On the Desert - Recent Events in Egypt/Chapter 17
CHAPTER XVII.
THE OLD SHEIKH — ILLNESS ON THE DESERT.
We had set out from Nukhl with the determination to reach Gaza by the end of the week at any cost, even if it were necessary to make forced marches for the purpose. We were now in a region where we were liable to storms, that might render it impossible for a whole day, or a series of days, to stir from camp; and in apprehension of such delays, we determined to make the most of clear weather. So we rose early, starting soon after sunrise, and kept on till nearly dark. This caused a grumbling among the men, the sound of which soon came to our ears. We found our new Arabs were not so tractable as the old ones. Their plan was directly opposed to ours: instead of starting early and camping late, they preferred to start late and camp early. They would like to take it leisurely, starting at eight or nine o'clock, and going into camp at three or four; and when they saw us striding ahead, and thus forcing them to follow, they began to murmur among themselves, and from murmurs proceeded to threats. So much did they work upon the fears of the dragoman, that he lost his head, and came to us in a panic of terror to tell us that "if we pressed the men so hard, they would leave us and go home." This was not a light danger to look in the face. Had they executed such a threat, we should have been like men in an open boat in mid-ocean. We should have had to walk a hundred miles (not even knowing the way) without food or water, with a good chance of leaving our bodies on the desert, a prey to vultures and hyenas. Such a spirit had to be stamped out on the instant. The suggestion roused Dr. Post, gentle as he is, and he turned fiercely upon the dragoman: "Yohanna, what do you mean by talking to the men in this way, or listening to them? The trouble is not with them: it is with you — with your miserable cowardice! Go about your business, and look after the tents and the baggage, and leave the men to me. I know the Arabs, and I will take care of them." Yohanna slunk off to the rear of the train, but for several days he was in mortal fear lest we should be left like a shipwrecked crew in the middle of the ocean.
Having silenced the dragoman, the Doctor turned to the sheikh, and to dispose him to favor these long marches, addressed him in quite another fashion, enlarging on the number of his camels, which made him a man of great consideration on the desert. He then drew upon his imagination for a picture of myself, using well-flavored Oriental language. He described me as a personage of great distinction, a sort of prince in disguise (very much in disguise), who was abroad in quest of knowledge, and who it was very desirable should carry away high impressions of his country, and who (this was thrown in incidentally), whatever his affluence or generosity, might, if disappointed or delayed in his progress, be less princely in his gifts than he would otherwise be! At the suggestion of backsheesh, the old sheikh grew attentive and almost devout, and at length answered with great solemnity, as if he had screwed up his mind to the highest pitch of resolution, and only needed Divine assistance, "We have leaned upon God"!
This sheikh was quite a character. His mixture of pious phrases with craft and cunning, his fervent appeals to Heaven while keeping an eye on the main chance, made him a good representative of his race. But for an Arab, he was not unintelligent. He knew the desert as the mariner knows the sea, and gave us much information about the state of his people. "How do you manage to live here on the desert?" was one of our first inquiries. "Well," answered the sheikh, "we make a few grindstones, and burn a little charcoal, and if a man raises two or three camels, he sells them." "But, does not the government pay you for the protection you give to the pilgrims who camp at Nukhl on their way to Mecca?" "The government pay anything?" said the old man, and his eyes flashed as he answered bitterly: "The government would take the grave-clothes off from the dead! It pays for nothing, but takes everything."
Few of the Arabs can read and write. Yet in proportion to their ignorance, is their reverence for what is written or printed, which has to them such a superiority to their own degree of knowledge as to be almost sacred in their eyes. Thus when a question arose as to where we must camp for the night, Dr. Post appealed to the map in the guide-book. But the sheikh shook his head; it was quite impossible for him to comprehend how the relations of dark lines on a map corresponded to the relations of mountains, wadies, and plains. He did not know; it might be so; but he could not understand it. "But," said the Doctor with the tone of a man who produces an argument which settles the matter, "is anything that is printed in a book a lie?" "No, indeed," said the old man with a simplicity of faith delightful to witness, "God forbid!"
