the muleteers along the highway and to find a guide for ourselves.

“Upon my head!” said Fattûḥ blandly. “Three guides wish to accompany your Excellency.”

“Praise be to God,” said I. “Bid them enter.”

“It would be well to see each separately,” observed Fattûḥ, “for they do not love one another.”

We interviewed them one by one, with an elaborate show of secrecy, and each in turn spent his time in warning us against the other two. Upon these negative credentials I had to come to a decision, and I made my choice feeling that I might as logically have tossed up a piastre. It fell upon a man of the Deleim, a tribe to whom we were not well disposed, but since the country through which we were to pass was mainly occupied by their tents, it seemed wiser to take a guide who claimed cousinship with their sheikhs. He was to find an escort of five armed horsemen and to bring us to Kheiḍir in return for a handsome reward, but we undertook to engage our own baggage camels. One of the drawbacks to this arrangement was that no camels were to be got at Hît, and I felt the more persuaded that we had struck a bad bargain when Nâif came back and said:

“How do I know that you will keep your word? Perhaps to-morrow you will choose another guide.”

“The English have but one word,” said I; it is a principle that should never be abandoned in the East. We struck hands upon it and Nâif left us “in the peace of God.”

Fattûḥ needed a day to complete his preparations, and I to see the pitch wells of Hît which lie some distance from the town. I did not see them all, but from the accounts I heard they would appear to be five in number. The largest is called the Marj (the Meadow); it is an hour and a quarter north-east of Hît and is said to be inexhaustible. The pitch is better in quality here than elsewhere, and the peasants can, when they choose, get 2,000 donkey-loads from it daily. The next in importance is at Ma’mûreh, but it is not worked. The pitch flows out over the desert and dries into an asphalt pavement about half-a-mile square. Further south is a small spring, Lteif, from which they get twenty loads a day, and near the town there is a fourth well which yields fifty loads a day (Fig. 53). The fifth well is on the other side of the Euphrates, at ’Atâ’ut; the average yield from it is twenty loads a day.

Near the asphalt beds of Ma’mûreh, about an hour south-west of Hît, lie the ruins of a village clustered round a minaret (Fig. 57). All the buildings were constructed of small unsquared stones set in mortar; the minaret was plastered on the outside and seemed to have been built of large blocks of stone and mortar, firmly welded together before they had been placed in position. The round tower, narrowing upwards and decorated at the top with a zigzag ornament, was placed upon a low octagonal structure which in turn rested upon a square base (Fig. 58). I climbed the winding stair that I might survey the country through which Nâif was to take us. It was incredibly desolate, empty of tent or village save where to the west the palm-groves of Kebeisah made a black splash upon the glaring earth. The heavy smoke of the pitch fires hung round Hît, and the sulphur marshes shone leprous under the sun—a malignant landscape that could not be redeemed by the little shrines which were scattered like propitiatory invocations among the gleaming salts.

About a mile from Ma’mûreh there is a still more remarkable ruin known as Madlûbeh. It is a large, irregularly shaped area marked off from the desert by heaps of stones half buried in sand. Standing among these heaps, and no doubt in their original position, there are a number of large monolithic slabs placed as if they were intended to form a wall (Fig. 59). Many of these must have fallen and been covered with the sand if the enclosure were at any time continuous, and perhaps the heaps are composed partly of buried slabs. Two stand in line with a narrow space between like a door (one of them was 5 m. long × 1·3 m. thick, and it stood 2 m. out of the ground); in another there was a small rectangular cutting that suggested a window-hole on the upper edge (it was 10 m. long × 1·3 m. thick, and stood about 3 m. out of the ground). The stones were carefully dressed on all sides. They may have formed the lower part of a wall of which the upper part was of sun-dried brick or rubble, but at what age they were placed in those wilds a cursory survey would not reveal.

When I returned to the khân, Fattûḥ greeted me with the intelligence that the Deleimî had broken his engagement. Nâif admitted that for ordinary risks the money we had offered would have been sufficient, but Kheiḍir lay in the land of his blood enemies, the Benî Ḥassan, and he would not go. Perhaps he hoped to force us to a more liberal proposal, but in this he was disappointed. A bargain is a bargain, and we fell back upon my boast that the English have but one word. In this dilemma Fattûḥ suggested that he should see what could be done with the Mudîr, and having a lively confidence in Fattûḥ’s diplomacy, I entrusted him with my passports and papers, of which I kept a varied store, and gave him plenipotentiary powers. He returned triumphant.

“Effendim,” said he, “that Mudîr is a man.” This is ever the highest praise that Fattûḥ can bestow, and my experience does not lead me to cavil at it. “When he had read your buyuruldehs he laid them upon his forehead and said, ‘It is my duty to do all that the effendi wishes.’ I told him,” interpolated Fattûḥ, “that you were a consul in your own country. He will give you a zaptieh to take you to Kebeisah, and if you command, the zaptieh shall go with you to Ḳal’at Khubbâz, returning afterwards to Hît. And it cannot be that we shall fail to find a guide and camels at Kebeisah, which is a palm-grove in the desert; for all the dwellers in it know the way to Kheiḍir. As for the caravan, another zaptieh will take it to Baghdâd.”

