day we experienced was March 2, when I had ridden out to Tell esh Sha’îr; on March 7 when we camped at Bustân the temperature at three o’clock in the afternoon was 70° in the shade, but the nights were still cold.

A strip of irrigated land and numerous villages lay along the river for the first two hours of the succeeding day’s march. We were forced to ride outside the cornfields that we might avoid the water conduits, but I do not think we missed anything of importance, for every twenty or thirty years the Euphrates rises high enough to submerge the cultivation, and the floods must have destroyed all vestiges of an older civilization. The low-lying fields cannot have been, within historic times, a former bed of the stream, as was the case above Buseirah; an occasional mound near the river showed that the bank had long been inhabited. We passed on the high ground a tell that looked like the site of an ancient village which had received its water from the Nahr Dawwarîn. An enormous amount of labour is expended upon the irrigation of the cornfields; sometimes there is a double system of jirds, those nearest the river watering the lowest fields and filling deep channels whence the water is again lifted by another series of jirds to the higher level. In the lower ground the peasants grow a little corn and clover for early pasture and sow a second crop when the spring floods have retreated. After two hours’ riding we entered a long stretch of sand heaped up into little hills which were held together by tamarisk thickets; it is apt to be submerged when the river is high, and we saw more than one overflow channel filled with pools of stagnant water. On the Syrian side the Euphrates is hemmed in here by hills whereon stands the castle of Ṣâliḥîyeh. In this wilderness we came upon some Arabs who were ploughing up a desolate spot in search of locusts’ eggs.

“Are there many locusts here?” said I, for locusts are not accustomed to lay their eggs in sand.

“No,” they answered, “there are none here; but, as God is exalted! there are thousands lower down.”

“Then why do you plough here?” I asked, with the tiresome persistence of the European.

“The government ordered it,” said they, and resumed their task.

In another hour we reached Tell ech Cha’bî (el Ka’bî?) where there is an Arab cemetery, the graves covered with unglazed potsherds. Ḥmeidî told me that when the Arabs bury their dead in such places they dig into the mound and extract broken pottery to strew upon the graves; the Bedouin use no pottery, their water-vessels being of copper or of skin. While we sat upon the top of the tell lunching and waiting for the caravan, which was delayed for nearly an hour in the loose sand, Ḥmeidî gave me his views on politics.

“Effendim,” said he, “we do not care what sultan we have so long as he is a just ruler. But as for ’Abdu’l Ḥamîd, he keeps three hundred women in his palace, and, look you, they have eaten our money.” Wherein he wronged the poor ladies; it was not they who scattered the revenues of the State.

In thirty minutes we came to Tell Simbal, a small sandy mound; in one hour and fifteen minutes more to Tell el Hajîn, with a village by the river, and after another hour and twenty minutes to Tell Abu’l Ḥassan, where we camped, seven and a quarter hours from Bustân. Abu’l Ḥassan is marked in Chesney’s map as “mound.” It is a very striking tell rising fifty feet above the river; upon the summit are Arab graves strewn with coarse pottery and with undressed stones dug out of the hill, and for a distance of a quarter of an hour’s walk to the north and east there are fragments of brick upon the ground. The graves are those of the Jebbûr, who, said Ḥmeidî, left this district thirty years ago and migrated to the Tigris, where I subsequently saw them. Nearly all the Silmân have also gone away, and though their camping grounds are marked by Kiepert on the Euphrates, their present quarters are on the Khâbûr. The Deleim and the Ageidât, a base-born tribe, together with the Bu Kemâl, now occupy the Euphrates’ banks, and the ’Anazeh come down to the river in the summer. There was no living thing near our camp except an enormous pelican, who was floating contentedly on the broad bosom of the stream. Our advent roused in him the profoundest interest, and as he floated he cast backward glances at us, to see what we were doing in his wilderness.

Fig. 47.—IRZÎ, TOWER TOMB.

But if Werdî be the descendant of Corsote, at least one other town must be placed between these two in the genealogical table. The bluff at the lower end of the river bend is covered with the ruins of Irzî, which have been remarked by every traveller who has passed by, either on the river or on the west bank. Balbi, who descended the Euphrates in 1579, says that the ruins occupied a site larger than Cairo and appeared to be the massive walls and towers of a great city. So far as I know no one has examined them closely, and when I climbed up the hill I found, not the bastioned walls that I had expected, but a number of isolated tower tombs. They stand in various stages of decay round the edge of the bluff and over the whole extent of a high rocky plateau which cannot be seen from below. There are no traces of houses, nor any means of obtaining water from the river, nor any cisterns for the storage of rain. Balbi’s city is a city of the dead; it is the necropolis of a town that stood, presumably, in the irrigated country below. The towers were all alike (Fig. 47). They are built of irregular slabs of stone, the shining gypsum of which the hill is formed, laid in beds of mortar. Each tower rests upon a square substructure, about 1·70 m. high; in this substructure are the tombs, hollowed out of the solid masonry, irregular in number and in position. In the best preserved of the towers I could see but one tunnel-like grave opening on the west side (Fig. 48), while there were two or three to the north and east. The tombs are covered by a small vault made of two stones leaning against one another. Above the substructure the walls are broken by corner piers of small projection, with two engaged columns between them. The columns are crowned by capitals made of a single projecting slab, above which a slightly projecting band of plaster forms an entablature. Then follows a plain piece of wall about a metre high upon which stands an upper order of engaged columns, half as large as those below, so that there was place for five between the corner piers, if these were repeated on the upper part of the tower. A door between the corner pier and one of the engaged columns opens on to a winding stair which leads to the top of the tower. No rule was observed as to the direction of the compass in which the doors were placed. The towers cannot be as old as Xenophon’s time; they are more likely to date from the first or second century of the Christian era; therefore the town to which they belonged must have been later than Corsote, and Corsote, it will be remembered, was deserted when he saw it. It is easy to understand that a city lying in the low ground might have been destroyed by inundations, and to imagine that a region so favourably situated for purposes of cultivation, and provided with an elaborate system of irrigation, should have been repopulated in a later age. And this is the explanation which I offer.[61]

The practice of burying the dead above “the common crofts, the vulgar thorpes,” is still observed by the Arabs. All their graves lie loftily upon the nearest height, even if it should be only a mound by the river. From my camp I watched one of their funeral processions making its slow way from the village of Abu Kemâl towards some barren hills. Three or four miles the dead man was carried across the desert to find his resting-place among the graves of his ancestors, and no tribesman would have been content to lay him at the village gates, like a Turk or a town dweller. They carried him to the hills and so performed, as in the days of the Irzî city, their final service.

Fattûh and Selîm returned after nightfall, and reported the zaptieh problem to be still unsolved. Even at Abu Kemâl there was but one man, and we were forced once again to commandeer Muṣṭafâ, who saw himself dragged further and

Fig. 48.—IRZÎ, TOWER TOMB.

Fig. 49.—NAOURA OF ’AJMÎYEH.

Fig. 50.—THE INHABITANTS OF RAWÂ.

further from his home at Deir. We promised that he should return from Ḳâyim with ’Abdullah, the zaptieh from Abu Kemâl, and Muṣṭafâ agreed with alacrity to this arrangement. All zaptiehs of my acquaintance enjoy travelling, with its contingent advantage of a regular daily fee from the effendi whom they escort. But neither he nor ’Abdullah knew the way along the left bank. “We have never heard of any one who wished to go by this road, wallah!” Moreover, they stood in considerable fear of the tribes whom we might encounter. I therefore engaged as guide ’Isâ, the affable, ragged person who had conducted me to Irzî, but since we were fully loaded with corn, we could not mount him and he marched smilingly for seven hours through a temperature of 83° in the shade. We rode over the Irzî bluffs and dropped by a steep and rocky path into the plain on the farther side, between the hills and the meandering river. To the right the village of Rabâṭ, with a long stretch of corn, lay near the water’s edge, and though our path lay only through tamarisk thickets, traces of numerous irrigation canals showed that the ground must once have been under cultivation. The plain is known as the Ḳâ’at ed Deleim, the land of the Deleim, and the tents of that tribe were to be seen on the banks of the Euphrates. It did not take me long to discover that we should reach Ḳâyim, or rather the point opposite to it, for it lies on the right bank, in about five hours from Werdî, and my heart sank to contemplate another long delay while we crossed and changed zaptiehs; therefore I refused to go down to the Euphrates and cut straight across a bend over high stony ground. So it happened that we never went near Ḳâyim, and the two kidnapped zaptiehs were embarked before they knew it on the road to ’Anah. We touched the river again seven hours from Werdî, where we found an encampment of the Jerâif, and since we were completely ignorant of what lay ahead, we pitched our tents there, opposite an island which Kiepert calls Ninmala. I found it almost impossible to get at any names for the numerous islands in these reaches of the Euphrates. The generic word for them is khawîjeh, and they bear no other title in the local speech. The Jerâif or Jerîfeh is a tribe which belongs properly to the right bank, but a few tents had come over on account of the terrible drought, there being always more pasture in the Jezîreh than in the Shâmîyeh. They are usually, so ’Isa explained, gôm to his tribe, the Bu Kemâl, but a truce had recently been patched up and he was received as hospitably as any of us.

There lies below ’Ânah and to the west of the Euphrates a region of desert through which few travellers have passed. The track of Chesney’s journey of 1857 skirts it to the west; Thielmann crossed it nearly forty years later a little further to the east; Huber, following the Damascus post-road, touched its northern edge. So said Kiepert, and with this meagre information as a base I questioned that night the Arabs gathered round Fattûḥ’s cooking fire as to the north-west corner of the Sasanian Empire. Among them was an aged man who had been to Nejd, in Central Arabia, and had brought back thence a bullet which was still lodged in his cheek; he knew that country, and if I would give him a horse he would take me to all the castles therein, Khubbâz, ’Amej, Themail, Kheiḍir....

“Where is Kheiḍir?” said I, for the name was unknown to me or to Kiepert.

“Beyond Shetâteh,” answered a lean and ragged youth. “I too know it, wallah!”

“Is it large?” I asked.

“It is a castle,” he replied vaguely, and one after another the men of the Jerâif chimed in with descriptions of the road. The sum total of the information offered by them seemed to be that water was scarce and raids frequent, but there were certainly castles; yes, in the land of Fahd Beg ibn Hudhdhâl, the great sheikh of the Amarât, there was Kheiḍir. I made a mental note of the name.

The region which we had now entered is particularly lawless. The government makes no attempt to control the Bedouin, and according to their custom they are occupied exclusively in raiding one another and in harrying the outlying property of the inhabitants of Rawâ, the town opposite to ’Ânah. In addition to the depredations of the local tribes, the country is swept by armed bands of the Shammar from far away to the east, and of the Yezîdis, whom the Mohammadans call Devil Worshippers, from the Jebel Sinjâr. Accordingly when we asked for a guide, we were told that there was no one who would come with us alone, lest he should be attacked on his solitary return by blood enemies from half the world away. We took with us, therefore, two horsemen, ’Affân, of the sheikhly house, and Murawwaḥ, the one armed with a rifle and the other with a rusty sword, and for the better part of the day we discussed the observance of blood feud. The old man with the bullet in his cheek, who was on his way to Baghdâd and proposed to travel with us as far as possible, served as an illustration of the text. It had a purely objective interest, for in spite of the fears exhibited by the Jerâif, there was very small risk of our meeting with a foe; the season for raiding is the summer, but the spring is a close time. ’Affân was eloquent in describing the long rides across the desert in the burning heat: “Lady, I have ridden four days with no water but what I could carry; that was when we bore off cattle and mules from the Jebel Sinjâr.”

“Eh billah!” asseverated Murawwaḥ, and felt for the hilt of his rusty sword.

We had not gone far before my mare shied out of the path and there swung up beside us a jovial personage mounted on a blood camel with his serving-man clinging behind him. He proved to be a sheikh of the Amarât, who are a branch of the ’Anazeh, and indeed he was own brother to Fahd ibn Hudhdhâl. His appearance suited his high birth. He was wrapped in a gold-bordered cloak, a fine silk kerchief was bound about his head, and his feet were shod with scarlet leather boots; he was tall and well liking, as are few but the great sheikhs among the half-fed Bedouin. He related to me the business which had brought him so far from his own people. One of the Jerâif had murdered a man of the Amarât, and the two tribes being on friendly terms, Sheikh Jid’ân (such was his name) had crossed the river to demand the summary execution of the murderer or the payment of blood money. He was hunting the man down through the Jerâif tents.

“Shall you find him?” I asked.

“Eh wah!” he affirmed and laughed over his task.

Him too I questioned concerning Kheiḍir. “Go forward to ’Ânah,” he said, “and there any man will take you to Kheiḍir. And if you come to my tents, welcome and kinship.” So we parted.

