Zigzag Journeys in the Camel Country: Arabia in Picture and Story

Part 1

Chapter 13,860 wordsPublic domain

Produced by MFR and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)

ZIGZAG JOURNEYS IN THE CAMEL COUNTRY

_By A. E. and S. M. ZWEMER_

Zigzag Journeys in the Camel Country

Arabia in Picture and Story. 12mo, cloth _net $1.00_

Topsy-Turvy Land

Arabia Pictured for Children. Decorated, cloth _net .75_

ZIGZAG JOURNEYS IN THE CAMEL COUNTRY

_ARABIA IN PICTURE AND STORY_

By SAMUEL M. ZWEMER _and_ AMY E. ZWEMER _Authors of “Topsy Turvy Land”_

NEW YORK CHICAGO TORONTO Fleming H. Revell Company LONDON AND EDINBURGH

New York: 158 Fifth Avenue Chicago: 125 North Wabash Ave. Toronto: 25 Richmond Street, W. London: 21 Paternoster Square Edinburgh: 100 Princes Street

_To the children of missionaries all the world over_

Here is another book of pictures and stories for the big children and small grown-up folks who enjoyed reading “Topsy Turvy Land” and want to know more about Arabia. A great part of this strange Camel Country is still unknown, and there are wide deserts which only the camel and his Arab guide have ever crossed. A few travellers and missionaries, however, have seen something of Arabia on their zigzag journeys along the coasts and inland. Would you like to hear the story?

The camels are waiting and the caravan is ready to start. You will not grow weary by the way, we hope. If the desert tracks are long and tiresome through the following chapters, just refresh yourself in the oasis of a picture.

