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Bedouin of the Syrian Desert Frontispiece The Mosque of 'Umar, Jerusalem The Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem A Street in Jerusalem St. Stephen's Gate, Jerusalem A Mahommedan Procession passing the Garden of Olives Russian Pilgrims Pilgrims receiving Baptism in Jordan Monastery of Kuruntul above Jericho Crossing the Gh?r The Bridge over Jordan The Monastery of Mar Saba, Wilderness of Judae The Wall of Lamentation, Jerusalem Jews of Bokhara Abyssinian Priests An Arab of the 'Adw?n Guarding Crops An Encampment near the Dead Sea The Theatre, 'Amm?n A Gateway, 'Amm?n The Temple, Khureibet es S?? Mausoleum, Khureibet es S?? Arabs of the Bel?a A Ruined Church, M?deba The ?al'ah at Z?za A Christian Encampment Flocks of the ?ukh?r A Roman Milestone Mshitta Mshitta, the Fa?ade Mshitta, the Inner Halls Arabs of the Bel?a Fell?? ul 'Isa ad Da'ja A Capital at Muwa??ar A Capital at Muwa??ar A Capital at Muwa??ar Milking Sheep G?abl?n ibn ?am?d ad Da'ja On the ??jj Road Arabs Riding Mard?f A Travelling Encampment of the 'Ag??l A Desert Well A Desert Water-course Camels of the ?aseneh Umm ej Jem?l Watering Camels Striking Camp Mu?ammad el A?rash Desert Flora and Fauna The Castle, ?alkhad Nas?b el A?rash A Group of Druzes From ?alkhad Castle, looking South-East ?reyeh A Druze Ploughboy Bo?r? Eski Sh?m The Village Gateway, ?abr?n A Druze Ma?'ad, ?abr?n Lintel, el Khurbeh The Walls of ?anaw?t ?anaw?t, The Basilica ?anaw?t, Doorway of the Basilica ?anaw?t A Temple The Temple, Mashennef ?al'at el Bei?a ?al'at el Bei?a ?al'at el Bei?a, Door of Keep Mouldings from ?al'at el Bei?a and from Palmyra A Gateway, Shakka The Sheikh's House, ?ay?t In the Palmyrene Desert 135 The Great Mosque and the Roofs of the Bazaar from the Fort A Corn Market The ?ubbet el Khazneh The Tekyah of Nakshibendi Gate of the Tekyah Mush?in Kalam Sweetmeat Sellers Court of the Great Mosque Threshing-floor of Karyatein The Tekyali of Nakshibendi Outside Damascus Gates A Water seller Su? W?di Barada Ba'albek The Great Court, Ba'albek Columns of the Temple of the Sun, Ba'albek Temple of Jupiter, Ba'albek Capitals in the Temple of Jupiter, Ba'albek Fountain in the Great Court, Ba'albek Fragment of Entablature, Ba'albek Basilica of Constantine, Ba'albek A Stone in the Quarry, Ba'albek R?s ul 'Ain, Ba'albek Cedars of Lebanon The ??mu'a Hurmul An Eastern Holiday A Street in ?om? Coffee by the Road-side ?al'at el ?u?n ?al'at el ?u?n, Interior of the Castle Windows of the Banquet Hall ?al'at el ?u?n, Walls of the Inner Enceinte Fella??n Arabs The Temple at ?u?n es Suleim?n North Gate, ?u?n es Suleim?n City Gate, Masy?d Capital at Masy?d Capital at Masy?d A Na'oura, ?am?h The ?ubbeh in the Mosque at ?am?h The Tekyah Kill?niyyeh, ?am?h Capital in the Mosque, ?am?h A Capital, ?am?h ?al'at es Seijar ?al'at es Seijar, The Cutting through the Ridge A Capital, ?am?h A House at el B?rah Moulding at el B?rah and Lintel at Khirbet H?ss Tomb, Serjilla Sheikh Y?nis House at Serjilla Tomb of Bizzos Church and Tomb, Ruwei?? ?a?r el ?an?t Tomb D?na A Beehive Village The Castle, Aleppo A Water-carrier ?al'at Sim'?n ?al'at Sim'?n ?al'at West Door ?al'at Circular Court ?al'at Circular Court ?al'at The Apse ?al'at West Door A Funeral Monument, ???ur? Khir?b esh Shems Khir?b esh Carving in a Tomb Capital, Upper Church at Kal?teh Bar?d, Canopy Tomb Bar?d, Tower to the West of the Town M?sa and his Family B?suf?n, a Kurdish Girl Tomb at D?n? The B?b el Hawa The Temple Gate, B??ir?a ?alb L?zeh The Apse, ?alb L?zeh ??rim Sal??n Travellers Antioch Antioch On the Bank of the Orontes, Antioch The Corn Market, Antioch Roman Lamp in Rifa't Agha's Collection Head of a Sphinx, Antioch Daphne The Gar?z The Statue in the Mulberry-Garden Lower Course of the Gar?z Sarcophagus in the Seraya, Antioch

To those bred under an elaborate social order few such moments of exhilaration can come as that which stands at the threshold of wild travel. The gates of the enclosed garden are thrown open, the chain at the entrance of the sanctuary is lowered, with a wary glance to right and left you step forth, and, behold! the immeasurable world. The world of adventure and of enterprise, dark with hurrying storms, glittering in raw sunlight, an unanswered question and an unanswerable doubt hidden in the fold of every hill. Into it you must go alone, separated from the troops of friends that walk the rose alleys, stripped of the purple and fine linen that impede the fighting arm, roofless, defenceless, without possessions. The voice of the wind shall be heard instead of the persuasive voices of counsellors, the touch of the rain and the prick of the frost shall be spurs sharper than praise or blame, and necessity shall speak with an authority unknown to that borrowed wisdom which men obey or discard at will. So you leave the sheltered close, and, like the man in the fairy story, you feel the bands break that were riveted about your heart as you enter the path that stretches across the rounded shoulder of the earth.