In thirty-five minutes from the camp we passed the mound of Balîjah with Arab graves upon it; then for three hours we saw nothing of interest until we came to the mazâr of Sultan ’Abdullah, a small modern shrine. Somewhere near it are the ruins of Jabarîyeh, but they must lie closer to the mazâr than Kiepert would have them. I rode on looking for them for half-an-hour, and when I questioned ’Affân he replied: “Jebarîyeh? It is under the mazâr. When you turned away I thought you did not wish to see those ruins.” It was too hot to go back. We were now opposite Ḳal’at Râfiḍah, a splendid pile upon the right bank of the Euphrates, and here we left the caravan with Murawwaḥ to guide it and followed the course of the river to Ḳal’at Bulâḳ, which the Arabs call Retâjah, an hour and a quarter’s ride in blazing sun. We found there a small square fort with round towers at the angles, the whole built of sun-dried brick. Though it is in complete ruin, I believe it to be modern, probably a Turkish ḳishlâ, but I saw some fragments of stone and mortar building which are, at any rate, older than the mud fort, and the site is so magnificent that it can scarcely have been neglected in ancient times. The hill on which the ruins stand is all but converted into an island by an abrupt turn of the river, which washes the precipitous rock on three sides. The current is gradually undermining the high seat of Retâjah and the greater part of the older stone building has fallen into the stream. We had a hard gallop to catch up the caravan, and a long pull over rocky ground before we sighted the river again, flowing in wide and tranquil curves under the sunset. On either side the banks were lined with naouras, the Persian water-wheels. The quiet air was full of the rumble and grumble of them, a pleasant sound telling of green fields and clover pastures, but there were no villages or any other sign of man. As I looked, I knew that we had passed over an unseen frontier; whether the geographers admitted it or no, this was Babylonia.

We rode down wearily to the first naoura and there threw ourselves from our horses. The river turned the wheel, the wheel lifted the water, the water raced down the conduit and spread itself out over a patch of corn and round the roots of a solitary palm-tree, and all happened as if it were a part of the processes of nature, like the springing of the palm tree and the swelling of the ears of corn. But it was nature in leading-strings, and the lords of creation, in a very unassuming guise, surged up from a hole in the ground roofed with palm fronds and bade us welcome to their domain—two men and a little boy who watched over the crops on behalf of a Rawâ merchant. The place has a name, ’Ajmîyeh, and a history, if only I could have deciphered it in the cut stones and fragments of wall which the river slowly washed bare and then washed away. But the immediate present was of greater importance. Before the moon was up, supper was spread by the naoura, and the watchmen, the boy, the Arabs and the old man with the bullet were sharing with my servants and zaptiehs an ample meal of rice. We had marched ten hours.

In the morning I saw that quantities of pottery were washed out of the bank together with the stones. Much of it was glazed with black upon the inside, some was the usual coloured Mohammadan stuff, and there were pieces of the big pointed jars, unglazed, which belong to every age. Beyond the corn lay masses of similar potsherds; the river bank must once have been strewn with small villages. When we had ridden for half-an-hour we met three horsemen of the Jerâif, and ’Affân declared that he would return with them to his tents, and as for Murawwaḥ he might cross with us to ’Ânah and go home along the right bank. I had no objection to raise, and as Murawwaḥ did not demur to the scheme ’Affân was allowed to leave us. Murawwaḥ was a small man and a lean, mounted on a half-starved mare, himself half starved, with naked feet, a ragged cotton cloak thrown over his head to protect him from the sun, and a rusty sword by his side to defend him from his enemies. We had struck up a wordless friendship and now that ’Affân was gone we fell into talk. I asked him whether he had heard of liberty.

“Eh wah!” he answered, “but we know not what it means.”

“It means to obey a just law,” said I, seeking for some didactic definition. But Murawwaḥ knew nothing of obedience nor yet of just rule.

The zaptieh ’Abdullah took up my word. “Oh Murawwaḥ,” said he, “when there is liberty in this land, there will be no more raiding and the Arabs will serve as soldiers.”

“No wallah!” returned Murawwaḥ firmly.

’Abdullah laughed. “Slowly, slowly,” he said, “the government will lay hands on the desert, and the Arabs will be brought in, for they are all thieves.”

Murawwaḥ drew himself up on his hungry mare. “Thieves!” he cried. “Thieves are dogs. How can you compare the Arabs with them? We will not bow our heads to any government. To the Arabs belongs command.” And he slashed the air defiantly with his tamarisk switch as he proclaimed the liberties of the wilderness, the right of feud, the right of raid, the right of revenge—the only liberty the desert knows.

Three hours and a half from ’Ajmîyeh we stopped at a naoura, Natârîyeh, to water our horses, and just beyond it we were overtaken by half-a-dozen angry men from Rawâ, mounted and carrying rifles. The cause of their ride and of their anger they were not slow to make known to us. The watchman at their naoura had sent in word to Rawâ that the Deleim had come down and were pasturing their mares in the corn. “And we went to the Ḳâimmaḳâm and asked for soldiers to drive them off, and the Ḳâimmaḳâm answered, ‘Go ask the Vâlî of Baghdâd, for I have none.’ As God is exalted! there were but two soldiers in the ḳishlâ of Rawâ. And we took our rifles and mounted our mares and rode out alone, and all last night we hunted them through the desert until we were so far from the river that we dared not go on. We are six men, look you, and the Deleim are counted by thousands. So we returned, and a curse upon the government that cannot protect our property, and may all Arabs burn in hell!”

At this point one of them perceived Murawwaḥ, who was riding in discreet silence by my side. “Listen, you! dog son of a dog,” he cried. “We lay out our capital and you take the interest; we sow and you gather the harvest, yes, without reaping, and we may starve that you and your accursed brothers may fatten. I have a mind to take you as hostage to Rawâ and hold you till we get our due.” Murawwaḥ, though for a free child of the desert he was unfortunately placed between zaptiehs and angry citizens, was not alarmed by the threat. We had changed parts as soon as we neared civilization, and he now edged nearer to me, knowing that he was safe under my protection, but for which he would not have ventured into Rawâ where there were too many reckonings scored up against the tribes.

We were not to escape without ourselves taking a lesson in the elements of raiding. Half-an-hour or so from Natârîyeh, Jûsef came riding up from the caravan, which was behind us, to ask if we had seen anything of the donkey, the unrivalled donkey purchased in Aleppo, and to our consternation we discovered that he was missing. There had been a few Arabs at Natârîyeh, and while we were engaged in watering the baggage animals, the donkey had strayed away to make acquaintance with some low-born Bedouin donkeys and had remained behind. Fattûḥ and ’Abdullah rode back and speedily found him (he was twice the size of the others), but his pack saddle and other trappings were gone. Thereupon Fattûḥ, like the merchants of Rawâ, took the law into his own hands, drove off an Arab donkey together with our own, and declared that unless the Arabs restored our property to us that night at ’Ânah he would sell theirs in the open market and keep the money. Thus it was that we turned raiders like every one else who lives in the desert. Fattûḥ caught me up two and a half hours later opposite the island of Ḳarâbileh, where I had stopped to lunch, and we sent Murawwaḥ back to reclaim the pack saddle, bidding him join us at ’Ânah. He was exceedingly loth to obey this order, saying that he dared not enter ’Ânah alone, and I never expected to see him again, in spite of the fact that he had not received his bakhshîsh. In another twenty minutes we were riding through the fruit gardens and palm groves of Rawâ—the fruit-trees were all in flower, a delectable sight for travellers in the wilderness. While the ferry-boats were being brought up I climbed the hill to the modern citadel (Rawâ, so far as I am aware, has no ancient history) and thence looked down upon the long thin line of ’Ânah, houses and palm-trees folded between the hills and the river, and afar the island that was ancient Anatho, floating upon the broad waters. The population of Rawâ swarmed up the hill after me, watching my every movement with strained attention, and before we were fairly embarked I registered a vow that no caravan of mine should ever again pass through the town, so exasperating it is to find two hundred people in your path whichever way you would turn (Fig. 50). When once we had crossed the river we fell into a merciful obscurity; the post-road runs through ’Ânah, and it matters not a para to anybody but the khânjî whether one European more or less comes down it. The khânjî, a friend of Fattûḥ’s, was unfeignedly glad to see us, and his khân looked good, but better still the patch of ground behind that stretched down to the water’s edge. Here with the consent of mine host we pitched our tents, in full view of an exquisite little island, green with corn and shaded by palm-trees; and whatever love you bear the desert there can be no doubt that green growing things are pleasant to the eye, and that the spirit rests comfortably upon the assurance that a good dinner, not tinned curry, will shortly be forthcoming. Just as it was ready, behold Murawwaḥ, obedient to the call of hunger—minus his sword indeed, for he had left it in pawn to the ferryman, but bringing with him the owner of the donkey we stole, together with the goods that had been stolen from us. And every one came to his own again. But the episode has never faded from Fattûḥ’s memory, and in the hour of reminiscence he is wont to say, “Your Excellency remembers how we raided the Arabs? May God be exalted! We have travelled much in the desert, and the only raid we ever saw was one of our own making.”

There was another arrival at our camp that night. Late in the evening Jûsef inquired whether I would receive a soldier, and thinking it was to-morrow’s zaptieh, I consented. A grizzled man appeared at the tent door and sat down on his heels.

“Peace be upon you,” said he.

“And upon you peace,” I answered.

“Effendim,” he said, “I am a man advancing in years.” He made the gesture of one who strokes a venerable beard, although his chin was bare. “And for long I have prayed for a son. Praise be to God, this night God has granted my request.”

“Praise be to God,” said I.

“God give you the reward,” he rejoined. “Effendim, in honour of this exceptional occasion, will you kindly help with the expenses?”

Now it happened somewhere about the year 1300 B.C. that Hattusil, King of the Hittites, wrote to the King of Babylon, and among other matters of international interest, he observed that the reason for the interruption of diplomatic relations with the court of Babylonia was the uncertainty of travel caused by the movements of the Bedouin. No other consideration, he said, should have prevented him from dispatching his ambassador to the son of so excellent a father. The conditions described in Hattusil’s letter hold good until to-day. The Bedouin are still masters of the desert road, and established order is helpless before the lawless independence of the tribes. The truth is that nomad life and civilization are incompatible terms: the peaceful cultivator and the merchant cannot exist side by side with the sheikh, and either the settled population must drive the Bedouin from out their borders, or the Bedouin will put progress and the accumulation of wealth beyond the power of the most industrious. Until we drew near to ’Ânah, our road had led us through regions which the Arabs hold in undisturbed possession. No caravans pass down the east bank of the Euphrates; no towns are built there; save for the spasmodic labours of the half settled tribes, no fields are cultivated. But with the first naoura of the Rawâ townsmen the conditions were altered, and when we crossed the river we plunged into the struggle that has been waged for all time between the nomad and the State. For four days we followed the high road to Baghdâd—unwillingly enough, since I was ever looking for a door into the Syrian desert—and I had opportunity to study the oldest problem of government.

The town of ’Ânah has been lengthening steadily ever since the sixteenth century, for Rauwolff says that it is one hour long, and della Valle two, and I know that it is three. But it was and remains a single street wide, a Babylonish mud-built thoroughfare, green with palms, murmurous with naouras and lapped by the swift current of the Euphrates (Fig. 51). From the hilltop of Rawâ I had already caught sight of the only vestiges of antiquity that ’Ânah can boast, the ruined castle and tall minaret upon the island of Lubbâd at the lower end of the town. Here stood the fortress which, “like many others in that country, is surrounded by the Euphrates.”[62] Julian, seeing the difficulties of a siege, came to terms with the inhabitants, who surrendered to him and were treated with all kindness. But the fortress he burnt. I was determined not to leave ’Ânah without visiting the island, and having settled with Fattûḥ the length of the day’s march, I left him to buy provisions and load the caravan, and rode down to a ferry opposite the island. The boat was commonly used to transport stones from the castle, and when we arrived it was in course of being loaded on the other side. Much shouting at length attracted the attention of the ferryman, and we went into a neighbouring coffee-house to await his coming. A party of citizens had gathered together over the morning cup; we joined the circle and shared in the coffee and the

Fig. 51.—’ÂNAH FROM THE ISLAND OF LUBBÂD.

Fig. 52.—’ÂNAH, A FISHERMAN.

Fig. 53.—HÎT, PITCH-SPRING.

talk. The men in the coffee-house entertained no hope that the constitutional or any other government would succeed in establishing order.

“Ever since the days of the Benî Ghassân,” said one (and I could have added “ever since the days of the Hittites”), “the Arabs have ravaged the land, and who shall stop them? The government does nothing and we can do nothing. We have no power and all of us are poor.”

“In the last six years,” said another, “we have had fourteen Ḳâimmaḳâms at ’Ânah. Not one of these gave a thought to the prosperity of the town, but he extorted what money he could before he was removed.”

“There is a new Ḳâimmaḳâm on his way here,” I observed.

“True,” he replied. “When the telegram came last summer telling of liberty and equality, the people assembled before the serâyah, the government house, and bade the Ḳâimmaḳâm begone, for they would govern themselves. Thereat came orders from Baghdâd that the people must be dispersed; and the soldiers fired upon them, killing six men. And we do not know what the telegram about liberty and brotherhood can have meant, but at least the Ḳâimmaḳâm was dismissed.”

My zaptieh broke in here. “Effendim,” said he, “it fell out once that I was in Bombay—yes, I was sent from Baṣrah with horses for one of the kings of India. And there I saw a poor man whose passport had been stolen from him, and he carried his complaint to the judge. Now the judge was of the English, and he fined the thief and cut off two of his fingers. That is government; in India the poor are protected.”

“Allah!” said one of the coffee-drinkers in undisguised admiration.

I knew better than to question the validity of the anecdote, and, with what modesty I could assume, I accepted the credit that accrued from it.

“But even the English,” pursued another, “cannot hold the tribes. Effendim, have the Afghans submitted to you? Wallah, no.”

He had laid his finger upon a knotty point, and I took up the question from a different side.

“Have not you men of ’Ânah sent a deputy to the mejlis?” I asked.

“Eh wallah!” they answered.

“Let him make known in Constantinople the evils under which you suffer, that the government may seek for a remedy.”

The suggestion was received in silent perplexity.

“For what purpose did you pay the deputy to go to Stambûl?” I pursued.

“The order came,” replied one of my interlocutors. “We do not know why the deputy was sent. Doubtless he has his own business in Stambûl and he is not concerned with ’Ânah.”