One evening as they were sitting round the camp-fire, Dr. Post took the opportunity to ask about the laws of hospitality among the Bedaween. He said: "If your tribe was at war with another tribe, and you were to meet one of that tribe alone on the desert, how would you treat him?" "That would depend on how he came to us. If he came as an enemy, we should treat him as an enemy. If he raised his spear, we should attack him, and perhaps kill him or make him prisoner. But if he threw himself upon our hospitality, we should do him no harm; but, on the contrary, we would defend him and protect him, and conduct him in safety to the border of his tribe, and let him depart in peace."
When the Doctor came and reported to me this conversation, I felt that now at last we had found what Diogenes looked for with his lantern — a man! (I was ready to forget how he took advantage of us in the contract at Nukhl, and to think only of the present display of virtue.) Here was an untutored child of nature, who had never felt the restraining influences of civilization, and who yet, out of the fountain of goodness within him, was imbued with the noblest sentiments that could inspire the human breast. If he was not a Christian, he was the highest type of Moslem, having the natural instincts of justice, with the added virtue of hospitality prescribed by his religion.
After this it was a little discouraging to hear the dragoman say that this same old sheikh was himself a notorious robber, and had helped himself to the property of others to such good purpose that he was now the possessor of two hundred camels! "Did you not see those camels on the hills as you approached the camp? They all belong to him, and are in great part spoil which he has thus obtained." I knew that the wealth of the desert was in camels. When a man has twenty or thirty, his great desire is more camels! He sells off some of the males, and keeps the females for breeding. If that does not supply him fast enough, he can replenish his herd by a judicious raid into the territory of his neighbor. But to think that our virtuous old sheikh could thus enrich himself! Yet that very evening, at another of the camp-fires where we were not present, he boasted that several years before he had executed a great raid towards Mecca, as the fruit of which he brought back some forty camels! This was a pilgrimage to Mecca to some profit. In his view this was the great achievement of his life.
These marauding expeditions are the chief excitement of the desert, and a source of perpetual fighting between different sheikhs and different tribes. A man who makes a business of robbing must of course take the chances of war, and not complain if now and then he is robbed himself. He who does not hesitate to kill, must take his chances of being killed. We had at hand this very moment an illustration of the blood feud. Just now Dr. Post rode up, and said that his cameleer had an affair of honor on his hands. A few days since his brother was with others tending a herd of camels which had been driven to pasturage ground south of Hebron, when a party from another tribe, probably from near the Dead Sea, came upon them, and stole the camels, and killed his brother. Now his only thought is of revenge. As soon as he returns from being with us, he will muster some of his clan, and set out to make a raid in return. He will hope to recover his camels, but his one object in life will be to ill somebody in revenge for his brother!
When we heard that our own sheikh was a robber, we were grieved to the heart, as when one learns something to the reproach of a well-beloved friend: for had we not sat at his camp-fire, and taken sweet counsel together? Such a disappointment was calculated to shake our faith in human nature. Our ideal was destroyed; our idol was cast down to the ground. As Washington said after the treason of Arnold, "Whom can we trust now?" so could we say, How can we ever believe again in an Arab sheikh as a model of virtue?