It was a stormy morning, the 5th of February. The west wind swept up from the Mediterranean, hurried across the plain where the Canaanites waged war with the stubborn hill dwellers of Judaea, and leapt the barrier of mountains to which the kings of Assyria and of Egypt had laid vain siege. It shouted the news of rain to Jerusalem and raced onwards down the barren eastern slopes, cleared the deep bed of Jordan with a bound, and vanished across the hills of Moab into the desert. And all the hounds of the storm followed behind, a yelping pack, coursing eastward and rejoicing as they went.

No one with life in his body could stay in on such a day, but for me there was little question of choice. In the grey winter dawn the mules had gone forward carrying all my worldly goods--two tents, a canteen, and a month's provision of such slender luxuries as the austerest traveller can ill spare, two small mule trunks, filled mainly with photographic materials, a few books and a goodly sheaf of maps. The mules and the three muleteers I had brought with me from Beyrout, and liked well enough to take on into the further journey. The men were all from the Lebanon. A father and son, Christians both, came from a village above Beyrout: the father an old and toothless individual who mumbled, as he rode astride the mule trunks, blessings and pious ejaculations mingled with protestations of devotion to his most clement employer, but saw no need to make other contribution to the welfare of the party--Ibrah?m was the name of this ancient; the son, ?ab?b, a young man of twenty-two or twenty-three, dark, upright and broad-shouldered, with a profile that a Greek might have envied and a bold glance under black brows. The third was a Druze, a big shambling man, incurably lazy, a rogue in his modest way, though he could always disarm my just indignation in the matter of stolen sugar or missing piastres with an appealing, lustrous eye that looked forth unblinking like the eye of a dog. He was greedy and rather stupid, defects that must be difficult to avoid on a diet of dry bread, rice and rancid butter; but when I took him into the midst of his blood enemies he slouched about his work and tramped after his mule and his donkey with the same air of passive detachment that he showed in the streets of Beyrout. His name was Mu?ammad. The last member of the caravan was the cook. Mikh?il, a native of Jerusalem and a Christian whose religion did not sit heavy on his soul. He had travelled with Mr. Mark Sykes, and received from him the following character: "He doesn't know much about cooking, unless he has learnt since he was with me, but he never seems to care twopence whether he lives or whether he is killed." When I repeated these words to Mikh?il he relapsed into fits of suppressed laughter, and I engaged him on the spot. It was an insufficient reason, and as good as many another. He served me well according to his lights; but he was a touchy, fiery little man, always ready to meet a possible offence half way, with an imagination to the limits of which I never attained during three months' acquaintance, and unfortunately he had learned other things besides cooking during the years that had elapsed since he and Mr. Sykes had been shipwrecked together on Lake Van. It was typical of him that he never troubled to tell me the story of that adventure, though once when I alluded to it he nodded his head and remarked: "We were as near death as a beggar to poverty, but your Excellency knows a man can die but once," whereas he bombarded my ears with tales of tourists who had declared they could not and would not travel in Syria unsustained by his culinary arts. The 'arak bottle was his fatal drawback; and after trying all prophylactic methods, from blandishment to the hunting-crop, I parted with him abruptly on the Cilician coast, not without regrets other than a natural longing for his tough rag?uts and cold pancakes.

I had a great desire to ride alone down the desolate road to Jericho, as I had done before when my face was turned towards the desert, but Mikh?il was of opinion that it would be inconsistent with my dignity, and I knew that even his chattering companionship could not rob that road of solitude. At nine we were in the saddle, riding soberly round the walls of Jerusalem, down into the valley of Gethsemane, past the garden of the Agony and up on to the Mount of Olives. Here I paused to recapture the impression, which no familiarity can blunt, of the walled city on the hill, grey in a grey and stony landscape under the heavy sky, but illumined by the hope and the unquenchable longing of generations of pilgrims. Human aspiration, the blind reaching out of the fettered spirit towards a goal where all desire shall be satisfied and the soul find peace, these things surround the city like a halo, half glorious, half pitiful, shining with tears and blurred by many a disillusion. The west wind turned my horse and set him galloping over the brow of the hill and down the road that winds through the Wilderness of Judaea.

At the foot of the first descent there is a spring, 'Ain esh Shems, the Arabs call it, the Fountain of the Sun, but the Christian pilgrims have named it the Apostles' Well. In the winter you will seldom pass there without seeing some Russian peasants resting on their laborious way up from Jordan. Ten thousand of them pour yearly into the Holy Land, old men and women, for the most part, who have pinched and saved all their life long to lay together the ?30 or so which will carry them to Jerusalem. From the furthest ends of the Russian empire they come on foot to the Black Sea, where they take ship as deck passengers on board a dirty little Russian boat. I have travelled with 300 of them from Smyrna to Jaffa, myself the only passenger lodged in a cabin. It was mid-winter, stormy and cold for those who sleep on deck, even if they be clothed in sheepskin coats and wadded top-boots. My shipmates had brought their own provisions with them for economy's sake--a hunch of bread, a few olives, a raw onion, of such was their daily meal. Morning and evening they gathered in prayer before an icon hanging on the cook's galley, and the sound of their litanies went to Heaven mingled with the throb of the screw and the splash of the spray. The pilgrims reach Jerusalem before Christmas and stay till after Easter that they may light their tapers at the sacred fire that breaks out from the Sepulchre on the morning of the Resurrection. They wander on foot through all the holy places, lodging in big hostels built for them by the Russian Government. Many die from exposure and fatigue and the unaccustomed climate; but to die in Palestine is the best of favours that the Divine hand can bestow, for their bones rest softly in the Promised Land and their souls fly straight to Paradise. You will meet these most unsophisticated travellers on every high road, trudging patiently under the hot sun or through the winter rains, clothed always in the furs of their own country, and bearing in their hands a staff cut from the reed beds of Jordan. They add a sharp note of pathos to a landscape that touches so many of the themes of mournful poetry. I heard in Jerusalem a story which is a better illustration of their temper than pages of description. It was of a man who had been a housebreaker and had been caught in the act and sent to Siberia, where he did many years of penal servitude. But when his time was up he came home to his old mother with a changed heart, and they two set out together for the Holy Land that he might make expiation for his sins. Now at the season when the pilgrims are in Jerusalem, the riff-raff of Syria congregates there to cheat their simplicity and pester them for alms, and one of these vagabonds came and begged of the Russian penitent at a time when he had nothing to give. The Syrian, enraged at his refusal, struck the other to the earth and injured him so severely that he was in hospital for three months.

