"Thou still unravished bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme."
Keats

There was so much of interest at Madaba, that we did not succeed in accomplishing the early start we had intended, and even after we were in the saddle, and had picked our way, not without difficulty, among the scattered stones, the middens, the children and dogs and chickens which occupy such open spaces as serve for paths, a native, speaking excellent German, came out of a house to suggest a visit to yet another mosaic pavement. This, however, we reluctantly declined, for, although we had a journey of but five hours in view, the sun was already high, and we had a bare plateau to traverse.

We soon left all traces of town life behind, and in little more than an hour came upon a scene which was, to many of us, a new delight: that of many hundreds of wandering camels in their {65} native surroundings—we had almost said their native element, so different are these creatures from the suffering, melancholy, over-worked, evil-smelling, grumbling brutes to which we are accustomed in Jerusalem. A camel to be seen to advantage requires the primeval spaces for which he was originally designed. He should stand clear against the horizon, however boundless; the background of narrow streets, the human brutality and noise, the mud beneath feet intended for desert sands, are an injustice for which we, and not they, are to blame. Bewildered, tortured, over-driven, he acquires that air of abject dejection which he shares with the London cab-horse, that habit of futile remonstrance which we learn to associate with him, to the entire exclusion of that dignity—an undoubted part of the freedom which is his birthright—that grace, which is inseparable from the surroundings that were his when the original type, never yet adapted to human environment, was first devised.

Camels of all shades of brown and grey were there; camels that had never had their coats disfigured by clipping nor galled with burdens; white camels, almost dazzling against the sapphire sky, the golden plain, the purple hills; baby camels, playful as kittens but with a puppy-like air of {66} solemnity, and more graceful than young colts, because better proportioned as to legs. The Bedu speak of the white camels as "blue," possibly for the same reason that an inhabitant of the Hebrides, when on the sea in stormy weather, will speak of his island by a fictitious name or, after dark, will whistle to his dogs rather than call them by name, for fear of attracting the attention of the Evil One. Many superstitions among Arabs are associated with blue, as again, the Highlander associating them with green, the colour of the fairies, will avoid naming the hue of the grass, calling it blue if adjective be necessary. The Arab puts a blue bead on his horse, a blue necklace on his child; his wife carries blue beads on her market-basket, and one is often hung over the door of the house, especially a new house. So Caliban, in the Oriental story which Shakespeare preserves for us in "The Tempest," speaks of his mother Setebos, the witch, as "a blue-eyed hag" (not "blear-eyed" into which certain commentators have corrected the original); and in a commentary upon an Arabic poem by Al Chirnik, sister of Tarafah, belonging to the early part of the seventh century, a seeress is described as "Hy, the blue-eyed one, from {67} the notorious people of the time of ignorance"—i.e. the period before the revelation of the Moslem faith.

Here and there the vast plain was dotted with the black temporary villages of the Bedu, generally arranged in a circle or square, dooah, around a central space upon which all the tents open, although, with some instinct of sanitation, the drapery was generally raised, both "but and ben," as they say in Scotland. The population seemed to be largely abroad, and every half mile or so we came upon a little group, more or less keeping an eye upon the herds, visible for miles, even to the farthest horizon, where they made long dados of themselves against the cloudless sky. Almost due south of us, each on its own hill, overlooking a Roman road running north and south, are two important ruins—Um Weleed (mother of children) and Um el Kuseir. They are only about half-an-hour apart, and we longed to make the short détour necessary to visit them, but the Professor's face was turned where duty called and we did not venture to propose the expenditure of time. Tristram describes these cities, and others lying along the same route, and thinks they may have been at least Maccabean, for {68} they are obviously much older than the Saracenic khans and the Roman forts, which are alike numerous in the district. He says that in all he looked in vain for any traces of Christian worship but that in each case there were the ruins of a temple, always outside the city, with the entrance to the east, and, wherever the architecture could be determined, of Doric origin; and he speculates as to whether these High Places may have originally served for Baal-worship. Another point which he notes, and which we, later, had opportunities of verifying, is the immense number of cisterns and underground storehouses, still in use by the Bedu for storage of grain and protection of flocks. It is interesting to recall that one of the commands given upon the Moabite stone, which was found but a few hours' journey south west, was "Make for yourselves every man a cistern in his house." The present names of these ruined towns, Um Weleed, Kirbet el-Herri, Zeb?b, Um er-Resas, Um el-Kuseir, and others, are all Arabic, and do not help us in identification, and trace of any other name seldom remains. They must, nevertheless, have been important; Um Weleed, for example, measures half-a-mile in length within the walls, and has suburbs in addition.

