X. THE STONY DESERT OF DAMASCUS

—What, you never ate a prairie oyster? cried the Major. Never—Then you shall by heaven, before the evening’s out. And so it happened after we had given everybody airplane rides blindfolded on a board, even to the cook and all the bearahs and one little man they dragged in off the street, and while we were swallowing our prairie oysters and taking a last nip of Scotch, rifle shots started snapping somewhere towards the edge of town. Someone looked out of the window into the rainy square and said,—Dear me, they seem to be firing. After I had gone to bed above the lisp of rain trickling down mudwalls I could hear an occasional shot shiver the cadence of the rain like a breaking glass.

At breakfast over the bacon and eggs it transpired that a raid had been made on the sarai, the government house, and that the safe had been carried away—Never mind, I know who did it, said the Adviser; he’s a good friend of mine. I’ll have him locked up before night. Those damn native levies are probably in league with him. I’ll settle him. We had hardly finished our last cup of tea when a young man dressed in a fine Persian aba of camel’s hair, with an expensive pink agal so heavily bound with gold thread that it would not stay straight but balanced ridiculously awry on his head, came stamping in with much ceremony. He said he was the son of the naqib of Madina and a relative of Malik Feisul, and gave what was afterwards explained to me to be an animated description of the heroic stand the caravan camp had made against the raiders. He also said it was too wet for the camels to start and that we were to spend yet another day looking at the crumbled mudwalls and the date gardens of Romadi. Tomorrow if God willed.… Bukra insh’allah.

Then the Aviator and the Intelligence Man and myself were prevailed upon to visit the young man with the pink-gilt agal in his tent and I was made to ride out on a led horse with red tassels on the bridle. In the tent, that was an English tent bought in Baghdad, we sat on sheepskins and drank tea and ate Turkish paste and I fingered my list of Arabic words like a breviary. Bronzefaced people gradually seeped in, made polite ejaculations and were silent. Tallow smell of sheepskins. Flash of eyes, teeth, brown toes along the edges of a Persian rug and lean dry hands motionless among the folds of abas, and a rakish man with a black beard passing little swell-bottomed glasses of tea, that the young man with the pink-gilt agal, who turned out to be the Sayyid Mohamet, clogged with condensed milk with his own hands as an especial treat. Eventually we escaped to the open air again after a great deal of bowing and scraping on both sides and went back to chairs, whisky and soda and luncheon. In the afternoon the indefatigable Sayyid Mahomet reappeared and dragged me round to the coffee houses and cigarette shops of the small brick bazaar down towards the Euphrates. We squatted on cane benches, grinning at each other, speechless as apes, and watched the flies glinting in the sun above a muddy alley outside, and drank tiny cups of coffee black as night and perfumed with some herb or other, the herb of delay perhaps that induces the bittersweet drowse into which one falls waiting for steamers to coal and roads to dry and streams to become fordable and caravans to start. Tomorrow, insh’allah, if God willed, we would start for Damascus across the desert.

And what should appear, wheezing and popping through the ruts and puddles, but the rusty Ford that had brought me from Baghdad across the mudflats that lie between the rivers’? The Sayyid was immediately agog with it and after a great deal of discussion we set out through drizzly rain, lurching and clattering through puddles, spluttering down narrow lanes, frightening old women and chickens, making horses rear and break their halters. Half the population of the café had piled in, grave men in brown robes with beards like Micah and Ezekiel stood on the running-boards, little urchins hoisted up their gowns about their shoulders and ran after us, and every time the motor backfired everybody rolled up his eyes and cried, alham’d ’ullah, Praise be to God. At last when we had twice circumnavigated the walls and date gardens and the tumbled cemeteries of Romadi, the engine gave a final frantic explosion, there was a horrid buckling snarl from the differential, and the car stopped. The driver took off his tarboosh and wailed and everybody roared with laughter. Took the opportunity to slip back into Europe through a breach in the wall to the British officers’ mess, where I sat reading the Strand until it was time for whiskys and sodas again.

After dinner and talk about irrigation schemes and uprisings I set out with two men with lanterns to find the caravan camp. A rainy wind was howling in our faces and continually blew out the lanterns, and we expected to find a raider in every patch of grey in the shrill blackness of the night. Eventually we heard a man singing and there came on the wind the growl and sharp smell of camels. The Britishers’ servants left me in my tent in the care of an obsequious and soiled man named Fahad who set up my bed with great skill and bowed himself out. Then one Saleh, a crookednosed youth in an English army coat, came in and said with a fine cockney twang:—Me speak bloody English, messboy bloody English camp. Me boy take care seecamels. Then he stopped and with the greatest delicacy and good humor began to say it over again—Do we go tomorrow? I interrupted him. He rolled up his eyes, gargled an insh’allah and left me. I sat on my cot and looked about. The tent was crimson inside, with little decorations of hearts and diamonds on the flaps. It was round at the top, tapering to a single pole, and hexagonal at the bottom and gave me the feeling of being a worm in a fuchsia flower. Rain had come up and beat a gentle tattoo on the roof. I got undressed slowly, listening to the extraordinary bubbling and groaning of the camels. At last here was an end of colonies and whisky and soda and the Strand and canned goods and the American Bar on Tigris bank and the soldier-littered rail-scarred dumping grounds of the West. I wrapped myself in my striped Tabriz and blew out the candle. The rain beat harder on the sag of the tent over my head. People on guard round the camp called to each other at intervals with a long gruffening call. Once there were some shots far away. And just outside my tent someone was crooning a frail circular snatch of song over and over again. Something about Ali Asgar, Ali Afgar, dead at Kerbela. The word dead, Miut, I recognized because coming up from Baghdad we had passed the body of a Hindoo boy beside the road lying on its back with a stony smile, and Jassem had come back to the car from looking at it, had shaken his beard and said, Miut, and we had driven on. And listening to the song and the bubbling of the camels and the beat of the rain I went to sleep.

First Day: Woke up and crawled out of my tent to find everything else struck and everyone bustling and shouting at a tremendous rate. My delull (dromedary) that I’d been introduced to the day before and whose name I had thought to be Malek stood waiting, and her tasselled saddlebags they dragged the ground O! The datepalms in the gardens of Romandi stood kneedeep in mist that was just beginning to sop up gold in premonition of the sun. While I grasped the silver-encrusted pommels of the saddle everybody gathered round anxiously to see if I would fall off when Malek jerked to her feet. The hobble was loosed. Malek gave a grunt and opened herself like a jackknife. My head poked above the mist into the sunlight that stung red in my eyes. Then we turned round and followed the long string of baggage camels down the ruddy trail that led north and west towards Kubaissa, and for the first time I noticed round the shadows of my head and Malek’s nodding head and Fahad’s head the halo that so excited Cellini.