“Aferîn!” said I. “There is none like you, oh Fattûḥ.”

“God forbid!” replied Fattûḥ modestly. “And now,” he proceeded, “let me bring your Excellency an omelet, for I am sure that you must be hungry.” But I understood this exaggerated solicitude to be no more than a covert slur upon the culinary powers of Mr. X.’s servant, who had provided us with an abundant lunch during Fattûḥ’s absence, and not even so voracious a consul as I could face a second meal. Fattûḥ retired in some displeasure to inform the muleteers that they would journey to Baghdâd and Kerbelâ and there rejoin us, please God.

We explored the village of Hît before nightfall, and a more malodorous little dirty spot I hope I may never see. “Why,” says the poet, concerning some unknown wayfarer, “did he not halt that night at Hît?” and it is strange that Ibn Khurdâdhbeh, who quotes the question, should have been at a loss for the answer. Possibly he had no personal knowledge of Hît. On the top of the hill there is a round minaret, similar in construction to the minaret of Ma’mûreh, but I saw no other feature of interest. The sun was setting as we came down to the palm-groves by the river. The fires under the troughs of molten bitumen sent up their black smoke columns between the trees (Fig. 60); half-naked Arabs fed the flames with the same bitumen, and the Euphrates bore along the product of their labours as it had done for the Babylonians before them. So it must have looked, this strange factory under the palm-trees, for the last 5,000 years, and all the generations of Hît have not altered by a shade the processes taught them by their first forefathers.

THE PARTHIAN STATIONS OF ISIDORUS OF CHARAX

The only modern record of the road along the left bank of the Euphrates from Raḳḳah to Deir is the rather meagre account given by Sachau; Moritz travelled down the left bank from Deir to Buseirah, but I know of no published description of the road from Buseirah to ’Ânah. It has not

therefore been possible hitherto to attempt to place in any continuous sequence the sites given by ancient authorities. Of these the fullest list is that of the Parthian stations furnished by Isidorus of Charax (Geographi Græci Minores, ed. by Müller, Vol. I. p. 244). It begins with the fixed point of Nicephorium (Raḳḳah) and ends with another fixed point, that of Anatho (’Ânah). Between these two lies Nabagath on the Aburas. The Aburas may safely be assumed to indicate the Khâbûr, and Nabagath is therefore Circesium-Buseirah. The following comparative table shows my suggestions for the remaining stations, combined with those which have already been made by Ritter and others. The times given are the rate of travel of my caravan; between Raḳḳah and Deir I had the advantage of comparing them with Sachau’s time-table. No two caravans travel over any given distance at exactly the same pace, but the general average works out without any grave discrepancy. I have often tried to reckon the speed at which my caravan travels and have come to the conclusion that it is very little under three miles an hour, say about two and seven-eighths miles an hour. Isidorus computes his distances by the schœnus. According to Moritz 1 schœnus = 5·5 kilometres. From Buseirah to ’Ânah I travelled over Isidorus’s road at the rate of 1 schœnus in 1 hr. 7 min., which would bring the schœnus down to 5·166 kilometres. The section from Raḳḳah to Buseirah is not so easy to calculate because Isidorus has in two places omitted to give the exact distance between the stations, but my rate of travel was not far different here from that noted in the other sections. So much for the average. The individual distances do not tally so exactly, and in attempting to determine the sites, the evidence that can be gathered from the country itself seems to me to weigh heavier in the scale than the measurements given by Isidorus, especially as his inexactitude is proved by the fact that the sum of the distances he allows from station to station do not coincide with the total distances, from the Zeugma (Birejik) to Seleucia, and from Phaliga to Seleucia, as he states them. In both cases the sum of the small distances comes to a larger figure than that which he allows for the totals—

Zeugma to Seleucia 171 sch.

total of distances between stations 174 sch., without the two omitted by him.

Phaliga to Seleucia 100 sch.

total of distances between stations 120 sch. without one omitted by him.

As regards the second section, Kiepert believed that a copyist’s error of 10 sch. too much had been made in Isidorus’s table between Izannesopolis and Aeipolis (the modern Hît), but even this correction will not bring the totals together (Ritter, Vol. XI. p. 738). The road from the Zeugma to Nicephorium does not follow the river, and I am therefore unable to control the statements of Isidorus above Raḳḳah; nor do I know the section between Hît and Seleucia. I need scarcely say that my table is of the most tentative character; it begins with the ninth station of Isidorus, Nicephorium.

