CHAPTER VII. Syria

SYRIA

Beyrout—Fever—Death of dragoman at Damascus—Jaffa—Descent of Jordan—Home

Our company parted at Alexandria. Barclay returned home, I went to Syria, and Boulton desired to go farther East, to study Arabic and Oriental modes of thought and expression. Our paths crossed only once in Syria. Owing to misadventures, and to my great regret, I never saw him after. He made his way to the British forces, then engaged in the siege of Mooltan, and was the guest of their commander, General Whish. He stationed himself, against advice, in a loopholed tower to witness the progress of the fight, a matchlock ball penetrated his eye and killed him on the spot. I heard the story many years afterwards from General Whish himself.

I sailed from Alexandria to Beyrout with my dragoman Ali and my two pet monkeys. We were then put into quarantine, where Ali found a party of negress girls who had been captured on the borders of Abyssinia during the very fighting for which my acquaintance in the caravan was bound. They had been taken to Beyrout via the Red Sea. The girls were delighted to talk to us of places known to them as well as to ourselves. They seemed as merry as possible at the prospect of being sold and of soon finding, each of them, a master and a home.

A journey so far as Khartum was then thought something of a feat, even in Syria, and Ali, as I am convinced, greatly fibbed about my social importance. It must have been on that account that the Governor of the Quarantine, or whatever his title may have been, relaxed his restrictions on my behalf so greatly as to call down severe newspaper criticism on his acts of favouritism. In fact, we made a champagne picnic together in two boats, under the sole condition of the party in the one not touching any one in the other. For a similar reason, as I suppose, I was invited and entertained in a most stately way at the palace of a Druse chief, situated among the hills.

I bought travelling gear at Beyrout, and went inland to buy a pair of horses for myself and Ali, because it was not easy to hire good riding-horses, though baggage-horses could always be had. I set myself up in style, with tent and extra walls, a canteen, and handsome coffee and pipe apparatus. On arrival at the place where the horses were to be bought, I camped on ground intersected with ditches of stagnant water—a most insanitary-looking place. I caught there a sharp intermittent fever which plagued me for years, and, though often kept in abeyance for a long time together, has occasionally recurred most unexpectedly. It is only a few weeks now since I had an attack of it. I returned with my horses to Beyrout, but was too unwell to make much use of them.

After some wanderings, I settled in Damascus, at first in the house of a medical man who enabled me to witness some gorgeous Jewish domestic ceremonies. I also took elementary lessons in Hebrew at his house, for which the little I knew of Arabic made an excellent preparation. A sad grief befell me there in the death of my faithful dragoman, Ali, through violent dysentery. All the last duties to the Moslem dead, the washings, the shrouding, and the wailings, took place in the courtyard. My own presence, as a Christian, at the funeral would have been seriously resented by the Moslems, though I was able to arrange about his tombstone. The sculptors here adopt a very simple process for their illiterate workmen. A flat face is given to the stone, on which the inscription is painted in black. Then all that is not painted is chipped away. The populace at Damascus was then in a fanatical humour and Christians had to be careful. There had been a frightful persecution of Jews a little previously, and there were others of Christians subsequently.

Ali had some trifling personal property, and wages were due to him. I sent these to his wife in Cairo, who was the only relative I ever heard him mention, together with a little present for herself, and thought my duty fulfilled and that all was finished. On the contrary, I had inadvertently roused a hornet’s nest of greedy claimants. An official Arabic letter was sent to me demanding various payments to numerous relatives, together with a threat of legal proceedings if not attended to. My banker, to whom I referred it, advised me to get out of the reach of the law as soon as I conveniently could, or I might find myself fleeced, and perhaps entangled interminably. Fortunately, this circumstance occurred about the time when I should have been returning to England on my own account, so I “re-levanted,” if it may be so expressed. Defaulters ordinarily “levant,” or run from Europe to the Levant; I ran in the opposite direction.

At Damascus in the hot time of the year there was more than one delicious retreat in public coffee-places with gardens, through which one of the innumerable runnels of clear river water was conducted. I also took an interesting ride through the outskirts of the town, where a vast amount of dried apricot is prepared. It looks like greasy brown paper, is wrapped in rolls, and is largely consumed. Each orchard has a smoothed place like a small threshing-floor, as well as a big cauldron over an oven into which the apricots are put. The resulting slush is ladled out and spread over the floor; when it is sufficiently hardened, it is rolled off it as if it were a sheet of oilcloth. The cost of preparation is so small and the results so good that this manufacture might be found remunerative in other countries where apricots grow in abundance.

I spent some happy days at Aden on the Lebanon, a little below the famous cedars. The Sheikh was only too glad to entertain me, because one of the miserable tribal fights was expected, and he was glad of the presence of armed persons in his house, to protect it. Nothing, however, happened, beyond a few harmless shots. I afterwards revelled in the glorious beauty of the gorges leading down to the Mediterranean, and rank the view down one of them as the very finest my eyes have ever rested on. Mr. J. G. Frazer, in his Adonis, Isis, and Osiris, has collected similar expressions from many other travellers.

I returned to Beyrout, where, finding one of my horses killed by a fall over a cliff, and being unfit to enjoy or even to endure more riding, I sold the other, and found my way to Jaffa on board an empty collier. The part of its deck that I wanted was cleaned, and the voyage was brief and not unpleasant.