{69} Of Ziza, however, where we halted for a short time about four hours after leaving Madaba, we find a clear record in the Roman Notitia, where the name occurs, unchanged by a single letter, as an important military station, "Equites Dalmatici Illyriciani Ziza". Here we found traces of what must have been one of the largest towns of Roman Arabia, the most prominent feature being a great tank of solid masonry, 420 by 330 feet, still larger than that at Madaba, and, although the dry season was far advanced, and the reservoir is much reduced in available extent by debris, containing still a good supply of water. Steps, so wide and shallow as to be accessible even to horses, lead down to the water; many of the single stones are over six feet in length, and the reservoir was fed by an ingenious contrivance which, aided by two sets of strong sluice gates and an embankment of earth and masonry, formerly economised all the water which, in the heavy winter rains, would come rushing along the valley and down the hill side, upon which the town was built. In various parts of the valley there are embankments, to turn the water from other gorges and depressions into this central reservoir, which is also provided {70} with dams in the event of flood, floods being frequent and dangerous in this country, where, in the early rains, the water rushes in torrents along the surface of the baked and hardened earth. In the neighbourhood of such provision for a large population one naturally looks for buildings of importance. Tristram observes that the tank, though of such infinite consequence as is barely conceivable to those who do not know the East, is not defended, pointing to a period of security, when the Dalmatian cavalry swept the surrounding plains and made their headquarters here and, possibly, at Castal. Against the horizon, on the crest of the ridge, are two castles, which we were unable to visit but which were described by Tristram: one a solidly-built fort, apparently Saracenic, although constructed of older materials, which, to judge from the sculpture remaining upon them, may have been the ruins of Byzantine churches, the other, to the east, is, he tells us, in a much more ruinous condition. The present remains seem to be Roman, but show traces of use as a mosque, and among the material are sculptured stones, possibly Byzantine, according to some Persian, as well as fragments of cufic inscriptions. Eastward, again, is the Roman town of {71} Ziza, which includes a strange aggregation such as is found in no country other than Syria. There is a fine Saracenic building, said by the Arabs to have been perfect until the Egyptian invasion of 1832; there are cufic inscriptions and sculptured crosses; an olive mill of basalt; remains of sarcophagi; and a large Christian church, of which one apse still remains standing. All these ruins suffered considerably from the wanton destruction wrought by the Egyptian troops, who, it is said, threw down a very perfect building in the town, and several entire Christian churches. Tristram was the first European to visit Mshatta and Castal as well as Ziza; the last, at the suggestion of Zadam, the son of the great shech of the Beni Sakr, the local tribe of Bedu, who, by the intervention of Klein, the German missionary famous for the discovery of the Moabite stone, accompanied Tristram as companion, and protector of the expedition. The ruins appear to have been previously pointed out to Captain, now Sir Charles, Warren, the representative of the Palestine Exploration Fund, who, however, made no investigation, so that it fell to the share of Tristram to be the discoverer of Mshatta, one of the most remarkable {72} architectural monuments in the world.

It was with ever-increasing eagerness of expectation that we hastened on, after asking our way from some railway workmen—Europeans—who were living in tents among the ruins, and who spoke a polyglot of Arabic, French, and Italian. Within a few minutes we crossed the line upon which they were engaged, intended—strange anachronism!—to connect Damascus with Mecca, an undertaking for which the Turkish Government deserves the credit of immense perseverance under very difficult conditions. It may be mentioned, in passing, as also to their credit, that they are now rapidly carrying out the line from Haifa northwards, undertaken some years ago by the English, and which—after the whole district had been surveyed, the line planned by the skill of Dr Schumacher, the German-American Vice-Consul at Haifa, and the work, in the hands of an English engineer and English foreman, had made some progress—was mysteriously abandoned, to the serious loss of many of the employés.