The first remarkable site which I saw on the river below Raḳḳah was the large area surrounded by a ditch, half-an-hour above my camping-ground. Isidorus’s tenth station from Zeugma is Galabatha. Ritter (Vol. XI. p. 687) observes that it must be above Abu Sa’îd, and the area enclosed by the ditch fulfils that condition. The eleventh station is Khubana which I put at Abu Sa’îd, where there are fragments of columns and other evidences of antiquity. The twelfth station is Thillada Mirrhada; I have placed it at Khmeiḍah (squared stones, brick walls, a broken sarcophagus), but the claims of Abu ’Atîḳ are considerable, the extent of the ruin field at the latter place being much larger than at Khmeiḍah. But Abu ’Atîḳ is 7 hrs. 5 min. from Abu Sa’îd, and the caravan time between Khmeiḍah and Abu Sa’îd (6 hrs. 5 min.) is already rather long for the 4 sch. allowed by Isidorus. The thirteenth station is Basilia with Semiramidis Fossa. Ritter long ago pointed to the probability of its having been situated at Zelebîyeh (Vol. XI. p. 687).

Semiramidis Fossa was no doubt a canal; Chesney saw traces of an ancient canal below Zelebîyeh. The distance from Thillada to Basilia is not given by Isidorus. Ritter would allow 5 sch. and Herzfeld 7 sch. (Memnon, 1907, p. 92); according to my reckoning both these distances are too long. I marched from Khmeiḍah to Zelebîyeh in 3 hrs. 40 min., which implies a distance of not more than 3 sch. For the fourteenth station, Allan, Umm Rejeibah is the only possible site I saw. It is true that I reached it in 3 hrs. from Zelebîyeh, whereas Isidorus puts it 4 sch. from Basilia, but I cut straight across the hills, and if I had followed the river (i. e. from the mouth of the canal, Semiramidis Fossa) the time needed would have been considerably longer. The fifteenth station, Biunan, was conjectured by Ritter to lie opposite Deir. I saw no traces of ruins upon the left bank, though Sachau speaks of the remains of two bridges (Reise, p. 262), and I should be more inclined to look for Biunan at a nameless site mentioned by Moritz (op. cit., p. 36). The difference is not in any case of importance, for the site seen by Moritz is immediately below Deir. He would have it to be Phaliga, which is doubtless Pliny’s Phaliscum, but that suggestion is difficult to reconcile with Isidorus’s 14 sch. from Basilia to Phaliga, which brings Phaliga much nearer to Circesium. Moreover, Isidorus states that Nabagath is near Phaliga—so near that he does not trouble to give any other indication of the distance between the two stations—and as Nabagath on the Aburas cannot be other than Buseirah, Phaliga too must be close to the Khâbûr mouth. I did not see the site mentioned by Moritz because I neglected to follow the river closely immediately below Deir; if it be, as I suppose, Biunan, I cannot attempt to identify the site of Phaliga. The seventeenth station, Nabagath, is, as has been said, Circesium-Ḳarḳîsîyâ-Buseirah. The eighteenth, Asikha, I would identify with the Zeitha of Ptolemy and Ammianus Marcellinus, and with the mounds I saw at Jemmah. For the nineteenth station, Dura, I know no other site than the very striking tell of Abu’l Ḥassan, the biggest mound upon this part of the river. Müller has suggested that the mound may represent Ptolemy’s Thelda (in his edition of Ptolemy’s Geography, p. 1003). Ammianus Marcellinus also mentions “a deserted town on the river” called Dura. The army of Julian reached it in two days’ march from Zeitha, at which place the emperor had made an oration to his soldiers after sacrificing at Gordian’s tomb. Now two days’ march from Zeitha-Jemmah would bring the army to Werdî-Irzî, which is no doubt the place called by Xenophon Corsote and described by him as “a large deserted city.” It is perhaps worthy of observation that, in spite of its being deserted, Cyrus provisioned his army at Corsote and that Julian’s army found at Dura, though it too was deserted, “quantities of wild deer, so that the soldiers and sailors had plenty of food.” My own impression on the spot was that Ammianus Marcellinus’s Dura must be Irzî. The tower tombs were certainly erected before the middle of the fourth century, therefore they were in existence when Julian passed; moreover, they were far more numerous and conspicuous than they are at present, since almost all of them have now fallen into ruin. It is difficult to see how Irzî could have failed to attract the attention of Ammianus Marcellinus, and Dura is the one place mentioned by him between Zeitha and ’Ânah. But the Dura of Isidorus, the nineteenth station, has to be placed at Abu’l Ḥassan, not at Irzî, since his twentieth station, Merrhan, necessarily falls at Irzî, and I can only conjecture that, as in Julian’s time both places were ruined and deserted, Ammianus Marcellinus made a confusion between them, or was wrongly informed, and transferred the name of Dura (Abu’l Ḥassan) to Merrhan (Irzî). For the twenty-first station, Giddan, I can offer no suggestion. Jabarîyeh will scarcely fit, as it is but 13 hrs. 15 min. from ’Ânah, and Giddan was 17 sch. from Anatho, but it must be admitted that all the distances between the stations from Merrhan to ’Ânah seem to be too long according to my caravan time. The twenty-second station, Belesibiblada, was placed by Chesney at Ḳal’at Bulâḳ, and I saw no better site for it, though I took only 9 hrs. and 25 min. to reach it from Irzî, and the distance given by Isidorus is 12 sch. Ritter would place at Ḳal’at Bulâḳ Ptolemy’s Bonakhe. I do not see any way of identifying with certainty the island station, the twenty-third, which was 4 sch. from ’Ânah. There are many islands in the stream above ’Ânah. One of them, Ḳarâbileh, is reported to have ruins upon it; it was about four hours’ journey from ancient ’Ânah, and may therefore be identical with the twenty-third station, which is placed at a distance of 4 sch. from Anatho. Anatho, the twenty-fourth station, Isidorus expressly states to be on an island; it was therefore the successor to the Assyrian fortress which I believe to have existed on the island of Lubbâd. Xenophon does not mention it; nor does Ptolemy, unless his Bethanua may be taken for ’Ânah as Ritter believed (Vol. XI. p. 716). Rawâ may possibly be the Phathusa of Zosimos, but I would rather place Phathusa on the left bank, opposite and below the island of Lubbâd, where there are many mounds and ruins. I did not follow the river below ’Ânah very closely, but the ruins I saw near Ḥadîthah help to justify the presumption that Olabus was situated there. Chesney wished to identify Izannesopolis with the ruins of a castle between Baghdâdî and Hît. I did not go to the spot, and my caravan time between Ḥadîthah and Hît is therefore rather misleading, for if I had followed the river so as to visit the ḳaṣr, the journey would have taken more than the seventeen and a half hours which I have recorded. Isidorus’s 16 sch. from Izannesopolis to Aeipolis can scarcely be correct, and Kiepert’s emendation (6 instead of 16) may well be accepted.