“His business is yours,” I said; “and if he will not see to it, at the next election you must choose a better man.”

“Will there be another election?” said they, and I found all ’Ânah to be under the impression that their representative held a life appointment.

The island is a little paradise of fruit-trees, palms and corn, in the middle of which is a village of some thirty houses built in the heaped-up ruins of the castle. From among the houses springs a tall and beautiful minaret, octagonal in plan (Fig. 56). Its height is broken by eight rows of niches, each face of the octagon bearing in alternate storeys a double and single niche, all terminating in the cusped arch which is employed at Raḳḳah. Some of the niches are pierced with windows to light the winding stair. The tower rises yet another two storeys, but the upper part is of narrower diameter, and the windows and niches are covered with plain round arches. At the northern end of the island the walls and round bastions of the fortress stand in part, but they are not very ancient. Ibn Khurdâdhbeh, who is the first of the Mohammadan geographers to mention ’Ânah, says only that it is a small town on an island;[63] in Abu’l Fidâ’s time it was still confined to the island;[64] Rauwolff (1564) notices the town on the island and the town on the right bank;[65] Yâḳût (1225) speaks of the castle, but the walls which I saw cannot be as old as his day. The minaret may belong to a different period, and de Beylié places it in the earliest centuries of Islâm.[66] I think that there was probably a fortress on the island long before the first written record which has come down to us, but I was close upon a generation too late to see the remains of it. From two informants in ’Ânah I heard that there had been big stone slabs at the northern end of the island “with figures of men upon them and a writing like nails,” but they had fallen into the water within the memory of the older inhabitants and had been washed away or covered by the stream. This tale of cuneiform inscriptions would not in itself be worth much, but while I was examining the minaret, a villager brought me a fragment of stone covered with carving in relief which was unmistakably Assyrian. I asked him whence it came, and he replied that it had formed part of a big stone picture which had fallen into the river. I bought from him a broken bowl inscribed with Jewish incantations of the well-known type.[67]

The island was once connected with both banks by bridges. There are some traces of the section that led across to the Jezîreh, and many piers of the Shâmîyeh bridge stand in the river. Though these piers no longer serve the purpose for which they were intended, they are still put to use, for the inhabitants of the island spread nets between them, and the fish swimming down with the current are entangled in the meshes and so caught (Fig. 52). We pulled up one of the nets as we passed, and it produced two large fish which I bought for a few pence. It is curious that the Bedouin neglect the ample supply of food with which the river would furnish them; in spite of frequent inquiries we had never found fish in their tents.

Just below the houses of ’Ânah on the Shâmîyeh bank there were mounds by the river from which, said my zaptieh, the people get antîcas after rain, and sometimes small gold ornaments are washed out of them. On the opposite bank I could see ruins for a distance of an hour’s ride from ’Ânah; they ended at a big mound called Tell Abu Thor, which appeared to be a natural outcrop of the rock, though there were many small, seemingly artificial, mounds about it.[68] An hour and a half from ’Ânah we passed another rocky hill, also called Tell Abu Thor, but I could see no traces of ruins round it. From the summit of the tell there was a fine view of the little fortified island of Tilbês, the island castle of Thilutha, whose inhabitants refused to surrender to Julian. I could see the bastions of masonry on the upper end of the island, together with the ruins of a castle on the Jezîreh bank, and if there had been any possibility of crossing the river I should have gone down to it; but there was no ferry nearer than ’Ânah. I did not follow the winding course of the Euphrates from ’Ânah to Hît. Many of the ruins marked in Chesney’s map deserve a careful survey, but my mind was now set upon another matter, and we rode on from stage to stage hoping each day that the next would provide us with a guide into the western desert. My zaptieh, Muḥammad, lent a sympathetic ear to the scheme which I developed to him as we rode. The arm of the law, weak enough on the Euphrates, does not reach into the wilderness, and his duties had taken him but a little way west of the road; the main difficulty to be encountered was the lack of water, a difficulty much enhanced by the drought.

“God send us rain!” he sighed. “Effendim, at this time of the year I am used to stay my mare at such places as these” (he pointed to the hollows in the barren ground), “and while I smoke a cigarette she will have eaten her fill of grass. But this year there is no spring herbage, and in the season of the rains, forty days have passed without rain. All the waterpools in the Shâmîyeh are exhausted, and the Arabs are crossing to the Jezîreh lest they die, for their flocks can give no milk.”

Presently we met a train of thirsty immigrants driving their goats to the Euphrates. Muḥammad called to them and asked if they would give us a cup of leben, sour milk. A half-starved girl shouted back in answer:

“If we had leben we should not be crossing to the Jezîreh.”

“God help you! ” cried Muḥammad. “Cross in the peace of God.”

A little further we passed through a number of newly-made graves, scattered thickly on either side of the road. “They are graves of the Deleim,” said Muḥammad. “A year ago a bitter quarrel arose within the tribe, and here they fought together and seventy men were slain. They buried them where they fell, the one party on one side of the road, and the other on the other side.”

We travelled fast and in five hours from ’Ânah came down to the river at Fḥemeh, where we found our tents pitched near a ḳishlâ. The guardhouse is the only building here, the village of Fḥemeh being in the Jezîreh about half-an-hour up stream. About the same distance lower down lies the island of Kuro, which is perhaps Julian’s Akhaya Kala, but I saw it only from afar and do not know whether there are still ruins upon it. We had parted at ’Ânah from Cyrus and from Julian; they marched with their armies down the Jezîreh bank, and our road lost much of its charm in losing the shadowy pageants of their advance.

We were tormented during the next three days by an intolerable east wind. It blew from sunrise to sunset, and, for aught we could tell, it might have issued from the mouth of a furnace, so scorching was its dust-laden breath. I heard of ruins at Sûs, a place where the Jerâif own cornfields; but it lay at the head of a peninsula formed by a great bend of the stream, and I had no heart to go so far out of the way.[69] We reached Ḥadîthah in six hours from Fḥemeh and camped there, partly because we were weary of the wind and dust, and partly because Muḥammad had advised me to seek there for a guide into the desert. The nearer we came to that adventure, the more formidable did it appear, and I was beginning to realize that it would be folly to take a caravan across the parched and stony waste, and to revolve plans for sending the muleteers to Kerbelâ and taking only Fattûḥ with me to Kheiḍir. At Ḥadîthah we met an aged corporal, who declared that nothing would be easier than to go straight thence to Ḳaṣr ’Amej, and for water we should find every night a pool of winter rain. He had crossed the desert two years ago and there had been no lack of water.

“But this year there has been no rain,” I objected; “and all the Arabs are coming down to the river because of the great drought. Where, then, shall we find the pools?”

“God knows,” he answered piously, and I put an end to the discussion and turned my attention to the ruins of Ḥadîthah.

The village, like all the villages in these parts, lies mainly upon an island, though a small modern suburb has sprung up upon the right bank. At the upper end of the island are the ruins of a castle, not unlike the ruins at ’Ânah. A bridge had been thrown over both arms of the river, and a straight causeway across the island had connected the two parts. Needless to say, the bridge has fallen. Still more remarkable, and quite unexpected, was a large area of ruins some way inland on the Shâmîyeh side, hidden from the river village by a ridge of high ground. It must have been the site of a big town. In one place I saw four columns lying upon the ground, no doubt pre-Mohammadan, though upon one of them were four lines of a much-defaced Arabic inscription of which I could read only a few words.[70] Nearer to the river, and visible from it, are a number of small mazârs, remarkable only because their pointed dome-like roofs show the same construction that is to be seen in the famous tomb of the Sitt Zobeideh at Baghdâd.

From ’Ânah the river landscape is exceedingly monotonous: a few naouras and a patch or two of cultivation, each with its farmhouse, a small domestic mud fortress with a tower; an occasional village set in a grove of palm-trees on an island in midstream. The houses were of sun-dried brick, the walls sloping slightly inwards, and crowned with a low mud battlement—line for line a copy of their prototypes on the Assyrian reliefs. This world, which was already sufficiently dreary, was rendered unspeakably hideous by the east wind. River, sky and mud-built houses showed the universal dun colour of the desert, and even the palm-trees turned a sickly hue, their fronds dishevelled by the blast and steeped in dust.

An hour and a half from Ḥadîthah we crossed the Wâdî Ḥajlân, in which there is a brackish spring. Just opposite its mouth are the remains of a castle on an island, Abu Sa’îd, but the greater part of the island, and with it the castle, has been carried away by the stream. Below it is the palm-covered island of Berwân. Twenty minutes further we passed over a dry valley, Wâdî Fâḍîyeh, where I left the high road and crossed the desert to Alûs, which we reached in an hour and forty minutes. Kiepert, following Chesney, calls it Al’ Uzz, but I doubt whether this spelling can be justified; the Arab geographers knew it as Alûs or Alûsah, and the name has not changed until this day. The village stands on an island, but there is also a ruined castle on the right bank of the river. We rode straight from Alûs to Jibbeh in two hours, though the zaptiehs reckon it three for a caravan. There was nothing to encourage us to loiter, inasmuch as our path lay over a horrible wilderness, stony, waterless and devoid of any growing thing. Rather more than half-way across we came to the ’Uglet Ḥaurân, a valley which is said to have its source in the Ḥaurân mountains south of Damascus. At the point where we crossed it, it was dry, but my zaptieh told me that there were springs higher up and that in wet years the water will flow down it from the Ḥaurân to the Euphrates. The wind was so strong that I could not row over to the village which stands on the island of Jibbeh, though I was tempted by the tall round minaret that rises from among the palm-trees. As far as I could see through my glasses, it bears an inscription on its summit and a brick dog-tooth cornice. On the Jezîreh bank there is a large and well-preserved fortress. We reached the solitary khân of Baghdâdî a few minutes later; the caravan was there before us, having accomplished what is reckoned to be a nine-hours’ stage in eight hours sixteen minutes. The village of Baghdâdî is an hour’s march lower down, and the khân by which we camped was only four months old; “Before that,” said Fattûḥ, “we used to sleep under the sky, and there was no one but us and the jackals.” I had heard that Fadh Beg Ibn Hudhdhâl had a garden at Baghdâdî, and I cherished a hope that we might meet there one of his family who would help us on the way to Kheiḍir; but when we passed by the garden a solitary negro was in charge, and as the palms were not yet three feet high, I could not blame Fadh Beg for not having elected to dwell among them. There was nothing to be done but to ride on to Hît.[71]

From Baghdâdî the road climbs up into the barren hills. It is no better than a staircase cut out of the rock, and Fattûḥ admitted that carriage driving is not an easy matter here. He added that the stage from Baghdâdî to Hît is less secure than any other, by reason of its being infested by the Deleim who exact a toll from unguarded caravans. We had found two zaptiehs at the khân and had taken one on with us when we sent the Ḥadîthah man back, leaving the khân protected by a single zaptieh, so limited is the number of soldiers posted along the road. If you are not a person of sufficient consequence to claim an escort, you must wait until a body of travellers shall have collected at Baghdâd or Aleppo, as the case may be, and set forth in their company, since it is not safe to venture singly over the Sultan’s highroad. We met that morning a large caravan of people driving, riding in panniers, and walking. No matter what their degree, all wore the singularly abandoned aspect to which only the Oriental on a journey can attain, and the shapelessness of their baggage enhanced their personal disqualifications. About half-an-hour after the caravan had passed, we came upon five or six ragged peasants, who stopped us and lifted their voices in lamentation. They had been held up by five Deleimîs in the valley below; their cloaks had been taken from them, and the bread that was to have sufficed them till they reached ’Ânah: “We are poor men,” they wailed. “God curse those who rob the poor!”

“God curse all the Deleim!” cried Fattûḥ. “Why did you linger behind the caravan in this part of the road?”

“We were weary and one of us had fallen lame,” they explained. “But have a care when you reach the valley bottom; five men with rifles are lurking among the sand-hills.”

Their tale filled me with a futile anger, so that I desired nothing so much as to catch and punish the thieves, and without waiting to consider whether this lay within our power, I galloped on in the direction indicated by the peasants, with Fattûḥ, Jûsef and the zaptiehs at my heels. We were all armed and had nothing to fear from five robbers. The valley was a sandy depression with a sulphur stream running through it. We searched the sand-hills without success, but when we came down to the Euphrates, there were five armed men strolling unconcernedly along the bank as though they would take the air. Now, you do not wander with a rifle in your hand in unfrequented parts of the Euphrates’ bank for any good purpose, and we were persuaded that these black-browed Arabs were the five we sought. Probably they had intended to reap a larger harvest, but finding the caravan too numerous they had contented themselves with the stragglers. Unfortunately we had no proof against them: the bread was eaten and the cloaks secreted among the stones, and though we spent some minutes in heaping curses upon them, we could take no steps of a more practical kind. The zaptieh, for his part, was in an agony of nervous anxiety lest we should propose to relieve them of their rifles. He looked forward to a return journey alone to Baghdâdî, and it is not good for a solitary man to have an outstanding quarrel with the Deleim. Finally I realized that we were wasting breath in useless bluster and called Fattûḥ away. If we were to concern ourselves with the catching of thieves, we might as well abandon all other pursuits in Turkey.

The town of Hît stands upon an ancient mound washed by the Euphrates (Fig. 54). Among the palm-trees at the river’s edge rise columns of inky smoke from the primitive furnaces of the asphalt burners, for the place is surrounded by wells of bitumen, famous ever since the days when Babylon was a great city.[72] Heaps of rubbish and cinders strew the sulphur marshes to the north of the town, and a blinding dust-storm was stirring up the whole devil’s cauldron when we arrived. It was impossible to camp and we took refuge in the khân, where we were so fortunate as to meet with an English traveller on his way back from India, the first European whom I had seen since we left Aleppo. The dust-storm rose yet higher towards evening, and though we closed the shutters of the khân—there was no glass in the windows—the sand blew in merrily through the chinks, and we ate a gritty supper in a temperature of ninety-three degrees.

