GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS

1824-1892

"THE HOWADJI IN SYRIA "

VIII

AMONG THE BEDOUEEN

THE pleasant tales of Sultans' pilgrimages are only the mirage of memory.

The poor and pious Muslim, which is not the title of Caliphs, when he undertakes a long desert journey, does not carry nine hundred camels for his wardrobe, but he 5 carries his grave-linen with him.

Stricken by fatigue, or privation, or disease, when his companions cannot tarry for his recovery or death, he performs the ablution with sand, and digging a trench in the ground, wraps himself in his grave-clothes, and covering his 10 body with sand lies alone in the desert to die, trusting that the wind will complete his burial.

In the Arabs around you, you will mark a kindred sobriety. Their eyes are luminous and lambent, but it is a melancholy light. They do not laugh. They move with 15 easy dignity, and their habitual expression is musing and introverted, as that of men whose minds are stored with the solemn imagery of the desert.

You will understand that your own party of Arabs is not of the genuine desert breed. They are dwellers in cities, not 20 dwellers in tents. They are mongrel, like the population of

7-12: i. 13-18: t, b.

a seaport. They pass from Palestine to Egypt with caravans of produce, like coast-traders, and are not pure Bedoueen.

But they do not dishonor their ancestry. When a true 5 Bedoueen passes upon his solitary camel, and with a lowspoken salaam, looks abstractedly and incuriously upon the procession of great American Moguls, it is easy to see that his expression is the same as that of the men around you, but intensified by the desert.

10

Burckhardt says that all Orientals, and especially the Arabs, are little sensible of the beauty of nature. But the Bedoueen is mild and peaceable. He seems to you a dreamy savage. There is a softness and languor, almost an effeminacy of impression, the seal of the sun's child. He does 15 not eat flesh-or rarely. He loves the white camel with a passion. He fights for defense, or for necessity; and the children of the Shereefs, or descendants of the Prophet, are sent into the desert to be made heroes. They remain there eight or ten years, rarely visiting their families.

20

The simple landscape of the desert is the symbol of the Bedoueen's character; and he has little knowledge of more than his eye beholds. In some of the interior provinces of China, there is no name for the ocean, and when in the time of Shekh Daheir, a party of Bedoueen came to Acre 25 upon the sea, they asked what was that desert of water.

A Bedoueen after a foray upon a caravan, discovered among his booty several bags of fine pearls. He thought them Dourra, a kind of grain. But as they did not soften in boiling, he was about throwing them disdainfully away, 30 when a Gaza trader offered him a red Tarboosh in exchange, which he delightedly accepted.

Without love of natural scenery, he listens forever to the fascinating romances of the poets, for beautiful expressions 4:b. 4-9:b. 12-19: v. 20-25: k, j. 26-31:k, j. 32-145, 4 : a, k, j.

naturally clothe the simple and beautiful images he everywhere beholds. The palms, the fountains, the gazelles, the stars, and sun, and moon, the horse, and camel, these are the large illustration and suggestion of his poetry.

Sitting around the evening fire and watching its flickering 5 with moveless melancholy, his heart thrills at the prowess of El-Gundubah, although he shall never be a hero, and he rejoices when Kattalet-esh-Shugan says to Gundubah, "Come let us marry forthwith," although he shall never behold her beauty, nor tread the stately palaces.

ΙΟ

He loves the moon which shows him the way over the desert that the sun would not let him take by day, and the moon looking into his eyes, sees her own melancholy there. In the pauses of the story by the fire, while the sympathetic spirits of the desert sigh in the rustling wind, he says to his 15 fellow, "Also in all true poems there should be palm-trees and running water."

For him in the lonely desert the best genius of Arabia has carefully recorded upon parchment its romantic visions, for him Haroun El Rashid lived his romantic life, for him 201 the angel spoke to Mohammed in the cave, and God received the Prophet into the seventh heaven.

Some early morning a cry rings through the group of black square tents. He springs from his dreams of green gardens and flowing waters, and stands sternly against the 25 hostile tribe which has surprised his own. The remorseless morning secretes in desert silence the clash of swords, the ring of musketry, the battle-cry. At sunset the black square tents are gone, the desolation of silence fills the air that was musical with the recited loves of Zul-Himmeh, and the light 30 sand drifts in the evening wind over the corpse of a Bedoueen.

-So the grim Genius of the desert touches every stop of 144, 20-145, 10: b, v. 5-10: a, c, i. 14-17: h. 18-22: c, h. 23-32: a, h, n.

ΙΟ

romance and of life in you as you traverse his realm and meditate his children. Yet warm and fascinating as is his breath, it does not warp your loyalty to your native West, and to the time in which you were born. Springing from 5 your hard bed upon the desert, and with wild morning enthusiasm pushing aside the door of your tent, and stepping out to stand among the stars, you hail the desert and hate the city, and glancing toward the tent of the Armenian Khadra, you shout aloud to astonished MacWhirter,

"I will take some savage woman, she shall rear my dusky race."

But as the day draws forward, and you see the same forms and the same life that Abraham saw, and know that Joseph leading Mary into Egypt might pass you to-day, nor be aware of more than a single sunset since he passed 15 before, then you feel that this germ, changeless at home, is only developed elsewhere, that the boundless desert freedom is only a resultless romance.

66

The sun sets and the camp is pitched. The shadows are grateful to your eye, as the dry air to your lungs. 20 But as you sit quietly in the tent door, watching the Armenian camp and the camels, your cheek pales suddenly as you remember Abraham, and that he sat in the tent door in the heat of the day." Saving yourself, what of the scene is changed since then? The desert, the camels, the 25 tents, the turbaned Arabs, they were what Abraham saw when "he lifted up his eyes and looked, and lo! three men stood by him."

You are contemporary with the eldest history. Your companions are the dusky figures of vaguest tradition. The 30" long result of Time" is not for you.

In that moment you have lost your birthright. You are Ishmael's brother. You have your morning's wish. A

1-4: e. 4-9: a, c, e. 11-15: a, i. 18-25: h. 27-29: b. 31-147, 5: b, c.

child of the desert, not for you are Art, and Poetry, and Science, and the glowing roll of History shrivels away.

The dream passes as the day dies, and to the same stars which heard your morning shout of desert praise, you whisper as you close the tent door at evening,

"Better fifty years of Europe, than a cycle of Cathay."

IX

INTO THE DESERT

It was not until the fourth day from Cairo that we stretched fairly away from the green land into the open desert.

5

At one point which, like a cape, extended into the sand, 10 we had crossed the cultivation of the Nile valley, and had rested under the palms-and, O woe! in a treacherous spot of that green way, whether it was angry that we should again return after so fair a start, or whether it was too enamored of Khadra to suffer her to depart, yet at high 15 noon, in crossing a little stream over which the other camels gallantly passed, the beasts that bore her palanquin tottered and stumbled, then fell mired upon the marge of the stream, and the bulky palanquin rolling like a foundering ship, gradually subsided into the mud and water, and 20 the fair Armenian was rescued and drawn ashore by her camel-driver.

The Howadji who were sauntering leisurely behind, perceiving the catastrophe, crossed the stream rapidly, and gaining the spot poured out profuse offers of aid and ex- 25 pressions of sympathy, while Khadra looked furiously at them with her large, dreamy eyes, and smiled at the strange sound of their voices.

146, 18-147, 5: v, n. 8-22: b, i. 23-148, 5: v (cf. 144, 10-147, 6).