When he recovered his consul came to him and said, "We have got the man who nearly killed you; before you leave you must give evidence against him." But the pilgrim answered, "No, let him go. I too am a criminal."

Beyond the fountain the road was empty, and though I knew it well I was struck again by the incredible desolation of it. No life, no flowers, the bare stalks of last year's thistles, the bare hills and the stony road. And yet the Wilderness of Judaea has been nurse to the fiery spirit of man. Out of it strode grim prophets, menacing with doom a world of which they had neither part nor understanding; the valleys are full of the caves that held them, nay, some are peopled to this day by a race of starved and gaunt ascetics, clinging to a tradition of piety that common sense has found it hard to discredit. Before noon we reached the kh?n half way to Jericho, the place where legend has it that the Good Samaritan met the man fallen by the roadside, and I went in to lunch beyond reach of the boisterous wind. Three Germans of the commercial traveller class were writing on picture-postcards in the room of the inn, and bargaining with the kh?nji for imitation Bedouin knives. I sat and listened to their vulgar futile talk--it was the last I was to hear of European tongues for several weeks, but I found no cause to regret the civilisation I was leaving. The road dips east of the kh?n, and crosses a dry water-course which has been the scene of many tragedies. Under the banks the Bedouin used to lie in wait to rob and murder the pilgrims as they passed. Fifteen years ago the Jericho road was as lawless a track as is the country now that lies beyond Jordan: security has travelled a few miles eastward during the past decade. At length we came to the top of the last hill and saw the Jordan valley and the Dead Sea, backed by the misty steeps of Moab, the frontier of the desert. Jericho lay at our feet, an unromantic village of ramshackle hotels and huts wherein live the only Arabs the tourist ever comes to know, a base-born stock, half bred with negro slaves. I left my horse with the muleteers whom we had caught up on the slope--"Please God you prosper!" "Praise be to God! If your Excellency is well we are content"--and ran down the hill into the village. But Jericho was not enough for that first splendid day of the road. I desired eagerly to leave the tourists behind, and the hotels and the picture-postcards. Two hours more and we should reach Jordan bank, and at the head of the wooden bridge that leads from Occident to Orient we might camp in a sheltered place under mud hillocks and among thickets of reed and tamarisk. A halt to buy corn for the horses and the mules and we were off again across the narrow belt of cultivated land that lies round Jericho, and out on to the Gh?r, the Jordan valley.

The Jericho road is bare enough, but the valley of Jordan has an aspect of inhumanity that is almost evil. If the prophets of the Old Testament had fulminated their anathemas against it as they did against Babylon or Tyre, no better proof of their prescience would exist; but they were silent, and the imagination must travel back to flaming visions of Gomorrah and of Sodom, dim legends of iniquity that haunted our own childhood as they haunted the childhood of the Semitic races. A heavy stifling atmosphere weighed upon this lowest level of the earth's surface; the wind was racing across the hill tops above us in the regions where men breathed the natural air, but the valley was stagnant and lifeless like a deep sea bottom. We brushed through low thickets of prickly sidr trees, the Spina Christi of which the branches are said to have been twisted into the Crown of Thorns. They are of two kinds these sidr bushes, the Arabs call them za??m and d?m. From the za??m they extract a medicinal oil, the d?m bears a small fruit like a crab apple that ripens to a reddish brown not uninviting in appearance. It is a very Dead Sea Fruit, pleasant to look upon and leaving on the lips a taste of sandy bitterness. The sidrs dwindled and vanished, and before us lay a sheet of hard mud on which no green thing grows. It is of a yellow colour, blotched with a venomous grey white salt: almost unconsciously the eye appreciates its enmity to life. As we rode here a swirl of heavy rain swooped down upon us from the upper world. The muleteers looked grave, and even Mikh?il's face began to lengthen, for in front of us were the Slime Pits of Genesis, and no horse or mule can pass over them except they be dry. The rain lasted a very few minutes, but it was enough. The hard mud of the plain had assumed the consistency of butter, the horses' feet were shod in it up to the fetlocks, and my dog Kurt whined as he dragged his paws out of the yellow glue. So we came to the Slime Pits, the strangest feature of all that uncanny land. A quarter of a mile to the west of Jordan--the belt is much narrower to the east of the stream--the smooth plain resolves itself suddenly into a series of steep mud banks intersected by narrow gullies. The banks are not high, thirty or forty feet at the most, but the crests of them are so sharp and the sides so precipitous that the traveller must find his way across and round them with the utmost care. The shower had made these slopes as slippery as glass, even on foot it was almost impossible to keep upright. My horse fell as I was leading him; fortunately it was on a little ridge between mound and mound, and by the most astonishing gymnastics he managed to recover himself. I breathed a short thanksgiving when I saw my caravan emerge from the Slime Pits: we might, if the rain had lasted, have been imprisoned there for several hours, since if a horseman falls to the bottom of one of the sticky hollows he must wait there till it dries.

Along the river bank there was life. The ground was carpeted with young grass and yellow daisies, the rusty liveries of the tamarisk bushes showed some faint signs of Spring. I cantered on to the great bridge with its trellised sides and roof of beams--the most inspiring piece of architecture in the world, since it is the Gate of the Desert. There was the open place as I remembered it, covered with short turf, sheltered by the high mud banks, and, Heaven be praised! empty. We had had cause for anxiety on this head. The Turkish Government was at that time sending all the troops that could be levied to quell the insurrection in Yemen. The regiments of southern Syria were marched down to the bridge, and so on to 'Amm?n, where they were entrained and sent along the Mecca railway to what was then the terminus, Ma'?n near Petra. From M?'an they had a horrible march across a sandy waste to the head of the Gulf of 'A?abah. Many hundreds of men and many thousands of camels perished before they reached the gulf, for the wells upon that road are three only , and one lies about two miles off the track, undiscoverable to those who are not familiar with the country.

