By the evening of 18th September, Forsskål was back in Suez after a difficult piece of sailing against the wind. Baurenfeind was growing steadily stronger, but on the other hand no Arabs had yet come to fetch them to Mount Sinai. According to the agreement, they should have been there several days ago. Forsskål was uneasy at their absence. What had happened to Niebuhr and von Haven? Why were they not holding to their very explicit agreement? Forsskål remembered Niebuhr’s earlier decision to shoot von Haven if ever he suspected the Dane of putting his sinister plans into effect. When the two men left Suez for Djebel el-Mokateb, von Haven had been more deeply humiliated than ever before. Had he now in desperation . . .? Forsskål did not complete this terrible thought, but tried to find something else with which to occupy himself. He pottered about down by the quayside; he got talking to the fishermen, the merchants and the shipbuilders, pumping them for information. In this way he discovered how the dhows were constructed of pine from Antioch in Syria or from the Greek islands, while the keel was of teak brought from India. He noticed how the smaller boats were made from cypress, acacia, and even from the mimosa tree. Because of the great expense of transporting the materials, ships were very expensive to build; a large vessel cost up to 45,000 Rigsdaler. On the other hand, the freight charges on the Red Sea were so high that it took only three voyages to Djidda, the port of Mecca, to cover the cost of the ship. From Suez were exported wheat, rice, lentils, beans, tobacco sewn up in leather bags, soap, linen, iron bars similarly sewn up in leather, knives, mirrors, powder and shot. On the return voyage the cargo was mainly coffee beans from Arabia Felix sewn up in wood bark, but also a little incense. Finally, the merchants showed Forsskål a number of special ships having large wooden bath-like containers fore and aft. These ships saw to the most important import into Suez. These were the dhows that went to the port of Tor several days’ journey down the gulf to fetch fresh water.
Thus he passed one day, two days, a week. Baurenfeind was completely recovered, but to balance this they now had another worry. What had become of Niebuhr and von Haven? There was very little time left before the expedition was to sail for Djidda; but still no Arabs had come, and there was still no news from Mount Sinai.
4
Both Carsten Niebuhr and von Haven kept very full diaries during their fateful journey in the footsteps of Moses and the Israelites, but in this instance von Haven’s merits the greater attention. The Sinai expedition had been assigned to him as his special task; it was one of the main objectives of the entire Danish expedition, and it was for this reason that Bernstorff had not wanted to detach him from the others. On the Sinai peninsula von Haven would have a unique opportunity of finding traces of the flight of Israel, and for making discoveries that would attract the attention of the whole civilised world. He was to visit Djebel el-Mokateb and copy its inscriptions, find the mountain in Sinai where Moses received the Ten Commandments, track down the place where he struck water from the rock with his staff, and finally visit the Sinai Monastery, a place renowned for its collection of ancient Hebrew manuscripts that had never been scrutinised let alone catalogued by European scholars. All in all, this task held considerably greater promise than even the exploration of Arabia Felix itself, from which any such sensational results could hardly be expected. From a scholarly point of view, von Haven had received by far the best of the assignments and to solve even one of them would make him world famous and gain for the King of Denmark invaluable prestige.
In von Haven’s diary we read how he failed to complete his task. He tells how they “left the eastern edge of the shore near Suez at day-break” and after three hours’ ride reached Ayum Musa, or Moses’s spring. “There we set up camp on account of the water. One of these springs has salt water. The other has water which the Arabs call fresh, but which has a bad enough taste, particularly when it is stored in skins. We took on two days’ supply of this water. We ate our main meal here and immediately found ourselves arguing with the Arabs about provisions. Our agreement with them stipulated that we should not provide food for any except our three sheiks. The chief among them demanded rice and butter for the other five so that they could prepare their own food, asking if they were expected to eat stones? Did we not know that we were in the desert? I reminded him of our agreement and asked him what he and the other two guides had done with the eighty-seven pattaks which they had received in advance in Suez. Why had they not bought provisions with this? These eighty-seven pattaks represented half the total sum we had been persuaded to give them in advance; which is something I forgot to mention above. This worked greatly to our disadvantage, both now and later. Even if the Arabs had not received more than this for the entire expedition, it would still have been an excessive price, in fact, double. They got fifteen pattaks from us for each camel, while we later discovered that they themselves were only paying three; and for a dromedary only five for the whole journey. Our questions and our arguments helped little. If we wanted peace we had to give coffee and tobacco as well as flour and rice to all eight men. When we ate they all came and invited themselves, as long as there was anything left. It would have meant the end of us if it had rested with these eight people.” After this unfortunate pause for food they again set off at eleven o’clock and rode on in the sandstorm until six in the evening. “We camped in the sand among some small bushes. The wind was so strong that we tried in vain to put up our tent. It blew sand into our eyes and into our food.”
