He Was A Man About Forty, Long, Thin, Pale,
And Of A Purely Nervous Temperament; And A Few Questions Elicited The
Fact That He Had Lately And Suddenly Given Up His Daily Opium Pill.
I
prepared one for him, placed him in my litter, and persuaded him to
stow away his burden in some place where it would be less troublesome.
He was my companion for two marches, at the end of which he found his
own Shugduf.
I never met amongst the Arab citizens a better bred or a
better informed man. At Constantinople he had learned a little French,
Italian, and Greek; and from the properties of a shrub to the varieties
of honey,[FN#5] he was full of “ useful knowledge,” and openable as a
dictionary. We parted near Meccah, where I met him only once, and then
accidentally, in the Valley of Muna.
At half-past five A.M. on Tuesday, the 6th of September, we rose
refreshed by the cool, comfortable night, and loaded the camels. I had
an opportunity of inspecting Al-Sufayna. It is a village of fifty or
sixty mud-walled, flat-roofed houses, defended by the usual rampart.
Around it lie ample date-grounds, and fields of wheat, barley, and
maize. Its bazar at this season of the year is well supplied: even
fowls can be procured.
We travelled towards the South-East, and entered a country destitute of
the low ranges of hill, which from Al-Madinah southwards had bounded
the horizon. After
[p.131] a two miles’ march our camels climbed up a precipitous ridge, and
then descended into a broad gravel plain. From ten to eleven A.M. our
course lay southerly over a high table-land, and we afterwards
traversed, for five hours and a half, a plain which bore signs of
standing water. This day’s march was peculiarly Arabia. It was a desert
peopled only with echoes,—a place of death for what little there is to
die in it,—a wilderness where, to use my companion’s phrase, there is
nothing but He.[FN#6] Nature scalped, flayed, discovered all her
skeleton to the gazer’s eye. The horizon was a sea of mirage; gigantic
sand-columns whirled over the plain; and on both sides of our road were
huge piles of bare rock, standing detached upon the surface of sand and
clay. Here they appeared in oval lumps, heaped up with a semblance of
symmetry; there a single boulder stood, with its narrow foundation
based upon a pedestal of low, dome-shapen rock. All were of a pink
coarse-grained granite, which flakes off in large crusts under the
influence of the atmosphere. I remarked one block which could not
measure fewer than thirty feet in height. Through these scenes we
travelled till about half-past four P.M., when the guns suddenly roared
a halt. There was not a trace of human habitation around us: a few
parched shrubs and the granite heaps were the only objects diversifying
the hard clayey plain.
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