We have
been quiet here, praying and smoking for the last hour!” “Go, eat thy
buried beans,[FN#5]” we replied. “What does an Egyptian boor know of
manliness!” The surly donkey-boy was worked up into a paroxysm of passion
by such small jokes as telling him to convey our salams to the Governor
of Jeddah, and by calling the asses after the name of his tribe. He
replied by “foul, unmannered, scurril taunts,” which only drew forth fresh
derision, and the coffee-house keeper laughed consumedly,
[p.265] having probably seldom entertained such “funny gentlemen.”
Shortly after leaving the Kahwat Turki we found the last spur of the
highlands that sink into the Jeddah Plain. This view would for some
time be my last of
“Infamous hills, and sandy, perilous wilds;”
and I contemplated it with the pleasure of one escaping from it. Before
us lay the usual iron flat of these regions, whitish with salt, and
tawny with stones and gravel; but relieved and beautified by the
distant white walls, whose canopy was the lovely blue sea. Not a tree,
not a patch of verdure was in sight ; nothing distracted our attention
from the sheet of turquoises in the distance. Merrily the little
donkeys hobbled on, in spite of their fatigue. Soon we distinguished
the features of the town, the minarets, the fortifications—so celebrated
since their honeycombed guns beat off in 1817 the thousands of Abdullah
bin Sa’ud, the Wahhabi,[FN#6] and a small dome outside the walls.
The sun began to glow fiercely, and we were not sorry when, at about
eight A.M., after passing through the mass of hovels and coffee-houses,
cemeteries and sand-hills, which forms the eastern approach to Jeddah,
we entered the fortified Bab Makkah. Allowing eleven hours for our
actual march,—we halted about three,—those wonderful donkeys had
accomplished between forty-four
[p.266] and forty-six miles,[FN#7] generally in deep sand, in one
night. And they passed the archway of Jeddah cantering almost as nimbly
as when they left Meccah.
Shaykh Nur had been ordered to take rooms for me in a vast pile of
madrepore—unfossilized coral, a recent formation,—once the palace of
Mohammed bin Aun, and now converted into a Wakalah. Instead of so
doing, Indian-like, he had made a gipsy encampment in the square
opening upon the harbour. After administering the requisite correction,
I found a room that would suit me. In less than an hour it was swept,
sprinkled with water, spread with mats, and made as comfortable as its
capability admitted. At Jeddah I felt once more at home. The sight of
the sea acted as a tonic. The Maharattas were not far wrong when they
kept their English captives out of reach of the ocean, declaring that
we were an amphibious race, to whom the wave is a home.
