CHAPTER XI
While he spoke we scoured along the dazzling plain, now nearly bare of
trees, and turning slowly softer under foot. At first it had been grey
shingle, packed like gravel. Then the sand increased and the stones
grew rarer, till we could distinguish the colours of the separate
flakes, porphyry, green schist, basalt. At last it was nearly pure
white sand, under which lay a harder stratum. Such going was like a
pile-carpet for our camels' running. The particles of sand were clean
and polished, and caught the blaze of sun like little diamonds in a
reflection so fierce, that after a while I could not endure it. I
frowned hard, and pulled the head-cloth forward in a peak over my eyes,
and beneath them, too, like a beaver, trying to shut out the heat which
rose in gla**y waves off the ground, and beat up against my face.
Eighty miles in front of us, the huge peak of Rudhwa behind Yenbo was
looming and fading in THE dazzle of vapour which hid its foot. Quite
near in the plain rose the little shapeless hills of Hesna, which
seemed to block the way. To our right was the steep ridge of Beni Ayub,
toothed and narrow like a saw-blade, the first edge of the sheaf of
mountains between the Tehama and the high scarp of the tableland about
Medina. These Tareif Beni Ayub fell away on their north into a blue
series of smaller hills, soft in character, behind which lofty range
after range in a jagged stairway, red now the sun grew low, climbed up
to the towering central ma** of Jebel Subh with its fantastic granite
spires.
A little later we turned to the right, off the pilgrim road, and took a
short cut across gradually rising ground of flat basalt ridges, buried
in sand till only their topmost piles showed above the surface. It held
moisture enough to be well grown over with hard wiry gra** and shrubs
up and down the slopes, on which a few sheep and goats were pasturing.
There Tafas showed me a stone, which was the limit of the district of
the Masruh, and told me with grim pleasure that he was now at home, in
his tribal property, and might come off his guard.
Men have looked upon the desert as barren land, the free holding of
whoever chose; but in fact each hill and valley in it had a man who was
its acknowledged owner and would quickly a**ert the right of his family
or clan to it, against aggression. Even the wells and trees had their
masters, who allowed men to make firewood of the one and drink of the
other freely, as much as was required for their need, but who would
instantly check anyone trying to turn the property to account and to
exploit it or its products among others for private benefit. The desert
was held in a crazed communism by which Nature and the elements were
for the free use of every known friendly person for his own purposes
and no more. Logical outcomes were the reduction of this licence to
privilege by the men of the desert, and their hardness to strangers
unprovided with introduction or guarantee, since the common security
lay in the common responsibility of kinsmen. Tafas, in his own country,
could bear the burden of my safe-keeping lightly.
The valleys were becoming sharply marked, with clean beds of sand and
shingle, and an occasional large boulder brought down by a flood. There
were many broom bushes, restfully grey and green to the eye, and good
for fuel, though useless as pasture. We ascended steadily till we
rejoined the main track of the pilgrim road. Along this we held our way
till sunset, when we came into sight of the hamlet of Bir el Sheikh. In
the first dark as the supper fires were lighted we rode down its wide
open street and halted. Tafas went into one of the twenty miserable
huts, and in a few whispered words and long silences bought flour, of
which with water he kneaded a dough cake two inches thick and eight
inches across. This he buried in the ashes of a brushwood fire,
provided for him by a Subh woman whom he seemed to know. When the cake
was warmed he drew it out of the fire, and clapped it to shake off the
dust; then we shared it together, while Abdulla went away to buy
himself tobacco.
They told me the place had two stone-lined wells at the bottom of the
southward slope, but I felt disinclined to go and look at them, for the
long ride that day had tired my unaccustomed muscles, and the heat of
the plain had been painful. My skin was blistered by it, and my eyes
ached with the glare of light striking up at a sharp angle from the
silver sand, and from the shining pebbles. The last two years I had
spent in Cairo, at a desk all day or thinking hard in a little
overcrowded office full of distracting noises, with a hundred rushing
things to say, but no bodily need except to come and go each day
between office and hotel. In consequence the novelty of this change was
severe, since time had not been given me gradually to accustom myself
to the pestilent beating of the Arabian sun, and the long monotony of
camel pacing. There was to be another stage tonight, and a long day
to-morrow before Feisal's camp would be reached.
