Having Duly Beaten Him, We Anchored
On The Open Coast, Insufficiently Protected By A Reef, And Almost In
Sight Of Our Destination.
In the distance rose Jabal Radhwah or
Radhwa,[FN#19] one of the "Mountains of Paradise[FN#20]" in which
honoured Arabia abounds.
It is celebrated by poetry as well as by piety.
"Did Radhwah strive to support my woes,
Radhwah itself would be crushed by the weight,"
says Antar.[FN#21] It supplies Al-Madinah with hones. I heard much of
its valleys and fruits and bubbling springs, but afterwards I learned
to rank these tales with the superstitious legends which are attached
to it. Gazing at its bare and ghastly heights, one of our party, whose
wit was soured by the want of fresh bread, surlily remarked that such a
heap of ugliness deserved ejection from heaven,-an irreverence too
public to escape general denunciation. We waded on shore, cooked there,
and
[p.223] passed the night; we were short of fresh water, which, combined
with other grievances, made us as surly as bears. Sa'ad the Demon was
especially vicious; his eyes gazed fixedly on the ground, his lips
protruded till you might have held up his face by them, his mouth was
garnished with bad wrinkles, and he never opened it but he grumbled out
a wicked word. He solaced himself that evening by crawling slowly on
all-fours over the boy Mohammed, taking scrupulous care to place one
knee upon the sleeper's face. The youth awoke in a fiery rage: we all
roared with laughter; and the sulky Negro, after savouring the success
of his spite, grimly, as but half satisfied, rolled himself, like a
hedgehog, into a ball; and, resolving to be offensive even in his
forgetfulness, snored violently all night.
We slept upon the sands and arose before dawn (July 17), determined to
make the Rais start in time that day. A slip of land separated us from
our haven, but the wind was foul, and by reason of rocks and shoals, we
had to make a considerable detour.
It was about noon on the twelfth day after our departure from Suez,
when, after slowly beating up the narrow creek leading to Yambu'
harbour, we sprang into a shore-boat and felt new life when bidding an
eternal adieu to the vile "Golden Wire."
I might have escaped much of this hardship and suffering by hiring a
vessel to myself. There would then have been a cabin to retire into at
night, and shade from the sun; moreover, the voyage would have lasted
five, not twelve, days. But I wished to witness the scenes on board a
pilgrim ship,-scenes so much talked of by the Moslem palmer
home-returned. Moreover, the hire was exorbitant, ranging from L40 to
L50, and it would have led to a greater expenditure, as the man who can
afford to take a boat must pay in proportion during his lan
[p.224] journey. In these countries you perforce go on as you begin: to
"break one's expenditure," that is to say, to retrench expenses, is
considered all but impossible. We have now left the land of Egypt.
[FN#1] The reader who has travelled in the East will feel that I am not
exaggerating. And to convince those who know it only by description, I
will refer them to any account of our early campaigns in Sind, where
many a European soldier has been taken up stone dead after sleeping an
hour or two in the morning sun.
[FN#2] The Zodiacal Light on the Red Sea, and in Bombay, is far
brighter than in England. I suppose this is the "after-glow" described
by Miss Martineau and other travellers: "flashes of light like
coruscations of the Aurora Borealis in pyramidal form" would exactly
describe the phenomenon. It varies, however, greatly, and often for
some days together is scarcely visible.
[FN#3] Niebuhr considers that the stars are brighter in Norway than in
the Arabian deserts; I never saw them so bright as on the Neilgherry
hills.
[FN#4] Written in the days of the vans, which preceded the Railway.
[FN#5] On one occasion I was obliged personally to exert myself to
prevent a party of ladies being thrust into an old and bad transit-van;
the ruder sex having stationed itself at some distance from the
starting-place in order to seize upon the best.
[FN#6] Abraham, for breaking his father's idols, was cast by Nimrod
into a fiery furnace, which forthwith became a garden of roses. (See
Chapter xxi. of the Koran, called "the Prophets.")
[FN#7] David worked as an armourer, but the steel was as wax in his
hands.
[FN#8] Solomon reigned over the three orders of created beings: the
fable of his flying carpet is well known. (See Chapter xxvii. of the
Koran, called "the Ant.")
[FN#9] These are mystic words, and entirely beyond the reach of
dictionaries and vocabularies.
[FN#10] In Moresby's Survey, "Sherm Demerah," the creek of Demerah. Ali
Bey calls it Demeg.
[FN#11] See "The Land of Midian (Revisited)" for a plan of
Al-Dumayghah, and a description of Al-Wijh (al-Bahr) These men of the
Beni Jahaynah, or "Juhaynah" tribe-the "Beni Kalb," as they are also
called,-must not be trusted. They extend from the plains north of
Yambu' into the Sinaitic Peninsula. They boast no connection with the
great tribe Al-Harb; but they are of noble race, are celebrated for
fighting, and, it is said, have good horses. The specimens we saw at
Marsa Dumayghah were poor ones, they had few clothes, and no arms
except the usual Jambiyah (crooked dagger). By their civility and their
cringing style of address it was easy to see they had been corrupted by
intercourse with strangers.
[FN#12] It is written Wish and Wejh; by Ali Bey Vadjeh and Wadjih;
Wodjeh and Wosh by Burckhardt; and Wedge by Moresby.
[FN#13] The terrible Afghan knife.
[FN#14] These the Arabs, in the vulgar tongue, call Jarad al-Bahr, "sea
locusts"; as they term the shrimp Burghut al-Bahr, or the sea-flea.
Such compound words, palpably derived from land objects, prove the
present Ichthyophagi and the Badawin living on the coast to be a race
originally from the interior.
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