Hijlah, 600.
4. Dubayah, 1500.
5. Benu Kalb, 2000.
6. Bayzanah, 800.
7. Benu Yahya, 800.
And he makes the total of the Benu Harb about Al-Jadaydah amount to
35,000 men. I had no means of personally ascertaining the correctness
of this information.
[FN#63] The reader will remember that nothing like exactitude in
numbers can be expected from an Arab. Some rate the Benu Harb at 6000;
others, equally well informed, at 15,000; others again at 80,000. The
reason of this is that, whilst one is speaking of the whole race,
another may be limiting it to his own tribe and its immediate allies.
[FN#64] “Sham” which, properly speaking, means Damascus or Syria, in
Southern Arabia and Eastern Africa is universally applied to Al-Hijaz.
[p.124] CHAPTER XXVI.
FROM AL-SUWAYRKIYAH TO MECCAH.
WE have now left the territory of Al-Madinah. Al-Suwayrkiyah, which
belongs to the Sharif of Meccah, is about twenty-eight miles distant
from Hijriyah, and by dead reckoning ninety-nine miles along the road
from the Prophet’s burial-place. Its bearing from the last station was
S.W. 11°. The town, consisting of about one hundred houses, is built at
the base and on the sides of a basaltic mass, which rises abruptly from
the hard clayey plain. The summit is converted into a rude
fortalice—without one, no settlement can exist in Al-Hijaz—by a bulwark of
uncut stone, piled up so as to make a parapet. The lower part of the
town is protected by a mud wall, with the usual semicircular towers.
Inside there is a bazar, well supplied with meat (principally mutton)
by the neighbouring Badawin; and wheat, barley, and dates are grown
near the town. There is little to describe in the narrow streets and
the mud houses, which are essentially Arab. The fields around are
divided into little square plots by earthen ridges and stone walls;
some of the palms are fine-grown trees, and the wells appear numerous.
The water is near the surface and plentiful, but it has a brackish
taste, highly disagreeable after a few days’ use, and the effects are the
reverse of chalybeate.
The town belongs to the Benu Hosayn, a race of
[p.125] schismatics mentioned in the foregoing pages. They claim the
allegiance of the Badawi tribes around, principally Mutayr, and I was
informed that their fealty to the Prince of Meccah is merely nominal.
The morning after our arrival at Al-Suwayrkiyah witnessed a commotion
in our little party: hitherto they had kept together in fear of the
road. Among the number was one Ali bin Ya Sin, a perfect “old man of the
sea.” By profession he was a “Zemzemi,” or dispenser of water from the Holy
Well,[FN#1] and he had a handsome “palazzo” at the foot of Abu Kubays in
Meccah, which he periodically converted into a boarding-house.
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