We pitched tents, picketed the horses, and lighted a huge bonfire of tamarisk and willow. The night was grey and still; there was rain on the hills, but none with us--a few inches represents the annual fall in the valley of Jordan. We were not quite alone. The Turkish Government levies a small toll on all who pass backwards and forwards across the bridge, and keeps an agent there for that purpose. He lives in a wattle hut by the gate of the bridge, and one or two ragged Arabs of the Gh?r share his solitude. Among these was a grey-haired negro, who gathered wood for our fire, and on the strength of his services spent the night with us. He was a cheery soul, was Mab??. He danced with pleasure, round the camp fire, untroubled by the consideration that he was one of the most preposterously misshapen of human beings. He told us tales of the soldiery, how they came down in rags, their boots dropping from their feet though it was but the first day's march, half starved too, poor wretches. A ??b?r had passed through that morning, another was expected to-morrow--we had just missed them. "M?sha-'llah!" said Mikh?il, "your Excellency is fortunate. First you escape from the mud hills and then from the Red?fs." "Praise be to God!" murmured Mab??, and from that day my star was recognised as a lucky one. From Mab?? we heard the first gossip of the desert. His talk was for ever of Ibn er Rash?d, the young chief of the Shamm?r, whose powerful uncle Mu?ammad left him so uneasy a legacy of dominion in central Arabia. For two years I had heard no news of Nejd--what of Ibn S?'oud, the ruler of Ri?? and Ibn er Rash?d's rival? How went the war between them? Mab?? had heard many rumours; men did say that Ibn er Rash?d was in great straits, perhaps the Red?fs were bound for Nejd and not for Yemen, who knew? and had we heard that a sheikh of the ?ukh?r had been murdered by the 'Aj?rmeh, and as soon as the tribe came back from the eastern pasturages. . . . So the tale ran on through the familiar stages of blood feud and camel lifting, the gossip of the desert--I could have wept for joy at listening to it again. There was a Babel of Arabic tongues round my camp fire that evening, for Mikh?il spoke the vulgar cockney of Jerusalem, a language bereft of dignity, and ?ab?b a dialect of the Lebanon at immense speed, and Mu?ammad had the Beyrouti drawl with its slow expressionless swing, while from the negro's lips fell something approaching to the virile and splendid speech of the Bedouin. The men themselves were struck by the variations of accent, and once they turned to me and asked which was right. I could only reply, "God knows! for He is omniscient," and the answer received a laughing acceptance, though I confess I proffered it with some misgiving.

The dawn broke windless and grey. An hour and a half from the moment I was awakened till the mules were ready to start was the appointed rule, but sometimes we were off ten minutes earlier, and sometimes, alas! later. I spent the time in conversing with the guardian of the bridge, a native of Jerusalem. To my sympathetic ears did he confide his sorrows, the mean tricks that the Ottoman government was accustomed to play on him, and the hideous burden of existence during the summer heats. And then the remuneration! a mere nothing! His gains were larger, however, than he thought fit to name, for I subsequently discovered that he had charged me three piastres instead of two for each of my seven animals. It is easy to be on excellent terms with Orientals, and if their friendship has a price it is usually a small one. We crossed the Rubicon at three piastres a head and took the northern road which leads to Salt. The middle road goes to ?eshb?n, where lives the great Sheikh of all the Arabs of the Bel?a, Sul??n ibn 'Ali i? ?i?b ul 'Adw?n, a proper rogue, and the southern to M?deba in Moab. The eastern side of the Gh?r is much more fertile than the western. Enough water flows from the beautiful hills of Ajl?n to turn the plain into a garden, but the supply is not stored, and the Arabs of the 'Adw?n tribes content themselves with the sowing of a little corn. The time of flowers was not yet. At the end of March the eastern Gh?r is a carpet of varied and lovely bloom, which lasts but a month in the fierce heat of the valley, indeed a month sees the plants through bud and bloom and ripened seed. A ragged Arab showed us the path. He had gone down to join the Red?fs, having been bought as a substitute at the price of fifty napoleons by a well-to-do inhabitant of Salt. When he reached the bridge he found he was too late, his regiment having passed through two days before. He was sorry, he would have liked to march forth to the war , but his daughter would be glad, for she had wept to see him go. He stopped to extricate one of his leather slippers from the mud.

"Next year," quoth he, catching me up again, "please God I shall go to America."

I stared in amazement at the half-naked figure, the shoes dropping from the bare feet, the torn cloak slipping from the shoulders, the desert head-dress of kerchief and camel's hair rope.

"Can you speak any English?" I asked.

"No," he replied calmly, "but I shall have saved the price of the journey, and, by God! here there is no advancement."

I inquired what he would do when he reached the States.

"Buy and sell," he replied; "and when I have saved 200 liras I shall return."

The same story can be heard all over Syria. Hundreds go out every year, finding wherever they land some of their compatriots to give them a helping hand. They hawk the streets with cheap wares, sleep under bridges, live on fare that no freeborn citizen would look at, and when they have saved 200 liras, more or less, they return, rich men in the estimation of their village. East of Jordan the exodus is not so great, yet once in the mountains of the Haur?n I stopped to ask my way of a Druze, and he answered me in the purest Yankee. I drew rein while he told me his tale, and at the end of it I asked him if he were going back. He looked round at the stone hovels of the village, knee deep in mud and melting snow: "You bet!" he replied, and as I turned away he threw a cheerful "So long!" after me.

"If ever you wish to enter there," said Abu Namr?d, "go to Namr?d." And to Namr?d accordingly I had come.

A very short inquiry revealed the dwelling of ?ab?b F?ris. I was received warmly, ?ab?b was out, Namr?d away , but would I not come in and rest? The house was small and the children many: while I debated whether the soaked ground outside would not prove a better bed, there appeared a magnificent old man in full Arab dress, who took my horse by the bridle, declared that he and no other should lodge me, and so led me away. I left my horse at the kh?n, climbed a long and muddy stair, and entered a stone paved courtyard. Y?sef Effendi hurried forward and threw open the door of his guest-chamber. The floor and the divan were covered with thick carpets, the windows glazed , a European cheffonier stood against the wall: this was more than good enough. In a moment I was established, drinking Y?sef's coffee, and eating my own cake.