S. M. Z. A. E. Z.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

I. ZIGZAG JOURNEYS IN ARABIA 13

II. THE CAMEL AT HOME 18

III. ALONG UNBEATEN TRACKS IN YEMEN 25

IV. GOING TO MARKET TO SOW SEED 32

V. WHERE THE QUEEN OF SHEBA LIVED 37

VI. THE JEWS OF KHEIBAR 43

VII. AMULETS AND OTHER EVERY-DAY THINGS 48

VIII. THE MOST WONDERFUL STONE IN THE WORLD 54

IX. THE CAMEL DRIVER WHO BECAME A PROPHET 60

X. THE LANGUAGE OF THE ANGELS 66

XI. PEARLS AND PEARL DIVERS 74

XII. A PIONEER JOURNEY ON THE PIRATE COAST 80

XIII. ACROSS THE DESERT OF OMAN 86

XIV. JAIL-BIRDS 95

XV. THE ACORN SCHOOL 101

XVI. THE STORY OF A ROLLER BANDAGE 107

XVII. NAJMA’S LAST CHRISTMAS 115

XVIII. THOSE WHO HAVE NEVER HEARD 119

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PAGE

THE DESERT SCOUT _Frontispiece_

THE BIG CAMEL MARKET IN THE CRATER AT ADEN WHERE WE PREACHED OUR FIRST SERMON, 1891 14

A SWIFT DROMEDARY AND AN ARAB POST-RIDER 20

A CARAVAN FROM YEMEN BRINGING IN HIDES FOR AMERICAN KID SHOES 22

A PICTURE CARVED IN STONE 2,000 YEARS OLD, WITH ITS INSCRIPTION, FROM THE LAND OF SHEBA 40

THE CASTLE OF KHEIBAR 45

WATER CARTS USED AT ADEN TO BRING WATER FROM THE WELLS TO THE CITY 46

A WOMAN OF THE HILL TRIBES, SHOWING VEIL AND AMULETS WORN 48

EVERY-DAY THINGS IN ARABIA 54

THE BLACK STONE AT MECCA 56

OPENING OF THE HEDJAZ RAILWAY 58

WHEN THE ARABS RETURN FROM PILGRIMAGE, THEY LOAD THEIR BAGGAGE ON THE POOR, PATIENT CAMEL 64

FIRST CHAPTER OF THE KORAN 68

THE EVOLUTION OF A PEARL BUTTON 76

PRAYER IN THE DESERT 88

MAP OF OMAN 91

BEDOUIN WOMEN AND THEIR CHILDREN 98

A MECCAN BOY 102

A BEDOUIN GIRL PLAYING PEEK-A-BOO ON A CAMEL 116

“ARABIA” (SONG) 125

Grateful acknowledgment is given to Mr. J. M. Coutinho, photographer at Aden, for permission to use several full-paged photographs. And gratitude is also expressed here for the use of other pictures taken by our missionary friends, the Rev. J. C. Young, M. D., and Dr. Sharon J. Thoms.

ZIGZAG JOURNEYS IN ARABIA

Zigzag are the lines across the deserts of Arabia that mark the weary journeys of the camel caravans for centuries. Arabia has no straight roads. The crooked, winding paths through valley and along mountainside or over sandy tracks are worn smooth by the shuffling feet of the animal-with-the-long-neck. Every bit of desert thorn or green herb on either side of the path means a step away from the straight line. The caravan zigzags towards its destination. The ship of the desert makes more tacks in its onward course than a sailing-boat with a contrary wind in a narrow harbour.

The Arab, like the camel, is not in love with straight lines. An Arab carpenter cannot draw a right angle, and the Arab mason seldom uses a plummet. An Arab servant has great trouble in laying a table-cloth square on the table. The old Arab temple at Mecca is called “a Cube” (Kaaba), and yet has none of its sides and angles equal but is a zigzag building. Streets are never parallel or at right angles, but go crisscross in all sorts of ways except the shortest way.

And so it came to pass that when the tribes of men after the deluge scattered from the Tower of Babel far to the south of the big Arabian peninsula they too travelled in zigzag lines. Some went to the far east on the Persian Gulf and began to be pearl-divers at Bahrein. Others took their best camels all the way across the waterless desert of the interior and settled in Oman to become the breeders of the finest dromedaries. Others went meandering southward along the river-beds, called _wadies_, till they came to the beautiful mountains of Yemen, green with trees and bright with blossoms. Others loved the dry, clear, keen air of the high plateau, and making tents of goat-hair they lived with their flocks, and are the Bedouin tribes of to-day. Still others were driven to the west and, because the country was barren and dreadfully hot, settled near a spring called Zem Zem, and built the city of Mecca. The waters of the spring were good, they said, for fever and pain, and so Mecca became a health resort and a market-place, and finally a religions centre. Every year the distant tribes came in great caravans to visit the city and exchange mares, camel-foals and bits of poetry.

The children of Ishmael and other grandchildren of “Father Abraham” also wandered down, and before the time of David the zigzag lines of the caravans that carried costly merchandise from Persia and India were all over Arabia. The single-track roads were as thick as the wrinkles on an old man’s forehead. But the great trunk lines were three: one of them extended from Aden on the far south, which was the chief harbour, along the whole western stretch of Arabia to Egypt. This was the road which the Queen of Sheba took when she came to see Solomon in all his glory. The other road extended from Babylon across the desert to Damascus, the oldest city in the world; and the third caravan route, nearly as important as the other two, went slant-wise from the mouth of the Euphrates River to the old capital of the Queen of Sheba, Marib. These three great railroads of the desert were busy day after day and month after month and year after year for many centuries. Great cities sprang up beside these camel tracks, and the ruins of Tadmor still show the wonderful importance of old time Arabia.

But for one reason and another trade chose other channels, and Arabia lost its importance. When the Wise Men came from the East to Bethlehem’s Manger the trunk lines were still in existence, but soon after Mohammed’s birth other parts of the world became more important, and Arabia became less and less known except to those who live in its deserts.

It had to be rediscovered in the present century, and the story of the rediscovery of Arabia is full of interest. This story, also, is a story of zigzag journeys.