There’s already excitement about safety money. It seems certain Bedawi of Toman are going to attack us if we don’t come across with five pounds Turkish per head of cattle. We are being guarded by some fine hardboiled men on ponies, henchmen, if I got the name right, of one Abdul Aziz, head sheikh of the Delaim. From the moment we got out of gunshot of the sarai at Romadi we were on our own. During the afternoon I had lagged behind the main body of the caravan and was brewing tea with the Sayyid Mahomet and Hadji Mahomet, his cook, and a fauneyed brown youngster from Damascus named Saleh, over a fire of wormwood sticks, when there appeared suddenly over a pebbly hill to the west a bunch of men riding their camels hard. They stopped when they saw us and the wind brought us the groaning and gurgling of their beasts as they dismounted. The Sayyid grabbed his gun and began talking big, and the cook hastily packed the tea things, and we all rode hard after the caravan, saddlebags bouncing and rattling, dromedaries slobbering and snorting. Marvellous how not knowing the language takes away all sense of responsibility. I followed the rest without the vaguest idea of who was friend and who foe, calm in the recollection that my watch had gone by airplane mail. Of course it was a false alarm, but it made your blood tingle just the same. Almost as much as the air and the larks that rose singing from under the camels’ feet and the uproar and shouting when a rabbit loped off into the thorny underbrush.

Second Day: We camped in a place called Sheib Mahomedi near a running stream. On the horizon to the north there are smudges of black smoke from the bitumen pits of Kubaissa. This morning I had to dress up in aba and ismak as Jassem made Saleh tell me that the sight of a European hat would make the caravan unpopular—English hat no bloody good. Arab hat good. So I am lying in all the pomp of a new Baghdad aba on a rug in front of my tent under a shining sky streaked like turquoise matrix. Beside my tent the big bales that load Jassem er Rawwaf’s camels are piled in a semicircle round a fire about which all the gravest people of the caravan squat and drink coffee. Opposite is the English tent of the Sayyid Mahomet, which is where gilded youth seems to gather. The circle is completed by the bales of the six or seven other outfits that make up the caravan, arranged like Jassem’s in a halfmoon to windward of the fire. Besides the Sayyid and myself and the dancing girls on their way to Aleppo there is only a Damascus merchant effete enough to pitch a tent. Everyone else squats on rugs round the fires under the blue. The camels have been driven off to pasture on the dry shrubs of the hills round about the waterhole and stand dark in curious attitudes against the skyline. Occasionally you catch sight of a guard with his gun aslant his back, motionless, watching from the top of one of the tawny and steely violet hills that break away in every direction like a confusion of seawaves.

Down by the waterhole where I had been bathing I had a long talk in seven words and considerable pantomime with one of the Sayyid Mahomet’s retainers, a tall chap with very slender feet and hands, named Souleiman. He was asking about an Englishman named “Hilleby” with whose outfit he had been cameldriver in the Nejd. Hearing that I knew about “Hilleby” excited him enormously. He too dressed like an Arab and liked the sweet air of the desert—Air of desert sweet like honey. Baghdad air filth. Souleiman plucked a sprig of an aromatic plant and made me smell it, some sort of rosemary perhaps it was—Desert like that, he said; then he screwed up his face in a spasm of disgust—Ingliz Baghdad like that. “Hilleby” friend of Arab, not afraid of the desert, good. Then he took me by the hand and led me to the Sayyid’s tent and sat me down in the seat of honor and brought me coffee and dates. After sitting there a long time trying to pick up a word here and there in the talk that seemed to be about the Nejd and how smoking was forbidden there and how great and goodly a person was ibn Saoud whom even the English called Sultan, Fahad my cameldriver appeared to tell me that my supper was ready. From him and Baghdad Saleh I got the impression that I was thought by the people of Jassem’s outfit to be frequenting low company in sitting so much in the tent of the Sayyid Mahomet. Saleh said as much when he drove the camels home at sunset:—Sayyid he bloody no good. Social life in the desert seems to be as complicated as it is everywhere else.

So I sat alone in my tent eating rice and canned sausage, kosher sausage at that. I peered out through the half-closed flap—Fahad always had the idea I ought to eat in secret and used to shut me up carefully every time he went out—and tried to size up the other outfits in the caravan. Round Jassem er Rawwaf’s campfire were my tent and the tent of the dancing girls, from which came a faint wailing of babies, and the little campfires of people with only a few camels who seemed to have attached themselves to Jassem’s outfit. Then opposite was the Sayyid’s khaki tent and the big tent of the merchant from Damascus and the two wattled litters in which squatted without ever moving a little Turkish merchant and his wife. At one end of the oval was the big encampment of the people who are driving the young camels over to sell in Syria, and at the other the outfit made remarkable by the presence of a fine old gentleman with a green turban and a beard like snow and a dark blue umbrella.

Blue smokespirals uncoil crisply from the campfires through the amethyst twilight. Camels stroll towards the camp in a densening herd, sniffing the air and nibbling at an occasional cluster of twigs, urged on by the long labial cry of the driver. The mollah is chanting the evening prayer. The men stand with bare feet in a long rank facing the southwest, make the prostrations slowly, out of unison. Gradually the camels fill the great oval place between the campfires, are hobbled and fold themselves up in rows, chewing and groaning. The stars impinge sharply like flaws in the luminous crystal-dark sky. My blankets smell of camel and are smoky from the fire. Once asleep, I am awakened by two shots that ring on the night like on a bell. There’s a sound of voices and pebbles scuttling under naked feet. Saleh sticks his head in the tent and says proudly,—Haremi, bang, bang, imshi, go away. And I’m asleep again rocked like by waves by the soft fuzzy grumbling noise of five hundred camels.

Third Day: After a couple of hours’ riding we saw palms in a shallow ravine and came upon the little desert port of Kubaissa huddled into its mudwalls among rocky ledges and sandhills. Was taken to see the Mudir and wasted most of the day in mamnouning, coffee, and civilities. In front of the city gate children were playing with a tame gazelle. Was carried off to his house by a fine fat sheikh and fed a wonderful meal of eggs and rice and fried dates and chicken. The fat sheikh is coming with us to terrify the bedawi by the augustness of his presence—All friends, he says, slapping himself on the chest. Was made to taste nine or ten different kinds of dates and not allowed to go to the bazaar, all sorts of attendants being sent to buy things I wanted instead. All this high society is rather trying. Eventually escaped with a book up a long rocky gulch to a deep basin in the hills full of mineral springs that steamed and bubbled out of potholes in yellow rocks. A very Sinai sort of a place. Jehovah used to come here in the old days.

Fourth Day: Great complication of social events. The Mudir came out to call on Jassem and the Americai, but was lured to the tent of the Sayyid Mahomet, who’s a great little social climber, instead. Excitement and dark looks. Then apologies. Visit made all over again, interminable mamnouning. I squatted and grinned and nodded like a damned porcelain figure. Still the Sayyid carried off his infamy in fine style, spreading rugs and abas on the ground and then strewing on them with a grandiloquent gesture a basket of dates and a bag of Turkish paste that the Mudir distributed to his attendants and to the maimed and halt and blind who crowded round. A great day for the Sayyid. Bukra insh’allah, we are off.

