CHAPTER XXII--TRAVELING IN A CARAVAN--SIGHTS ON THE WAY.

_Turning our faces eastward--The land of the Sun--Palmyra, Bagdad, and Babylon--The desert in summer and winter--A dangerous road--The Robbers of the Wilderness--Ruins in the Desert--A city of wonders--The haunts of the Bedouins--Engaging an escort--The start for Palmyra--On a Dromedary’s back--The environs of Damascus--A bed on the sand--“Everyone to his taste”--A knavish Governor--Winking at Robbery--In the Desert--On the great caravan track--Caravansaries, what are they?--The high road to India--An Arab fountain._

HOW I longed, when at Damascus, to push further into Asia. Before me lay the land of the Arabian nights--the valley of the Euphrates and of the Tigris; beyond the horizon my imagination pictured the battlemented walls of Bagdad, her white domes and arrowy minarets shining among the waving palms.

I walked her streets once trodden by the feet of Haroun-al-Raschid and made familiar in the stories that were written in his time and--if we may believe our tradition--for his entertainment.. I fancied myself upon the site of Babylon or of Nineveh, and amid the crumbled ruins of those once powerful cities that represented the grandeur and greatness of the ancient East.

I followed the story of Xenophon in the retreat of the Ten Thousand, and stood upon the ground where Alexander marched to the glory that made him The Great. I was upon the threshold--yes, I had passed the portals--of that part of the East which has suffered least from the progress and enterprise of the Occident. With longing eyes I looked beyond the rising sun and wished, oh, how I wished, that I might go on and on till I should {301}tread the soil of Ormuz or of Ind, and feel upon my brow the spice-laden breezes of fair Cathay.

But fate was inexorable and many things conspired to prevent my further progress. We had arranged to keep together till we reached Egypt; the rest of the party were pressed for time and had determined upon Damascus as the Ultima Thule of their journey. The season was not favorable for an overland excursion as we might be caught in winter storms in the desert, and furthermore the robbers were more dangerous then than in the summer. From Damascus it is customary to travel with a caravan under a heavy escort, and there would be no caravan for several months. The authorities will sometimes give an escort and be responsible for the safety of the traveller, but such an outfit costs heavily and requires a very long purse. Arrangements can be made to ride with the fortnightly mail from Damascus to Bagdad, but there are various objections to this mode of journeying.

I thought over all the obstacles in my way and concluded that it was best to keep with our party and go on to Palestine and Egypt. Among the reasons which impelled me to this decision was the fact that I had neither time nor money enough to go farther East, and besides I should be cut off from the society of the “Doubter.” I might get along without money by setting up as a dervish and begging my way, but could existence be possible without our skeptic? Consequently I _must_ go to Egypt.

Even Palmyra had to be given up, and, sighing, I turned my face to the west. But I fell in with a French traveller, who had come overland from Bagdad and spent a day at Palmyra, and I listened with boyish interest to his account of what he saw there.

It is no small matter to reach Palmyra, for the reason that it stands in the midst of desolate wastes, which are the possession or at all events the “backsheeshing” ground of the most lawless of the Bedouin Arabs They have no conscientious scruples about robbery; the only point in their favor is that they are averse to shedding blood, and unless he offers resistance, the traveller can feel as certain about saving his life as he is of losing his property. They may strip him of everything and leave him naked, on foot, and without food or drink in the middle of the desert, but they have qualms of conscience about murder, though {302}quite willing their victim should starve or roast to death. Those who assert that the Bedouins are heartless and cruel, should take note of the above fact, and make an ample apology if they have hitherto said anything uncomplimentary about these plundering blackguards.

It is absolutely necessary to have an escort in going to Palmyra, and one can be found among the Bedouin sheiks, loafing around Damascus. Under their convoy the traveller can consider himself secure; they are pretty honorable in this respect, and after getting a heavy “backsheesh” for safe conduct, they carry out their contracts, though they expect an additional “backsheesh” on their return and the delivery of the traveller to himself, in good order and condition. It is better to leave money and valuables in Damascus, taking only enough coin along to pay trifling expenses, and leaving the compensation of escort and dragoman at the banker’s or consulate. If you are going overland to Bagdad, carry your money in drafts and circular notes, and not in gold. The Bedouin has a sharp eye for money, and much coin is sure to attract it.

The Palmyra journey should be made with camels or dromedaries, for the reason that there are long stretches without water. Horses may be ridden, but there must be one or more camels at any rate to carry water for them. The sheiks always prefer to take no horses, as they can thereby make the journey more quickly, and consequently cheaper.

Well, let us suppose we are going to Palmyra. We have completed all our arrangements, agreed upon the price to be paid, and how to pay it, have arrayed ourselves in Oriental garments, mounted our dromedaries, and filed out of the city. There may be a difficulty in obtaining a sufficient number of dromedaries for the start, and in that case we ride horses to Kuryetien, about! two days’ journey from Damascus. There the sheik will have the necessary animals assembled and waiting our arrival.

We strike away to the northeastward, going at first along a paved road and among the groves and gardens for which the country around Damascus is famous. We meet crowds of people on their way to town, and accompanied by camels and donkeys: bearing the produce of the farms. In some seasons of the year {303}we will meet long strings of camels, which have come from Bagdad, laden with dates, silks, leather goods, and other merchandise from that city; there may be dozens of these in a single party, and sometimes there may be hundreds of them. The drivers are brown, and not over clean; water has been a scarce article among them, and the rivers of Damascus are to their eyes a most welcome sight. One would think that the privations of the desert would inspire no great love for the arid waste, and yet these wild Arabs are so attached to it that they make their stay in the city as brief as possible, and the moment their business is ended they hasten back to their wanderings in the wilderness.