Sand in the food, bad drinking water and a lot of grasping Arabs who would not let them eat in peace—these are the main impressions from von Haven’s first day’s journey in the track of Moses and the Israelites. Nourishment was his big problem. To Niebuhr, on the other hand, the altercation with the Arabs over the question of food was a trifling thing, laughable in comparison with the expedition’s objective: “We were accompanied not only by the three sheiks, but also by a number of their friends and servants who wanted to visit their kinsfolk in the desert and live partly at our expense en route. For when an Arab chief travels, the whole company eats from his kitchen; and since we had paid so much money merely to look at a few old inscriptions, they took us for wealthy people.”
Niebuhr’s own problems on this first day of the expedition were on quite another plane: “The region we were about to travel through is one of the most interesting in the Orient, because Moses has described the journey in this desert of the children of Israel. I therefore took pains to survey as accurately as possible the road we covered, giving attention to everything that might serve to improve the map.”
He now encountered two of the main tasks that bulked large in his subsequent work of mapping Arabia Felix: the problem of measuring the distances covered, and the eliciting of reliable place-names.
The first did not cause him excessive difficulty: “In these countries it is not so difficult to determine distances as in Europe, where the mail-coach drives fast only when approaching an inn but at other times goes slow. Caravans always move at the same speed. I therefore counted my own paces, sometimes in the cooler hours of the morning and evening, and sometimes during the great heat of the afternoon, by walking for half an hour on foot alongside the caravan. In this way I discovered that when it was hot I walked 1,580 double paces, and when it was cool 1,620 double paces. I therefore assumed an average of 1,600 double paces per half-hour when the road was level, which it was almost always.” By this means he only needed to look at his watch at the beginning and end of each stage to be able to calculate the distance covered.
More difficult was the problem of finding the proper place-names. The suspicious Arabs could not understand why this European was interested in the names of even the most wretched little villages and the most deserted valleys. “I nevertheless succeeded in gaining the confidence of one of the Arabs, partly by small gifts, partly because I let him sit behind me on my camel. I asked him about the same hills both coming and going, and generally got the same names. My colleague, however, would not so demean himself as t
o have anything to do with the lowly Bedouins, and was thus given only wrong or rude answers to his questions.”
It seems clear that already on the first day von Haven had managed to fall out with their guides. Over the question of giving the Arabs a little extra flour and rice—a trifle which might well have been overlooked by a man who for six years now had lived, travelled and eaten at the state’s expense with nothing to show for it—von Haven had managed to create a mood of hostility among the very people on whose good will the success of the expedition depended.
The effects were not slow to show themselves. The very next day von Haven notes in his diary.
“As a result of the dispute with the Arabs about provisions we had the misfortune to see our leather jar, holding approximately twenty rotal of butter, kicked over by an Arab foot and the butter spilt on the sand. We cannot be certain whether this happened by accident or design. One must remember that here in Egypt and in the desert butter is not hard and firm as in our countries. It is liquid, as if it had been melted, especially in summer.”
Not only were the Arabs apparently incensed at a man who thought he could escape his duties in the way of hospitality in the desert by referring them to a scrap of paper, but, with their sure insight into people, they had also discovered where he was vulnerable and were now taking revenge. The loss could be written off, but this was only the beginning. Soon von Haven’s attitude was to cost the Danish expedition much more than twenty or so rotal of butter.