Fifth Day: Malek has bushy eyelashes and eyebrows she can wiggle. Extraordinary how dainty camels are about their food. Some luscious-looking dry shrubs she won’t touch and there are occasionally little rosettes with thistly leaves that make her eyes pop out of her head with greediness, that no amount of beating will drive her past.

Off first thing in the morning with considerable pomp, with the sun right in our backs and our shadows incredibly long, topped by crowns of bright rays. Rode with the fat sheikh, who kept producing legs of chicken out of his saddlebags. This is the order of our going: the outfits each start separately, with Jassem’s usually first, and gradually fall into line along the trail; then as they get the sleep jounced out of them and the sun thaws their dromedaries the grandees of the caravan ride ahead. A couple of the Agail can usually be seen scouting far off among rocky hillocks on the horizon. At lunch the grandees squat about saucepans of rice and drink coffee and the caravan gets ahead and is caught up to during the afternoon.

This evening we’re camping in a flat basin full of low aromatic plants, shiah and ruetha. Ruetha, that’s probably the aromatic stuff Xenophon’s always talking about in the Anabasis, seems to delight the camels beyond anything. Water must stand here in the rainy season. That rainy season, incidentally, must be about on us, for great showers are piling up to northward to everybody’s delight, as they say a day’s rain will mean plenty of food for camels. Also it keeps the Bedawi in their tents.

Sat in the tent of the Sayyid, in spite of Baghdad Saleh’s remonstrances,—Sayyid he bloody loosewiler, whatever that meant,—and drank tea clogged with condensed milk I’d given the Sayyid in a moment of expansiveness, and listened to Souleiman, the man who went to the Nejd with “Hilleby,” play wailingly on a tiny little lute.

Trebizond

Sixth Day: Enteuthen exelaunei a good bunch of parasangs with a general feeling of climbing up on a plateau. The trail, made up of many little paths padded soft by the feet of centuries of camels, wound around pinkish ledges here and there dotted with dry plants. In one place we passed the traditional skeletons. In a bottom we found the tracks of a Ford, the tracks of Leachman’s car, they said. Leachman was shot during the revolt by the son of an old man he’d insulted. A delicious camping place at length at the edge of a basin where the dry shiah was tall as your waist. Three big rabbits broke cover as we were folding up our camels and everybody shouted and shot off guns in a most cheerful manner.

In the afternoon passed a small square stone tower.

Walked abroad after supper at the hour when they were bringing home the camels. A Bedawi whom I’d seen before riding on a white dromedary came up to me and said he was a friend of Malik Feisul’s. We walked out into the desert together, he sniffing the air and saying that the air of the desert was sweet. His name was Nuwwaf. His tents were in El Garrá halfway over to Damascus. I taught him to say north, south, east and west, and he pronounced the words perfectly at once; while my pronunciation of the Arabic equivalents was so comical that he laughed until the tears filled his kohl-pencilled eyes. He took me to have coffee with the people who are bringing over the herd of young camels to sell in Syria. The Hadji, the old gentleman with the umbrella, was sitting at their campfire holding forth about something.

Back in my tent I found Baghdad Saleh and Jassem’s little boy rolling me cigarettes. They tried to explain some terrible fate that had almost swooped down on the camels, but I couldn’t gather anything definite except that it had been averted by Baghdad Saleh’s single-handed prowess. It’s very difficult to discover what Saleh means when he tries to speak English because, having worked in the Anglo-Indian camp in Baghdad, he has the deplorable notion that Hindustani and English are the same language.

It’s the finest thing in the world to have no watch and no money and to feel no responsibility for events. Like being a dervish or a very small child.

Seventh Day: The mail plane passed overhead, flying high. Everybody looked at it scornfully without comment. Goddam cold and rainsqualls lashing in our faces. Everything more or less wet. Never have seen such exquisite distaste expressed by any animal as by Malek in the rain. Insh’allah the wind will go down with the sun. Sitting in chilly splendor in my gold-embroidered aba in my hearts and diamonds tent that lets in the wind most damnably for all its crimson lining. But who ever shivered in a broader wind?

The Sayyid’s stock seems to be very low in the caravan. Souleiman had a fight with him about something, hit him in the face, so Baghdad Saleh says, climbed on his camel and made off for Baghdad. I shall miss the faint wail of his lute stealing through the bubbling, grumbling sound of camels across the camp at night.

Eighth Day: There never was invented a leisurelier, more soothing way of travel than this. The swaying of the camel is just enough to tire you out gradually, gently. You beat him just enough to keep your thoughts in a faint doze. You ride first with one person, then with another, looking back at the long trailing caravan like a kite’s tail behind you; parts of it go out of sight in depressions, curve round hills. It’s the way clouds travel, rivers flow. There are no orders given. Everyone knows what to do, as when birds migrate.

The sky is an immense sphere of clouded glass balanced on the bit of piecrust the earth; today it shines with occasional ruddy flaws of winter sunshine.

Towards evening, at the hour when your legs ache and your belly yaps like a dog with hunger, we came into a vast shallow valley running north and south. At the other rim of it was a row of long black things like beetles, the tents of the Delaim.

Ninth Day: Sweet wind and clear sky. A small party of Agail with a dozen or so baggage camels passed us coming from Aleppo. Very much like speaking a ship at sea.

We sat all day in our tents, O Israel.

Spent the day roaming about restlessly, trying to talk Arabic with Nuwwaf and reading Molière. There’s some hitch. The fat sheikh from Kubaissa seems rather low. Much talk of a certain sheikh Mohamet Turki of the Kubain wanting an incredible amount of safety money.

Tenth Day: Still in the same place. Strange people keep filtering into camp, Delaim dressed in white, very large white-skinned men with waxed whiskers and their hair in pleats over their ears. They are friends of the Agail and the caravan is more or less under their protection.

From the first crack of dawn tremendous tumultuous speechifying went on at the campfire of Jassem er Rawwaf and has kept up all day; people jump to their feet and shout and wave their arms. The fat sheikh seems to be the general mediator. Jassem er Rawwaf is tall with prominent teeth and a beard slightly lopsided like the beard of Moses; he wears two head-cloths that fall amply over his shoulders, one white and one purple, and mostly sits silent directing the making of coffee with little movements of his long hands or strokes a string of amber beads. Once he got angry and leaned forward across the fire and said something slowly and deliberately that made everyone quiet down and nod his head. Later I asked him what the row was about. He smiled and shrugged his shoulders, at the same time rubbing his thumb and forefinger together with a gesture incredibly Semitic, and said gently, Floos, money.

All the desert seems to be prowling about greedily and appraisingly, waiting to pounce on our bales of Persian tobacco and the tempting herd of young camels.

Nuwwaf came and sat in my tent and talked a great deal about how the Ingliz were united and used their guns only to shoot strangers, while the Arabs were always squabbling among themselves and were very nice to strangers. At least so I understood. I agreed with him vigorously.

There’s a great deal of polishing of guns going on.

Eleventh Day: Last night happened the first great rumpus.