Hît was the last possible starting-point for the Syrian desert, and no sooner had we arrived than I summoned Fattûḥ and presented him with an ultimatum. We had failed to get any but the most contradictory reports of wells upon the road to Kheiḍir and I would not expose the caravan to such uncertain chances, but if we went alone we could carry enough water for our needs. It only remained to dispatch

[57] Sachau travelled up the left bank of the Khâbûr, and should therefore have crossed the course of the canal, but he makes no mention of it.

[58] I should conjecture that on the Euphrates as on the Tigris the disappearance of the settled population dates from the terrible disaster of the Mongol invasion.

[59] I looked carefully for any trace of a big canal opposite Ṣâliḥîyeh and saw none.

[60] Anabasis, Bk. I. ch. 5, 9.

[61] With the doubtful contribution made by Ammianus Marcellinus to the question, I have dealt in the Appendix to this chapter.

[62] Amm. Mar., Bk. XXIV. ch. i. 6.

[63] Ed. de Goeje, p. 233.

[64] Ed. Reinaud, p. 286.

[65] Quoted by Ritter, Vol. XI. p. 717.

[66] De Beylié: Prome et Samarra, p. 68. See, too, Viollet’s memoir presented to the Acad. des Inscrip. et B.-Lettres, quoted above. He, too, was shown the fragment of Assyrian relief and gives an illustration of it, for which reason I do not trouble to publish my photograph.

[67] Pognon: Inscriptions mandaïtes des coupes de Khouabir.

[68] Chesney notices that the ruins of the old town lie on the left bank below the present ’Ânah. Quoted by Ritter, Vol. XI. p. 724.

[69] It is, I suppose, Chesney’s Sarifah, which has been conjectured to be the Kolosina of Ptolemy: Ritter, Vol. XI. p. 730.

[70] These ruins give additional weight to Ritter’s suggestion that Ḥadîthah was the Parthian station of Olabus: Vol. XI. p. 731. The Arab town of Ḥadîthah is first mentioned by Ibn Khurdâdhbeh, ed. de Goeje, p. 74.

[71] Julian crossed the Euphrates at Parux Malkha, which cannot be far from Baghdâdî, and captured the castle of Diacira. This castle must have stood at the southern end of the great bend made by the Euphrates below Baghdâdî. Chesney saw the ruins of a fortress there. It is perhaps Ptolemy’s Idicara and the Izannesopolis of Isidorus: Ritter, Vol. XI. p. 737.

[72] Herodotus mentions the bitumen wells and calls the town Is. It has been identified with the Ihi of the Babylonian inscriptions, the Ahava of Ezra, and with the Ist from which a tribute of bitumen was brought to Thothmes III, according to an inscription at Karnak.

Fig. 54.—HÎT.

Fig. 55.—HÎT, THE SULPHUR MARSHES.

Fig. 56.—MINARET ON ISLAND OF LUBBÂD.

Fig. 57.—MINARET AT MA’MÛREH.

Fig. 59.—MADLÛBEH.

the muleteers along the highway and to find a guide for ourselves.

“Upon my head!” said Fattûḥ blandly. “Three guides wish to accompany your Excellency.”

“Praise be to God,” said I. “Bid them enter.”

“It would be well to see each separately,” observed Fattûḥ, “for they do not love one another.”

We interviewed them one by one, with an elaborate show of secrecy, and each in turn spent his time in warning us against the other two. Upon these negative credentials I had to come to a decision, and I made my choice feeling that I might as logically have tossed up a piastre. It fell upon a man of the Deleim, a tribe to whom we were not well disposed, but since the country through which we were to pass was mainly occupied by their tents, it seemed wiser to take a guide who claimed cousinship with their sheikhs. He was to find an escort of five armed horsemen and to bring us to Kheiḍir in return for a handsome reward, but we undertook to engage our own baggage camels. One of the drawbacks to this arrangement was that no camels were to be got at Hît, and I felt the more persuaded that we had struck a bad bargain when Nâif came back and said:

“How do I know that you will keep your word? Perhaps to-morrow you will choose another guide.”

“The English have but one word,” said I; it is a principle that should never be abandoned in the East. We struck hands upon it and Nâif left us “in the peace of God.”

Near the asphalt beds of Ma’mûreh, about an hour south-west of Hît, lie the ruins of a village clustered round a minaret (Fig. 57). All the buildings were constructed of small unsquared stones set in mortar; the minaret was plastered on the outside and seemed to have been built of large blocks of stone and mortar, firmly welded together before they had been placed in position. The round tower, narrowing upwards and decorated at the top with a zigzag ornament, was placed upon a low octagonal structure which in turn rested upon a square base (Fig. 58). I climbed the winding stair that I might survey the country through which Nâif was to take us. It was incredibly desolate, empty of tent or village save where to the west the palm-groves of Kebeisah made a black splash upon the glaring earth. The heavy smoke of the pitch fires hung round Hît, and the sulphur marshes shone leprous under the sun—a malignant landscape that could not be redeemed by the little shrines which were scattered like propitiatory invocations among the gleaming salts.

Fig. 58.—MA’MÛREH, MINARET.

About a mile from Ma’mûreh there is a still more remarkable ruin known as Madlûbeh. It is a large, irregularly shaped area marked off from the desert by heaps of stones half buried in sand. Standing among these heaps, and no doubt in their original position, there are a number of large monolithic slabs placed as if they were intended to form a wall (Fig. 59). Many of these must have fallen and been covered with the sand if the enclosure were at any time continuous, and perhaps the heaps are composed partly of buried slabs. Two stand in line with a narrow space between like a door (one of them was 5 m. long × 1·3 m. thick, and it stood 2 m. out of the ground); in another there was a small rectangular cutting that suggested a window-hole on the upper edge (it was 10 m. long × 1·3 m. thick, and stood about 3 m. out of the ground). The stones were carefully dressed on all sides. They may have formed the lower part of a wall of which the upper part was of sun-dried brick or rubble, but at what age they were placed in those wilds a cursory survey would not reveal.

When I returned to the khân, Fattûḥ greeted me with the intelligence that the Deleimî had broken his engagement. Nâif admitted that for ordinary risks the money we had offered would have been sufficient, but Kheiḍir lay in the land of his blood enemies, the Benî Ḥassan, and he would not go. Perhaps he hoped to force us to a more liberal proposal, but in this he was disappointed. A bargain is a bargain, and we fell back upon my boast that the English have but one word. In this dilemma Fattûḥ suggested that he should see what could be done with the Mudîr, and having a lively confidence in Fattûḥ’s diplomacy, I entrusted him with my passports and papers, of which I kept a varied store, and gave him plenipotentiary powers. He returned triumphant.

“Effendim,” said he, “that Mudîr is a man.” This is ever the highest praise that Fattûḥ can bestow, and my experience does not lead me to cavil at it. “When he had read your buyuruldehs he laid them upon his forehead and said, ‘It is my duty to do all that the effendi wishes.’ I told him,” interpolated Fattûḥ, “that you were a consul in your own country. He will give you a zaptieh to take you to Kebeisah, and if you command, the zaptieh shall go with you to Ḳal’at Khubbâz, returning afterwards to Hît. And it cannot be that we shall fail to find a guide and camels at Kebeisah, which is a palm-grove in the desert; for all the dwellers in it know the way to Kheiḍir. As for the caravan, another zaptieh will take it to Baghdâd.”

“Aferîn!” said I. “There is none like you, oh Fattûḥ.”

We explored the village of Hît before nightfall, and a more malodorous little dirty spot I hope I may never see. “Why,” says the poet, concerning some unknown wayfarer, “did he not halt that night at Hît?” and it is strange that Ibn Khurdâdhbeh, who quotes the question, should have been at a loss for the answer. Possibly he had no personal knowledge of Hît. On the top of the hill there is a round minaret, similar in construction to the minaret of Ma’mûreh, but I saw no other feature of interest. The sun was setting as we came down to the palm-groves by the river. The fires under the troughs of molten bitumen sent up their black smoke columns between the trees (Fig. 60); half-naked Arabs fed the flames with the same bitumen, and the Euphrates bore along the product of their labours as it had done for the Babylonians before them. So it must have looked, this strange factory under the palm-trees, for the last 5,000 years, and all the generations of Hît have not altered by a shade the processes taught them by their first forefathers.

THE PARTHIAN STATIONS OF ISIDORUS OF CHARAX

The only modern record of the road along the left bank of the Euphrates from Raḳḳah to Deir is the rather meagre account given by Sachau; Moritz travelled down the left bank from Deir to Buseirah, but I know of no published description of the road from Buseirah to ’Ânah. It has not

Fig. 60.—HÎT, THE BITUMEN FURNACES.

Fig. 61.—THE EUPHRATES AT HÎT.

Fig. 62.—THE WELL AT KEBEISAH.

Fig. 63.—’AIN ZA’ZU.

therefore been possible hitherto to attempt to place in any continuous sequence the sites given by ancient authorities. Of these the fullest list is that of the Parthian stations furnished by Isidorus of Charax (Geographi Græci Minores, ed. by Müller, Vol. I. p. 244). It begins with the fixed point of Nicephorium (Raḳḳah) and ends with another fixed point, that of Anatho (’Ânah). Between these two lies Nabagath on the Aburas. The Aburas may safely be assumed to indicate the Khâbûr, and Nabagath is therefore Circesium-Buseirah. The following comparative table shows my suggestions for the remaining stations, combined with those which have already been made by Ritter and others. The times given are the rate of travel of my caravan; between Raḳḳah and Deir I had the advantage of comparing them with Sachau’s time-table. No two caravans travel over any given distance at exactly the same pace, but the general average works out without any grave discrepancy. I have often tried to reckon the speed at which my caravan travels and have come to the conclusion that it is very little under three miles an hour, say about two and seven-eighths miles an hour. Isidorus computes his distances by the schœnus. According to Moritz 1 schœnus = 5·5 kilometres. From Buseirah to ’Ânah I travelled over Isidorus’s road at the rate of 1 schœnus in 1 hr. 7 min., which would bring the schœnus down to 5·166 kilometres. The section from Raḳḳah to Buseirah is not so easy to calculate because Isidorus has in two places omitted to give the exact distance between the stations, but my rate of travel was not far different here from that noted in the other sections. So much for the average. The individual distances do not tally so exactly, and in attempting to determine the sites, the evidence that can be gathered from the country itself seems to me to weigh heavier in the scale than the measurements given by Isidorus, especially as his inexactitude is proved by the fact that the sum of the distances he allows from station to station do not coincide with the total distances, from the Zeugma (Birejik) to Seleucia, and from Phaliga to Seleucia, as he states them. In both cases the sum of the small distances comes to a larger figure than that which he allows for the totals—

Zeugma to Seleucia171 sch.

total of distances between stations 174 sch., without the two omitted by him.

Phaliga to Seleucia100 sch.

total of distances between stations 120 sch. without one omitted by him.

As regards the second section, Kiepert believed that a copyist’s error of 10 sch. too much had been made in Isidorus’s table between Izannesopolis and Aeipolis (the modern Hît), but even this correction will not bring the totals together (Ritter, Vol. XI. p. 738). The road from the Zeugma to Nicephorium does not follow the river, and I am therefore unable to control the statements of Isidorus above Raḳḳah; nor do I know the section between Hît and Seleucia. I need scarcely say that my table is of the most tentative character; it begins with the ninth station of Isidorus, Nicephorium.

The first remarkable site which I saw on the river below Raḳḳah was the large area surrounded by a ditch, half-an-hour above my camping-ground. Isidorus’s tenth station from Zeugma is Galabatha. Ritter (Vol. XI. p. 687) observes that it must be above Abu Sa’îd, and the area enclosed by the ditch fulfils that condition. The eleventh station is Khubana which I put at Abu Sa’îd, where there are fragments of columns and other evidences of antiquity. The twelfth station is Thillada Mirrhada; I have placed it at Khmeiḍah (squared stones, brick walls, a broken sarcophagus), but the claims of Abu ’Atîḳ are considerable, the extent of the ruin field at the latter place being much larger than at Khmeiḍah. But Abu ’Atîḳ is 7 hrs. 5 min. from Abu Sa’îd, and the caravan time between Khmeiḍah and Abu Sa’îd (6 hrs. 5 min.) is already rather long for the 4 sch. allowed by Isidorus. The thirteenth station is Basilia with Semiramidis Fossa. Ritter long ago pointed to the probability of its having been situated at Zelebîyeh (Vol. XI. p. 687).

Isidorus

Schœni

Modern Sites

Time

Xenophon

Pliny

Ptolemy

Ammianus Marcellinus

Zosimos

Herodotus

Stations

Description

hrs. min.

Nicephorium

Greek town founded by Alexander

—

Raḳḳah

—

Nicephorium

Callinicum

—

10.

Galabatha

Deserted village

Ditch

6 15

—

11.

Khubana

Village

Abu Sa’îd

1 30

—

12.

Thillada Mirrhada

Royal station

Khmeiḍah

6 5

—

13.

Basilia

Temple of Artemis built by Darius, village surrounded by wall

Zelebîyeh

3 40

—

Semiramidis Fossa

Euphrates dam

14.

Allan

Walled village

Umm Rejeibah

—

15.

Biunan

Temple of Artemis

Near Deir

—

16.