Y?sef Effendi Sukkar is a Christian and one of the richest of the inhabitants of Salt. He is a laconic man, but as a host he has not his equal. He prepared me an excellent supper, and when I had eaten, the remains were set before Mikh?il. Having satisfied my physical needs he could not or would not do anything to allay my mental anxieties as to the further course. Fortunately at this moment ?ab?b F?ris arrived, and his sister-in-law, Paulina, an old acquaintance, and several other worthies, all hastening to "honour themselves" at the prospect of an evening's talk. We settled down to coffee, the bitter black coffee of the Arabs, which is better than any nectar. The cup is handed with a "Deign to accept," you pass it back empty, murmuring "May you live!" As you sip some one ejaculates, "A double health," and you reply, "Upon your heart!" When the cups had gone round once or twice and all necessary phrases of politeness had been exchanged I entered upon the business of the evening. How was I to reach the Druze mountains? the Government would probably refuse me permission, at 'Amm?n there was a military post on the entrance of the desert road; at Bo?r? they knew me, I had slipped through their fingers five years before, a trick that would be difficult to play a second time from the same place. ?ab?b F?ris considered, and finally we hammered out a plan between us. He would send me to-morrow to ?neib, his corn land on the edge of the desert; there I should find Namr?d who would despatch word to one of the big tribes, and with an escort from them I could ride up in safety to the hills. Y?sef's two small sons sat listening open-eyed, and at the end of the talk one of them brought me a scrap of an advertisement with the map of America upon it. Thereat I showed them my maps, and told them how big the world was and how fine a place, till at ten the party broke up and Y?sef began spreading quilts for my bed. Then and not till then did I see my hostess. She was a woman of exceptional beauty, tall and pale, her face a full oval, her great eyes like stars. She wore Arab dress, a narrow dark blue robe that caught round her bare ankles as she walked, a dark blue cotton veil bound about her forehead with a red handkerchief and falling down her back almost to the ground. Her chin and neck were tattooed in delicate patterns with indigo, after the manner of the Bedouin women. She brought me water, which she poured over my hands, moved about the room silently, a dark and stately figure, and having finished her ministrations she disappeared as silently as she had come, and I saw her no more. "She came in and saluted me," said the poet, he who lay in durance at Mecca, "then she rose and took her leave, and when she departed my soul went out after her." No one sees Y?sef's wife. Christian though he be, he keeps her more strictly cloistered than any Moslem woman; and perhaps after all he is right.

The rain beat against the windows, and I lay down on the quilts with Mikh?il's exclamation in my ears: "M?sha-'llah! your Excellency is fortunate."

The village of Salt is a prosperous community of over 10,000 souls, the half of them Christian. It lies in a rich country famous for grapes and apricots, its gardens are mentioned with praise as far back as the fourteenth century by the Arab geographer Abu'l F?da. There is a ruined castle, of what date I know not, on the hill above the clustered house roofs. The tradition among the inhabitants is that the town is very ancient; indeed, the Christians declare that in Salt was one of the first of the congregations of their faith, and there is even a legend that Christ was His own evangelist here. Although the apricot trees showed nothing as yet but bare boughs the valley had an air of smiling wealth as I rode through it with ?ab?b F?ris, who had mounted his mare to set me on my way. He had his share in the apricot orchards and the vineyards, and smiled agreeably, honest man, as I commended them. Who would not have smiled on such a morning? The sun shone, the earth glittered with frost, and the air had a sparkling transparency which comes only on a bright winter day after rain. But it was not merely a general sense of goodwill that had inspired my words; the Christians of Salt and of M?deba are an intelligent and an industrious race, worthy to be praised. During the five years since I had visited this district they had pushed forward the limit of cultivation two hours' ride to the east, and proved the value of the land so conclusively that when the ??jj railway was opened through it the Sultan laid hands on a great tract stretching as far south as Ma'?n, intending to convert it into a chiflik, a royal farm. It will yield riches to him and to his tenants, for if he be an indifferent ruler, he is a good landlord.

Half an hour from Salt, ?ab?b left me, committing me to the care of his hind, Y?sef, a stalwart man, who strode by my side with his wooden club over his shoulder. We journeyed through wide valleys, treeless, uninhabited, and almost uncultivated, round the head of the Bel?a plain, and past the opening of the W?dy S?r, down which a man may ride through oak woods all the way to the Gh?r. There would be trees on the hills too if the charcoal burners would let them grow--we passed by many dwarf thickets of oak and thorn--but I would have nothing changed in the delicious land east of Jordan. A generation or two hence it will be deep in corn and scattered over with villages, the waters of the W?dy S?r will turn mill-wheels, and perhaps there will even be roads: praise be to God! I shall not be there to see. In my time the uplands will still continue to be that delectable region of which Omar Khayy?m sings: "The strip of herbage strown that just divides the desert from the sown"; they will still be empty save for a stray shepherd standing over his flock with a long-barrelled rifle; and when I meet the rare horseman who rides over those bills and ask him whence he comes, he will still answer: "May the world be wide to you! from the Arabs."