I’d gone to my tent and closed myself in to read by candlelight when across the camp there began a great deal of shouting. Everybody started tripping over my tent ropes and rushing about. Baghdad Saleh rushed in to get his gun that he’d left there for safe keeping. Fahad appeared tremendously excited and kept shouting something equivalent to Man the boats. I stood in the door of the tent without being able to see anything, as it was very dark, but Fahad insisted I go in again, shaking his head in a most lugubrious manner. Meanwhile the candle had been knocked over, so I sat a minute in the dark on my cot, listening to the growing tumult outside. I had been plentifully nourished with horrors of Baghdad so I began to form pictures like the waxwork at Madam Toussaud’s of Gordon at Khartoum. I thought of lithographs I’d had in my childhood of explorers in pith helmets being transfixed by assegais. The unfortunate death of the Prince Napoleon. Thank God I didn’t have a pith helmet.

Finding that I was trembling and chilly, I went to the door of the tent again and lit a cigarette. Immediately a man I did not know ran by shouting something. I gave him the cigarette. He went off with it, seeming much encouraged. Then the Sayyid came up bareheaded and shaking and breathless, saying something about a gun. No, I didn’t have a gun, but I gave him my cigarette. By the time I’d given away a handful of cigarettes the shouting had begun to recede in the distance. I kept wondering when the rifles would begin, not knowing how extremely careful with firearms the Arabs are. Then a great many people came and began to explain what had happened, all more or less unintelligibly. Did manage to gather, though, that the fight had started by one of ibn Kubain’s men trying to steal the Sayyid’s rifle. The rifle had been got back but there had been a fight and heads had been broken.

There were double sentries posted and everybody lay down heroically to sleep.

This morning we moved north across a thorny slope noisy with larks, to a camping place near a waterhole in front of the tents of the Delaim.

Went over with the fat sheikh to visit the Delaim. Their tents are very large, open on the lee side, divided in the middle by a curtain that screens off the women’s part. To anyone born in a way of life given over to cult of Things they seem incredibly bare; a few rugs, some saddles and guns and a couple of piles of sheepskins, some cooking-bowls and the black ragged walls of their tents, are all the Delaim have to swaddle themselves in between the naked earth and the inconceivable sky. We squatted on rugs that were spread for us, coffee was brought, and I stared across the plain that stretched away indefinitely southward, where grazed great herds of sheep with men in brown robes walking among them like in illustrations to the Old Testament, while the fat sheikh talked gravely with the people we were the guests of. Then a woman brought a flat wooden dish that had in it a cake of unleavened bread, steaming hot, swimming with melted ewe’s butter. Must be such butter that Jael brought forth in a lordly dish. A boy poured water over our hands from a little copper ewer, and the head of the house broke a piece out of the middle of the dish with a loud Alham’d’ullah. Then we stretched out our right hands and did eat.

In the afternoon went round and sat at people’s fires and drank coffee and tried to find out how long we were expected to stay in the tents of the Delaim. Everybody said we’d go bukra insh’allah, but they said insh’allah so many times and rolled up their eyes so fearfully as they said it that it seemed pretty sure that the responsibility for leaving tomorrow was being foisted on Allah and that we’d stay where we were.

Twelfth Day: Terrific cold wind. Too cold to do anything but crouch over the fire with your eyes full of smoke.

Went to call on the Damascus merchants who brought me over the cakes the other day. Their little boy produced, to everyone’s pride and delight, two or three phrases of excellent English. His elder brother knows about five words of French so we had a roaring conversation. Their father seemed extremely gloomy about our prospects and suggested that we’d probably turn back to Baghdad. But the little boy, who can’t be more than ten, heartened everybody by saying,—We weel shoot Bedawi with the gun and keel him.

I don’t entirely like the enthusiasm with which these Delaim people look over my possessions. Three superb rascals have just left my tent. They sat there a long time with baksheesh on the tip of their tongues. They felt of the canvas and of my aba and poked at the hippo and asked what was inside it, and their eyes sparkled with greed at the sight of the silver-incrusted saddle El Souadi lent me. I tried to glut them with cigarettes.

Bad. About noon. The wind’s like a razor, and the camp is knocked flat with dismay. The merry men of ibn Kubain have called our bluff and driven off our camels from the grazing grounds. From the little hillock with the cairn I saw them disappearing behind the horizon. People rushed out from camp and shot off guns, but the Kubain people are stronger than we are, or at least they have more nerve.

Baghdad Saleh has just come in without his British army coat or his new red ismak, dragging his feet and looking very dejected:—Bloody Bedawi, bloody loosewilers steal bloody seecamels. He explained that he was asleep at the time or it would never have happened. He was beaten up and his gun was stolen and his coat and his new head-cloth—Bedawi no good.

I went and found Jassem, who was sitting in the lee of some bales of tobacco, beside the ashes of a fire. He smiled gloomily and nodding to the horizon made a gesture of coins running through his fingers and said with great emphasis, Floos, floos ketir, money, much money. So I went sulkily back to my tent. Well, the walking was probably excellent. It would be farewell to the hippo and its nonsensical contents. Perhaps we’d all be carried off into servitude in some lost oasis. So long as I don’t lose my glasses, I was thinking. I lay shivering on the camp bed wrapped up in the Baghdad blanket. Molière had lost his flavor and drawing seemed a futile occupation. All the wind of heaven whistled round my legs. The tent was no more protection than a sieve. The leaden day was already shattered into tumultuous twilight when I heard a familiar delicious cupalaoop in the distance and the grumbling of camels. The camels were being driven home. They drifted one by one into camp, craning their necks absentmindedly from side to side until the whole space between the fires was full of their roaring and bubbling.

Thirteenth Day: It’s all a farce played according to rules. The Delaim went after ibn Kubain’s people and brought back the camels, and everything is where it started. We’ll pay the safety money and I suppose the Delaim will get some of it for their trouble. The insh’allahs about leaving tomorrow are pretty feeble so I guess we’ll round out the week in this accursed spot. My only amusement is sitting on the cairn and watching the flocks of the Delaim move slowly among the scrub-littered valleys round the waterholes. I’m sick of Molière. And the stars in their courses fought against Sisera.

Yesterday afternoon, after the crisis was over, the camp became very social. Groups of the Delaim and the Fede’an roamed about from campfire to campfire. I sat in state on my camp bed and everyone came and sat on the floor of my tent and was silent. Got very chummy with a young man of ibn Kubain’s people who wore his hair in two little plaits neatly looped in front of his ears. He showed me his Turkish rifle and said he was the Osmanli’s own man. Feeling it was up to me to do something to promote the Christmas spirit, I gave everybody cigarettes and handfuls of tobacco. The man with the little plaits I liked so much, I gave a box of matches. Whereupon he offered to go with me to Esch Scham or over the sea or anywhere. Then I would give him many gold pounds Turkish. I tried to explain that I was a fakir, a poor man, and had no floos of any sort, but he would not believe me. At that point Nuwwaf came in. Now Nuwwaf is a friend of Feisul’s and a deadly enemy of the Fede’an and was much annoyed to find me so friendly with a mere bandit. I didn’t have enough Arabic to explain to him that I liked these little brown hardboiled people better than the big white Delaim with their waxed moustaches, even if they were holding us up. He went off looking very hurt.