The soil about Jaffa is perfectly dry and wonderfully fertile, but only on the strict condition of its being amply supplied with water. Its environs were traversed by dusty roads between dull mud walls, on whose other side the richly watered gardens lay; so pedestrians, as might be expected, were thirsty and covetous. I saw a sort of pump handle with a spout on the side of the road, and an inscription above bearing some such encouraging text as “Drink! Here is water.” Accordingly we pumped, and a little water did certainly come; but however hard we pumped there issued no more than a scanty streamlet out of the spout. We heard, all the same, a sound of abundance of water that never reached us, the cause of which was soon discovered to be an ingeniously arranged division, by means of which the pumper got only a small fraction of the water he raised, and the garden got all the rest. It was an excellent example of the higher forms of commercial enterprise. They enrich all round, but the merchant to whose initiative they are due gets by far the biggest share.

I was too unwell for a long day’s ride on horseback, and hired a camel, which was not a usual conveyance, to take me from Jaffa to Jerusalem. The exaltation I felt at the first sight of the walls was far too high to last long. It was broken in the night by the miaulings of cats, the flat roofs of the houses forming an almost unlimited playground for those unscriptural and half-diabolical creatures.

In those days the course of the Jordan had been untravelled, as I was assured, since the memory of man, and the Dead Sea had never been navigated, with one solitary and most painful exception a year or two previously. Captain Costigan, whose accomplished married sister, Mrs. Bradshaw, I counted among my Leamington friends, had transported a boat to the Dead Sea. His man, or men, played him false, emptying the water keg in order that they might sooner get at the wine. He started with, I think, only a single man, the wind was unfavourable to return, he had to toil at the oar under the blazing sun, caught sunstroke and died.

The peace among the tribes who occupied the valley of the Jordan, which had been favourable to him, still continued, and I determined on an expedition down it, having then temporarily thrown off the ague. It seemed possible that the Jordan might be descended on a small raft of inflated water skins, or “kelligs,” so I procured half a dozen of them, with the necessary lashings and other gear, and started with a few horsemen for Tiberias. I put the raft together just below the small bridge through which the Jordan runs out of the lake, and my escort travelled by the side of the river to render assistance when needed, and to form camp from time to time. It was rather a hare-brained attempt, though amusing to plan. The river was very small and shallow, but carried the light raft well; however, it was soon whirled under overhanging trees, and I was nearly combed off it. Then matters grew worse, and decidedly dangerous. The horsemen rode by the side, and were highly amused at my difficulties. At length I became convinced that it would be madness to persevere, so I left the raft, dressed myself, mounted my led horse, and we rode on down the valley. It is all so perfectly known and mapped now that it would be absurd to recount the little that I could tell, but I became more and more impressed with the weirdness of the great fissure in the earth’s crust through which the Jordan flows. Even the Lake of Tiberias is 300 feet below the level of the sea, and the Dead Sea is about 1000 feet deeper still, and its climate very sultry in consequence.

My first camping-place was among the tents of the Emir Rourbah. It was an important encampment of Bedouins, whose dress I had been instructed to wear, and on no account to appear in the hated Turkish fez. When I arrived, there were watchers on every point of vantage. I was kindly received and shown much of their everyday life. The Emir had a quantity of chain armour, such as was in common use among the chiefs in the Soudan. I was surprised to find how effectual it was in spreading over a large surface the sensation of what otherwise would have been a painfully sharp blow. Matters progressed very pleasantly until the thoughtless omission of a Moslem ceremony soured my welcome. It may sound trifling, but it was effective all the same. I had shot a desert partridge, but not killed it, so, taking it up, I knocked its head, English fashion, against the stock of my gun. I ought to have cut its throat with my knife, while repeating the Moslem formula. I caught sight of a look of abhorrence on the face of my companions, and thereupon evidently ceased to be considered as one of themselves, but as a hateful and hypocritical Christian; so I was glad to be allowed soon to depart.

After a brief stay about Jericho, where I tasted and foolishly bathed in the nasty, sticky, dense water of the bituminous Dead Sea, which stuck in my hair for the day, I returned to Jerusalem with the view of transporting a boat. But finding that I was wanted at home on some legal business, that it was desirable to be out of the way of the claimants to the little property of poor Ali, my late dragoman, and feeling ill and used-up, I set sail with my two monkeys homewards.

I was put in quarantine in the Lazarette of Marseilles for, I think, ten days. Its superior officer was a military martinet. One of my monkeys got loose and ran all about the Lazarette, where, according to rule, he ought to have put every article that he touched into at least the same quarantine as himself, and there were bales of goods in store. The officer was transported with rage, and actually ran after the nimble monkey with drawn sword, to the intense amusement of the onlookers and of the monkey. I quietly captured him at last. The officer vented his feelings in appropriate language, but as he could do no more, the breach of quarantine regulations was overlooked, and so the matter ended.

When I reached London, on a chilly November day, I failed to find a comfortable night’s lodging for my pets, but an old friend who was living in apartments kindly undertook their charge. He handed them with many instructions to his landlady, who thought and perhaps said, “Drat the beasts!” and shut them up in the cold scullery, where they were found the next morning dead in one another’s arms.