So I was grateful for the cooking and the marketing, which spent one
hour, and for the second hour of rest after it which we took by common
consent; and sorry when it ended, and we re-mounted, and rode in pitch
darkness up valleys and down valleys, pa**ing in and out of bands of
air, which were hot in the confined hollows, but fresh and stirring in
the open places. The ground under foot must have been sandy, because
the silence of our pa**age hurt my straining ears, and smooth, for I
was always falling asleep in the saddle, to wake a few seconds later
suddenly and sickeningly, as I clutched by instinct at the saddle post
to recover my balance which had been thrown out by some irregular
stride of the animal. It was too dark, and the forms of the country
were too neutral, to hold my heavy-lashed, peering eyes. At length we
stopped for good, long after midnight; and I was rolled up in my cloak
and asleep in a most comfortable little sand-grave before Tafas had
done knee-haltering my camel.
Three hours later we were on the move again, helped now by the last
shining of the moon. We marched down Wadi Mared, the night of it dead,
hot, silent, and on each side sharp-pointed hills standing up black and
white in the exhausted air. There were many trees. Dawn finally came to
us as we pa**ed out of the narrows into a broad place, over whose flat
floor an uneasy wind span circles, capriciously in the dust. The day
strengthened always, and now showed Bir ibn Ha**ani just to our right.
The trim settlement of absurd little houses, brown and white, holding
together for security's sake, looked doll-like and more lonely than the
desert, in the immense shadow of the dark precipice of Subh, behind.
While we watched it, hoping to see life at its doors, the sun was
rushing up, and the fretted cliffs, those thousands of feet above our
heads, became outlined in hard refracted shafts of white light against
a sky still sallow with the transient dawn.
We rode on across the great valley. A camel-rider, garrulous and old,
came out from the houses and jogged over to join us. He named himself
Khallaf, too friendly-like. His salutation came after a pause in a
trite stream of chat; and when it was returned he tried to force us
into conversation. However, Tafas grudged his company, and gave him
short answers. Khallaf persisted, and finally, to improve his footing,
bent down and burrowed in his saddle pouch till he found a small
covered pot of enamelled iron, containing a liberal portion of the
staple of travel in the Hejaz. This was the unleavened dough cake of
yesterday, but crumbled between the fingers while still warm, and
moistened with liquid bu*ter till its particles would fall apart only
reluctantly. It was then sweetened for eating with ground sugar, and
scooped up like damp sawdust in pressed pellets with the fingers.
I ate a little, on this my first attempt, while Tafas and Abdulla
played at it vigorously; so for his bounty Khallaf went half-hungry:
deservedly, for it was thought effeminate by the Arabs to carry a
provision of food for a little journey of one hundred miles. We were
now fellows, and the chat began again while Khallaf told us about the
last fighting, and a reverse Feisal had had the day before. It seemed
he had been beaten out of Kheif in the head of Wadi Safra, and was now
at Hamra, only a little way in front of us; or at least Khallaf thought
he was there: we might learn for sure in Wasta, the next village on our
road. The fighting had not been severe; but the few casualties were all
among the tribesmen of Tafas and Khallaf; and the names and hurts of
each were told in order.
Meanwhile I looked about, interested to find myself in a new country.
The sand and detritus of last night and of Bir el Sheikh had vanished.