It’s a cloudy stagnant day. The elders of Israel sit round Jassem’s fire where Fahad is cooking disgustedly pots and pots of rice to feed this multitude. Now and then a gust of dispute rises and is caught up by other groups round other smoky fires, or there is an impressive clink of moneybags.

Fourteenth Day: Rained cats and dogs in the night, so we have to wait another day before starting, as camels are as helpless in mud as a giraffe on skates. That’s five days going in two weeks. Damn all delays. I have the immortal itch to be gone from these cheezy hills where the sheep graze dully as maggots and the tents of the Delaim lie like dead beetles along the horizon. Was called on today, right after my lunch of oatmeal and condensed milk, by my Osmanli friend and the little crosseyed boy who is sheikh of the ibn Kubain crowd and a great mob of our yesterday’s enemies. The little sheikh showed me with pride a German trench periscope he had; several of his men had field glasses. Everybody was having a social time when the fat sheikh and Jassem er Rawwaf came and drove them all away. Evidently the caravan does not approve of the way I get on with our enemies. That’s the hell of being a hakim and sitting in a crimson tent. Everything you do has political significance. Nuwwaf came to see me later, looking very offended and making various unfriendly comments about the Fede’an. I cheered him up by having Jassem’s little boy bring us coffee, and then we walked up to the cairn and he pointed westward along the marked trail. Five days that way to El Garrá where his flocks were. If I could stay with him he’d have a sheep killed for me. I should stay with him many days, very many days, always; and for a moment, leaning against the enormous ceaseless wind that whined and rattled among the little stones of the cairn, I thought I would. To live always in a tent of black felt eating unleavened bread and ewe’s butter, with the wind always sheer in your nostrils, moving south in winter, north in summer, for the grazing of the camels and sheep; to take a shrill-voiced Bedawi woman for a wife, to die of a rifleshot in a raid and be buried under a pile of stones beside the ashes of your fire and the round dungheaps of your last camping ground. Will the world hold anything to make up for the not living of that life?

I came back very hungry to my tent and had Fahad cook me my last can of kosher sausage. The tent soars like a balloon in the wind.

Fifteenth Day: Crawled out of my cocoon a couple of hours before dawn to find the stars crackling with cold. Everything had been struck. The camping ground was a struggling confusion of camels and drivers holding their necks to the ground while the packs were being fastened on their backs. The camels were struggling and groaning and roaring, the drivers were cursing and kicking. Jassem, always quiet, crouched over the last embers of the fire, warming his long hands. He was laughing quietly to himself when I sat beside him. He handed me a last drop of coffee in one of his thimble cups and then packed up the three pots and the cups and the pestle and mortar in his red saddlebags. Malek was brought by Fahad and nakhed; she lurched to her feet with such a jump that my head almost tangled in Orion, and we were off, everything at a jog trot due north towards the Dipper. A superb ride through the dawn across grass-sheening uplands to the great canyon of the Sheib Hauran, down round the face of red sandstone cliffs, Malek leaping like a mountain goat from rock to rock, to the water bed, where remained a few muddy pools from the last week’s rain. There the camels were watered quickly and we were off again, scattering up the steep paths of the north side, I riding beside the old Hadji with the umbrella who rolled his eyes and cried Alham’d’ullah in the most groaning tones every time his camel took a leap. Then when we had scrambled up the last squared cliff of the canyon rim we were off under sparkling showers across the vastest, most pancake flat desert we have yet come to. Travelled eleven hours at top speed, and made camp in the dark, wolf-hungry and dog-tired. Wow!

Sixteenth Day: Reclining Roman fashion on my couch and looking out between the loopedup tentflaps at Fahad pottering very tired and cross among the cooking-pots from which steam rises silvery against a pistachio-green twilight. Up above the sky loosens into scrolled clouds of platinum and feathery purple. Barefoot Ali walks slowly across behind the fire, leading home a strayed camel. Ali, the most skillful of our camel drivers, is built like a beech-tree, never says anything, and walks with incredible majesty.

The journey was long and splendid. Gazelles were sighted. We rode through patches of scrub full of larks where now and then a rabbit broke cover under the camel’s feet and sat watching a second with twitching nose before loping off into the blue ruetha again. White tablelands to the north that pinked to amethyst in the afternoon. And now the evening cry of cupallyouawp, cupallyouawp of the drivers calling the camels home from pasture.

After eight hours of the saddle my legs began to drop off.

It seems that the war in the Nejd is over. Ibn Saoud has captured Hael and ibn Raschid and all his wives and followers and is now supreme ruler of Central Arabia. There is a man in our caravan of the Shamar, a lean man with crazy eyes who gets to his feet beside his campfire after evening prayer every day and calls a challenge to any man who is enemy of his tribe to come out and fight. Every night his voice rises in a challenging cry that unfurls like a banner above the bustle and the camelnoises of the camp.

Seventeenth Day: Still headed a little west of north, wandering through gulches and between eroded tablelands. Camped about midafternoon near a waterhole in the dry bed of a sheib. To the south of us are high mesetas like those between Madrid and Toledo. Warm sunny afternoon. People retire modestly behind rocks to wash themselves and change their clothes. Wandered off over a hill and lay on a broad stone in the sun reading Martial. I have never been so happy. In the evening sat beside Hassoon at Jassem’s campfire for a long while watching the balled flames of ruetha, listening to talk I could not understand, and looking at the moon through the fragrant dark-green smoke. Drank endless little cups of coffee, the black unsweetened coffee of the desert, three times distilled, flavored with an herb that makes it bitter as quinine, as pervading as one of Wagner’s great pilings up of the orchestra, as restful to the aching wind-rasped body as morning sleep. These people from the Nejd, Jassem and Hassoon and Ali, and the two little black men with the camel colts are the finest people in the world. Later I lay awake looking out at the moonlight, listening to the crunch, crunch of the camels’ cud and the soft bubbling of Fahad’s waterpipe. If I had any sense I’d stay with Nuwwaf in El Garrá and never go any farther. Anyhow I don’t care if it takes up a thousand years to get to Damascus.

Eighteenth Day: Nuwwaf and his friend went off today on their big white dromedaries. There had been discussion for several days as to whether the caravan should go through El Garrá or no. I suppose Nuwwaf wanted fat safety money in return for his protection. Anyway we are going northward still, probably to Aleppo instead of Damascus. They went off angry without eating bread. I might have gone with them. As I saw the two white specks growing smaller and smaller among the jagged folds of the hills I felt very bitter at my decision. It was during the noonday rest. I was eating rice out of the Sayyid’s bowl with the Sayyid and Saleh, squatting in a patch of shiah. Our three hobbled camels stood above us, dripping green slavver from their mouths as they crunched and swallowed the succulent young growth of the shiah.

During the afternoon we veered more to the west into the teeth of a great wind cold as frozen razorblades. We are crossing a flat flint-strewn plain of a rusted purple color across which the camel tracks stretch straight and smooth like the path of a ship at sea. In the evening entertained myself with a touch of that damned Teheran fever. Ate quinine in great quantity for supper.