The next morning, as if to show how virtue (!) is rewarded in this world, there came by our tent at sunrise a great herd of camels, which belonged to our friend the sheikh, and were the reward of his "industry"! They were being driven to new pastures, having exhausted their late grounds. It was a very picturesque sight. There were camels of all sizes and all ages, large and small, old and young — some were very young, mere babies. I observed that the old camels had large humps, and was told that when they are not used, but are left at pasture, their humps increase in size. They were accompanied by their herdsmen, who were all dressed in sheepskins, like the shepherds on the Campagna around Rome. Following on soon after, we overtook them as they were roaming over the hills. I think the sheikh had a new saddle-beast brought to him to ride, for he suddenly appeared mounted on a young, swift dromedary. While we were moving along at a slow and solemn pace, he dashed up at full speed, and rode by as if in a charge of battle. His legs and feet were bare, but he had on a red tunic under his coarse goat's-hair cloak, and there was a touch of finery in the housings of his saddle. He presented quite a military figure, with his gun slung behind his back, and his pistol in his belt, as he rode by at full gallop, and disappeared over the crest of a hill. As he passed, I observed sticking up behind him what I took to be a sheep's head, but what proved to be a little camel, born only the day before, which he had slung by his saddle, and carried off, while the poor mother followed behind, lowing and groaning mournfully. As the whole herd was on a day's march to find pasture, and as this new-born baby could not walk, it was thus carried. After a time the sheikh took it out of the sack, and put it on the ground, when the poor mother nursed it with great satisfaction.
These little camels were a great amusement to us. We had one in our camp but a few weeks old, the offspring of one of our saddle-beasts, that followed its mother all the way to Gaza, six days march. Like the young of all animals, it had a certain prettiness that did not belong to the huge form of the full-grown camel. But it had none of the fun and frolic of a young colt. The solemnity of that little creature was overpowering. Once or twice the Doctor tried to stir it up to play, but it made no response to these attentions, except to rise up slowly and move off a few paces, as if in silent protest against such familiarities. He gave it up, concluding that the love of fun and play was wholly wanting in the camel, whose "moral nature" seems to be subdued to the endless monotony of the desert.
The following day the sheikh left us with many salaams and benedictions. After cheating us all he could, he gave us his blessing, like some men that are not Bedaween. It was truly delightful, after we had been robbed, to have the man who had robbed us willing to part on the best of terms, hoping to meet us again, and renew our pleasant relations! We were touched by the assurance of his distinguished consideration. The old man wished us Peace: what more could we ask? He gave us his blessing: may it do us good![1]
As we were getting farther North, the country was not so utterly uninhabited. Now and then we descried in the distance a party of Bedaween, mounted on their camels, coming toward us at full sail. As they came up out of the horizon, like ships out of the sea, Dr. Post would exclaim "There come the Midianites!" for indeed I suppose these men of the desert, in race and costume, as in the beasts they rode, were not very unlike the Midianites who bought Joseph of his brethren, and sold him into Egypt. We met also several parties of the Tawarah tribe returning from Gaza, loaded with grain, two sacks to a camel, each sack containing several bushels. Their appearance was such as we suppose that of the sons of Jacob to have been when they went down into Egypt to buy corn. Probably they took the old caravan route from Syria to Egypt — a journey that need not have taken more time than the twenty-four days now required for the camel's pace from Sinai to Gaza and back again.
It is one of the chief pleasures of this desert travelling, that it brings before us so vividly the mode of life of patriarchal times: for the world does not change on the desert, and men live now as they lived thousands of years ago. Abraham was a sheikh — not in character like the one from whom we have just parted, but in appearance perhaps not unlike a sheikh who may be seen now and then, aged and venerable, with long and snowy beard falling on his breast. He was a prince of the desert, rich in camels and asses, and flocks and herds, and men-servants and maid-servants. The custom by which he held his servants is the same which exists to-day. One of the men that accompanied us from Nukhl was a black who belonged to the sheikh — yet not a slave, as the dragoman was careful to explain, but "a servant born in his house," and entitled by usage, if not by written law, to certain privileges, which date from the earliest times.