Phaliga

Village

—

Phaliscum

—

17.

Nabagath

Walled village on Aburas

Near Phaliga

Buseirah

Villages on Araxes

—

Khabura

Circesium

—

18.

Asikha

Village

Jemmah

5 10

—

Zeitha

—

19.

Dura Nicanoris

Town founded by Macedonians, called Europus by Greeks

Abu’l Ḥassan

8 20

—

Thelda

—

20.

Merrhan

Castle and walled village

Irzî

6 30

Corsote

—

Dura

—

21.

Giddan

Town

Jabarîyeh?

—

22.

Belisibiblada

—

Ḳal’at Bulâḳ

9 25

—

Bonakhe

—

23.

Island

—

Ḳarâbileh?

—

24.

Anatho

Island

Lubbâd, island opposite ’Ânah

11 50

—

Bethauna

Anatha

—

25.

Olabus

Island, Parthian treasure-house

Ḥadîthah

—

26.

Izannesopolis

—

Chesney’s Ḳaṣr

—

Idicara

—

27.

Aeipolis

Bitumen wells

16 (6?)

Hît

17 30

—

Sitha

CHAPTER IV

HÎT TO KERBELÂ

March 18-March 30

History in retrospect suffers an atmospheric distortion. We look upon a past civilization and see it, not as it was, but charged with the significance of that through which we gaze, as down the centuries shadow overlies shadow, some dim, some luminous, and some so strongly coloured that all the age behind is tinged with a borrowed hue. So it is that the great revolutions, “predestined unto us and we predestined,” take on a double power; not only do they turn the current of human action, but to the later comer they seem to modify that which was irrevocably fixed and past. We lend to the dwellers of an earlier day something of our own knowledge; we watch them labouring towards the ineluctable hour, and credit them with a prescience of change not given to man. At no time does this sense of inevitable doom hang more darkly than over the years that preceded the rise of Islâm; yet no generation had less data for prophecy than the generation of Mohammad. The Greek and the Persian disputed the possession of western Asia in profitless and exhausting warfare, both harassed from time to time by the predatory expeditions of the nomads on their frontiers, both content to enter into alliance with this tribe or with that, and to set up an Arab satrap over the desert marshes. Thus it happened that the Benî Ghassân served the emperor of the Byzantines, and the Benî Lakhm fought in the ranks of the Sassanian armies. But neither to Justin II nor to Chosroes the Great came the news that in Mecca a child was born of the Ḳureish who was to found a military state as formidable as any that the world had seen, and nothing could have exceeded the fantastic improbability of such intelligence.

I had determined to journey back behind this great dividing line, to search through regions now desolate for evidences of a past that has left little historic record, calling upon the shades to take form again upon the very ground whereon, substantial, they had played their part. So on a brilliant morning Fattûḥ and I saw the caravan start out in the direction of Baghdâd, not without inner heart-searchings as to where and how we should meet it again, and having loaded three donkeys with all that was left to us of worldly goods, we turned our faces towards the wilderness. I looked back upon the ancient mound of Hît, the palm-groves, and the dense smoke of the pitch fires rising into the clear air, and as I looked our zaptieh came out to join us—a welcome sight, for the Mudîr might well have repented at the eleventh hour. Now no one rides into the desert, however uncertain the adventure, without a keen sense of exhilaration. The bright morning sun, the wide clean levels, the knowledge that the problems of existence are reduced on a sudden to their simplest expression, your own wit and endurance being the sole determining factors—all these things brace and quicken the spirit. The spell of the waste seized us as we passed beyond the sulphur marshes; Ḥussein Onbâshî held his head higher, and we gave each other the salaam anew, as if we had stepped out into another world that called for a fresh greeting.

“At Hît,” said he, and his words went far to explain the lightness of his heart, “I have left three wives in the house.”

“Mâshallah!” said Fattûḥ, “you must be deaf with the gir-gir-gir of them.”

“Eh billah!” assented Ḥussein, “I shut my ears. Three wives, two sons and six daughters, of whom but two married. Twenty children I have had, and seven wives; three of these died and one left me and returned to her own people. But I shall take another bride this year, please God.”

“We Christians,” observed Fattûḥ, “find one enough.”

“You may be right,” answered Ḥussein politely; “yet I would take a new wife every year if I had the means.”

“We will find you a bride in Kebeisah,” said I.

Hussein weighed this suggestion.

“The maidens of Kebeisah are fair but wilful. There is one among them, her name is Shemsah—wallah, a picture! a picture she is!—she has had seven husbands.”

“And the maidens of Hît?” I asked. “How are they?”

“Not so fair, but they are the better wives. That is why I choose to remain in Hît,” explained Ḥussein. “The bimbâshî would have sent me to Baghdâd, but I said, ‘No, let me stay here; the maidens of Hît do not expect much.’ Your Excellency may laugh, but a poor man must think of these things.”

We rode on through the aromatic scrub until the black masses of the Kebeisah palm-groves resolved into tall trunks and feathery fronds.[73] The sun stood high as we passed under the village gate and down the dusty street that led to the Mudîr’s compound. We tied our mares to some mangers in his courtyard and were ourselves ushered into his reception-room, there to drink coffee and set forth our purpose. The leading citizens of Kebeisah dropped in one by one, and the talk was of the desert and of the dwellers therein. The men of Kebeisah are not ’Arab, Bedouin; they hold their mud-walled village and their 50,000 palm-trees against the tribes, but they know the laws of the desert as well as the nomads themselves, and carry on an uneasy commerce with them in dates and other commodities, with which even the wilderness cannot dispense, the accredited methods of the merchant alternating with those of the raider and the avenger of raids. There was no lack of guides to take me to Khubbâz, for the ruin is the first stage upon the post-road to Damascus, and half the male population was acquainted with that perilous way.

“It is the road of death,” said Ḥussein Onbâshî, stuffing tobacco into the cup of his narghileh.

“Eh billah!” said one who laid the glowing charcoal atop. “Eight days’ ride, and the government, look you, pays no more than fifteen mejîdehs from Hît and back again.”

An old man, wrapped in a brown cloak edged with gold, took up the tale.

“The government reckons fifteen mejîdehs to be the price of a man’s life. Wallah! if the water-skins leak between water and water, or if the camel fall lame, the rider perishes.”

“By the truth, it is the road of death,” repeated Ḥussein. “Twice last year the Deleim robbed the mail and killed the bearer of it.”

I had by this time spread out Kiepert.

“Inform me,” said I, “concerning the water.”

“Oh lady,” said the old man, “I rode with the mail for twenty years. An hour and a half from Kebeisah there is water at ’Ain Za’zu’, and in four hours more there is water in the tank of Khubbâz after the winter, but this year there is none, by reason of the lack of rain. Twelve hours from Khubbâz you shall reach Ḳaṣr ’Amej, which is another fortress like Khubbâz, but more ruined; and there is no water there. But eighteen hours farther you find water in the Wâdî Ḥaurân, at Muḥeiwir.”

“Is there not a castle there?” I asked. Kiepert calls it the castle of ’Aiwir.

“There is nought but rijm,” said he. (Rijm are the heaps of stones which the Arabs pile together for landmarks.) “And after nine hours more there is water at Ga’rah, and then no more till Dumeir, nine hours from Damascus.”

If this account is exact, there must be four days of waterless desert on the road of death.

The springs in Kebeisah are strongly charged with sulphur, but half-way between the town and the shrine of Sheikh Khuḍr, that lifts a conical spire out of the wilderness, there is a well less bitter, to which come the fair and wilful maidens night and morning, bearing on their heads jars of plaited willow, pitched without and within (Fig. 62). We did not fill our water-skins there when we set out next day for Ḳaṣr Khubbâz, but rode on to ’Ain Za’zu’, where the water is drinkable, though far from sweet (Fig. 63). There are

Fig. 64.—ḲAṢR KHUBBÂZ AND RUINS OF THE TANK.

Fig. 66.—ḲAṢR KHUBBÂZ, THE GATEWAY.

Fig. 67.—ḲAṢR KHUBBÂZ, A VAULTED CHAMBER.

Fig. 68.—THEMAIL.

two other sulphurous springs, one a little to the north and one to the south, round each of which, as at ’Ain Za’zu’, the inhabitants of Kebeisah sow clover, the sole fodder of the oasis in rainless years like the spring of 1909; so said Fawwâz, the owner of the two camels on which we had placed our small packs. Fawwâz rode one of them and his nephew, Sfâga, the other, and they hung the dripping water-skins under the loads. We followed the course of a shallow valley westwards, and before we left it sighted a train of donkeys making to the north with an escort on foot—Arabs of the Deleim. They looked harmless enough, but I afterwards found that they had caused Fawwâz great uneasiness; indeed they kept him watchful all through the night, fearing that they might raid us while we slept. I was too busy observing the wide landscape to dwell on such matters. The desolate world stretched before us, lifting itself by shallow steps into long, bare ridges, on which the Arab rijm were visible for miles away. The first of these steps—it was not more than fifty feet high—was called the Jebel Muzâhir, and when we had gained its summit we saw the castle of Khubbâz lying out upon the plain. To the north the ground falls away into a wâdî, a shallow depression like all desert valleys, in which are traces of a large masonry tank that caught the trickle of the winter springs and held their water behind a massive dam (Fig. 64). The tank is now half full of soil and the dam leaks, so that as soon as the rains have ceased the water store vanishes. It had left behind it a scanty crop of grass and flowers, which seemed luxuriant to us in that dry season; we turned the mares and camels loose in what Fattûḥ called enthusiastically the rabî’ah (the herbage of spring), and pitched my light tent in the valley bottom, where my men could find shelter among the rocks against the chills of night. I left all these arrangements to Fattûḥ, and with Ḥussein and Fawwâz to hold the metre tape, measured and photographed the fort till the sun touched the western horizon.

The walls of Khubbâz are built of stones, either unworked or very roughly squared, set in a thick bed of coarse mortar.

Fig. 65.—KHUBBÂZ.

In form the fort is a hollow square with round bastions at the angles, and except on the side facing towards Kebeisah, where the centre of the wall is occupied by a gate, there is also a round bastion midway between the angle towers (Fig. 65). All these bastions are much ruined and I may be wrong in representing them as if unequal size. Before the door there has been a vaulted porch, among the ruins of which lies a large block of stone which looks as if it had served as lintel to the outer door; I could see no moulding or inscription upon it (Fig. 66). The existing inner door is arched, the arch being set forward in a curious fashion. It opened into a vaulted entrance passage which communicated with an open court in the centre of the building. The court was surrounded by barrel-vaulted chambers, some of which showed traces of repair or reconstruction, though the old and the new work are now alike ruined.[74] All the vaults are set forward about three centimetres beyond the face of the wall (Fig. 67). Above the outset the first few courses of stones are laid horizontally, inclining slightly inwards, but where the curve of the vault makes it impossible to continue this method without the aid of centering beams, the stone is cut into narrow slabs which are set upright so as to form slices of the vault, and each slice has an inclination backwards, the first resting against the head wall and every succeeding slice resting against the one behind it. This is the well-known Mesopotamian system of vaulting without a centering, which is as old as the Assyrians.[75] It is best adapted to brick, but it can be carried out in stone when the span of the vault is not large, provided that the stones be cut thin, so as to resemble as nearly as possible brick tiles. On the south side, which is the best preserved, there are traces of an upper storey, or possibly of an upper gallery or chemin de ronde. A doorway led from it into a small chamber hollowed out of the thickness of the central bastion: I imagine that there was a similar outlook chamber in the other bastions, but in all these the upper part is ruined. I could find no inscriptions; the Arab tribe marks (awâsim) were scratched upon the plaster with which the inner side of the walls had been coated. I do not doubt that Khubbâz belongs to the Mohammadan period, nor that it is a relic of the great days of the khalifate when the shortest road from Baghdâd to Damascus was guarded by little companies of soldiers stationed at Khubbâz and ’Amej, and perhaps at other points. The plan is that of many of the Roman and Byzantine lime fortresses upon the Syrian side of the desert,[76] of the Mohammadan forts and fortified khâns scattered over Syria and Mesopotamia,[77] and of the modern Turkish guardhouse; the structural details are Mesopotamian, dictated by the conditions of the land.

At the pleasant hour of dusk I sat among the flowering weeds by my tent door while Fattûḥ cooked our dinner in his kitchen among the rocks, Sfâga gathered a fuel of desert scrub, Fawwâz stirred the rice-pot, and the bubbling of Ḥussein’s narghileh gave a note of domesticity to our bivouac. My table was a big stone, the mares cropping the ragged grass round the tent were my dinner-party; one by one the stars shone out in a moonless heaven and our tiny encampment was wrapped in the immense silences of the desert, the vast and peaceful night. Next morning, as we rode back to Kebeisah, Fattûḥ and I, between intervals devoted to chasing gazelle, laid siege on our companions and persuaded them to accompany us in our further journey. Fawwâz avowed that he was satisfied with us and would come where we wished (and as for Sfâga he would do as he was told) as long as Ḥussein would give a semi-official sanction to the enterprise by his presence. It was more difficult to win over Ḥussein, who had received from the Mudîr no permission to absent himself so long from Hît; but Fattûḥ pointed out that, when you have three wives, with the prospect of a fourth, to say nothing of six daughters of whom but two are married, you cannot afford to neglect the opportunity of earning an extra bakhshîsh. This reasoning was conclusive, and before we reached ’Ain Za’zu’ we had settled everything, down to the quantity of coffee-beans we would buy at Kebeisah for the trip. But when we got to Kebeisah we were greeted by news that went near to overturning our combinations. There had been alarums and excursions in our absence; the Deleim had attacked a party of fuel-gatherers two hours from the oasis, in the very plain we were to cross, and had made off with eight donkeys. One of the donkeys belonged to Fawwâz; he shook his head over the baleful activity of the tribe and murmured that we were a small party in the face of such perils. Moreover, in the Mudîr’s courtyard there stood a half-starved mare which had been recaptured in a counter-raid from the seventh husband of the famous Shemsah. He too was of the Deleim. We gave the mare a feed of corn—her gentle, hungry eyes were turned appealingly on our full mangers; but to Shemsah I was harder hearted, though her eyes were more beautiful than those of the mare. She came suppliant as I sat dining on the Mudîr’s roof at nightfall and begged me to recover her husband’s rifle, which lay below in the hands of the government. Her straight brows were pencilled together with indigo and a short blue line marked the roundness of her white chin; a cloak slipping backwards from her head showed the rows of scarlet beads about her throat, and as she drew it together with slender fingers, Fattûḥ, Ḥussein and I gazed on her with unmixed approval, in spite of the irregular course of her domestic history. But I felt that to return his rifle to a Deleimî robber was not part of my varied occupations, though who knows whether Shemsah’s grace, backed by what few mejîdehs she could scrape together, did not end by softening the purpose of Ḥussein and the Mudîr, “the Government,” as in veiled terms we spoke of them?