The next day, 9th September, they passed the so-called “Pharaoh’s Bath,” a warm spring that comes out in a grotto in the hillside. While Niebuhr set up his astrolabe on the beach to try to take readings of the Red Sea, the intention was that von Haven should look for inscriptions in this remarkable grotto. But nothing came of it: “The descent to the bath is so difficult that one must have a rope about one’s body and be held by people standing up above. One must also carry a light, for within it is so dark that one sees nothing of the wall merely by the light of day. As one stands at the entrance and puts one’s head a little forward over the hole, one feels such a great heat and such a smell of sulphur that one must immediately withdraw.”
After this assault upon his senses, he returned to the caravan to discover “that the chief sheik had forced our cook to prepare food, and he and the other Arabs had eaten everything up before we arrived.”
One can imagine the hungry man’s fury. More squabbling followed. The very next night the Arabs took further revenge, but this time it was not limited to a mere jar of butter. Von Haven writes in his diary for 10th September:
“Our guides gave us only until midnight that night. They woke us up, shouting that it was a long way to the next oasis and that they wanted to get there before the sun got too hot. But behind all this was an ulterior purpose, which we became aware of only on our way back. Not far from our camp that night was a large rock with inscriptions on it, as well as some others on the hillside itself close by. They wanted to lead us past these during the night so that we should not see them.”
Quite clearly there was no great good-will among their guides; and now they were barely one day’s journey from the first of the objectives of this expedition—the famous Djebel el-Mokateb, where they could do nothing without the cooperation of the Arabs. After a pause the following morning the caravan continued on about noon. But this time the leader gave a sign to stop after only an hour and a half’s ride:
“We did not understand why it had been such a short march, until the Arabs told us that we were quite near Djebel el-Mokateb and that they would take us on there the next day, seeing that it was too far to get there in what was left of the afternoon.”
The reasoning sounds curious, especially when it turned out the following day that it was only another two hours’ ride. Nevertheless, von Haven seems to have suffered the delay with exemplary patience. The reason for it is suggested by his diary:
“This afternoon and this evening so many Arabs came and intruded themselves on us that we had to slaughter a goat, which was consumed in one evening meal. Half of it they used for making soup and the other half they roasted on the fire. Both dishes tasted good, for we had not had any meat to eat since Suez.”
The next morning, 11th September, they set off at dawn. All had eaten their fill, and now the great event was due to take place. We are still following von Haven:
“Finally the day arrived which was to bring us enlightenment about Djebel el-Mokateb. At seven o’clock we reached the foot of the mountain, where we had to dismount and leave our dromedaries, which found plenty of small bushes to feed on. In front of us we saw the mountain we were to climb; and still the only sort of stone we could see anywhere was this sandstone. Our hopes began to fade. This kind of stone did not lend itself to the making of inscriptions. For two full hours we climbed the mountain, from half-past seven to half-past nine. It was very steep; there was no road or footpath, and we had to leap from one stone to another, or clamber along the sides of ravines and precipices. When we got to the top, we saw here and there at some distance from us various upright stones which we took to be grave-stones.
“The top of the mountain was a broad though uneven plateau, which might take perhaps an hour or more to walk across. When we had gone a short way, we found a little grotto which to all appearances was hewn out of the rock; and immediately after it a larger grotto, which was seventeen to eighteen ordinary paces in length, twelve to fourteen in breadth and of a completely irregular shape. It was supported by two pilasters hewn out of the rock itself, each of them perhaps a couple of ells in circumference. The grotto itself was of a height not quite sufficient to allow a man to walk upright in it, that is to say 2⅜ Danish ells[1] high. A little farther on we came to the grave-stones mentioned earlier, and at one place we found many more than we had been able to see from afar. But they had been knocked over and broken. Some of those that still stood upright bore inscriptions, but they were hieroglyphic. The first section of these hieroglyphics had been worn away or ruined by the action of time. The same was true of all those that had been knocked over. Of eight or nine stones still standing upright there were but four that had one side of their hieroglyphics clearly legible or recognisable. One stone might be 3 ells high, ¾ ell broad on two of its sides, and ½ ell broad on the two other sides. For they were not perfect squares in plan. They were of greyish sandstone, inclined a little to brown or red, but so slightly that one could only really describe it as greyish. I did not know if it wholly resembled the material of the obelisks in Rome and Egypt. But the hieroglyphics were of the same kind.