While we were thus on the march, making our observations, and our comparisons of that which now is with that which has been, we had other experiences of a serious character to which I must refer, if it were only as a lesson and warning to future travellers. If these descriptions of Life on the desert should lead others to follow me, I must insist that they take the utmost precautions: for while the journey is one of extraordinary interest, it is also one of very great fatigue. The fatigue alone would be nothing, if one could lie down after a day's march, and get thoroughly rested. But on the desert the pressure is incessant to keep moving. There is no spot that invites to rest; no quiet wayside inn, no cooling shade, attracts the weary traveller. Herein lies the danger, that this succession of forced marches will finally bring on utter exhaustion. To this danger we were especially exposed, from the long route we took. Merely to go from Suez to Sinai and return, is comparatively easy: for that is but six days either way, and the traveller can rest at Sinai a week if he chooses before he begins his homeward march. But when the time of the return journey is doubled, the exposure is quadrupled; for the process of exhaustion goes on in a compound ratio, and is very likely to end in illness, which in this helpless situation, utterly separated from all chance of relief, at once becomes a serious matter. I had once had a narrow escape. The day after the ascent of Serbal, I was completely used up, and that night was threatened with fever; and now Dr. Post, who was so wiry and active, and who seemed incapable of fatigue, was in danger of breaking down.
On the second day after leaving Nukhl, we attempted a forced march, starting at six o'clock, so that by eleven we had done what we ought to have been satisfied with doing by noon. We had been five hours in the saddle, and had done the half of a full day's work. I then observed for the first time the Doctor's spirits flag. He dismounted, and threw himself under a juniper bush with a look of exhaustion that I had never seen in him before, and told me to ride on, and that he would soon join me. I thought my place was beside him under that juniper bush. Could our friends at home have seen us at that moment, they would have felt an anxiety which they were happily spared, since they did not hear of it till it was all over.
After an hour and a half, we started again, riding and walking bu turns till a little after four o'clock, when we came to a beautiful spot for a camp. As soon as we were off the camels, the Doctor took shelter under a large bush till the baggage train should come up. It always seemed to move very slowly when we were waiting impatiently for it. As soon as the tents were pitched, he lay down on his cot with an expression of utter weariness. He was very hot, and could take only a glass of lemonade to cool the fever that seemed to be burning in his veins. When dinner was served, he took a little soup, and went directly to bed. I covered him up, and tried to perform the part of nurse as well as I could, yet all the while feeling most painfully my utter helplessness.
That night I was in great anxiety: for the bare possibility of an illness on the desert was enough to awaken the most serious apprehensions. Had I been the sick one, my companion was an experienced and skilful physician, and would know what to do. He too could speak Arabic, and could give directions to our men. I had just as much knowledge of medicine as of Arabic — that is to say, I knew nothing of either — while the dragoman and cook were as ignorant as the Bedaween themselves. The only possible hope of relief would be to send to Gaza, which was four days' march. Four days there and four days back — eight days — that would seem like an eternity while waiting on the desert. In that time all our supplies of food would be exhausted, so that we should be in danger of dying by starvation, if we did not by fever. We were in a spot where we could not get a drop of water for ourselves or our camels. One shudders to think what might happen in such a time! But thanks to the sick man's skilful treatment of himself, the night passed with no increase of fever.
The next morning we did not strike our tents at sunrise, and yet somehow that hour always gave me a touch of fever — a fever to which I am subject, the fever of impatience. Nothing chafes me like forced inaction. After walking out to look at the clouds, which were threatening, I returned to the tent to find my friend still very weak. What should be done? Should he rest here for the day, or make a start, even if he could go only a short distance? At last he rose heavily and wearily, and bracing himself with a strong dose of quinine, mounted his camel. As soon as he was in the saddle, his spirits began to rise. The fresh air and the motion gave him new life. But what relieved my fears was to see his old passion for flowers kindle at the sight of some new specimens which he could gather for his collection of the Flora of the Desert. He could not resist the attraction of a new plant, and I verily believe, if he had been in articulo mortis, that the sight of a new flower brought to his bedside would have caused a smile of satisfaction to spread over his dying features. Of course I took courage from seeing him revive, and from the rebound of feeling, entered with new joy into the scenes that opened before us. As we rose upon a ridge that divided two wadies, there was a view of mountains in the distance that was so striking that I reined in my camel to take a long and steady look, and then called the cameleer to hold her till I could put down some notes, as an artist takes a hurried sketch of a scene which he fears will escape him forever. Many of the notes here written out were thus taken on the back of my camel. If they have any merit, it is because they were taken on the spot, and reproduce, as nearly as it is in my power to do it, the exact scenes and impressions of the moment.