With the exercise of some diplomacy we induced Fawwâz to hold to his engagement, but the Mudîr took fright when he heard of our intentions, and threatened our guides with dire retribution if they led us into the heart of the desert. I think the threat was only intended to relieve him of responsibility, for Ḥussein shrugged his shoulders, and said it would be enough if we rode an hour in the direction of Ramâdî, on the Euphrates, and then changed our course and made straight for Abu Jîr, an oasis where we expected to find Arab tents. We set off next morning in the clear sunlight which makes all projects seem entirely reasonable, and dropped, after three-quarters of an hour, into a little depression. When we had crossed the sulphur marsh which lay at the valley bottom, we altered our direction to the south-west and rode almost parallel to a long low ridge called the Ga’rat ej Jemâl, which lay about three miles to the west of us. Four hours from Kebeisah we reached a tiny mound out of which rose a spring of water, sulphurous but just drinkable. The top of the mound was lifted only a few feet above the surrounding level, but that was enough to give us a wide view, and since in all the world before us there was no shade or shelter from the sun, we sat down and lunched where we could be sure that a horseman would not approach us unawares. And as we rested, some one far away opened a bottle into which Solomon, Prophet of God, had sealed one of the Jinn. Up sprang a gigantic column of smoke that fanned outwards in the still air and hung menacingly over the naked, empty plain. I waited spellbound to see the great shoulders and huge horned head disengage themselves from the smoke-wreaths that rolled higher and—

“ ’Ain el ’Awâsil burns,” said Fawwâz. “A shepherd has set it alight.”

There was a small pitch-well an hour away to the south-east, and if springs that burn when the tinder touches them are more logical than spirits that issue from a bottle when the seal is broken, then the explanation of Fawwâz may be accepted. But at that moment I could not stay to think the problem out, for if it was hot riding, sitting still was intolerable, and we were not anxious to linger when every half-hour’s march meant half-an-hour of dangerous country behind us. From noon to sunset the desert is stripped of beauty. Hour after hour we journeyed on, while the bare forbidding hills drew away from us on the right, and the plain ahead rolled out illimitable. We saw no living creature, man or beast, but an hour from ’Ain el ’As[.]fûrîyeh, where we had lunched, we came upon a deep still pool in an outcrop of rock, the water sufficiently sweet to drink. This spot is called Jelîb esh Sheikh; it contains several such pools, said Fawwâz, and he added that the water had appeared there of a sudden two years before, but that now it never diminished, nor rose higher in the rocky clefts. Just beyond the pool we crossed the Wâdî Muḥammadî, which stretched westwards to the receding ridges of the Gar’at ej Jemâl, and east to the Euphrates; it was dry and blotched with an evil-looking crust of sulphur. Fawwâz turned his camel’s head a little to the east of south and began to look anxiously for landmarks. We hoped to find at Abu Jîr an encampment of the Deleim, and, eagerly as we wished to avoid the scattered horsemen of the tribe by day, it was essential that we should pass the night near their tents. The desert is governed by old and well-defined laws, and the first of these is the law of hospitality. If we slept within the circuit of a sheikh’s encampment he would be “malzûm ’aleinâ” (responsible for us) and not one of his people would touch us; but if we lay out in the open we should court the attack of raiders and of thieves. Two hours from the Wâdî Muḥammadî we reached a little tell, from the top of which we sighted the ’alâmah (the landmarks) of Abu Jîr, a couple of high-piled mounds of stones. An hour later they lay to the east of us, and we saw still farther to the south-east the black line of tamarisk bushes that indicated the oasis. But it was another hour before we got up to it, and the sun was very low in the sky when we set foot on the hard black surface that gives the place its name. There was no time to lose, and we embarked recklessly on the “Father of Asphalt,” only to be caught in the fresh pitch that had been spread out upon the wilderness by streams of sulphurous water. We dismounted and led our animals over the quaking expanse, coasting round the head-waters of the springs—there are, I believe, eight of them—and experimenting in our own persons on half-congealed lakes of pitch before we allowed the camels to venture across them. The light faded while we were thus engaged, and seeing that too much caution might well be our undoing, I shouted to Fattûḥ to follow, and struck out eastwards. Fattûḥ was half inclined to look upon our case as a result of premeditated treachery on the part of Fawwâz, but I had noted unmistakable signs of fear and bewilderment in the bearing of the latter, and at all hazards I was resolved not to sleep in a pool of tar. We made for a line of tamarisk bushes behind which lay a thin haze of smoke, and as we broke through the brushwood we beheld a black tent crouching in the hollow. We rode straight up to the door and gave the salaam.

“And upon you peace,” returned the astonished owner.

“What Arabs are you, and where is your sheikh’s tent?” said I, in an abrupt European manner.

He was taken aback at being asked so many questions and answered reluctantly, “We are the Deleim, and the tent of Muḥammad el ’Abdullah lies yonder.”

We turned away, and I whispered to Fattûḥ not to hasten, and above all to approach the sheikh’s tent from in front, lest we should be mistaken for such as come upon an evil errand. He fell behind me, and with as much dignity as a tired and dusty traveller can muster, I drew rein by the tent ropes and gave the salaam ceremoniously, with a hand lifted to breast and lip and brow. A group of men sitting by the hearth leapt to their feet and one came forward.

“Peace and kinship and welcome,” said he, laying his hand on my bridle.

I looked into his frank and merry face and knew that all was well.

“Are you Muḥammad el ’Abdullah, for whom we seek?”

“Wallah, how is my name known to you?” said he. “Be pleased to enter.”

Ḥussein Onbâshî, when he appeared with the camels a quarter of an hour later, found a large company round the coffee-pots, listening in breathless wonder (I no less amazed than the rest) while the sheikh related the exploits of—a motor!

“And then, oh lady, they wound a handle in front of the carriage, and lo, it moved without horses, eh billah! And it sped across the plain, we sitting on the cushions. And from behind there went forth semok.” He brought out the English word triumphantly.

“Allah, Allah!” we murmured.

Ḥussein took from his lip the narghileh tube which was already between them and explained the mystery.

“It was the automobile of Misterr X. He journeyed from Aleppo to Baghdâd in four days, and the last day Muḥammad el ’Abdullah went with him, for the road was through the country of the Deleim.”

“I saw them start,” said Fattûḥ the Aleppine. “But the automobile lies now broken in Baghdâd.”

Muḥammad paid no heed to this slur upon the reputation of the carriage.

“White!” said he. “It was all painted white. Wallah, the Arabs wondered as it fled past. And I was seated within upon the cushions.”

That night Fattûḥ and I held a short council. We had won successfully through a hazardous day, but it seemed less than wisdom to go farther without an Arab guide, and I proposed to add Muḥammad el ’Abdullah to our party, if he would come.

“He will come,” said Fattûḥ. “This sheikh is a man. And your Excellency is of the English.”

Muḥammad neither demurred nor bargained. I think he would have accompanied me even if I had not belonged to the race that owned the carriage. Our adventure pleased him; he was one of those whose blood runs quicker than that of his fellows, whose fancy burns brighter, “whom thou, Melpomene, at birth” ... upon many an unknown cradle the Muse sheds her clear beam.

“But if we were to meet the raiders of the Benî Ḥassan?” I asked, mindful of the unsuccessful parleyings at Hît.

“God is great!” replied Muḥammad, “and we are four men with rifles.”

There was once a town at Abu Jîr, guarded by a little square fort with bastioned angles like Ḳaṣr Khubbâz. It was, however, much more ruined; of the interior buildings nothing remained, while the outer walls were little better than heaps of stones. But below this later work there were remains of older foundations, more careful masonry of larger materials, and outside the walls traces of a pavement, composed of big slabs of stone, accurately fitted together. All round the fort lay the foundations of houses, stone walls or crumbling mounds of sun-dried brick, not unlike the ruins of Ma’mûreh. There must have existed here a mediæval Mohammadan settlement, if there was nothing older, and the discovery was sufficiently surprising, for Abu Jîr now lies far beyond the limits of fixed habitation. The Deleim still turn the abundant water of the oasis to some profit, planting a few patches of corn and clover in the low ground below the ruins, but the insecurity of the desert forbids all permanent occupation. We had not gone far on our way next morning before Muḥammad stopped short in the ode he was singing and bent down from his saddle to examine some hoof-prints in the sandy ground. Two horsemen had travelled that way, riding in the same direction that we were taking.

“Those are the mares of our enemies,” he observed.

“How do you know?” I asked.

“I heard that they had passed Abu Jîr in the night,” he answered and resumed his song. When he had brought it to an end, he called out—

“Oh lady, I will sing the ode that I composed about the carriage.”

At this the camel-riders and Ḥussein drew near and Muḥammad began the first ḳaṣîdah that has been written to a motor.

[73] Yâḳût mentions Kebeisah as the oasis four miles from Hît upon the desert road. There are, he says, a number of villages there, the inhabitants of which live in the extreme of poverty and misery, by reason of the aridity of the surrounding waste.

[74] The central division wall in the long south chamber is a later addition.

[75] Described by Choisy: L’Art de bâtir chez les Byzantins, p. 31.

[76] For example Ḳasṭal (Brünnow and Domaszewski: Provincia Arabia, Vol. II. pl. xliv.); Ḳaṣr el Abyaḍ (de Vogüé: La Syrie Centrale, Vol. I. p. 69); Deir el Kahf, founded in A.D. 306 (Butler: Ancient Architecture in Syria, Section A, Part II. p. 146); Ḳuṣeir el Ḥallâbât, dated A.D. 213 (ditto, p. 72); barracks at Anderîn, dated A.D. 558 (ditto, Section B, Part II. pl. viii.).

[77] Ṭuba with a triple court (Musil: Ḳuṣeir ’Amra, Vol. I. p. 13); Kharânî (ditto, p. 97); Khân ez Zebîb (Provincia Arabia, Vol. II. p. 78).

“I tell a marvel the like of which no man has known, A glory of artifice born of English wit.”

“True, true!” ejaculated Fawwâz ecstatically.

“Eh billah!” exclaimed Ḥussein.

“Her food and her drink are the breath from a smoke-cloud blown, If her radiance fade bright fire shall reburnish it.”

“Allah, Allah!” cried the enraptured Fawwâz.

“On the desert levels she darts like a bird of prey, Her race puts to shame a mare of the purest breed; As a hawk in the dusk that hovers and swoops to slay, She swoops and turns with wondrous strength and speed.”

“Wallah, the truth!” Ḥussein’s enthusiasm was uncontrollable.

“Eh wallah!” echoed Fawwâz and Sfâga.

“He who mounts and rides her sits on the throne of a king....”

“A king in very truth!” cried Fawwâz.

“If the goal be far, to her the remote is near....”

“Near indeed!” burst from the audience.

“More stealthy than stallions, more swift than the jinn a-wing, She turns the gazelle that hides from her blast in fear.”

“Allah!” Fawwâz punctuated the stanza.

“Not from idle lips was gathered the wisdom I sing....”

“God forbid!” exclaimed Fawwâz, leaning forward eagerly.

“In the whole wide plain she has not met with her peer.”

“Mâshallah! it is so! it is the truth, oh lady!” said Ḥussein.

“I did not quite understand it all,” said I humbly, feeling rather like Alice in Wonderland when Humpty Dumpty recited his verses to her. “Perhaps you will help me to write it down this evening.”

So that night, with the assistance of Fawwâz, who had a bowing acquaintance with letters, we committed it to paper, and I now know how the masterpieces of the great singers were received at the fair of ’Ukâẓ in the Days of Ignorance.

“The truth! it is the truth!” shouted the tribes between each couplet. “Eh by Al Lât and by Al ’Uzzah!”

Three hours from Abu Jîr we cantered down to the Wâdî Themail and saw some black tents pitched by a tell on the farther side. Flocks of goats were scattered over the plain; the shepherds, when they perceived our party, drew them together and began to drive them towards the tents. At this Muḥammad pulled up, rose in his stirrups, and waved a long white cotton sleeve over his head—a flag of truce.

“They take us for raiders,” said he, laughing. “Wallah, in a moment we should have had their rifles upon us.”

Fig. 69.—THEMAIL.

“God guide us, God guard us, God protect us!” muttered Muḥammad as he settled himself into the saddle. He never took the road without this pious ejaculation.