It is of this railway that Professor George Adam Smith prognosticated so hopefully, as being {73} the most important material innovation from the West. "... Not only will it open up the most fertile parts of the country, and bring back European civilisation to where it once was supreme—on the east of Jordan—but, if ever European arms return to the country—as in a contest for Egypt or for the Holy Places when may they not return?—this railway, running from the coast across the central battlefield of Palestine, will be of immense strategic value" ("Hist. Geog. of the Holy Land," p. 20).

At the point where we cross the line the rails are not yet in place, but the iron monster will soon be here—fit symbol of an age which mocks the time that is, but creates few monuments which shall defy the time that shall be; which enables the curious to gaze at the wonders of the past, but leaves him no leisure to initiate what may survive our race, and speak, as do the ruins of Moab, to an age and a people of a distant future. We come on the wings of steam, and with all the miracles of science, but we leave no trace but unsightly heaps and a scar upon the face of the landscape. We were glad, some of us, when we had reached and crossed the unshamed anachronism, and, forgetting the noise that would break the silence of the plain, the {74} smoke that would soil its purity, the advertisement, the competition, with their attendant vulgarity and vice, we could throw ourselves again into the arms of Nature, and listen to the voices of our Mother Earth.

It seemed far more in keeping with our mood of the moment when, an hour or so later, we crossed the Haj (pilgrim) Road from Damascus to Mecca; the road, or rather aggregation of paths, some hundreds of parallel tracks, dispersed over a width of 1000 yards, alternately dividing and amalgamating, over which, for some twelve hundred years, the followers of the Prophet have passed to the visible centre and cradle of their faith. It is possible that the sons of Isaac may have trodden this very path on their way from the desert to the land of promise, for here there can be little variation in roadways, as they are determined not by mountain passes or choice of gradient, but by the presence of water. The shech of the district is responsible for the safe conduct of the pilgrimage across his territory, and it is at their own risk that any wander from the caravan. It is not many years since a body of pilgrims, tempted by some vision of a nearer route, had to be followed up when they did not reappear. A few only were saved, but two {75} hundred perished from thirst, and one shudders to think of the possible animal suffering involved, although, happily, most would be mounted on the long-enduring camel. The Professor told us that at times, when his caravan had lost its way in the desert at night, his mukaris would stoop down and scoop up a handful of sand some two or three inches deep, which they would smell for traces of camel droppings, showing, when they were deeper than a possible surface accident, that the travellers were on the timeworn track.

Almost involuntarily we drew rein, and paused, with mingled feelings, before this record of human emotions. Five times a day every good Moslem must turn toward Mecca, and once in a lifetime, if possible, he must journey thither in pilgrimage, either personally or by proxy. The road is strewn with the bones not only of animals but of men, who have fallen by the way, from thirst or exhaustion, it may be, or from plague and the cholera, which so constantly dog their footsteps. The Arabs have a story that a good Derwish in Mecca begged the leader of the pilgrimage to take the cholera away with him from a place where so many holy men were daily perishing. "But," said the Haj, "there are many good men in Jerusalem, {76} whom we can ill spare!" "Well," said the Derwish, "take it, anyway, and if Allah does not want it in Jerusalem He will send it on elsewhere"; and that, says history, as well as tradition, has happened annually ever since, for though Jerusalem is left untouched, the dread cholera accompanies the returning pilgrims almost every season, and is seldom far away from the track which lay before us.

Although many now avail themselves of the steamers on the Red Sea and Persian Gulf, thousands assemble every year at Damascus, where the holy tent of the caravan is kept, and large numbers still come, even from Circassia, Central Asia, and Northern Africa, in order to make the orthodox journey in its entirety. Formerly it was reckoned as lasting twenty-seven days but, owing to various mitigations in the difficulty of travel, the time tends, every year, to become shorter. Nevertheless, the Arabs have a saying which expresses a journey of indefinite length (much as we say "to go to Jericho"): "To go to the gate of God"; (Bab-el Allah) the gate that is, at the end of the Meidan, the suburb of Damascus, where the pilgrimage assembles, known as Bawabet Allah.