CHAPTER IV

HÎT TO KERBELÂ

March 18-March 30

History in retrospect suffers an atmospheric distortion. We look upon a past civilization and see it, not as it was, but charged with the significance of that through which we gaze, as down the centuries shadow overlies shadow, some dim, some luminous, and some so strongly coloured that all the age behind is tinged with a borrowed hue. So it is that the great revolutions, “predestined unto us and we predestined,” take on a double power; not only do they turn the current of human action, but to the later comer they seem to modify that which was irrevocably fixed and past. We lend to the dwellers of an earlier day something of our own knowledge; we watch them labouring towards the ineluctable hour, and credit them with a prescience of change not given to man. At no time does this sense of inevitable doom hang more darkly than over the years that preceded the rise of Islâm; yet no generation had less data for prophecy than the generation of Mohammad. The Greek and the Persian disputed the possession of western Asia in profitless and exhausting warfare, both harassed from time to time by the predatory expeditions of the nomads on their frontiers, both content to enter into alliance with this tribe or with that, and to set up an Arab satrap over the desert marshes. Thus it happened that the Benî Ghassân served the emperor of the Byzantines, and the Benî Lakhm fought in the ranks of the Sassanian armies. But neither to Justin II nor to Chosroes the Great came the news that in Mecca a child was born of the Ḳureish who was to found a military state as formidable as any that the world had seen, and nothing could have exceeded the fantastic improbability of such intelligence.

I had determined to journey back behind this great dividing line, to search through regions now desolate for evidences of a past that has left little historic record, calling upon the shades to take form again upon the very ground whereon, substantial, they had played their part. So on a brilliant morning Fattûḥ and I saw the caravan start out in the direction of Baghdâd, not without inner heart-searchings as to where and how we should meet it again, and having loaded three donkeys with all that was left to us of worldly goods, we turned our faces towards the wilderness. I looked back upon the ancient mound of Hît, the palm-groves, and the dense smoke of the pitch fires rising into the clear air, and as I looked our zaptieh came out to join us—a welcome sight, for the Mudîr might well have repented at the eleventh hour. Now no one rides into the desert, however uncertain the adventure, without a keen sense of exhilaration. The bright morning sun, the wide clean levels, the knowledge that the problems of existence are reduced on a sudden to their simplest expression, your own wit and endurance being the sole determining factors—all these things brace and quicken the spirit. The spell of the waste seized us as we passed beyond the sulphur marshes; Ḥussein Onbâshî held his head higher, and we gave each other the salaam anew, as if we had stepped out into another world that called for a fresh greeting.

“At Hît,” said he, and his words went far to explain the lightness of his heart, “I have left three wives in the house.”

“Mâshallah!” said Fattûḥ, “you must be deaf with the gir-gir-gir of them.”

“Eh billah!” assented Ḥussein, “I shut my ears. Three wives, two sons and six daughters, of whom but two married. Twenty children I have had, and seven wives; three of these died and one left me and returned to her own people. But I shall take another bride this year, please God.”