Nineteenth Day: Chilly dawn; hoarfrost on the bare flints, followed by a warm delicious day riding sleepily through gorges and dry watercourses and over rolling flinty hills. Tremendous numbers of rabbits wherever there’s a patch of vegetation, and pernickety-looking grey-crested birds; I wonder if they are hoopoes. The Hadji bit the dust this afternoon. One of those mules of Abdullah’s that are always causing trouble bit his camel’s tail and the camel gave a great leap and twisted himself in thirteen directions and off went saddle and Hadji and umbrella and a vast diversity of little packages and cookpots. The old gentleman lay groaning and crying Alham’d’ullah until everybody picked him up and cursed Abdullah and his mules, and the bent umbrella was straightened. Then he perked up and was set upon his beast again without seeming very much the worse.

When we made camp one of the camels that had gone hopelessly lame was killed. He seemed to know what was coming and stood tottering in the center of the camping ground, looking from side to side out of bulging eyes. Then one of the little black men from the Nejd, with his sleeves rolled up and his tunic girded high at the waist, jerked him off his feet and neatly cut his throat. Before the last twitches of life were out of the carcass it was skinned and, amid tremendous excitement and shouting, cut up. Fahad, all bloody up to the elbows, came back to our outfit staggering under the liver and several ribs. The liver was immediately grilled by being set among the embers, and the rest of the meat was stewed. I sat reading the elaborate idiocies of L’Amant Magnifique and made a noble supper at sundown off porridge and gobbets of camel meat fried with onions. Those onions are really the making of my larder. Went to sleep and dreamed of the sun-king and red heels tapping to the slow time of sarabands.

Twentieth Day: The sunrise was straight in our backs when we started out this morning, an unbelievable firework of grey and gamboge and salmon color; and so on sleepily swaying on Malek hour after hour, under a sky so intense that you seemed to see through the blue light of the world into the black of infinite space. Camped in the evening in a flat plain full of ruetha. Walked far out away from the caravan full of its noises of cookery and tent-pitching until a roll of the hills hid even the camels scattering to graze. There was no wind. The only sound was the occasional crunch or scuttle of a pebble under my feet. Suddenly I thought of the demons that Marco Polo tells about that dwell in deserts and whisper soft in travellers’ ears, coaxing them away from their tents and their caravans over another and another hill, until they lose the north and wander in the waste until they die. It was almost dark. Condor clouds hovered thicker and thicker above the bleeding west. A little wind came up and hissed, whispered soft among the flints. My name, almost, hissed soft among the flints. Hoisting the skirts of my aba about my waist, I ran and ran until against the last twilight I could see the tents and piles of bales and the ring of fires and the confused long-necked crowd of camels being nakhed for the night.

Some people compute eight, others fifteen days to Esch Scham.

Twenty-first Day: There are two little conical mountains to the west. One of them I think is called Jebal Souab. The group of grandees riding far ahead of the caravan came suddenly across the crest of a low hill into view of a great herd of gazelles. For several minutes they did not see us. Everyone had a rifle ready. Then like surf breaking on a ledge the nearest gazelles jumped straight in the air and were off. In the click of a trigger the whole herd was out of sight. Hard luck, because my larder is quite exhausted and I’m living on rice and fried dates I get from Jassem. My cigarettes are all gone too, and the news seems to have got about the caravan because these fine people never let me stir abroad without smoking. People I’ve never been particularly chummy with appear with the makings on every side so that I have to smoke more than I want to keep up with their generosity. As for Hassoon, he seems to want me to smoke them two at a time. Funny sensation being hungry all the time. Am attended for hours by visions splendid of roast goose and canvasback duck and horsd’œuvre at the Bristol. When I wake up I find the air round my bed crowded with corn muffins and waffles. The descriptions of food in Mr. Martial’s epigrams bring tears to my eyes.

The Golden Horn

Twenty-second Day: Splendid morning’s ride through finest country ever, prairies of dry aromatic shrubs full of rabbits and strange white softly flying birds. Skirting the two little mountains, Souab and Damlough, under a sky piled high with rose and amber-glinting cumulus clouds, I was riding ahead with the grandees. Everyone seemed a little uneasy as one of the Agail had picked out a man on horseback watching the caravan from a shoulder of the mountain. Then all at once there was a cry of Haremi, bandits, and we all rode full tilt back to the caravan with clanky rattling of saddlebags and a waving of guns. Far away towards the mountain men on white ponies were loping down the hills like rabbits. Jassem rode up to his outfit and halted it in a little ravine. The camels groaning and roaring with their loads on them were nakhed and hobbled in a flash. The dancing girls tumbled squeaking out of their litter. The other sections of the caravan nakhed as they came up, until the camels were all sitting down squeezed together tight in an uneasy square. The pebbly bed of the ravine was full of shouts and squealing of women. The two horses were mounted, one by the Sayyid who annoyed everybody very much by stopping to put on his best aba for the occasion, the other by Abdullah; and the Agail and all the other combatant members of the caravan took up positions on the little hillocks round about. The Damascus merchant and his son took firm hold of me by either arm and sat me down between them in the deepest part of the gully, whether for their protection or mine I never made out. The little Turk’s fat wife lay in a heap like soiled clothes at her husband’s feet and now and then let out a long curdled shriek. Fahad pottered about scowling, tightening hobbles on camels, picking up things that had fallen out of saddlebags, muttering complaints as if this were all just another whim of Jassem’s. Everybody sat hunched with expectation for a long while and I began to think again of the unfortunate death of the Prince Napoleon, but nothing happened. So I managed to get loose from my Damascus friends and climbed up on to the hillock above the ravine. There I found the Sayyid riding round and round like mad with his long sleeves floating behind him in the wind and his silver-encrusted gun flashing in the sun—Baruda Ketir Ketir. Guns many many, bandits many many, Bedawi on horseback many many, he shouted when he saw me. I replied that in Frankistan I had seen guns so big that the whole caravan could ride through one. That seemed to settle him for a while. The Agail were coming back from scouting about the hills. It was a fine sight to see them gird up their loins and tie up the long sleeves behind each other’s backs. Jassem was quiet and smiling as ever. With one hand he held his gun, with the other he stroked his beard. The purple and the white headcloths fluttered behind him as he walked. There was a big body of men on horseback advancing towards us; nobody knew who they were. The Agail with extra cartridge belts scattered towards the hills again, and I joined the circle of the less timorous noncombatants who sat smoking on a little mound, presided over by the Hadji, who nursed in his lap his cherished umbrella and invoked Allah at every batting of an eyelash. We must have sat that way for an hour when suddenly a rifleshot and then another rattled in the hollows of the hills. Two men on white ponies appeared on the slope in front of us, riding licketysplit and occasionally shooting. A few bullets whirred over our heads. The group of the less timorous broke up in confusion. I have a distinct impression that the Hadji raised his umbrella. Somehow I found myself engaged in a long conversation with a Turkish camel driver. What language we talked I have no idea, as he knew no more Arabic than I did, but we managed to convey the most complicated ideas to one another while the Agail fell back towards the camels and more and more men on white ponies appeared on the hills from every direction, riding round and round us, shooting as they rode like the Indians in Custer’s Last Stand that used to be the last number in Buffalo Bill’s great show.