From the broken uplands that stand over the Gh?r, we entered ground with a shallow roll in it and many small ruined sites dotted over it. There was one at the head of the W?dy S?r, and a quarter of an hour before we reached it we had seen a considerable mass of foundations and a big tank, which the Arabs call Birket Umm el 'Am?d . Y?sef said its name was due to a column which used to stand in the middle of it, surrounded by the water; an Arab shot at it and broke it, and its fragments lie at the bottom of the tank. The mound or tell, to give it its native name, of Am?reh is covered with ruins, and further on at Yad?deh there are rock-hewn tombs and sarcophagi lying at the edge of the tank. All the frontier of the desert is strewn with similar vestiges of a populous past, villages of the fifth and sixth centuries when M?deba was a rich and flourishing Christian city, though some are certainly earlier still, perhaps pre-Roman. Yad?deh of the tombs was inhabited by a Christian from Salt, the greatest corn-grower in these parts, who lived in a roughly built farm-house on the top of the tell; he too is one of the energetic new comers who are engaged in spreading the skirts of cultivation. Here we left the rolling country and passed out into the edges of a limitless plain, green with scanty herbage, broken by a rounded tell or the back of a low ridge--and then the plain once more, restful to the eye yet never monotonous, steeped in the magic of the winter sunset, softly curving hollows to hold the mist, softly swelling slopes to hold the light, and over it all the dome of the sky which vaults the desert as it vaults the sea. The first hillock was that of ?neib. We got in, after a nine hours' march, at 5.30, just as the sun sank, and pitched tents on the southern slope. The mound was thick with ruins, low walls of rough-hewn stones laid without mortar, rock-cut cisterns, some no doubt originally intended not for water but for corn, for which purpose they are used at present, and an open tank filled up with earth. Namr?d had ridden over to visit a neighbouring cultivator, but one of his men set forth to tell him of my arrival and he returned at ten o'clock under the frosty starlight, with many protestations of pleasure and assurances that my wishes were easy of execution. So I went to sleep wrapped in the cold silence of the desert, and woke next day to a glittering world of sunshine and fair prospects.

The first thing to be done was to send out to the Arabs. After consultation, the Da'ja, a tribe of the Bel?a, were decided to be the nearest at hand and the most likely to prove of use, and a messenger was despatched to their tents. We spent the morning examining the mound and looking through a mass of copper coins that had turned up under Namr?d's ploughshare--Roman all of them, one showing dimly the features of Constantine, some earlier, but none of the later Byzantine period, nor any of the time of the Crusaders; as far as the evidence of coinage goes, ?neib has been deserted since the date of the Arab invasion. Namr?d had discovered the necropolis, but there was nothing to be found in the tombs, which had probably been rifled centuries before. They were rock-cut and of a cistern-like character. A double arch of the solid rock with space between for a narrow entrance on the surface of the ground, a few jutting excrescences on the side walls, footholds to those who must descend, loculi running like shelves round the chambers, one row on top of another, such was their appearance. Towards the bottom of the mound on the south side there were foundations of a building which looked as though it might have been a church. But these were poor results for a day's exploration, and in the golden afternoon we rode out two hours to the north into a wide valley set between low banks. There were ruins strewn at intervals round the edge of it, and to the east some broken walls standing up in the middle of the valley--Namr?d called the spot, ?u?eir es Sa?l, the Little Castle of the Plain. Our objective was a group of buildings at the western end, Khureibet es S??. First we came to a small edifice half buried in the ground. Two sarcophagi outside pointed to its having been a mausoleum. The western wall was pierced by an arched doorway, the arch being decorated with a flat moulding. Above the level of the arch the walls narrowed by the extent of a small set-back, and two courses higher a moulded cornice ran round the building. A couple of hundred yards west of the ?a?r or castle there is a ruined temple. It had evidently been turned at some period to other uses than those for which it was intended, for there were ruined walls round the two rows of seven columns and inexplicable cross walls towards the western end of the colonnades. There appeared to have been a double court beyond, and still further west lay a complex of ruined foundations. The gateway was to the east, the jambs of it decorated with delicate carving, a fillet, a palmetto, another plain fillet, a torus worked with a vine scroll, a bead and reel, an egg and dart and a second palmetto on the cyma. The whole resembled very closely the work at Palmyra--it could scarcely rival the stone lacework of Mshitta, and besides it had a soberer feeling, more closely akin to classical models, than is to be found there. To the north of the temple on top of a bit of rising ground, there was another ruin which proved to be a second mausoleum. It was an oblong rectangle of masonry, built of large stones carefully laid without mortar. At the south-east corner a stair led into a kind of ante-chamber, level with the surface of the ground at the east side owing to the slope of the hill. There were column bases on the outer side of this ante-chamber, the vestiges probably of a small colonnade which had adorned the east fa?ade. Six sarcophagi were placed lengthways, two along each of the remaining walls, north, south and west. Below the base of the columns on either side of the stair ran a moulding, consisting of a bold torus between two fillets, and the same appeared on the inner side of the sarcophagi. The face of the buttress wall on the south side rose in two in-sets, otherwise the whole building was quite plain, though some of the fragments scattered round upon the grass were carved with a flowing vine pattern. This mausoleum recalls the pyramid tomb which is common in northern Syria; I do not remember any other example of it so far south. It may have resembled the beautiful monument with a colonnaded front which is one of the glories of the southern D?na, and the fragments of vine scroll were perhaps part of the entablature.

When I returned to my tents a little before sunset, I learnt that the boy we had despatched in the morning had lingered by the way and, alarmed by the lateness of the hour, had returned without fulfilling his mission. This was sufficiently annoying, but it was nothing compared with the behaviour of the weather next day. I woke to find the great plain blotted out by mist and rain. All day the south wind drove against us, and the storm beat upon our canvas walls. In the evening Namr?d brought news that his cave had been invaded by guests. There were a few tents of the ?ukh?r a mile or two away from us , and the day's rain had been too much for the male inhabitants. They had mounted their mares and ridden in to ?neib, leaving their women and children to shift for themselves during the night. An hour's society presented attractions after the long wet day, and I joined the company.

The following day was little more promising than that which had preceded it. The muleteers were most unwilling to leave the shelter of the caves and expose their animals to such rain in the open desert, and reluctantly I agreed to postpone the journey, and sent them into M?deba, three hours away, to buy oats for the horses, cautioning them not to mention from whom they came. It cleared a little in the afternoon, and I rode across the plain southwards to ?as?al, a fortified Roman camp standing on a mound.