At noon we halted beside a spring, which is supposed by some explorers to be the Fountain of Hagar, perhaps because it is the only one found in the region. It was the first time we had seen a drop of water since we left Nukhl, and this was the third day's march. The mere suggestion is a touching one: for in all the mournful tales of the desert, none is sadder than the story of Hagar, driven from the tent of Abraham, and fleeing with her child into the wilderness, and there ready to perish with thirst, when saved by a spring that burst forth in the sand, perhaps the same which was now bubbling up at our feet.
This afternoon we passed over a succession of barren hills, the very abomination of desolation. But no matter, every step that we take brings us nearer home! Already my friend sees, though afar off, the signs of change. When he first came upon the squill plant, he could not restrain his excitement. "That plant," he said, "is never found except near the sea, or at least within the reach of the salt air. We are approaching the Mediterranean. It may be yet fifty or sixty miles off, but we are getting near it." How delightful is this enthusiasm of the man of science, which can make him forget illness and the fatigues of the desert!
But here the enthusiasm of the botanist outwent the strength of the man, and that night when we reached camp, after ten hours' march, I feared he would break down utterly. There was a deep sadness in his tone as he said: "If I am not better to-morrow, I cannot move." I never passed a night of greater anxiety in my life. All the horrors of the situation came upon me. I imagined myself arriving at Gaza alone, obliged to telegraph to Beirut and to Florence that my companion had died on the desert! These may seem wild imaginings, born of anxiety and fear; but let any man be thus alone with a sick friend in the heart of the desert, and see if his thoughts are not as black as the midnight above his tent.
The morning found him in no condition to move. "If I were at home," he said, "I should not only not leave my house, I should not leave my bed." The day opened dark and dreary; there were clouds all round the horizon, and a storm seemed to be coming on. Under that lowering sky, to put a sick man on a camel for a day's march seemed like madness, and yet there was almost equal danger in lingering here. We had to decide promptly. Bad as the case was, I insisted that we must start and go as far as we could. I do not think he would have raised his head from the pillow that day if he had not seen the look on my face. But seeing in me something which seemed to speak of a desperate necessity, he rose up once more as if to take his last ride. How he went through that day, I can only explain by this, that on the desert, as on the sea, men "cry unto the Lord in their troubles, and He bringeth them out of their distresses."
All the morning we were looking for rain. By the rules of storms it ought to have rained. The Doctor proved it, (a man of science is nothing if not scientific,) for he had a perfect theory of storms. He took the map, and showed how the hot air of Africa, coming from the Sahara, strikes the Mediterranean, and drinks up clouds full of rain, which descend on the neighboring coasts. We were now in the rainy belt, and by good right it should, would, and must rain. So we should have had it if the elements had done their duty. I rallied him pleasantly for his confident prediction, too happy if I could bring a smile on his dear, sad face. For my part, I preferred to walk by faith and sight, instead of theory, and not flee before the storm until it came; and as a kind Providence would have it, in an hour or two the sky cleared, and we had a beautiful day, all the better for the clouds that tempered the heat of the sun.
And now at last we were rewarded for our perseverance in the march. The character of the country changed. We were coming up out of the desert: we were getting nearer the sea. These great ridges of sand are the dunes of a sea coast. Indeed the dear Doctor traced them farther — to the same Sahara which is the source of storms, from which they are blown into the sea, and carried along by currents setting eastward to the southern bend of the coast of the Mediterranean, where, washed up on the shore and dried by the sun, they are again lifted by the winds, and borne thus far into the interior.