Though, in these days when, even among {77} Moslems, the tendency shows itself to minimise the duties of life, and many only contribute to the cost of the general pilgrimage, and compromise with conscience by a mere payment in money, nevertheless, even yet, custom, superstition, temporary advantage, hereditary conventionality or, it may be, pious instinct, religious fervour, cosmic yearning, avail now, as in all ages, to the direction of human conduct, and the parallel tracks are still well trodden. To us, who can enter in part only into the spirit of the East—its absolute faith in predestination, in the predetermination of salvation or perdition, in the irrelevance between religion and conduct, in the resignation which seems to us so utterly without hope, in its limitation of the relations between Man and God, its perpetual ascription of praise with but little margin for intercession—the whole position is a great mystery, and in the tramp, tramp of thousands of feet, which seems to us to echo wearily through vast avenues of time, we find it difficult to catch any note of love, or hope, or aspiration. They carry an inevitable burden of human sorrow, which is no fit offering at such a shrine as theirs; they have hopes and fears and human longings which they may confide to none but human {78} hearts: God is great; there is no god but God; all that befalls them is already decreed; and the pilgrimage is to His glory and in no sense for their own consolation. Browning's Epistle of an Arab Physician recurred to the mind of some among us, with the startled utterance of the Syrian contemporary of Jesus of Nazareth:
"... think, Abib; dost thou think?"
So, the All-great were the All-loving too!
So through the thunder comes a human voice
Saying: "O heart I made, a heart beats here!"

Thus dreaming, we journeyed on, still over vast spaces with dim horizons, bounded by low ranges of hills, showing in deep purple against the cloudless, sapphire sky.

Suddenly all was changed! We were no longer among the unsatisfied yearnings of pilgrimage but the companions of that youngest brother in the fairy tales, whose long journeyings had so often entered into our dream of the distant lands, for were we not drawing up at the gate of the Enchanted Palace, more beautiful than any dream, more deeply mysterious than the wonders of the Arabian Nights?
"Here all things in their place remain,
As all were ordered, ages since.
Come, Care and Pleasure, Hope and Pain,
And bring the fated fairy Prince!"

{79} Truly the place was under a spell—here in this wide wilderness, an unfinished dream of the sculptor of a giant age, stood the Castle of Mshatta; far exceeding any description which we had read or heard; paralysing us with such awe of its beauty and mystery as seldom seizes one before the work of Man; its immensity, its majesty, the unique perfection of its workmanship, above all, its silence, its absolute mystery, seeming in unison with the vast works of Nature all around, rather than with any conception of a merely human mind.

We were speechless in presence of this monument of a race to which we could give no name, of a purpose at which we could not even guess, of aspirations never fulfilled, hopes never realised.
"Titanic forces taking birth
In divers seasons, divers climes.
For we are Ancients of the earth
And in the morning of the times."

Tristram, after his second visit in the year 1872, returned to England, declaring that the whole question continued to be an insoluble mystery. Even the name gave no clue, and such meaning as it may even have had as Um shita, "mother of winter," presumably so called as {80} affording winter shelter for the flocks, is now subtracted, for although the spelling of Mashita or Meshita has been employed up to the present, even by the precise Baedeker in his English edition of 1900, the derivation is now declared fanciful, and Mshatta the more accurate rendering of the name.

That the problem is a difficult one is the more obvious from the very fact that it has none of the complications which beset the arch?ologist elsewhere. There have been no subtractions, no accretions, no changes. Hardly a ruin remains in Syria where Moslem zeal has not destroyed its sculptured imagery. Here all is perfect as when the artist laid down his chisel. Not a detail is defaced; the few stones which may have been removed have in no degree marred its completeness; its position has been its protection; far alike from the ignorant zeal of the fellahin Moslem, from the misdirected industry of the town Christian, it has inherited none of the blessings of civilisation. It is still the "unravished bride of quietness." As Tristram has well said: "Too proud to cultivate, happily too careless to destroy, the incurious Bedawin has roamed over its rich pasture lands: never tempted to loosen a stone, for he needs no {81} building materials, and content if the old cisterns and arches afford a shelter in winter for his flocks."