This Turk did not like the Arabs a bit, said they were a low and shifty lot. Neither did he like History nor the Germans nor Baghdad nor the British. He had been in the Turkish army during the war, had deserted, had three times been stripped naked and left for dead by the Bedawi. He had wandered to all sorts of inconceivable places, always trying to get home to some village near Brusa. Everywhere everybody had too many guns and there was no law.

All this went on for a long time, and nobody seemed much the worse for it, until at last Jassem stood on the mound and waved a long white sleeve in the direction of the attackers and everybody began to say that they were friends after all.

The raiders rode into camp on their lolloping ponies, gaunt men tanned black by the wind, riding in pairs, singing as they came. Their clothes were ragged and dirty, looped up with cartridge belts. Ibn Haremis is their name or the name of their sheikh and they belong to the Fede’an.

I sit shivering among my baggage in a cold wind that has just come up to spite us. Opposite me the Damascus merchants are dejectedly raising their tent. Tall desert people stalk haughtily through the camp. They have just made off with a rug belonging to the Damascus people who are setting up a great outcry. Fahad is cooking me supper, cursing under his breath. Jassem and Hassoon sit impassively by their fire grinding coffee. Their eyes shining under their headcloths follow every movement of their friends of ibn Haremis the way the eyes of a cornered cat will watch a dog.

Twenty-third Day: This is goddam tiresome. Here we are sitting on our tails again, discussing safety money. This ibn Haremis gang is a rare one. They’ve all been sitting in my tent looking at me and my blankets and the hippo, and numerous other things that people have brought to my tent for safekeeping. Such a set of walleyed, crooknosed, squinting, oneeyed, scarfaced cutthroats and slitpurses I have never seen. They go through all my possessions with gimlet eyes, and their hands feeling my blankets seem glued with greed to every fiber. I made a fatal error; they invited me to go see their sheikh and for some reason I was sore at them and refused. I don’t know why, because I imagine they’d be very good fellows if you got to know them. May have unpleasant consequences, though. So I sulk in my tent with all the blankets wrapped about me and curse the wind and this blithering plateau and think of hot baths and steaks smothered in onions. Still it was worth it to hear their carolling song as they rode in pairs on white lolloping ponies into the conquered camp.

Twenty-fourth Day: Five camels and five pounds Turkish as ransom for the hippo was the khowa decided on, and now ibn Haremis is our friend and brother. Incidentally last night several old women appeared and sat round the fire and raised their voices in the discussion equally with the men. This morning the merry men saw us on our way. Great relief was manifested on all sides when our friends and brethren ceased to protect us and returned to their tents. During the day we kept crossing rocky wind-tortured ridges between flat patches of sandy desert. At sunset I thought I saw the mountains of Syria lying purple athwart the sun, but at dawn there was no sign of them.

Twenty-fifth Day: We were navigating splendidly this morning in the face of the perpetual westerly wind when some of Abdullah’s ridiculous mules had to get lost in a tangle of dry watercourses. So we sat down beside a waterhole in a delicious sheltered valley, the Sheib War, with only half a day accomplished. Had the first wash in a week in a smooth sun-filled cave in the cliff where I lay a long time on the warm rock while my clothes were airing, reading Juvenal, to whom I don’t kindle, notwithstanding his gorgeous turgid flow of indignant imagery. I smell rhetoric in him. Hope I left a few fleas behind in that rocky cave. It’s terribly annoying to be cold and fleabitten at the same time. The mules are caught again and come with a great scampering and clattering up the canyon. Bukra insh’allah, we’ll see the mountains of Syria and the Jebal Druse.

Twenty-sixth Day: Feel rather like the anonymous Wise Man who got there too late to offer myrrh or frankincense. Goddam cold and I don’t care who knows it. Doubt if I was ever colder in my life. All day rode in a bitter wind under a bright sky over terrific uplands of sharp glinting flints. About the first real continuous desert; no trace of vegetation. All our fires are of dry camel dung, jelle, collected from an old camping place we passed. Here we are camped under a cairn at the head of Wadi Mia which is diversely said to be four and eight days from Damascus. Shiver and pray for supper. Fleas.

Twenty-seventh Day: Have a sort of suspicion that this is Christmas Day, but as I’m not quite sure what the date was when I left Baghdad, I may have calculated wrong. Ate kastowi for lunch, rice with my last onions for supper. Cold as blazes. Long desolate ride over purple hills strewn with sharp flints into a wind colder and sharper than all the flints from here to Jericho. This must be the highest part of the hogback, as there comes in the rain an occasional spit of sleet. Put my foot in it terribly this evening. Was taking my habitual before-supper stroll to the highest hill round about the camp, and had paused on the crest to look down through grey smudges of mist into the vast putty-colored wilderness ahead of us. In front of me, standing out against the last silvery light like monsters of an eocene world, two camels were making love, twining their snaky necks together with flopping slobbering lips and groanings through yellow teeth. Clumsily, sensitively under the aluminum twilight the act was accomplished. I had climbed on a rock to see further, when I saw Jassem running up the slope with his fieldglasses in his hand, hallooing desperately. I went down to him and found him wild. All day the caravan had been manoeuvring to keep out of sight of some black tents pitched in the next valley and there I was standing like a monument on top of the hill, visible for a day’s journey in every direction. He vented his wrath, and I my shame, by throwing stones at the camels and driving them back to camp.

Twenty-eighth Day: Bitter rain in misty squalls. A North Sea day with nary a glimpse of sun. Rode from before dawn till after dark through howling flinty wilderness. The Agail laugh at me at night sitting round the fire because the stinging smoke of jelle makes my eyes water. Hassoon can hold his face almost to the flame in the thickest of the smoke without a flicker of his eyelids. Held high discourse about America. It seems that some of the Agail have been there and come back with the word that it was a land full of floos. The coffee we were drinking came from Santos, so everybody thought I lived where the coffee came from. Everyone wondered at the great iron ships going over the sea; and sitting there in the desert round the glowing fire of cameldung under a night of unfathomable misty blackness, we felt the suction of the great machine, the glint of whirring nickel, the shine of celluloid and enamel, the crackle of banknotes fingered in banks, the click and grinding of oiled wheels. I made a great speech and said that if I had any sense I would live in the desert with the Agail and never go back; but they took it as a compliment and did not understand. Jassem asked me, then, what kind of a hakim I was in my country, a great man like Cokus? No not quite.

The Hadji has no luck. He slept in my tent last night as it was very wet outside, and naturally the tent had to blow down and half the camels to stampede, so that the poor old gentleman was forgotten and trampled on and finally picked prone and groaning from under the collapsed bed. And the umbrella underwent further injuries.

My shoes are split and I have chilblains.