In the afternoon we came into a broad land, not cut up by narrow wadies — a wide, open, rolling country, of long sweeps and gentle undulations, that might be as beautiful as the breezy downs of England, if only these were clothed with vegetation. That too increases: it is more to-day than since we entered the Desert of the Wandering. Flowers bloom more abundantly. The eye of my friend gleamed with pleasure as he caught sight of the lily, or asphodel, and of the Star of Bethlehem. We are now fairly in the South Country, the portion of Canaan set apart to the tribe of Simeon, where, although the patches of cultivation are as yet few and scattered, there is good pasture-ground for flocks and herds. And so He who led the Israelites across the Great and Terrible Wilderness, has now, over the same burning desert, brought two weary pilgrims to the borders of the Promised Land.
- ↑ My recollection of two notable personages who appear in these pages — the Sheikh of the tribe of the Tayyahah and the Governor of Nukhl — has been quickened by recent intelligence, which renders it quite probable that both were concerned in the massacre of Professor Palmer and his party, an event which has created such a profound feeling in England, on account of the character of the men who suffered this terrible fate. Edward Henry Palmer was one of the first Oriental scholars in England. In the University of Cambridge he was a Professor of Arabic, of which he was master, besides being familiar with other languages of the Farther East, translating poems from the Persian, and reading and speaking Hindustanee. He had made a special study of the Peninsula of Sinai, having been with the Survey Expedition in 1868-9, and also in charge of an exploring party in the Desert of the Wandering, and the South Country, and Moab, in 1869-70. The result of his explorations was a work of great value on "The Desert of the Exodus." He was well known to the sheikhs and the tribes on the desert. So familiar indeed had his face become that he bore the name of Sheikh Abdallah. Sir Charles Wilson says of him: "I never met a European who possessed such influence over Arabs — due, I believe, to his eloquence; his knowledge of the Koran, which he could almost recite by heart; and to his memory, which enabled him to retain at once any Arab ballad he heard." This power over the people, and this familiarity with the country, gave him confidence that he could go anywhere with safety, and thus led him into danger and to death. Soon after the commencement of the late war, the English Government wished to send a trusted man on a secret mission to the Arabs of the Peninsula, to enlist them, if possible, on the side of the English; if not, at least to detach them from the side of the Egyptians; and consulting him as to whom they could find who would be at once competent and willing to go, he volunteered for the perilous service. He took with him three thousand pounds for the purchase of camels, to be used for transportation by the Indian Contingent that was to arrive at Suez; and which, instead of joining the English troops at Ismailia, was to execute a separate movement across the desert to Cairo. His motive was patriotic, but it was a rash undertaking to venture among these fierce tribes at a moment when they were greatly excited by the war. He was accompanied by two officers, Capt. Gill and Lieut. Charrington, who had had experience in such expeditions. But their enterprise was soon to come to an end. They had made but a single day's march from the Wells of Moses to Wady Sudr, from which a pass leads through the mountain range towards Nukhl, which probably they were to take. As they reached this camping-ground, the Bedaween [not of the Tawarah tribe, who were our escort, but of other tribes, of which I shall have occasion to speak hereafter] gathered round them; and seeing how few they were, took them prisoners, and the next morning conducted them into the mountains, where it was said at the time that they were taken to the edge of a precipice, and given their choice — to throw themselves over or be shot; and that Professor Palmer covered his face with his hands, and took the fatal leap, while Captain Gill and Lieutenant Charrington, with the instinct of soldiers, chose to be shot, and fell with their face to the foe. But further investigation seems to show that they had not even a choice of the mode of death. There was nothing to relieve it from the character of a brutal massacre. This terrible affair was for some time unknown; but as no report was received from the expedition, alarm began to be felt, and Colonel Warren, with a force large enough for its own protection, was sent in search. The fate of the missing party was soon learned, as the bodies of the murdered men were found in the ravine below the precipice where they perished. Colonel Warren found the desert full of hostility, and his own party was threatened with attack. But this reign of terror continued only with the power of Arabi Pasha in Egypt. With the triumph of English arms, the murderers were brought to justice. Five who were proved to have taken part in the massacre, were executed in the presence of a large number of sheikhs of different tribes, who were brought in from the desert to witness this signal retribution. After such a proof of English power, it is to be hoped that travellers will again be safe to pass through the Peninsula of Sinai.