In the wonderful fa?ade upwards of fifty animals, exquisitely sculptured, in every variety of attitude, still quench their thirst in pairs, bending opposite each other, over a graceful vase; their outline, their very motion perfectly rendered; lions, lynxes, panthers, gazelle, buffaloes; here is a man with a dog, there a man carries a basket of fruit; birds hover; peacocks, storks, partridges, parrots, vaunt their beauty, with the grace of the models from which they were drawn, in days when we were living in wattled huts. The more conventional outlines—the cornices and mouldings, the continuous vandyke, with a great rose boss at every angle—although strikingly unfamiliar, are eminently satisfying to the eye, and the wonderful realism of the flowers, grapes, and vine-leaves, which fill up every remaining inch of the fa?ade, is like a dream of Grinling Gibbon carved out in massive stone.

Where, unless in the Alhambra, or (as we learn from Fergusson, De Vogüe, Dieulafoy, and other authorities on Persian art) in remote parts of Persia, can we find anything in the least comparable to the bewildering richness of the designs which have blossomed for us here in the wilderness?—far, {82} not only from mankind, but from such gifts of nature as would make possible the presence of mankind; where, for lack of water, even the rich soil of the great tableland cannot be cultivated, and the district must for ever remain, as it has ever been, a desert! The Arabs have no traditions of this place, as they have of so many other ruins, and they do not even ascribe its foundation to Saladdin or the Khalifs, to whom all that is great is almost invariably assigned. Can a building covered with human and animal designs owe its origin to the Moslem, to whom all such representations were forbidden? Although Thompson, the author of "The Land and the Book," proposed to consider the ruins as those of a church and convent, there is, apart from all other difficulties as to size, plan, and position, no single indication of Christian workmanship or symbol. Were the Romans likely to build a sumptuous Oriental palace in a lonely desert, far from any military road? If the Bedawy, the wandering Ishmaelite, sole denizen of deserts such as this, were for once to depart from his normal style of architecture—two or three poles and a piece of cloth—is it likely that his descendants would have preserved no tradition of so extraordinary a deviation?

{83} One solution offered is, nevertheless, that it was the work of Byzantine architects, employed by the desert tribes, notably the Beni Sakr, in the days when they were rich with the subsidies paid to them by the Romans for protection of their colonies and forts and roads from the encroachments of other enemies of the desert; that it was never intended as a place of residence but merely for the reception of ambassadors, who were to be over-awed, partly by the miracle of this rose of the wilderness, partly by the skill shown in the triumph over niggard Nature; or, in the event of this being insufficient, were to be separated from their steeds, and presented with free house room until hunger, thirst, and loneliness should make them amenable. Whether the work remained incomplete from paucity of money or of ambassadors, is not revealed.

Another solution, of which Fergusson is the originator, is that it was the work of the Persian king, Chosroes II., who, between the years 611 and 614, overran the whole of Northern Syria and Asia Minor. Gibbon's enumeration, gathered from contemporary authors (Gibbon's "Decline and Fall," Chap. x. 701), of his 20,000 camels and 3000 concubines, his 960 elephants and 6000 horses, suggests, at least, that he had the money for the {84} building of artistic palaces, and the fact that he spent the years of his youth at Hierapolis, where he had ample opportunity for studying the art and culture of Asia Minor, may suggest, further, that he possibly had the taste. These kings of the Sassanian dynasty were, indeed, noted for their love of architecture, and the Court favourite of Chosroes II., Ferhad, was an architect. A drawing of an ancient bas-relief at Shiraz, to be seen at the Institute of British Architects, presents Chosroes as slaying a lion, while his fair favourite, Shireen, watches Ferhad sculpturing birds and foliage upon a rock. Some forty or fifty Sassanian bas-reliefs, sculptured pictures such as those at Mshatta, still remain in various places. Moreover, we learn that Chosroes II. had thousands of Greek and Syrian slaves, whom he employed in the construction of sumptuous buildings. The site of Mshatta might well lie in his route between Damascus and the Nile. (See Chap. iii. p. 53.)