“We Christians,” observed Fattûḥ, “find one enough.”

“You may be right,” answered Ḥussein politely; “yet I would take a new wife every year if I had the means.”

“We will find you a bride in Kebeisah,” said I.

Hussein weighed this suggestion.

“The maidens of Kebeisah are fair but wilful. There is one among them, her name is Shemsah—wallah, a picture! a picture she is!—she has had seven husbands.”

“And the maidens of Hît?” I asked. “How are they?”

“Not so fair, but they are the better wives. That is why I choose to remain in Hît,” explained Ḥussein. “The bimbâshî would have sent me to Baghdâd, but I said, ‘No, let me stay here; the maidens of Hît do not expect much.’ Your Excellency may laugh, but a poor man must think of these things.”

We rode on through the aromatic scrub until the black masses of the Kebeisah palm-groves resolved into tall trunks and feathery fronds.[73] The sun stood high as we passed under the village gate and down the dusty street that led to the Mudîr’s compound. We tied our mares to some mangers in his courtyard and were ourselves ushered into his reception-room, there to drink coffee and set forth our purpose. The leading citizens of Kebeisah dropped in one by one, and the talk was of the desert and of the dwellers therein. The men of Kebeisah are not ’Arab, Bedouin; they hold their mud-walled village and their 50,000 palm-trees against the tribes, but they know the laws of the desert as well as the nomads themselves, and carry on an uneasy commerce with them in dates and other commodities, with which even the wilderness cannot dispense, the accredited methods of the merchant alternating with those of the raider and the avenger of raids. There was no lack of guides to take me to Khubbâz, for the ruin is the first stage upon the post-road to Damascus, and half the male population was acquainted with that perilous way.

“It is the road of death,” said Ḥussein Onbâshî, stuffing tobacco into the cup of his narghileh.

“Eh billah!” said one who laid the glowing charcoal atop. “Eight days’ ride, and the government, look you, pays no more than fifteen mejîdehs from Hît and back again.”

An old man, wrapped in a brown cloak edged with gold, took up the tale.

“The government reckons fifteen mejîdehs to be the price of a man’s life. Wallah! if the water-skins leak between water and water, or if the camel fall lame, the rider perishes.”

“By the truth, it is the road of death,” repeated Ḥussein. “Twice last year the Deleim robbed the mail and killed the bearer of it.”

I had by this time spread out Kiepert.

“Inform me,” said I, “concerning the water.”

“Oh lady,” said the old man, “I rode with the mail for twenty years. An hour and a half from Kebeisah there is water at ’Ain Za’zu’, and in four hours more there is water in the tank of Khubbâz after the winter, but this year there is none, by reason of the lack of rain. Twelve hours from Khubbâz you shall reach Ḳaṣr ’Amej, which is another fortress like Khubbâz, but more ruined; and there is no water there. But eighteen hours farther you find water in the Wâdî Ḥaurân, at Muḥeiwir.”

“Is there not a castle there?” I asked. Kiepert calls it the castle of ’Aiwir.

“There is nought but rijm,” said he. (Rijm are the heaps of stones which the Arabs pile together for landmarks.) “And after nine hours more there is water at Ga’rah, and then no more till Dumeir, nine hours from Damascus.”

If this account is exact, there must be four days of waterless desert on the road of death.

The springs in Kebeisah are strongly charged with sulphur, but half-way between the town and the shrine of Sheikh Khuḍr, that lifts a conical spire out of the wilderness, there is a well less bitter, to which come the fair and wilful maidens night and morning, bearing on their heads jars of plaited willow, pitched without and within (Fig. 62). We did not fill our water-skins there when we set out next day for Ḳaṣr Khubbâz, but rode on to ’Ain Za’zu’, where the water is drinkable, though far from sweet (Fig. 63). There are

two other sulphurous springs, one a little to the north and one to the south, round each of which, as at ’Ain Za’zu’, the inhabitants of Kebeisah sow clover, the sole fodder of the oasis in rainless years like the spring of 1909; so said Fawwâz, the owner of the two camels on which we had placed our small packs. Fawwâz rode one of them and his nephew, Sfâga, the other, and they hung the dripping water-skins under the loads. We followed the course of a shallow valley westwards, and before we left it sighted a train of donkeys making to the north with an escort on foot—Arabs of the Deleim. They looked harmless enough, but I afterwards found that they had caused Fawwâz great uneasiness; indeed they kept him watchful all through the night, fearing that they might raid us while we slept. I was too busy observing the wide landscape to dwell on such matters. The desolate world stretched before us, lifting itself by shallow steps into long, bare ridges, on which the Arab rijm were visible for miles away. The first of these steps—it was not more than fifty feet high—was called the Jebel Muzâhir, and when we had gained its summit we saw the castle of Khubbâz lying out upon the plain. To the north the ground falls away into a wâdî, a shallow depression like all desert valleys, in which are traces of a large masonry tank that caught the trickle of the winter springs and held their water behind a massive dam (Fig. 64). The tank is now half full of soil and the dam leaks, so that as soon as the rains have ceased the water store vanishes. It had left behind it a scanty crop of grass and flowers, which seemed luxuriant to us in that dry season; we turned the mares and camels loose in what Fattûḥ called enthusiastically the rabî’ah (the herbage of spring), and pitched my light tent in the valley bottom, where my men could find shelter among the rocks against the chills of night. I left all these arrangements to Fattûḥ, and with Ḥussein and Fawwâz to hold the metre tape, measured and photographed the fort till the sun touched the western horizon.