Twenty-ninth Day: Stuck again. Fifteen camels lame from the heavy going of the last few days. Shivered in wet tents all day. Sat all afternoon in the tent of the Sayyid, while his cook Hadji Mahomet told stories. I could not follow them at all, but they began with such pomaded suaveness of Once upon a time there lived … and worked up to such pitch of excitement where everybody cried Ei Wallah and Allah and wallowed in such smutty chortlings when all hands wriggled in their places and curled up their brown toes with delight that it was almost as if I had understood the words. Then the Damascus merchant’s little boy sang and everybody ate dates and drank tea. Between the verses of love-songs everyone cries Allah and groans in a most melancholy manner.

Thirtieth Day: Began in mist and despair. Then phantom hills to the west seemed to promise Syria and its fleshpots, and the sun came out and the immense disk of purple flint shone like a shattered mirror.

Thirty-first Day: Splendid frosty morning. Interminably westward across this petrified sea of flints. Continually hungry. Hours before noon I start thinking of the taste of kastowi, a delicious molasses-brown concoction of ewe’s butter and dates fried up together, and in the evening I massacre the rice and bread almost without tasting it. Last night I dreamed of dining at the Bristol in Marseilles, of eating the crackly brown skin of roast goose. It makes me feel terribly soft. No one else seems to mind half rations. The Arabs are the most frugal people I ever consorted with.

Thirty-second Day: Half day on. Camels low, as there has been no food for several days. Let ’em take a thousand years to get to Damascus. I don’t care. I’ll never sit about such fragrant fires again, or with such fine people. Christ, I feel well, bearded, fullblooded, all the bile out of my belly, all the wrinkles ironed out of my mind by the great cold purple flinty flatiron of the desert.

The Sayyid and Damascus Saleh have had a row, I don’t know what about.

Thirty-third Day: A new wind has come up, Hawa Esch Scham, the wind of Damascus, they call it. Everything is pink and warm colored like the ears of a jackrabbit seen for a second against the sun. We have made a splendid camp on a shiah-covered slope. At the end of a trough to the northwest are tall promontory hills jutting into the desert, the actual hills of Syria. Beyond them is Tidmor that I am not fated to see—Alas, Zenobia. Shoes split, feet chilblained, hands stiff with cold, but jolly as a lark. Wish I had a rum punch, hot, with a slice of lemon and two cloves.

Thirty-fourth Day: Through rocky defiles and over patches of sandy desert with the hills of Syria gathering like a herd of cattle to the west. This afternoon we were almost held up again. Two of the Agail sighted guns and headcloths at the opening of a deep ravine the trail leads through, so in a jiffy the caravan did a right-about-face, and went off to the south, while the grandees on their dromedaries rode on towards the ambuscade with their guns cocked. These people wore various-colored headcloths and were from the Jebal Druse. I don’t think they were actually Druses, but rabble from the outskirts, half Bedawi and half Druse. They asked to see the mad Frank who was wandering about the desert, and upon my being produced looked at me critically but amiably. A lot of big talk followed. They were finally bought off with fifteen pounds Turkish and a sack of dates. I don’t think they could have done us much mischief anyway as few of them were mounted.

Thirty-fifth Day: We are riding between two ranges of barren mountains, pink and ochre and purple and indigo in the shadows, reflected in long streaks of stagnant water that leaves where it dries the sand cracked and mottled like alligator hide. Now that we are out of danger from the Bedawi everybody is worried about the French camel corps, as there is a duty on tobacco and camels and the game is to smuggle through. How a caravan of five hundred camels can slip into Damascus unnoticed is beyond me, but one should never deny wonders. Everybody is restless and excited like the last day out on an ocean liner.

Thirty-sixth Day: All things have come to pass. We are camped over against Dmair, huddled in a little hollow of the hills. We are in Syria. Blue smoke goes up from the village and is lost in the blue of the ridges in front of Lebanon. Further south the Jebal Sheikh sits hunched and hoary. There are goats and flocks of sheep grazing round about the camp. I’d like to go to Dmair, but Jassem won’t let me for fear of waking the drowsy customs officers. Various inhabitants of Dmair are coming out to us on camels and donkeys, however. I almost wish we were still out in the desert, leaving instead of arriving, but oh, for a hot bath and food, food, food.

Thirty-seventh Day: O those Sayyids. The unforgettable entry into Damascus.

Last night the caravan camp was full of goings and comings, deep talk round Jassem’s fire, and groaning and bubbling of camels. The last thing I heard as I went to sleep was the clink of money, gold pounds Turkish being counted from palm into palm. In the morning when I woke up the camp looked as if a cyclone had struck it. Half the camels, most of the bales of tobacco and rugs and, I imagine, opium had vanished in blue haze. Jassem sat quietly grinding his coffee, occasionally stroking his black beard. As I was drinking coffee with him he gently insinuated the thought that when I talked with the French in Damascus I should not know how many camels nor how we had come. I told him I had a bad head for figures.

Then Abdullah’s white stallion was brought up and I perched my galled posterior on an execrable saddle and we were off towards Damascus, I on my stallion, the Sayyid on his dromedary, the Sayyid’s cook on a skittish white camel, and one of the Agail on foot to put us on the road. That morning seemed endless. We kept losing the road, first over shaggy uplands and then in a fat valley full of pasture lands, patches of green sesame and alfalfa, apple orchards, pink adobe houses. Eventually the Sayyid took pity on my agonized bouncing on the stirrupless stallion and let me ride his dromedary. The white camel did not like the smell of civilization and kept trying to bolt back to the desert. At last, deliriously hungry, galled, limping, tired to a frazzle, we got to a village where we left our beasts in the inn, ate all too frugally of beans and cheese and kebab, and then drove, lolling like Zeus in his chariot of eagles, in a landau into Damascus. Then before I could put food to my mouth or water to my skin I had to go to see all the Sayyid’s relatives, old men with beards in the Scribes’ bazaar, people in mysterious courtyards who were adherents of Feisul’s and plotting against the French, a tailor in a tailor shop, the keeper of a café frequented by the Agail; with all these, interminable scraping and mamnouning, until at last we found ourselves in contact with the forces of civilization. We had left the cab outside a café where we were palavering busily, I too dazed with hunger and unwashedness to know what was going on; on coming out we found a drunken French officer sitting in it. The Sayyid protested that it was our cab and the Frenchman started spouting abuse, and the Sayyid drew his little dagger and there would have been the devil to pay if the Frenchman had not hazily realized that I was talking French to him. He immediately apologized profusely and embraced the Sayyid in the name of the Allies and we all rode off together singing “la Madelon de la Victoire” to a most Parisian ginmill in the main square. The Sayyid sat outside while we Occidentals went in and drank I don’t know how many glasses of absinthe in the name of Liberty, Fraternity and Equality. In a pink indeterminate and vaguely swishing cloud I drove to the hotel, somehow got rid of the Frenchman and the Sayyid, and at last was alone sprawling buoyant in a warm bath that tasted of absinthe, smelled of absinthe, swished and simmered drowsily, tingled pinkly with absinthe.