The sudden arrest of the work—one stone west of the entrance gate has been just laid down beside the place prepared for it, many stones have the sculpture incomplete, or merely indicated, we saw slabs upon which tentative sketches of horses had been made—might be accounted for {85} by the fact that, in 623, the Emperor Heraclius, "the Roman eagle swooping magnificently in her dying throes," compelled Chosroes, after only, at the utmost, fourteen years of power in Syria, to recall his troops from Egypt, Syria, and Asia Minor, and though, for four years, the strife was fierce between Persian and Roman, the latter ultimately triumphed, and Chosroes died miserably in a dungeon. Barely ten years later the Romans were banished by the Saracens.

The learned Professor Brünnow has made the suggestion that this building originated with the Ghassanides, the Beni Jafn, who migrated from Yemen in the first Christian century and, having been made, by the Romans, wardens of the marches of the Empire, developed later into an important dynasty; submitting even to the civilising influences of Christianity, for, in 180, Amir I. founded a monastery in Hauran. Brünnow observed the same vandyke pattern, which, however, is in itself a somewhat elementary design, upon a water jar in Jaulan, a district considerably north of Mshatta, but where, he observes, the Ghassanides were at home. Although the jar was modern it was conceivably copied from an ancient design, as was, undoubtedly, another standing beside it. Moreover, he found a pattern of double vandykes—that {86} is, of squares joined at the corners, upon a frieze in the same district. Other arch?ologists object that certain details cannot be older than Justinian, when Arabian kings held no sway near the Jordan, others doubt whether the Arabian kings ever extended their power into this unquestionably Roman province. To the mere layman it seems so probable that a row of vandykes was the first thing that Adam drew with a stick upon the sand, that he fails to find in it anything distinctive enough to form the basis of a historical or architectural theory.

The entrance, with its magnificent fa?ade, is to the south, the sculpture, extending over 156 feet in the centre of the face, is broken by a gateway, and rises to the height of 18 feet. Behind this is a quadrangle, 170 yards square, at each angle a round bastion, and five others, semicircular, between them. On the south front alone there are six, the central gateway being flanked by two, boldly octagonal, and magnificently sculptured. The interior is best described as being divided into three portions, by parallel lines running north and south, the side ones about 46, the centre about 66, yards in width. The centre one has been divided into three sections; that nearest the gate, which is {87} portioned into many chambers, was probably intended for a guard house; the second may have been an open space, with a fountain, and the third or northernmost was the palace itself. This consists of brick walls, resting on three courses of stone, the bricks, of somewhat curious form, resembling, it is said, those of no known building, except a ruined palace north-east of Damascus, described by Tyrwhitt Drake and Sir Richard Burton. They are like Roman tiles, but larger and thinner, 3 inches thick and about 18 inches square. The palace is divided into twenty-four rooms, the entrance hall being about 50 feet square, four others being perhaps two-thirds of that size. The entrance is through a wide doorway, with massive pilasters and elaborate capitals, with ornamentation, possibly, of Persian or Egyptian—certainly not of Greek—design. Architects have perplexed themselves over the problem, still unsolved, as to how the palace was lighted, as there is not a single window from without, and within only a few small round openings over the doors. Bliss, of Beirut, the distinguished American arch?ologist, conjectures that the large halls were unroofed, and that the smaller rooms opened upon them, a plan quite consistent with the Oriental conception {88} of a house, originally derived from tents opening into a central space, and developing, first into rooms opening into a court, and, later, into the modern house, in which all rooms on both floors open into a leewan, or central apartment.

Naturally, all these observations were made later, for it was our privilege to remain for some nights within the palace walls, where, amid kind and hospitable friends, and in comfortable tents, bearing the familiar initials T. I. W. (Thames Iron Works), relics of the abandoned English railway, we found leisure to rest and to dream. Some of us found the spell of fairyland so strong that little else than dream seemed possible. Never, perhaps, so loud as here, did we "hear the East a-calling,"
"something which possessed
The darkness of the world, delight,
Life, anguish, death, immortal love
Ceasing not, mingled, unrepressed
Apart from space, withholding time,
But flattering the golden prime
Of good Haroun Alraschid."