This type of camp was not uncommon on the eastern frontiers of the Empire, and was imitated by the Ghass?nids when they established themselves in the Syrian desert, if indeed Mshitta was, as has been surmised, but a more exquisite example of the same kind of building. ?as?al has a strong enclosing wall broken by a single gate to the east and by round bastions at the angles and along the sides. Within, there is a series of parallel vaulted chambers leaving an open court in the centre--the plan with slight variations of ?al'at el Bei?a in the Safa and of the modern caravanserai. To the north there is a separate building, probably the Praetorium, the house of the commander of the fortress. It consists of an immense vaulted chamber, with a walled court in front of it, and a round tower at the south-west corner. The tower has a winding stair inside it and a band of decoration about the exterior, rinceaux above and fluted triglyphs below, with narrow blank metopes between them. The masonry is unusually good, the walls of great thickness; with such defences stretching to his furthest borders, the citizen of Rome might sleep secure o' nights.

When I passed by ?as?al, five years before, it was uninhabited and the land round it uncultivated, but a few families of fella??n had established themselves now under the broken vaults and the young corn was springing in the levels below the walls, circumstances which should no doubt warm the heart of the lover of humanity, but which will send a cold chill through the breast of the archaeologist. There is no obliterator like the ploughshare, and no destroyer like the peasant who seeks cut stones to build his hovel. I noted another sign of encroaching civilisation in the shape of two half starved soldiers, the guard of the nearest halting place on the ??jj railroad, which is called Z?za after the ruins a few miles to the west of it. The object of their visit was the lean hen which one of them held in his hand. He had reft it from its leaner companions in the fortress court--on what terms it were better not to inquire, for hungry men know no law. I was not particularly eager to have my presence on these frontiers notified to the authorities in 'Amm?n, and I left rather hastily and rode eastward to Z?za.

The rains had filled the desert watercourses, they do not often flow so deep or so swiftly as the one we had to cross that afternoon. It had filled, too, to the brim the great Roman tank of Z?za, so that the ?ukh?r would find water there all through the ensuing summer. The ruins are far more extensive than those at ?as?al; there must have been a great city here, for the foundations of houses cover a wide area. Probably ?as?al was the fortified camp guarding this city, and the two together shared the name of Z?za, which is mentioned in the Notitia: "Equites Dalmatici Illyriciana Z?za." There is a Saracenic ?al'ah, a fort, which was repaired by Sheikh ?oktan of the ?ukh?r, and had been furnished by him, said Namr?d, with a splendour unknown to the desert; but it has now fallen to the Sultan, since it stands in the territory selected by him for his chiflik, and fallen also into ruin. The mounds behind are strewn with foundations, among them those of a mosque, the mihrab of which was still visible to the south. Z?za was occupied by a garrison of Egyptians in Ibrah?m Pasha's time, and it was his soldiers who completed the destruction of the ancient buildings. Before they came many edifices, including several Christian churches, were still standing in an almost perfect state of preservation, so the Arabs reported. We made our way homewards along the edge of the railway embankment, and as we went we talked of the possible advantages that the land might reap from that same line. Namr?d was doubtful on this subject. He looked askance at the officials and the soldiery, indeed he had more cause to fear official raiders, whose rapacity could not be disarmed by hospitality, than the Arabs, who were under too many obligations to him to do him much harm. He had sent up a few truck-loads of corn to Damascus the year before; yes, it was an easier form of transport than his camels, and quicker, if the goods arrived at all; but generally the corn sacks were so much lighter when they reached the city than when Namr?d packed them into the trucks that the profit vanished. This would improve perhaps in time--at the time when lamps and cushions and all the fittings of the desert railway except the bare seats were allowed to remain in the place for which they were made and bought. We spoke, too, of superstition and of fears that clutch the heart at night. There are certain places, said he, where the Arabs would never venture after dark--haunted wells to which thirsty men dared not approach, ruins where the weary would not seek shelter, hollows that were bad camping grounds for the solitary. What did they fear? Jinn; who could tell what men feared? He himself had startled an Arab almost out of his wits by jumping naked at him from a lonely pool in the half light of the dawn. The man ran back to his tents, and swore that he had seen a jinni, and that the flocks should not go down to water where it abode, till Namr?d came in and laughed at him and told his own tale.

We did not go straight back to my tents. I had been invited out to dine that evening by Sheikh Nah?r of the Beni ?akhr, he who had spent the previous night in Namr?d's cave; and after consultation it had been decided that the invitation was one which a person of my exalted dignity would not be compromised by accepting.

"But in general," added Namr?d, "you should go nowhere but to a great sheikh's tent, or you will fall into the hands of those who invite you only for the sake of the present you will give. Nah?r--well, he is an honest man, though he be Mesk?n,"--a word that covers all forms of mild contempt, from that which is extended to honest poverty, through imbecility to the first stages of feeble vice.

The Mesk?n received me with the dignity of a prince, and motioned me to the place of honour on the ragged carpet between the square hole in the ground that serves as hearth and the partition that separates the women's quarters from the men's. We had tethered our horses to the long tent ropes that give such wonderful solidity to the frail dwelling, and our eyes wandered out from where we sat over the eastward sweep of the landscape--swell and fall, fall and swell, as though the desert breathed quietly under the gathering night. The lee side of an Arab tent is always open to the air; if the wind shifts the women take down the tent wall and set it up against another quarter, and in a moment your house has changed its outlook and faces gaily to the most favourable prospect. It is so small and so light, and yet so strongly anchored that the storms can do little to it; the coarse meshes of the goat's hair cloth swell and close together in the wet so that it needs continuous rain carried on a high wind before a cold stream leaks into the dwelling-place.

