Amurath to Amurath

by Bell, Gertrude

  “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 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. 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. 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.

  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 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 gallo
ping 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, 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 nothin
g 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. 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, 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 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.