We were marching up a valley, from two hundred to five hundred yards in
width, of shingle and light soil, quite firm, with occasional knolls of
shattered green stone cropping out in its midst. There were many thorn
trees, some of them woody acacias, thirty feet and more in height,
beautifully green, with enough of tamarisk and soft scrub to give the
whole a charming, well kept, park-like air, now in the long soft
shadows of the early morning. The swept ground was so flat and clean,
the pebbles so variegated, their colours so joyously blended that they
gave a sense of design to the landscape; and this feeling was
strengthened by the straight lines and sharpness of the hills. They
rose on each hand regularly, precipices a thousand feet in height, of
granite-brown and dark porphyry-coloured rock, with pink stains; and by
a strange fortune these glowing hills rested on hundred-foot bases of
the cross-grained stone, whose unusual colour suggested a thin growth
of moss.
We rode along this beautiful place for about seven miles, to a low
watershed, crossed by a wall of granite slivers, now little more than a
shapeless heap, but once no doubt a barrier. It ran from cliff to
cliff, and even far up the hill-sides, wherever the slopes were not too
steep to climb. In the centre, where the road pa**ed, had been two
small enclosures like pounds. I asked Khallaf the purpose of the wall.
He replied that he had been in Damascus and Constantinople and Cairo,
and had many friends among the great men of Egypt. Did I know any of
the English there? Khallaf seemed curious about my intentions and my
history. He tried to trip me in Egyptian phrases. When I answered in
the dialect of Aleppo he spoke of prominent Syrians of his
acquaintance. I knew them, too; and he switched off into local
politics, asking careful questions, delicately and indirectly, about
the Sherif and his sons, and what I thought Feisal was going to do. I
understood less of this than he, and parried inconsequentially. Tafas
came to my rescue, and changed the subject. Afterwards we knew that
Khallaf was in Turkish pay, and used to send frequent reports of what
came past Bir ibn Ha**ani for the Arab forces.
Across the wall we were in an affluent of Wadi Safra, a more wasted and
stony valley among less brilliant hills. It ran into another, far down
which to the west lay a cluster of dark palm-trees, which the Arabs
said was Jedida, one of the slave villages in Wadi Safra. We turned to
the right, across another saddle, and then downhill for a few miles to
a corner of tall cliffs. We rounded this and found ourselves suddenly
in Wadi Safra, the valley of our seeking, and in the midst of Wasta,
its largest village. Wasta seemed to be many nests of houses, clinging
to the hillsides each side the torrent-bed on banks of alluvial soil,
or standing on detritus islands between the various deep-swept channels
whose sum made up the parent valley.
Riding between two or three of these built-up islands, we made for the
far bank of the valley. On our way was the main bed of the winter
floods, a sweep of white shingle and boulders, quite flat. Down its
middle, from palm-grove on the one side to palm-grove on the other, lay
a reach of clear water, perhaps two hundred yards long and twelve feet
wide, sand-bottomed, and bordered on each brink by a ten-foot lawn of
thick gra** and flowers. On it we halted a moment to let our camels put
their heads down and drink their fill, and the relief of the gra** to
our eyes after the day-long hard glitter of the pebbles was so sudden
that involuntarily I glanced up to see if a cloud had not covered the
face of the sun.
We rode up the stream to the garden from which it ran sparkling in a
stone-lined channel; and then we turned along the mud wall of the
garden in the shadow of its palms, to another of the detached hamlets.
Tafas led the way up its little street (the houses were so low that
from our saddles we looked down upon their clay roofs), and near one of
the larger houses stopped and beat upon the door of an uncovered court.
A slave opened to us, and we dismounted in privacy. Tafas haltered the
camels, loosed their girths, and strewed before them green fodder from
a fragrant pile beside the gate. Then he led me into the guest-room of
the house, a dark clean little mud-brick place, roofed with half
palm-logs under hammered earth. We sat down on the palm-leaf mat which ran
along the dais. The day in this stifling valley had grown very hot; and
gradually we lay back side by side. Then the hum of the bees in the
gardens without, and of the flies hovering over our veiled faces
within, lulled us into sleep.