“Give me a pillow of snow,” said a Laplander, breathing his last in a Southern clime, “and I shall die happy.”

“Give me my bed of sand in the desert,” says the Bedouin Arab, “and I shall sleep in peace.”

Every man to his own liking. Tastes are different all the world over.

Ten or twelve miles from Damascus, we leave the groves and shady gardens, and emerge upon a plain irrigated by the waters of the Barada. The plain is cultivated, though generally destitute of arboreal productions, and here and there are the little clumps of trees where the houses of the farmers are embowered. We passed some villages in the groves; we see a little hamlet on the plain to our right, but evidently we were not likely to find a dense population. Now we leave the plain and ascend a some-what rugged path along a barren and rounded mountain which attains an elevation of nearly two thousand feet above the valley of the Barada. In an hour or so we reach the pass, and at the ruin of an old caravansary we look down upon a plain which stretches away like an ocean and fills the eastern horizon.

Five villages are in sight; they are the homes of the people that cultivate portions of this plain. Wheat and barley are the principal products of the plain, and they find a market in Damascus. The inhabitants are peaceable, but their frequent encounters with Bedouin plunderers have made them acquainted with the use of weapons, and give them a rather warlike appearance. They dress much like the Bedouins, and a stranger finds it difficult to distinguish one from the other. {304}The first night of the journey is usually spent at Jerud, a large village, which is the capital of the province and the dwelling place of a Turkish _agha_ or petty governor. He has a company of cavalry at his command to resist the Bedouin Arabs, and not unfrequently has occasion to use them. It is hinted that he sometimes shuts his eyes while a foray is in progress, and begins the pursuit when the plunderers have reached a secure distance. Of course the robbers are expected to do the square thing under such circumstances, and make an honorable division of the spoils. But we should not listen to such calumnies, as we expect to stop over night in the governor’s house, and as long as we are under his roof we receive every hospitality. The assemblage is a mixed one, as there are Arabs from half-a-dozen tribes spending the night there, and we are expected to show no haughtiness in any way. The man who goes around with his nose in the air will run the risk of a snub from some of his fellow-guests.

Out of Jerud we go in the morning at a pretty early hour, and very soon we are in the Desert. We have left the fertile country behind us, and before and around we have the treeless and desolate waste. We are in a wide valley bounded by bleak and barren hills whose sides present an unvarying panorama of grey rocks and earth. The ground is not sandy, but is covered with fragments of limestone and flint, and now and then we see a little tuft of coarse grass struggling to maintain an existence, and evidently doubtful about keeping it up.

Birds and beasts are rare; in fact there is no inducement for them to stay there. When speaking of birds in such a locality, I am reminded of the story of a traveller at an unpromising place somewhere in Utah of Nevada. He entered the diningroom of the only hotel and asked for breakfast.

“Can give you beefsteak, fried ham, and curlew,” said the landlord, whose beard resembled an inverted sage-bush, and whose belt revealed a bowie-knife and revolver. And he added, “The curlew is very good.”

“What is curlew?” said the wayfarer.

“It is a bird that we shoot round here.”

“Has it got any wings?”

{305} “And can it fly?”

“You _bet_ it can fly!”

“Then bring me some beefsteak,” said the traveller, emphatically. “I want nothing to do with a bird that would stay in this miserable country when he could fly away from it. No curlew in mine, if you please.”

Three or four miles from Jerud we pass a village where there is a fountain, and then for nearly thirty miles the road follows the desert valley as before.

A hot sky above, bleak mountains on either hand, before us an undulating plain, shut in by these mountains, and beneath our feet the gravelly, flinty, verdureless soil, and our caravan slowly winding onward, form the scene presented to our eyes. Can we believe that this route has had an existence for centuries?

Thousands and thousands of years--history does not tell us for how long--this way has been trodden by the feet of patient camels and less patient men. It was the caravan route from Damascus to the opulent East. Ages and ages ago began and flourished a commerce now greatly decayed; as we look from the backs of our beasts of burden we see here and there the ruins of castles and caravansaries which once formed the halting places of the merchants when night overtook them, protected them against robbers, and in turn, perhaps, protected the robbers and sent out predatory bands for purposes of plunder. Once this was the great road to India and Far Cathay, long before the sea routes were known, and when navigation was in its most primitive state. Steam and sail and the mariner’s {306}compass have laid a destroying hand on the caravan traffic, and in place of the myriad trains of camels that once moved along this mountain-girdled valley we find now but a comparatively thin thread of commerce. The world is a world of progress.

We reach Kuryetein, a large village occupied by Moslems and Christians in the proportion of two to one. It is in the same valley we have traversed all the way from Jerud, which continues to Palmyra, forty miles further on. Here is an oasis in the Desert; a fountain bursts from the end of a low spur which juts out of the mountain range and touches one end of the village.

It is quite possible that the man who declared it remarkable that great rivers run by large cities might insist that there is a fountain near Kuryetein and dispute our assertion that Kuryetein is near a large fountain; but we wont be particular about words, as we are to stop here over night and want to have a peaceful time of it, to prepare us for the fatigues of to-morrow.

The water from the fountain is carried in little canals by a very careful system of irrigation over a considerable extent of ground, and creates fertility in what would otherwise be a barren waste. Kuryetein is in the country of the Bedouins, and these Arabs frequently come and camp near the village on account of the water that constantly flows there. They bring their flocks j and herds and constitute themselves a general nuisance, as they are not particular about camping grounds and take the first place they can find, without much regard for the owner’s rights. If I were obliged to live in a village situated as this is, and under all its disadvantages, I would move away at once.

The broken columns and large stones, hewn and squared, lying around, indicate beyond a doubt that a city of importance once stood here, but the most diligent inquirer can learn nothing of the inhabitants concerning the place. It stood there as far back as they can remember, and that is all they know about it.

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