The walls of Khubbâz are built of stones, either unworked or very roughly squared, set in a thick bed of coarse mortar.

In form the fort is a hollow square with round bastions at the angles, and except on the side facing towards Kebeisah, where the centre of the wall is occupied by a gate, there is also a round bastion midway between the angle towers (Fig. 65). All these bastions are much ruined and I may be wrong in representing them as if unequal size. Before the door there has been a vaulted porch, among the ruins of which lies a large block of stone which looks as if it had served as lintel to the outer door; I could see no moulding or inscription upon it (Fig. 66). The existing inner door is arched, the arch being set forward in a curious fashion. It opened into a vaulted entrance passage which communicated with an open court in the centre of the building. The court was surrounded by barrel-vaulted chambers, some of which showed traces of repair or reconstruction, though the old and the new work are now alike ruined.[74] All the vaults are set forward about three centimetres beyond the face of the wall (Fig. 67). Above the outset the first few courses of stones are laid horizontally, inclining slightly inwards, but where the curve of the vault makes it impossible to continue this method without the aid of centering beams, the stone is cut into narrow slabs which are set upright so as to form slices of the vault, and each slice has an inclination backwards, the first resting against the head wall and every succeeding slice resting against the one behind it. This is the well-known Mesopotamian system of vaulting without a centering, which is as old as the Assyrians.[75] It is best adapted to brick, but it can be carried out in stone when the span of the vault is not large, provided that the stones be cut thin, so as to resemble as nearly as possible brick tiles. On the south side, which is the best preserved, there are traces of an upper storey, or possibly of an upper gallery or chemin de ronde. A doorway led from it into a small chamber hollowed out of the thickness of the central bastion: I imagine that there was a similar outlook chamber in the other bastions, but in all these the upper part is ruined. I could find no inscriptions; the Arab tribe marks (awâsim) were scratched upon the plaster with which the inner side of the walls had been coated. I do not doubt that Khubbâz belongs to the Mohammadan period, nor that it is a relic of the great days of the khalifate when the shortest road from Baghdâd to Damascus was guarded by little companies of soldiers stationed at Khubbâz and ’Amej, and perhaps at other points. The plan is that of many of the Roman and Byzantine lime fortresses upon the Syrian side of the desert,[76] of the Mohammadan forts and fortified khâns scattered over Syria and Mesopotamia,[77] and of the modern Turkish guardhouse; the structural details are Mesopotamian, dictated by the conditions of the land.

At the pleasant hour of dusk I sat among the flowering weeds by my tent door while Fattûḥ cooked our dinner in his kitchen among the rocks, Sfâga gathered a fuel of desert scrub, Fawwâz stirred the rice-pot, and the bubbling of Ḥussein’s narghileh gave a note of domesticity to our bivouac. My table was a big stone, the mares cropping the ragged grass round the tent were my dinner-party; one by one the stars shone out in a moonless heaven and our tiny encampment was wrapped in the immense silences of the desert, the vast and peaceful night. Next morning, as we rode back to Kebeisah, Fattûḥ and I, between intervals devoted to chasing gazelle, laid siege on our companions and persuaded them to accompany us in our further journey. Fawwâz avowed that he was satisfied with us and would come where we wished (and as for Sfâga he would do as he was told) as long as Ḥussein would give a semi-official sanction to the enterprise by his presence. It was more difficult to win over Ḥussein, who had received from the Mudîr no permission to absent himself so long from Hît; but Fattûḥ pointed out that, when you have three wives, with the prospect of a fourth, to say nothing of six daughters of whom but two are married, you cannot afford to neglect the opportunity of earning an extra bakhshîsh. This reasoning was conclusive, and before we reached ’Ain Za’zu’ we had settled everything, down to the quantity of coffee-beans we would buy at Kebeisah for the trip. But when we got to Kebeisah we were greeted by news that went near to overturning our combinations. There had been alarums and excursions in our absence; the Deleim had attacked a party of fuel-gatherers two hours from the oasis, in the very plain we were to cross, and had made off with eight donkeys. One of the donkeys belonged to Fawwâz; he shook his head over the baleful activity of the tribe and murmured that we were a small party in the face of such perils. Moreover, in the Mudîr’s courtyard there stood a half-starved mare which had been recaptured in a counter-raid from the seventh husband of the famous Shemsah. He too was of the Deleim. We gave the mare a feed of corn—her gentle, hungry eyes were turned appealingly on our full mangers; but to Shemsah I was harder hearted, though her eyes were more beautiful than those of the mare. She came suppliant as I sat dining on the Mudîr’s roof at nightfall and begged me to recover her husband’s rifle, which lay below in the hands of the government. Her straight brows were pencilled together with indigo and a short blue line marked the roundness of her white chin; a cloak slipping backwards from her head showed the rows of scarlet beads about her throat, and as she drew it together with slender fingers, Fattûḥ, Ḥussein and I gazed on her with unmixed approval, in spite of the irregular course of her domestic history. But I felt that to return his rifle to a Deleimî robber was not part of my varied occupations, though who knows whether Shemsah’s grace, backed by what few mejîdehs she could scrape together, did not end by softening the purpose of Ḥussein and the Mudîr, “the Government,” as in veiled terms we spoke of them?