Some bold travellers in Europe were anxious to visit the birthplace of Mohammed and see the holy city of Mecca, and at the risk of their lives, men like Burckhardt, Burton and others reached Mecca and Medina, travelling with the Arab caravans and dressed as Moslem pilgrims. In 1862 Palgrave made his celebrated journey across Arabia from west to east. And in 1876 Doughty, one of the bravest travellers, made his long and difficult zigzag journeys through Northwest and North Arabia, often in danger of his life. Suffering hunger and thirst with the Bedouins, he was driven from place to place until he finally got out of the interior safely.

Even earlier than these well-known travellers were the journeys of Cursten Niebuhr in Yemen. In 1763 he was sent by the King of Denmark to explore the unknown peninsula, and set out with five companions. After many wonderful adventures he came back, but he was the only one of the five: the others died in Arabia through fever or on the voyage.

Except for the portion of Arabia seen by those bold travellers and by others like them, a great part of the country is still unknown. No missionaries have ever crossed Arabia although they have made journeys into the interior and along the coasts. It is surprising, but it is true that the most unknown country in the world to-day is Arabia. We have better maps of the North Polar regions and even of the moon than we have of Southeast Arabia and portions of the interior.

The barren desert, fear of the Bedouin, always ready to rob and waylay the caravan, and the hatred of the Moslem for the Christian have closed the country for many years against travellers and missionaries; but, although so long neglected, Arabia is now becoming better known. The coasts have been explored, and they are actually building a railway to-day across the desert from Damascus to Mecca and another railway along the northern borders to Bagdad. A few months ago a British traveller crossed Arabia in a motor car. How the camels must have been surprised!

In the chapters that follow, we will take some zigzag journeys together,—sometimes on camels, sometimes on donkey-back, or in the Arab sailing-boats along the coast. We will not tell you what others have seen or heard in this wonderful country of the camel, but tell our own story; and we hope that you will learn to love the Arab, his country, and his camel as much as we do, and make many a new zigzag track across the map of Arabia to mark your journeys as future missionaries.

THE CAMEL AT HOME

Persia for goats, Egypt for crocodiles, Cashmere for sheep, Thibet for bulldogs, India for tigers, but Arabia for the camel! To see real live dromedaries, you must come to Arabia. For although the camel is often met with elsewhere, no country can show him in all his beauty like that country which is called by the Arabs themselves “Um-el-Ibl,” mother of the camel. The Oman dromedary is the prince of all camel breeds, and is so highly esteemed in the markets of the East as to fetch three times the price of any other camel. And no wonder that this animal has reached perfection in Arabia! He has been at home in its deserts and trained by its tribes for many, many centuries. Arabia and the camel are so closely connected that one can neither understand the Arab nor his language without him. Without the camel, life in a large part of Arabia would at present be impossible. Without the camel, the Arabic language itself would lose a vast number of words and ideas and possibly also a great many of its difficult sounds. There is not a page in the Arabic dictionary which does not have some reference to the camel and the life of this wonderful ship of the desert. The Arabs give him five thousand, seven hundred and forty-four different names, but the most common name by which he is known, not only by the Arabs but in all languages, is that of “Jemil,” that is to say, “camel.”

When the Ishmaelites brought Joseph to Egypt, and when the Queen of Sheba came to visit Solomon, they travelled on camels. The caravan was the earliest trunk line across the great lands of the East, and has probably carried more freight and more passengers than the Pennsylvania Railroad or the largest ocean liners. Long before wagons were invented, wheat, barley, wool and spices came across the desert on camels to Nineveh and Egypt.

Have you ever seen such a desert ship? A large, bony animal, six or seven feet high to the top of its hump, and rude and ungainly in appearance. Its neck is long, but curved beautifully. Its ears are ridiculously small, and the upper lip is cleft nearly to the nose, while the lower lip hangs down, and gives the whole face the appearance of “having the blues.”