Four hours of weary desert lie between Themail and ’Asîleh, but Muḥammad diversified the way by pointing out the places where he had attacked and slain his enemies. These historic sites were numerous. The Deleim have no friends except the great tribe of the ’Anazeh, represented in these regions by the Amarât under Ibn Hudhdhâl. To the ’Anazeh he always alluded as the Bedû, giving me their names for the different varieties of scanty desert scrub as well as the common titles. Even the place-names are not the same on the lips of the Bedû; for example El ’Asîleh is known to them as Er Radâf.

“Are not the Deleim also Bedû?” I asked.

“Eh wah,” he assented. “The ’Anazeh intermarry with us. But we would not take a girl of the Afâḍleh; they are ’Agedât” (base born).

The friendship between the Amarât and the Deleim is intermittent at best, like all desert alliances. As we neared the Wâdî Burdân, Muḥammad called our attention to some tamarisk bushes where he and his raiding party had lain one night in ambush, and at dawn killed four men of the Amarât and taken their mares.

“Eh billah!” said he with a sigh of satisfaction.

The very rifle he carried had been taken in a raid from Ibn er Rashîd’s people. He showed me with pride that the name of ’Abdu’l ’Azîz ibn er Rashîd, lately Lord of Nejd, was scratched upon it in large clear letters.

“I did not take it from them,” he explained. “I found it in the hands of one of the Benî Ḥassan.” I fell to wondering how many midnight attacks it had seen, and how many masters it had served since Ibn er Rashîd’s agents brought it up from the Persian Gulf.

The Wâdî Burdân is one of three valleys that are reputed to stretch across the Syrian desert from the Jebel Ḥaurân to the Euphrates. The northernmost is the Wâdî Ḥaurân, which joins the river above Hît, and the southernmost the Wâdî Lebai’ah, on which stands Kheiḍir. When the snow melts in the Ḥaurân mountains water flows down all three, so I have heard, but later in the year there is no water in the Wâdî Burdân, except at ’Asîleh, though Kiepert marks it “quellenreich.” Muḥammad declared that there was no permanent water west of ’Asîleh save at Wîzeh, a spring which has often been described to me. It rises underground, and you approach it by a long passage through the rock, taking with you a lantern, my informants are careful to add. At the end of the passage you come to a shallow pool where the mud predominates, though it is always possible to quench your thirst at it. ’Asîleh is an autumn camping-ground of the ’Anazeh. The deep fine sand of the valley is bordered by a fringe of tamarisk bushes, covered, when we were there, with feathery white flower. Their roots strike down into the water, which rises into cup-shaped holes scooped out in the sand, and the deeper you dig the clearer and the colder it is. For four days we had found no water that was sweet, and the pools under the tamarisk bushes tasted like nectar. It was a delightful solitary camp. The setting sun threw a magic cloak of colour and soft shadows over the sandhills of the Wâdî Burdân, and under the starlight my companions lingered round the camp fire, smoking a narghileh and telling each other wondrous tales. When I joined them Fattûḥ was holding forth upon the evil eye, a favourite topic with him. I knew by heart the tragedy of his three horses who died in one day because an acquaintance had looked at them in their stable.

“And if your Excellency doubts,” said Fattûḥ, “I can tell you that there is a man well known in Aleppo who has one good eye and one evil. And this he keeps bound under a kerchief. And one day when he was sitting in the house of friends they said to him, ‘Why do you bind up the left eye?’ He said, ‘It is an evil eye.’ Then they said, ‘If you were to take off the kerchief and look at the lamp hanging from the roof, would it fall?’ ‘Without doubt,’ said he; and with that he unbound the kerchief and looked, and the lamp fell to the ground.”

“Allah!” said Fawwâz. “There is a man at Kebeisah who has never dared to look at his own son.”

“At ’Ânah,” observed Ḥussein, letting the narghileh relapse into silence for a moment, “there is a sheikh who wears a charm against bullets.”

But Muḥammad knew as much as most men about the ways of bullets, and he thought nothing of this expedient.

“Whether the bullet hits or misses,” he remarked, “it is all from God.” He poured me out a cup of coffee. “A double health, oh lady,” said he.

The sun had not risen when we left ’Asîleh, but it fell upon us as we climbed the sandhills, and gave to every little thorny plant a long trail of shadow.

“God guide us, God guard us, God protect us!” murmured Muḥammad.

The desert was unbearably monotonous that morning. The ground rose gradually, level above level in an almost imperceptible slope which was just enough to prevent us from seeing more than a quarter of an hour ahead. A dozen times I marked a bush on the top of the rise and promised myself that when we reached it we should have a wider prospect; a dozen times the summit melted away into another slope as featureless as the last. We were journeying in a south-easterly direction, straight into the sun, and as I rode, with eyes downcast to avoid the glare, I noticed that the ground was strewn with yellow gourds larger than an orange.

“It is ḥanẓal,” said Muḥammad. “It grows only where the plain is very dry, and best in rainless years. Wallah, so bitter is the fruit that, if you hold dates in your hand and crush the ḥanẓal with your foot, they say you cannot eat the dates for the flavour of the ḥanẓal. God knows.”

His words set loose a host of memories, for though I had never before seen the bitter colocynth gourds, the great singers of the desert have drawn many an image from them, and I drifted back through their world of heroic loves and wars to where Imru’l Ḳais stood weeping, as though his eyelids were inflamed with the acrid juice.

Five hours from ’Asîleh we dipped into the Wâdî el ’Asibîyeh, where the marshy bottom still bore footprints of horses and camels that had come down to drink before the pools had vanished. A steep bank on the south side gave us a rim of shadow in which we stretched ourselves and lunched, and from the top of the bank we sighted the palm-trees of Raḥḥâlîyeh, an hour and a half to the south; we had seen them three hours earlier from the summit of a little mound and then lost them again. The oasis is surrounded by stagnant pools that lie rotting in the sun; at the end of the summer the evil vapours marry with the fresh dates, with which the inhabitants are surfeited, and breed a horrible fever that will kill a strong man in a few hours. The air was heavy with the rank smell of the marsh, and I warned my people to drink no water but that which we had brought with us from the clear pools of ’Asîleh. There are sixteen thousand palm-trees at Raḥḥâlîyeh and, buried in their midst, a village governed by a Mudîr, to whom I hastened to pay my respects. He gave me glasses of tea while my tent was being pitched—may God reward him! We camped that night in a palm garden, where we were entertained by a troop of musicians playing on drums and a double flute, to which music one of them danced between the sun and shade of the palm fronds. Their faces were those of negroes, though they had the clear yellow skin of the Arab, and I noticed that most of the population of Raḥḥâlîyeh was of this type. “They have always been here,” said Ḥussein contemptuously, “they and the frogs.” In spite of the flickering shade of the palm-trees it was stifling hot, and I looked with regret over the broken mud wall of our garden into the clean stretches of the open desert. But the splendours of the sunset glowed between the palm trunks; in matchless beauty a crescent moon hung among the dark fronds, and we lay down to sleep with the contentment of those who have come safely out of perilous ways.

The Mudîr had given me useful information concerning some ruins that lie between Raḥḥâlîyeh and Shetâteh. Next day I sent Fattûḥ and the camels direct to the second oasis, and, taking with me Ḥussein and Muḥammad, with a boy for guide, set out to explore the site of an ancient city. Fawwâz objected loudly to this arrangement, and on reflection I am inclined to think that we overrated the security

Fig. 70.—MUḤAMMAD EL ’ABDULLAH.

Fig. 71.—KHEIḌIR, MA’ASHÎ AND SHEIKH ’ALÎ.

Fig. 73.—BARDAWÎ FROM SOUTH-WEST.

Fig. 74.—BARDAWÎ, EAST END OF VAULTED HALL.

of the road, though no harm came of it. About an hour to the south of Raḥḥâlîyeh, on the northern edge of low-lying marshy ground, rich in springs, stands the shrine of Sayyid Aḥmed ibn Hâshim, and near it to the north and west are vestiges of what must have been a large town. We followed for at least a quarter of a mile the foundations of a fine masonry wall 150 centimetres thick. Between this wall and the low ground the surface of the plain is broken by innumerable mounds and heaps of stone; here, said the boy, after rain, the women of the two oases find gold ornaments and pictured stones. I saw and bought some of the pictured stones at Shetâteh; they are Assyrian cylindrical seals; but without knowing in what quantities and with what other objects they appear, it would be rash to decide that the site is as old. There was undoubtedly a mediæval Arab city there; all the ground was strewn with fragments of Arab coloured pottery, and at the western limit of the ruin field there are remains of the usual four-square fort; Murrât is its present name.[78] It is built of uncut stone and unburnt brick; the doorway in the north wall is covered with a flattened pointed arch that suggests the thirteenth century or thereabouts.[79] My own belief is that the town to which this castle belonged stood on the site of an older city, and I place here ’Ain et Tamr, an oasis that was famous in the days of the Persian kings. Yâḳût describes it as having lain near Shetâteh, and observes that Khâlid ibn u’l Walîd took and sacked it in the year 12 A.H., but he says nothing about a later town on the same spot, to which the evidence of the ruins points. Perhaps it was absorbed in Shetâteh.

Fig. 72.—BARDAWÎ.

“The words are good,” said Muḥammad politely, “but I do not care about the air.”

So we came to Bardawî, a striking tell with an oval fortress standing upon it (Fig. 72). There had been at least three storeys of vaulted rooms lifting the strange tower-like structure high above the level of the desert (Fig. 73). It suggests a watchtower guarding the eastern approaches to the city, but I am not prepared to affirm that the present edifice is earlier than the Mohammadan period. A substructure and the remains of an upper floor are standing, the ground plan of both being the same. A small vaulted hall, with three vaulted chambers on either side, occupied the centre of the building; the door, with traces of a porch or ante-room, lay to the west; while to the east there were two much-ruined chambers, which communicated with the hall by means of a narrow door. The masonry is of undressed stones laid in mortar. The vaults of the side chambers seem to have been built over a rude centering; they are much flattened and so irregularly constructed as to approach in form to a gable roof. These rooms were lighted by a small round hole in the outer wall, under the apex of the vault. The vault of the hall springs with a double outset from the wall and terminates at the eastern end (the west end is ruined) in a semi-dome which was adjusted to the rectangular corners by means of squinch arches (Fig. 74). The partition walls are carried up above the level of the upper vaults, apparently for another storey. The lower part of a strong facing of masonry is still in existence on the south side, and I conjecture that it was continued originally to the top of the tower. Having photographed and planned this singular building, we dismissed our guide, whose services we no longer needed, and set out over broken sabkhah in the direction of Shetâteh. We were jogging along between hummocks of thorn and scrub, Muḥammad as usual singing, when suddenly he broke off at the end of a couplet and said:

“I see a horseman riding in haste.”

I looked up and saw a man galloping towards us along the top of a ridge; he was followed closely by another and yet another, and all three disappeared as they dipped down from the high ground. In the desert every newcomer is an enemy till you know him to be a friend. Muḥammad slipped a cartridge into his rifle, Ḥussein extracted his riding-stick from the barrel, where it commonly travelled, and I took a revolver out of my holster. This done, Muḥammad galloped forward to the top of a mound; I followed, and we watched together the advance of the three who were rapidly diminishing the space that lay between us. Muḥammad jumped to the ground and threw me his bridle.

“Dismount,” said he, “and hold my mare.”

I took the two mares in one hand and the revolver in the other. Ḥussein had lined up beside me, and we two stood perfectly still while Muḥammad advanced, rifle in hand, his body bent forward in an attitude of strained watchfulness. He walked slowly, alert and cautious, like a prowling animal. The three were armed and our thoughts ran out to a possible encounter with the Benî Ḥassan, who were the blood enemies of our companion. If, when they reached the top of the ridge in front of us, they lifted their rifles, Ḥussein and I would have time to shoot first while they steadied their mares. The three riders topped the ridge, and as soon as we could see their faces Muḥammad gave the salaam; they returned it, and with one accord we all stood at ease. For if men give and take the salaam when they are near enough to see each other’s faces, there cannot, according to the custom of the desert, be any danger of attack. The authors of this picturesque episode turned out to be three men from Raḥḥâlîyeh. One of them had lent a rifle to the boy who had guided us and, repenting of his confidence, had come after him to make sure that he did not make off with it. We pointed out the direction in which he had gone and turned our horses’ heads once more in the direction of Shetâteh.

“Lady,” said Muḥammad reflectively, “in the day of raids I do not trust my mare to the son of my uncle and not to my own brother, lest they should see the foe and fear, and ride away. But to you I gave her because I know that the heart of the English is strong. They do not flee.”

“God forbid!” said I, but my spirit leapt at the compliment paid to my race, however lightly it had been evoked.

The incident led to some curious talk concerning the rules that govern desert wars. You do not invariably raid to kill; on the contrary, you desire, as far as possible, to avoid bloodshed, with all its tiresome and dangerous consequences of feud.

“Many a day,” explained Muḥammad, “we are out only to rob. Then if we meet a few horsemen who try to escape from us, we pursue, crying, ‘Your mount, lad!’ And if they surrender and deliver to us their mares, their lives are safe, even if they should prove to be blood enemies.”

It is usual to hold in small esteem the courage called forth by Arab warfare, and I do not think that the mortality is,

Fig. 75.—SHETÂTEH, SULPHUR SPRING.

Fig. 76.—ḲAṢR SHAM’ÛN, OUTER WALL.

Fig. 77.—UKHEIḌIR FROM NORTH-WEST.

Fig. 78.—UKHEIḌIR, INTERIOR FROM SOUTH-EAST.

as a rule, high; but I have on one or two occasions found myself with an Arab guide under conditions that might have proved awkward, and I have never yet seen him give signs of fear. It is only to town-dwellers like Fawwâz that the wilderness is beset with terrors.