With the exercise of some diplomacy we induced Fawwâz to hold to his engagement, but the Mudîr took fright when he heard of our intentions, and threatened our guides with dire retribution if they led us into the heart of the desert. I think the threat was only intended to relieve him of responsibility, for Ḥussein shrugged his shoulders, and said it would be enough if we rode an hour in the direction of Ramâdî, on the Euphrates, and then changed our course and made straight for Abu Jîr, an oasis where we expected to find Arab tents. We set off next morning in the clear sunlight which makes all projects seem entirely reasonable, and dropped, after three-quarters of an hour, into a little depression. When we had crossed the sulphur marsh which lay at the valley bottom, we altered our direction to the south-west and rode almost parallel to a long low ridge called the Ga’rat ej Jemâl, which lay about three miles to the west of us. Four hours from Kebeisah we reached a tiny mound out of which rose a spring of water, sulphurous but just drinkable. The top of the mound was lifted only a few feet above the surrounding level, but that was enough to give us a wide view, and since in all the world before us there was no shade or shelter from the sun, we sat down and lunched where we could be sure that a horseman would not approach us unawares. And as we rested, some one far away opened a bottle into which Solomon, Prophet of God, had sealed one of the Jinn. Up sprang a gigantic column of smoke that fanned outwards in the still air and hung menacingly over the naked, empty plain. I waited spellbound to see the great shoulders and huge horned head disengage themselves from the smoke-wreaths that rolled higher and—

“ ’Ain el ’Awâsil burns,” said Fawwâz. “A shepherd has set it alight.”

There was a small pitch-well an hour away to the south-east, and if springs that burn when the tinder touches them are more logical than spirits that issue from a bottle when the seal is broken, then the explanation of Fawwâz may be accepted. But at that moment I could not stay to think the problem out, for if it was hot riding, sitting still was intolerable, and we were not anxious to linger when every half-hour’s march meant half-an-hour of dangerous country behind us. From noon to sunset the desert is stripped of beauty. Hour after hour we journeyed on, while the bare forbidding hills drew away from us on the right, and the plain ahead rolled out illimitable. We saw no living creature, man or beast, but an hour from ’Ain el ’As[.]fûrîyeh, where we had lunched, we came upon a deep still pool in an outcrop of rock, the water sufficiently sweet to drink. This spot is called Jelîb esh Sheikh; it contains several such pools, said Fawwâz, and he added that the water had appeared there of a sudden two years before, but that now it never diminished, nor rose higher in the rocky clefts. Just beyond the pool we crossed the Wâdî Muḥammadî, which stretched westwards to the receding ridges of the Gar’at ej Jemâl, and east to the Euphrates; it was dry and blotched with an evil-looking crust of sulphur. Fawwâz turned his camel’s head a little to the east of south and began to look anxiously for landmarks. We hoped to find at Abu Jîr an encampment of the Deleim, and, eagerly as we wished to avoid the scattered horsemen of the tribe by day, it was essential that we should pass the night near their tents. The desert is governed by old and well-defined laws, and the first of these is the law of hospitality. If we slept within the circuit of a sheikh’s encampment he would be “malzûm ’aleinâ” (responsible for us) and not one of his people would touch us; but if we lay out in the open we should court the attack of raiders and of thieves. Two hours from the Wâdî Muḥammadî we reached a little tell, from the top of which we sighted the ’alâmah (the landmarks) of Abu Jîr, a couple of high-piled mounds of stones. An hour later they lay to the east of us, and we saw still farther to the south-east the black line of tamarisk bushes that indicated the oasis. But it was another hour before we got up to it, and the sun was very low in the sky when we set foot on the hard black surface that gives the place its name. There was no time to lose, and we embarked recklessly on the “Father of Asphalt,” only to be caught in the fresh pitch that had been spread out upon the wilderness by streams of sulphurous water. We dismounted and led our animals over the quaking expanse, coasting round the head-waters of the springs—there are, I believe, eight of them—and experimenting in our own persons on half-congealed lakes of pitch before we allowed the camels to venture across them. The light faded while we were thus engaged, and seeing that too much caution might well be our undoing, I shouted to Fattûḥ to follow, and struck out eastwards. Fattûḥ was half inclined to look upon our case as a result of premeditated treachery on the part of Fawwâz, but I had noted unmistakable signs of fear and bewilderment in the bearing of the latter, and at all hazards I was resolved not to sleep in a pool of tar. We made for a line of tamarisk bushes behind which lay a thin haze of smoke, and as we broke through the brushwood we beheld a black tent crouching in the hollow. We rode straight up to the door and gave the salaam.