“Four of these stones seemed to be set in a small square and to enclose a space of from four to five ells. But among them and close by them lay other broken ones, so that this pattern was not completely recognisable. Near by there were a few other small grottoes hidden under the rock, but so full of sand and grit that one had to go on hands and knees to examine them. One of them was supported by a pilaster of the rock itself, and had two small holes in its rear wall, namely the wall facing the entrance. These holes or niches were deep enough to have served for holding small idols, and were about one ell high. Among the broken stones were two special figures: a portrait bust, the face of which had been damaged, presumably by Arabs; and an idol with three faces, one to each side and the third a little lower to the front, the second with two hands firmly attached to the body; all of it poor workmanship. It was rather like an idol that I had had Herr Baurenfeind copy in Alexandria from an original in the house of the Danish Consul, and which in addition to its three faces was also covered with hieroglyphics.
“If anyone is inclined to believe that the Israelites could have set up these grave-stones, and perhaps brought the hieroglyphic script with them from Egypt, at least for a short time, there is the difficulty of these two figures, which surely Moses did not have carved either by Israelites or for Israelites; not to mention the fact that the hieroglyphics themselves contain human and animal figures.
“
We asked the Arabs where all the other inscriptions were, looking about us for other hills and valleys where we might discover all the many and extensive inscriptions. They answered that this was all, and asked us in surprise whether this was not a lot? In short, there was nothing more to see, nothing more to be traced; interrogate our own or other Arabs as much as we liked, they all assured us that they knew of no other Djebel el-Mokateb in the entire desert, apart from this one.
“On the top of the mountain was a sheik who had eaten with us the previous evening; he claimed that the mountain and everything on it belonged to him. This was not mere empty boasting. Not only are the Arabs the lords of the desert, recognising no other rulers than their own sheiks; but he himself was one of the most powerful sheiks of the Leghat tribe.
“It was for him to decide whether he would allow us to copy or not. For this permission he demanded ten pattak, insisting also on another condition which at first he would not reveal. As he would not accept the four pattak we offered, we went away. As we were going, our own sheik whispered softly in our ear that if the great sheik and the other Arabs attached to him could have half the money that came up out of the mountain as we wrote, we could have permission to copy. We laughed and answered that the Arabs could take all the money—that is, all that came up out of the earth as we wrote. He then asked whether we would promise him in advance that some money would come up. There was little we could answer to this, and the great sheik still would not accept the sum we offered, which thus put an end not merely to the preliminaries but to the entire treaty. We descended with some difficulty, reached our dromedaries at the foot of the mountain at twelve o’clock and, an hour later, arrived back at our camp where the rest of the caravan was. When the two sheiks who had remained behind heard how difficult we had been about handing out money, they asked what we had been thinking of. Those men were expecting us to give them at least a thousand pattak, or a few hundred out of the mountain treasure; and as we had not been willing to accede to this condition and give half the treasure to the Arabs, they realised very well, they said, that it was sheer malice that had prevented us from doing so. They said they knew very well that we had retained the inscriptions in our heads, or in our memory, and that we would write them down later when we were alone, and that the treasure or the money that lay under the mountain would not fail to follow us later; this money would rise and join us back in our own country if we commanded it to march. It did not help very much to assure them that all this was superstitious nonsense. The chief sheik asked me quite angrily if we were not people who could make clouds rain if we wanted to. I told him he was mad, out of his mind, and that for the moment I did not wish to speak to him any further.”
Arabia Felix Page 17