The coffee beans were roasted and crushed, the coffee-pots were simmering in the ashes, when there came three out of the East and halted at the open tent. They were thick-set, broad-shouldered men, with features of marked irregularity and projecting teeth, and they were cold and wet with rain. Room was made for them in the circle round the hearth, and they stretched out their fingers to the blaze, while the talk went on uninterrupted, for they were only three men of the Sherar?t, come down to buy corn in Moab, and the Sherar?t, though they are one of the largest and the most powerful of the tribes and the most famous breeders of camels, are of bad blood, and no Arab of the Bel?a would intermarry with them. They have no fixed haunts, not even in the time of the summer drought, but roam the inner desert scarcely caring if they go without water for days together. The conversation round Nah?r's fire was of my journey. A negro of the ?ukh?r, a powerful man with an intelligent face, was very anxious to come with me as guide to the Druze mountains, but he admitted that as soon as he reached the territory of those valiant hillmen he would have to turn and flee--there is always feud between the Druzes and the Beni ?akhr. The negro slaves of the ?ukh?r are well used by their masters, who know their worth, and they have a position of their own in the desert, a glory reflected from the great tribe they serve. I was half inclined to accept the present offer in spite of the possible drawback of having the negro dead upon my hands at the first Druze village, when the current of my thoughts was interrupted by the arrival of yet another guest. He was a tall young man, with a handsome delicate face, a complexion that was almost fair, and long curls that were almost brown. As he approached, Nah?r and the other sheikhs of the ?ukh?r rose to meet him, and before he entered the tent, each in turn kissed him upon both cheeks. Namr?d rose also, and cried to him as he drew near:

"Good? please God! Who is with you?"

The young man raised his hand and replied:

"God!"

He was alone.

Without seeming to notice the rest of the company, his eye embraced the three sheikhs of the Sherar?t eating mutton and curds in the entrance, and the strange woman by the fire, as with murmured salutations he passed into the back of the tent, refusing Nah?r's offer of food. He was G?abl?n, of the ruling house of the Da'ja, cousin to the reigning sheikh, and, as I subsequently found, he had heard that Namr?d needed a guide for a foreigner--news travels apace in the desert--and had come to take me to his uncle's tents. We had not sat for more than five minutes after his arrival when Nah?r whispered something to Namr?d, who turned to me and suggested that since we had dined we might go and take G?abl?n with us. I was surprised that the evening's gossip should be cut so short, but I knew better than to make any objection, and as we cantered home across Namr?d's ploughland and up the hill of ?neib, I heard the reason. There was blood between the Da'ja and the Sherar?t. At the first glance G?abl?n had recognised the lineage of his fellow guests, and had therefore retired silently into the depths of the tent. He would not dip his hand in the same mutton dish with them. Nah?r knew, as who did not? the difficulty of the situation, but he could not tell how the men of the Sherar?t would take it, and, for fear of accidents, he had hurried us away. But by next morning the atmosphere had cleared , and a day of streaming rain kept the blood enemies sitting amicably round Namr?d's coffee-pots in the cave.

The third day's rain was as much as human patience could endure. I had forgotten by this time what it was like not to feel damp, to have warm feet and dry bed clothes. G?abl?n spent an hour with me in the morning, finding out what I wished of him. I explained that if he could take me through the desert where I should see no military post and leave me at the foot of the hills, I should desire no more. G?abl?n considered a moment.

"Oh lady," said he, "do you think you will be brought into conflict with the soldiery? for if so, I will take my rifle."

I replied that I did not contemplate declaring open war with all the Sultan's chivalry, and that with a little care I fancied that such a contingency might be avoided; but G?abl?n was of opinion that strategy went further when winged with a bullet, and decided that he would take his rifle with him all the same.

In the afternoon, having nothing better to do, I watched the Sherar?t buying corn from Namr?d. But for my incongruous presence and the lapse of a few thousand years, they might have been the sons of Jacob come down into Egypt to bicker over the weight of the sacks with their brother Joseph. The corn was kept in a deep dry hole cut in the rock, and was drawn out like so much water in golden bucketsful. It had been stored with chaff for its better protection, and the first business was to sift it at the well-head, a labour that could not be executed without much and angry discussion. Not even the camels were silent, but joined in the argument with groans and bubblings, as the Arabs loaded them with the full sacks. The Sheikhs of the ?ukh?r and the Sherar?t sat round on stones in the drizzling mist, and sometimes they muttered, "God! God!" and sometimes they exclaimed, "He is, merciful and compassionate!" Not infrequently the sifted corn was poured back among the unsifted, and a dialogue of this sort ensued:

"Cold, cold! W?llah! rain and cold!"

At dusk I went into the servants' tent and found Namr?d whispering tales of murder over the fire on which my dinner was a-cooking.

"In the days when I was a boy," said he , "you could not cross the Gh?r in peace. But I had a mare who walked--w?llah! how she walked! Between sunrise and sunset she walked me from Mezer?b to Salt, and never broke her pace. And besides I was well known to all the Ghaw?rny . And one night in summer I had to go to Jerusalem--force upon me! I must ride. The waters of Jordan were low, and I crossed at the ford, for there was no bridge then. And as I reached the further bank I heard shouts and the snap of bullets. And I hid in the tamarisk bushes more than an hour till the moon was low, and then I rode forth softly. And at the entrance of the mud hills the mare started from the path, and I looked down and saw the body of a man, naked and covered with knife wounds. And he was quite dead. And as I gazed they sprang out on me from the mud hills, ten horsemen and I was but one. And I backed against the thicket and fired twice with my pistol, but they surrounded me and threw me from the mare and bound me, and setting me again upon the mare they led me away. And when they came to the halting place they fell to discussing whether they should kill me, and one said: 'W?llah! let us make an end.' And he came near and looked into my face, and it was dawn. And he said: 'It is Namr?d!' for he knew me, and I had succoured him. And they unbound me and let me go, and I rode up to Jerusalem."

The muleteers and I listened with breathless interest as one story succeeded another.

"There are good customs and bad among the Arabs," said Namr?d, "but the good are many. Now when they wish to bring a blood feud to an end, the two enemies come together in the tent of him who was offended. And the lord of the tent bares his sword and turns to the south and draws a circle on the floor, calling upon God. Then he takes a shred of the cloth of the tent and a handful of ashes from the hearth and throws them in the circle, and seven times he strikes the line with his naked sword. And the offender leaps into the circle, and one of the relatives of his enemy cries aloud: 'I take the murder that he did upon me!' Then there is peace. Oh lady! the women have much power in the tribe, and the maidens are well looked on. For if a maiden says: 'I would have such an one for my husband,' he must marry her lest she should be put to shame. And if he has already four wives let him divorce one, and marry in her place the maiden who has chosen him. Such is the custom among the Arabs."

He turned to my Druze muleteer and continued:

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