Shetâteh is an oasis of 160,000 palms. The number is rapidly diminishing, and on every side there are groups of headless trunks from which the water has been turned off. This is owing to the iniquitous exactions of the tax-gatherers, who levy three and four times in the year the moneys due from each tree, so that the profits on the fruit vanish and even turn to loss. The springs are sulphurous, but very abundant. The palm-trees rise from a bed of corn and clover; willows and pomegranates edge the irrigation streams, and birds nest and sing in the thickets. To us, who had dropped out of the deserts of the Euphrates, it seemed a paradise. The glimmering weirs, the sheen of up-turned willow leaves, the crinkled beauty of opening pomegranate buds were so many marvels, embraced in the recurring miracle of spring, that grows in wonder year by year.

Through these enchanted groves we rode from our camp to the castle of Sham’ûn, the citadel of the oasis. Its great walls, battered and very ancient, tower above the palm-trees, and within their circuit nestles a whole village of mud-built houses (Fig. 76). There is an arched gateway to the north, but the largest fragment of masonry lies to the east, a massive, shapeless wall of stone and unburnt bricks, seamed from top to bottom by a deep fissure, which the khalif, ’Alî ibn Abi Tâlib, said my guide, made with a single sword cut. Among the houses there are many vestiges of old foundations, and a few vaulted chambers, now considerably below the level of the soil. It was impossible to plan the place in its present state; I can only be sure that it was square with bastioned corners. My impression is that it is pre-Mohammadan, repaired by the conquerors, and local tradition, to which, however, it would be unwise to attach much value, bears out this view. Possibly Sham’ûn was the main fortress of ’Ain et Tamr before the Mohammadan invasion.

At Shetâteh I parted from Ḥussein, Muḥammad, and the camel riders. Kheiḍir was reported to be four hours away, a little to the south of the Kerbelâ road. The Ḳâimmaḳâm could supply me with two zaptiehs, and Fattûḥ had hired a couple of mules to carry our diminished packs. The four men intended to travel back together, making a long day from Raḥḥâlîyeh to Themail so as to avoid a night in the open desert. They started next morning in good heart, fortified by presents of quinine, a much-prized gift, and other more substantial rewards. Muḥammad would gladly have come with us to Kerbelâ, but we remembered the Benî Ḥassan and decided that it would be wiser for him to turn back, though before he left we had laid plans for a longer and a more adventurous journey to be undertaken another year, please God! We had not gone more than an hour from Shetâteh before we met a company of the Benî Ḥassan coming in to the oasis for dates, a troop of lean and ragged men driving donkeys. They asked us anxiously whether we had seen any of the Deleim at Shetâteh.

“No, wallah!” said Fattûḥ with perfect assurance, and I laughed, knowing that Muḥammad was well on his way to Raḥḥâlîyeh.

We had ridden to the south-east for about three hours, through a most uncompromising wilderness, when, in the glare ahead, we caught sight of a great mass which I took for a natural feature in the landscape. But as we approached, its shape became more and more definite, and I asked one of the zaptiehs what it was.

“It is Kheiḍir,” said he.

“Yallah, Fattûḥ, bring on the mules,” I shouted, and galloped forward.

Of all the wonderful experiences that have fallen my way, the first sight of Kheiḍir is the most memorable. It reared its mighty walls out of the sand, almost untouched by time, breaking the long lines of the waste with its huge towers, steadfast and massive, as though it were, as I had at first thought it, the work of nature, not of man. We approached it from the north, on which side a long low building runs out towards the sandy depression of the Wâdî Lebai’ah (Fig. 77). A zaptieth caught me up as I reached the first of the vaulted rooms, and out of the northern gateway a man in long robes of white and black came trailing down towards us through the hot silence.

“Peace be upon you,” said he.

“And upon you peace, Sheikh ’Alî,” returned the zaptieh. “This lady is of the English.”

“Welcome, my lady Khân,” said the sheikh; “be pleased to enter and to rest.”

He led me through a short passage and under a tiny dome. I was aware of immense corridors opening on either hand, but we passed on into a great vaulted hall where the Arabs sat round the ashes of a fire.

“My lady Khân,” said Sheikh ’Alî, “this is the castle of Nu’mân ibn Mundhir.”

Whether it were a Lakhmid palace or no, it was the palace which I had set forth to seek. It belongs architecturally to the group of Sassanian buildings which are already known to us, and historically it is related to the palaces, famous in pre-Mohammadan tradition, whose splendours had filled with amazement the invading hordes of the Bedouin, and still shine with a legendary magnificence, from the pages of the chroniclers of the conquest. Even for the Mohammadan writers they had become nothing but a name. Khawarnaḳ, Sadîr, and the rest, fell into ruin with Ḥîrah, the capital of the small Arab principality that occupied the frontiers of the desert, and their site was a matter of hearsay or conjecture. “Think on the lord of Khawarnaḳ,” sang ’Adî ibn Zaid prophetically—

“—— eyes guided of God see clear— He rejoiced in his might and the strength of his hands, the encompassing wave and Sadîr; And his heart stood still and he spake: ‘What joy have the living to death addressed? For the open cleft of the grave lies close upon pleasure and power and rest. Like a withered leaf they fall, and the wind shall scatter them east and west.’ ”

But for all its total disappearance under the wave of Islâm, the Lakhmid state had played a notable part in the development of Arab culture. It was at Ḥîrah that the desert came into contact with the highly organized civilization of the Persians, with the wealth of cultivated lands and the long-established order of a settled population; there, too, as among the Ghassânids on the Syrian side of the wilderness, they made acquaintance with the precepts of Christianity which exercised so marked an influence on the latest poets of the Age of Ignorance, some of whom, like ’Adî ibn Zaid himself, are known to have been Christians, and prepared the way for the Prophet’s teaching.[80] So little have the eastern borders of the Syrian desert been explored that except for the ruin field of Ḥîrah, a town which was destroyed in order to furnish building materials for the Moslem city of Kûfah, and a cluster of mouldering vaults, said to represent the castle of Khawarnaḳ,[81] not one of the famous pre-Mohammadan sites has been identified, and it is possible that important vestiges of the Lakhmid age may lie unsuspected within a few days’ journey from regions familiar to travellers and even to tourists. Meanwhile Kheiḍir (the name is the colloquial abbreviation of Ukheiḍir = a small green place) is the finest example of Sassanian architecture which has yet been discovered. Its wonderful state of preservation is probably due to the fact that it was some distance removed from the nearest inhabited spot. Shetâteh is separated from it by three hours of naked desert; the canals that feed Kerbelâ are yet further away, and the water supply of Ukheiḍir, derived from wells in the Wâdî Lebai’ah, is too small to have tempted the fellaḥîn to establish themselves there. Nowhere in the vicinity, so far as I could learn, are

Fig. 83.—UKHEIḌIR, NORTH-EAST ANGLE TOWER.

Fig. 84.—UKHEIḌIR, STAIR AT SOUTH-EAST ANGLE.

Fig. 85.—UKHEIḌIR, INTERIOR OF SOUTH GATE.

Fig. 86.—UKHEIḌIR, CHEMIN DE RONDE OF EAST WALL.

Fig. 87.—UKHEIḌIR, NORTH GATE, FROM OUTSIDE.

there more abundant springs, and the palace has therefore been allowed to drop into a slow decay, forgotten in the midst of its wildernesses, save when a raiding expedition brings the Bedouin into the neighbourhood of Shetâteh.

Most of us who have had opportunity to become familiar with some site that has once been the theatre of a vanished civilization have passed through hours of vain imaginings during which the thoughts labour to recapture the aspect of street and market, church or temple enclosure, of which the evidences lie strewn over the surface of the earth. And ever, as a thousand unanswerable problems surge up against the realization of that empty hope, I have found myself longing for an hour out of a remote century, wherein I might look my fill upon the walls that have fallen and stamp the image of a dead world indelibly upon my mind. The dream seemed to have reached fulfilment at Ukheiḍir. There the architecture of a by-gone age presented itself in unexampled perfection to the eye. It was not necessary to guess at the structure of vaults or the decorative scheme of niched façades—the camera and the measuring-tape could register the methods of the builder and the results which he had achieved. But it was evident that no satisfactory record of Ukheiḍir could be made within the limits of the day which I had allowed myself for the expedition. We had exhausted our small stock of provisions, and the materials necessary for carrying out so large a piece of work as the planning of the palace were at Kerbelâ with the caravan. Fattûḥ disposed of these difficulties at once by declaring that he intended to ride into Kerbelâ that night and bring out the caravan next day. The truth was that he yearned for the sight of the baggage horses, and for my part I longed for a bed and for a table more than I could have thought it possible. I was weary of sleeping on the stony face of the desert, of sitting in the dust and eating my meals with a seasoning of sand—so infirm is feminine endurance. An Arab called Ghânim, clean-limbed and spare, like all his half-fed tribe, offered himself as guide, and ’Alî assured us that he knew every inch of the way. But when the zaptiehs heard that one of them was to accompany the expedition they turned white with fear. To ride through the desert at night, they declared, was a venture from which no man was likely to come out alive. I hesitated—it requires much courage to face risks for others—but Fattûḥ stood firm, ’Alî laughed, and the thought of the bed carried the day. They started at eight in the evening, and I watched them disappear across the sands with some sinking of heart. All next day I was too well occupied to give them much thought, but when six o’clock came and ’Alî set watchers upon the castle walls, I began to feel anxious. Half-an-hour later Ma’ashî, the sheikh’s brother and my particular friend, came running down to my tent.

“Praise God! my lady Khân, they are here.”

The Arabs gathered round to offer their congratulations, and Fattûḥ rode in, grey with fatigue and dust, with the caravan at his heels. He had reached Kerbelâ at five in the morning, found the muleteers, bought provisions, loaded the animals, and set off again about ten.

“And the oranges are good in Kerbelâ,” he ended triumphantly. “I have brought your Excellency a whole bag of them.”

It was a fine performance.

The Arabs who inhabited Kheiḍir had come there two years before from Jôf in Nejd: “Because we were vexed with the government of Ibn er Rashîd,” explained ’Alî, and I readily understood that his could not be a soothing rule. The wooden howdahs in which the women had travelled blocked one of the long corridors, and some twenty families lodged upon the ground in the vaulted chambers of princes. They lived and starved and died in this most splendid memorial of their own civilization, and even in decay Kheiḍir offered a shelter more than sufficient for their needs to the race at whose command it had been reared. Their presence was an essential part of its proud decline. The sheikh and his brothers passed like ghosts along the passages, they trailed their white robes down the stairways that led to the high chambers where they lived with their women, and at night they gathered round the hearth in the great hall where their forefathers had beguiled the hours with tale and song in the same rolling tongue of Nejd. Then they would pile up the desert scrub till the embers glowed under the coffee-pots, while Ma’ashî handed round the delicious bitter draught which was the one luxury left to them. The thorns crackled, a couple of oil wicks placed in holes above the columns, which had been contrived for them by the men-at-arms of old, sent a feeble ray into the darkness, and Ghânim took the rebâbah and drew from its single string a wailing melody to which he chanted the stories of his race.

“My lady Khân, this is the song of ’Abdu’l ’Azîz ibn er Rashîd.”

He sang of a prince great and powerful, patron of poets, leader of raids, and recently overwhelmed and slain in battle; but old or new, the songs were all pages out of the same chronicle, the undated chronicle of the nomad. The thin melancholy music rose up into the blackness of the vault; across the opening at the end of the hall, where the wall had fallen in part away, was spread the deep still night and the unchanging beauty of the stars.

“My lady Khân,” said Ghânim, “I will sing you the song of Ukheiḍir.”

But I said, “Listen to the verse of Ukheiḍir”—

[78] The whole area of ruins is known as Kherâb = ruin.

[79] It is not necessarily so late, for the Baghdâd Gate at Raḳḳah has the same arch, and it is certainly earlier.

[80] See Rothstein: Die Dynastie der Lakhmiden in al Ḥîra, p. 25. He gives reasons for believing that the art of writing Arabic was first practised at Ḥîrah. The population was largely Christian (the ’Ibâd of the Arab historians); Ḥîrah was the seat of a bishopric, and frequent allusion is made to churches and monasteries in and near the town.

[81] Meissner: “Ḥîra und Khawarnaḳ”, Sendschriften der D. Orient Gesell., No. 2.

Продолжить читать

Главное
⭐️Free
Gertrude Bell
Amurath to Amurath
📖Бесплатный фрагмент

Читать бесплатно онлайн книгу Amurath to Amurathавтор Gertrude Bell

AMURATH TO AMURATH

PREFACE

NOTE

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

CHAPTER I ALEPPO TO TELL AḤMAR Feb. 3—Feb. 21

CHAPTER II TELL AḤMAR TO BUSEIRAH Feb. 21—March 7

CHAPTER III BUSEIRAH TO HÎT March 7—March 18

THE PARTHIAN STATIONS OF ISIDORUS OF CHARAX

CHAPTER IV HÎT TO KERBELÂ March 18-March 30

Читать бесплатно онлайн книгу Amurath to Amurath
автор Gertrude Bell

AMURATH
TO AMURATH

CHAPTER I

ALEPPO TO TELL AḤMAR

Feb. 3—Feb. 21

CHAPTER II

TELL AḤMAR TO BUSEIRAH

Feb. 21—March 7

CHAPTER III

BUSEIRAH TO HÎT

March 7—March 18

CHAPTER IV

HÎT TO KERBELÂ

March 18-March 30