“And upon you peace,” returned the astonished owner.

“What Arabs are you, and where is your sheikh’s tent?” said I, in an abrupt European manner.

He was taken aback at being asked so many questions and answered reluctantly, “We are the Deleim, and the tent of Muḥammad el ’Abdullah lies yonder.”

We turned away, and I whispered to Fattûḥ not to hasten, and above all to approach the sheikh’s tent from in front, lest we should be mistaken for such as come upon an evil errand. He fell behind me, and with as much dignity as a tired and dusty traveller can muster, I drew rein by the tent ropes and gave the salaam ceremoniously, with a hand lifted to breast and lip and brow. A group of men sitting by the hearth leapt to their feet and one came forward.

“Peace and kinship and welcome,” said he, laying his hand on my bridle.

I looked into his frank and merry face and knew that all was well.

“Are you Muḥammad el ’Abdullah, for whom we seek?”

“Wallah, how is my name known to you?” said he. “Be pleased to enter.”

Ḥussein Onbâshî, when he appeared with the camels a quarter of an hour later, found a large company round the coffee-pots, listening in breathless wonder (I no less amazed than the rest) while the sheikh related the exploits of—a motor!

“And then, oh lady, they wound a handle in front of the carriage, and lo, it moved without horses, eh billah! And it sped across the plain, we sitting on the cushions. And from behind there went forth semok.” He brought out the English word triumphantly.

“Allah, Allah!” we murmured.

Ḥussein took from his lip the narghileh tube which was already between them and explained the mystery.

“It was the automobile of Misterr X. He journeyed from Aleppo to Baghdâd in four days, and the last day Muḥammad el ’Abdullah went with him, for the road was through the country of the Deleim.”

“I saw them start,” said Fattûḥ the Aleppine. “But the automobile lies now broken in Baghdâd.”

Muḥammad paid no heed to this slur upon the reputation of the carriage.

“White!” said he. “It was all painted white. Wallah, the Arabs wondered as it fled past. And I was seated within upon the cushions.”

That night Fattûḥ and I held a short council. We had won successfully through a hazardous day, but it seemed less than wisdom to go farther without an Arab guide, and I proposed to add Muḥammad el ’Abdullah to our party, if he would come.

“He will come,” said Fattûḥ. “This sheikh is a man. And your Excellency is of the English.”

Muḥammad neither demurred nor bargained. I think he would have accompanied me even if I had not belonged to the race that owned the carriage. Our adventure pleased him; he was one of those whose blood runs quicker than that of his fellows, whose fancy burns brighter, “whom thou, Melpomene, at birth” ... upon many an unknown cradle the Muse sheds her clear beam.

“But if we were to meet the raiders of the Benî Ḥassan?” I asked, mindful of the unsuccessful parleyings at Hît.

“God is great!” replied Muḥammad, “and we are four men with rifles.”

There was once a town at Abu Jîr, guarded by a little square fort with bastioned angles like Ḳaṣr Khubbâz. It was, however, much more ruined; of the interior buildings nothing remained, while the outer walls were little better than heaps of stones. But below this later work there were remains of older foundations, more careful masonry of larger materials, and outside the walls traces of a pavement, composed of big slabs of stone, accurately fitted together. All round the fort lay the foundations of houses, stone walls or crumbling mounds of sun-dried brick, not unlike the ruins of Ma’mûreh. There must have existed here a mediæval Mohammadan settlement, if there was nothing older, and the discovery was sufficiently surprising, for Abu Jîr now lies far beyond the limits of fixed habitation. The Deleim still turn the abundant water of the oasis to some profit, planting a few patches of corn and clover in the low ground below the ruins, but the insecurity of the desert forbids all permanent occupation. We had not gone far on our way next morning before Muḥammad stopped short in the ode he was singing and bent down from his saddle to examine some hoof-prints in the sandy ground. Two horsemen had travelled that way, riding in the same direction that we were taking.

“Those are the mares of our enemies,” he observed.

“How do you know?” I asked.

“I heard that they had passed Abu Jîr in the night,” he answered and resumed his song. When he had brought it to an end, he called out—

“Oh lady, I will sing the ode that I composed about the carriage.”

At this the camel-riders and Ḥussein drew near and Muḥammad began the first ḳaṣîdah that has been written to a motor.