It was, perhaps, bathos, on our part, but we wished Tennyson had known enough Arabic to write Er-Rashid!

How far it all seemed from the littlenesses {89} we have learned to confuse with realities—"the greeting where no kindness is," "the dreary intercourse of daily life"!
"We grew in gladness, till we found
Our spirits in the golden age."

Our thoughts turned to dear ones far away as, we may fancy, do those of some who have gone from among us, so far removed we seemed even from those nearest in spirit! We were ready
"To pass with all our social ties
To silence, from the paths of men,
And every hundred years to rise
And learn the world, and sleep again."

Towards evening, when the golden light was fading from over the wide plain, we turned our steps towards the eastern hills, a long, low, limestone range, a day's ride distant, although, in the clear atmosphere, it seemed as if we might almost reach their foot in time to see the sun set. One of the soldiers in charge of our party kept us in sight all the time; for away in those dim recesses are wild tribes, who submit to no government but that of their own chief, Ibn Rashid, the great Arabian potentate, whose stronghold is far away beyond the hills, in the city of Hayil, and whom all other shechs hold {90} in awe. Our host, Dr Schumacher, told us that not even his Circassian soldiers, fierce and fearless as they are, would consent to accompany him beyond that plain into the district of Hadramat, and it was still with the sensation of being in touch with fairy lore that we listened while the Professor told us stories of his sojourn in that distant land, of hospitality received in that far-away stronghold, and of personal and friendly intercourse with the great chief himself. We were interested later to note the anachronism of the two cairns, on widely distant hills, remains of Dr Schumacher's survey for the great German map of East Jordan.

As our shadows lengthened we stood to watch the herds of gazelle descending into the plain; the graceful creatures, secure in their swiftness, coming so near that we could watch their movements even without our field-glasses. We had already learnt that they came down daily, towards sunset, often close to the palace walls, and our Sportsmen had long lain in wait for them there in the hope of game, but the news of the human invasion, the profane breaking of the silence, had gone forth, and the gentle creatures, having little reason to feel confidence in the lords of creation, had turned away elsewhere.

{91} As we retraced our steps we lingered, picking up here a flint arrow-head, gift of a distant past, there a bleached snake-skin, perfect as though worn but yesterday. Other treasures, too, we found: wonderful velvety arums, crimson, purple, and black, not the large arum pal?stinum of the spring, but a minute, dainty, fairy-like copy of it, fitly adorning this dream world; crocuses, leafless, almost stalkless, white, mauve, and pink, rich relations of the "naked ladies" of our home meadows, and tiny pink geraniums, the lingering guests of summer.

Scarcely were we again at home, when Nature endowed us with another, and truly royal, spectacle. As the full moon rose, above our palace walls, she was eclipsed, and we stood long, watching alternately the western miracle of sunset and the eastern pageant of the slow and, as it seemed, reluctant moonrise. Some of the Arab servants watched with us, but they were of so superior a class that they showed but the faint, unimaginative interest of average civilised man elsewhere. They told us, however, of the superstitious practices still pursued by those "who knew no better"—the singing and beating of tom-toms and sacrifice of a cock. They were wonderful servants, or seemed so {92} to us, the slaves of the kitchen of the West. The cook produced excellent dinners, of three hot courses, upon a box of charcoal embers he could lift with one hand, and the waiters, summoned with a hand-clap, not only brought but ran to bring whatever you might want. Everything was spotlessly clean, and the waiting at table would have done credit to an English "Jeames." They all spoke at least three languages, and they amused our leisure moments with games and songs. The native, however, must come out somewhere, and we are bound to record that, when an imprisoned cock crowed from a small wooden box, these Arabs, who are never quiet one second themselves, took him out and whipped him!

We went to rest early in our luxurious tents, and woke next morning to find, among other miracles, that the water in our jugs was barely above freezing point.