The camel has many uses. When too old to carry a burden, it is used for food. Camel’s milk is very wholesome. Camel’s hair is used for making both fine and coarse cloths, and the skin is used for sandals, water-bags and thongs.

The dromedary is the swift post-camel, which carries its rider on long journeys seventy miles a day on the stretch. A caravan of ordinary camels is like a freight train and is intended to go slowly and surely with its heavy load of merchandise; but a company of dromedary riders is like a limited express. The ordinary caravan travels six hours a day and about three miles an hour, but a good dromedary can perform wonders on the road. A merchant once rode the entire distance from El Kasim to Taif and back, over seven hundred miles in fifteen days; and a post-rider at Maan in North Arabia can deliver a message at Damascus, two hundred miles away, at the end of three days. The ordinary camel is like a packhorse, but the dromedary by careful breeding has become a race-horse. The camel is thick-built, heavy footed, ungainly, jolting. The dromedary has more slender limbs, finer hair, a lighter step, a wonderfully easy pace and is more enduring of thirst. All the camels in Arabia have a single hump. The two-humped camel, which you sometimes see in the circus, does not come from Arabia, but from Central Asia. As for the ordinary camel, his life is as hard as the desert soil and as barren of all comfort as the desert is bare of grass. Surely, no animal would have more right to feel sulky and dull. Always in hard use as a beast of burden, underfed and overloaded in the desert land where even a thorny bush is considered a tit-bit, and where water costs money, it is no fun at all to be a camel.

Yet to describe the camel is to describe God’s goodness to the desert dwellers. The Arabs have a saying that the camel is the greatest of all blessings given by Allah to mankind; and when Mohammed, the prophet, wished to call attention to the providence and loving-kindness of God among the Bedouins, who were not at all religious, he said, “And will ye not look then at the camel how she is created?” With his long neck he is able to reach far out among the desert shrubs on both sides of his pathway and to eat as he trudges along. The skin of his month is so thick and tough that it enables him to eat hard and thorny plants, the only herbage of the desert. The camel’s ears are very small so that he can close them when the desert storm begins and the sand-drifts come like a snow-storm. But his nostrils are large for breathing and yet can be closed up tight during the fearful simoom or hot desert winds. His eyes are protected by heavy, overhanging lids against the direct rays of the noon sun, and his cushioned feet are adapted for the ease of the rider and of the animal himself. Five horny pads, one on each knee, and one under the breast, support the animal when kneeling to receive a burden or when he rests on the hot sand. The camel’s hump was nature’s pack-saddle for the commerce of many lands and for many ages. The arched backbone which supports the hump is constructed, just like the Brooklyn Bridge, to sustain the greatest weight in proportion to the span. A strong camel can bear one thousand pounds’ weight, although the usual load is not more than six hundred pounds. The camel is the most useful of all domestic animals, as you can see in the pictures. He can carry burdens or draw water or carry the swift post or bring in fire-wood from the desert, or grind corn. While still living he provides fuel, milk, excellent hair for making tents, ropes, and shawls. And when dead the Arabs eat his flesh for food, use his leather to make sandals, and the big broad shoulder-blades are used as slates in the day-schools in many parts of Arabia. A camel march is the standard of distance among the Arabs, and the price of a milch camel is the standard of value among the Bedouins of the desert. The camel is the most patient animal in existence, and yet he often has an ugly temper and is undoubtedly stupid to a degree. He will never attempt to throw you off his back, but if you fall off he will never dream of stopping for you; and if turned loose in the desert, it is a chance of a thousand to one whether he will find his way back to his accustomed home or pasture. When the camel becomes angry, he bends back his long, snaky neck and opens his big jaws to bite. Do you notice the powerful jaws of the camels in the pictures? Yet with all his faults, his ungainly gait, and his ugly appearance, you cannot help loving this ship of the desert when once you have made a zigzag journey on camel-back with the Arab caravans. Perched high in the air you feel as if you were riding on a church steeple or an aeroplane and the swinging, swaying motion after you become used to it is as good as that of a pleasure yacht in New York Bay when the wind is blowing. Then you feel like singing with the Arab poet:

“Roast meat and milk; the swinging ride On a camel sure and tried, Which her master speeds amain O’er low dale and level plain.”

