DAMASCUS AT TEN O’CLOCK, coffee, the customs house, picking up the French mail for Bagdad, and off again. We had been joined by a small truck, or camionette, and another passenger car, a pilot car, carrying a guard with a rifle, and our convoy was now complete.
Through the center of the town, rather like a modern French city, the convoy moved, and then into a different world; a world of narrow twisting streets, with camels moving aside to let our car through, and incredibly tiny shops, where the silver and inlay workers squatted over their work, and hideous western trade goods competed with the native stuffs.
Narrow corners, which the Panhard negotiated with difficulty, scowls from the natives as our horn cleared the way, and we were out on the great plain which a few miles beyond becomes the Syrian desert.
It grew hot. While we moved it was bearable, but when for any purpose the car halted, the heat was intolerable. We stopped for water for the cars in an Arab village, stuck at a street corner the Panhard could not turn, backed and tried another way, and were at last on the desert itself. It stretched away to the east of us, five hundred miles of it, to the Valley of the Rivers, where the Euphrates pours down its yellow flood and Bagdad sits alone beside the Tigris. And can sit there alone forever, for all of me.
The desert again. But this time a different desert. A hard-packed arid desert, not of sand but of what resembled the adobe of our western states. A little rain and it becomes impassable; the feet slip in the gumbo, car wheels turn helplessly, as we were to learn later on, and even the Bedouins, watching their herds of camels, sheep, and goats, remain where they are until the sun has dried the earth again.
During the rains, an almost imperceptible grass grows, and on this the vast herds feed. The tribes follow this grass, and as the rains occur at different seasons east and west, are always on the move. A week, two weeks, and once more the tents are struck, the baggage camels packed, and they travel on.
All day long we passed through these herds. Thousands of camels, fat-tailed sheep and goats grazed under the care of Bedouins who moved up near the track—there was no road—to see us pass. Now and then we passed a camp, savage dogs barking and children running. But toward evening we seemed to have left all life behind us; we were in an empty world. As darkness closed down the lights of the car appeared to make a path through a dense black forest, and so overwhelming was this feeling that at last I spoke of it.
Madame moved in her seat.
“Strange!” she said. “I feel it too. An unfriendly forest.”
Even the Swiss gentleman acknowledged to the same sensation, and it persisted during all the hours of darkness over and back. And as the hours progressed, to this and my fatigue was added a certain uneasiness. Details of the attack the week before rose in my mind, and on either side closed in that imaginary forest, concealing who knew what of the sinister and the wicked.
However, at ten o’clock that night we drove safely into the ruins of Palmyra, and under what is left of the Temple of the Sun found the rest house, and clean beds. Perhaps by this time the company’s new building is ready, and if so something of the picturesqueness of our arrival will be lost.
The rest house, when we were there, was the house of the local Sheik. Around a small courtyard were its one-story buildings, and when we had driven in the gates were closed and fastened. We had a quick view of the men of the Sheik’s family, gathered on the earthen floor of a room to the right and drinking the eternal thick black coffee, and of a pet sheep in the kitchen where our meal was being prepared. A lantern moved about the court-yard, dark when our car lights were extinguished, and a sense of the eeriness of our situation began to make itself felt.
Beds we had, clean and comfortable, and water to wash with, but of other toilet facilities as we know them there were none whatever. The lantern shone on strange bearded faces and figures clothed in swinging Arab garb. And outside our shelter, their huts filling the Temple of the Sun whose ruined façade lifted itself above us in the starlight, was a barbarous and not too friendly population, probably ready to kill or to let alone at the raising of their Sheik’s finger.
However, as it turned out, we were not so far from the strong arm of authority as we had believed. We had no more than begun to hunt our soap and tooth brushes than an Arab appeared at our door and summoned us. We were to go somewhere.
We endeavored to explain. We were tired and hungry and dirty. We were not in condition to pay calls. Another time we would take great pleasure, and so on. But in the end we had to go.
It was hair-raising. Behind him in the darkness we slid and stumbled, groped and clutched. And at last we were in a small building, with a French officer in uniform behind a real desk! At the moment I could have kissed him. Later on——
We had no vise for Irak! We had so many vises on our passports that the space had run out; we were vised for every British possession, including the Prince of Wales’ ranch at Calgary and the Albert Memorial, but somebody had slipped up on Irak. Maybe they had never heard of it. I am sure we never had, until recently.
The matter seemed serious. In vain we pleaded. The officer turned to a gorgeous individual in a white silk turban and brilliant aba, with his eyes heavily made up with kohl, and this personage eyed us and evidently considered us highly suspicious.
At this impasse I remembered our credentials from the Department of Labor. At a White House reception Secretary Davis had asked us if we would care to go on our trip as special agents of the department, gathering such information as came to hand, and on our eagerly agreeing, had sent us various papers. So various, indeed, that the Head had sent him a postcard of our camel caravan from Egypt, saying on it that: “The rear camel is laden with the credentials of the Department of Labor!”
These we now produced, but if the French officer weakened the handsome Bedouin remained obdurate. I have a feeling that if I had had a chance to wash my face and powder my nose I might have influenced him, but as things were it looked hopeless.
In the end, however, we paid some twenty dollars, the French officer poured some water into the drying ink, signed on the dotted line, and doubtfully let us go.