There are two lessons we can learn from the camel, and I think all the boys and girls who read this chapter will like to know them. The first is, _how to bear a burden_ and never complain. The secret of carrying this burden you will see when the caravan prepares for the long journey. Every camel kneels down to receive its load in the morning; every camel kneels down to have its load taken off in the evening. And that is why he is able to carry his burden to the end of the desert road. How much easier the great burden of a lost world in need of the Gospel could be carried, if we all learned to kneel morning and evening! To kneel and have the Master’s hand lay the burden on us, and the same hand take it off. Then we would feel the responsibility, and yet not miss the quietness and rest of real missionary service. Will you not kneel to-night, and to-morrow, and ask Jesus to teach you this lesson? Because, you know, the burden of these heathen lands is _very_ heavy. There is on all of them, on Arabia too, the burden of sin, and of suffering, and of sorrow. What an awful burden! And yet the Bible tells us, “Bear ye one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.”

The second lesson is that of _patience_, which is the chief virtue of the camel, the most necessary virtue for every little missionary, and absolutely necessary for every big missionary. As the long train of camels goes on through the narrow sand path and between the thorn-shrubs of the wilderness, step by step, without sound and without ceasing, tramp, tramp, tramp, I have often thought of the text: “They shall walk and not faint.” Patient walking is better than impatient hurrying, in mission work and everything else. Patient waiting, too, you can learn from the camel. To wait patiently for results and not to dig up the seed we have sown before it sprouts. The Great Husbandman has long patience over every seed that He sows; why should not we?

“Let us, then, be up and doing, With a heart for any fate, Still achieving, still pursuing, Learn to labour and to wait.”

III

ALONG UNBEATEN TRACES IN YEMEN

Those who think Arabia is a sandy desert with a few nomad tents and camels and ostriches scattered over it, have never seen Yemen. Yemen is the most fertile and most beautiful of all the provinces of Arabia. It means _the right hand_, and this name was given it as one of good omen by the early Arabs. It was called by the Romans _Arabia Felix_, or Happy Arabia, to distinguish it from _Arabia Petrea_ (Stony Arabia) and _Arabia Deserta_ (Desert Arabia).

Those who have never gone inland from Aden cannot imagine how very different the hill country is from the torrid coast, but a journey of even thirty miles inland is convincing. Corn never grew more luxuriantly in Kansas or Iowa than in some of the valleys of Yemen. If the country had a good government and the people were Christians, it would be one of the happiest in the world; a country where the orange, lemon, quince, grape, mango, plum, apricot, peach and apple yield their fruit in their season; where you can also get pomegranates, figs, dates, plantains and mulberries; a country where wheat, barley and coffee are staple products, and where there is a glorious profusion of wild flowers—although the camel drivers call it grass. Here one can see the nest of the oriole hanging from the acacia tree, and wild doves chasing each other from the clefts of the rocks, while farther up in the highlands, wild monkeys sport among the foliage of the trees.

It was my privilege to make two journeys through Yemen to its beautiful capital, Sanaa. On my first journey (1891) I went by the usual road from Hodeida on the coast, but in 1893 I chose the unbeaten tracks from Aden directly north, in order to see some of the places not yet visited and meet the people.

At the time of my first and also of my second journey, the Arabs were in rebellion against the Turks. They have been fighting them now for fifteen years, trying to secure their independence, and this year the country is more disturbed than ever, but the Arabs have no unity, no leadership, and, worst of all, no artillery, and so the Turkish government succeeds in crushing the rebellion time after time, and holding this province of Arabia in her grasp.