2]***


This ebook was transcribed by Les Bowler.

          [Picture: Portrait of Lady Anne Blunt in Arab Costume]





                          A PILGRIMAGE TO NEJD,


                      _THE CRADLE OF THE ARAB RACE_.

                                * * * * *

                A VISIT TO THE COURT OF THE ARAB EMIR, AND
                         “OUR PERSIAN CAMPAIGN.”

                                * * * * *

                           BY LADY ANNE BLUNT.
             AUTHOR OF “THE BEDOUIN TRIBES OF THE EUPHRATES.”

                                * * * * *

                         IN TWO VOLUMES.—VOL. I.

                                * * * * *

               WITH MAP, PORTRAITS, AND ILLUSTRATIONS FROM
                          THE AUTHOR’S DRAWINGS.

                                * * * * *

                            _SECOND EDITION_.

                                * * * * *

                                 LONDON:
                      JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET,
                                  1881.

                         [_All Rights reserved_.]

                                * * * * *




These Volumes Are Dedicated


                                    TO

                      SIR HENRY CRESWICKE RAWLINSON,

                              K.C.B., F.R.S.

                                    BY

                                                            THE AUTHORESS.




PREFACE BY THE EDITOR.


READERS of our last year’s adventures on the Euphrates will hardly need
it to be explained to them why the present journey was undertaken, nor
why it stands described upon our title page as a “Pilgrimage.”  The
journey to Nejd forms the natural complement of the journey through
Mesopotamia and the Syrian Desert; while Nejd itself, with the romantic
interest attached to its name, seems no unworthy object of a religious
feeling, such as might prompt the visit to a shrine.  Nejd, in the
imagination of the Bedouins of the North, is a region of romance, the
cradle of their race, and of those ideas of chivalry by which they still
live.  There Antar performed his labours of Hercules, and Hatim Taï the
more historical hero entertained his guests.  To the Ánazeh and Shammar,
especially, whose northward migrations date only from a few generations
back, the tradition of their birth-place is still almost a recollection;
and even to the Arabs of the earlier invasions, the townsmen of such
places as Bozra, Palmyra, and Deyr, and to the Taï Bedouins, once lords
of Jebel Shammar, it appeals with a fascination more than equal to that
of the Hejaz itself.  Nejd is to all of them what Palestine is to the
Jews, England to the American and Australian colonists; but with this
difference, that they are cut off from the object of their filial
reverence more absolutely in practice than these by an intervening gulf
of desert less hospitable than any sea.  It is rare to meet anywhere in
the North an Arab who has crossed the Great Nefûd.

To us too, imbued as we were with the fancies of the Desert, Nejd had
long assumed the romantic colouring of a holy land; and when it was
decided that we were to visit Jebel Shammar, the metropolis of Bedouin
life, our expedition presented itself as an almost pious undertaking; so
that it is hardly an exaggeration, even now that it is over, and we are
once more in Europe, to speak of it as a pilgrimage.  Our pilgrimage then
it is, though the religion in whose name we travelled was only one of
romance.

Its circumstances, in spite of certain disappointments which the
narrative will reveal, were little less romantic than the idea.  Readers
who followed our former travels to their close, may remember a certain
Mohammed Abdallah, son of the Sheykh of Palmyra, a young man who, after
travelling with us by order of the Pasha from Deyr to his native town,
had at some risk of official displeasure assisted us in evading the
Turkish authorities, and accomplishing our visit to the Ánazeh.  It may
further be remembered that, in requital of this service and because we
had conceived an affection for him (for he appeared a really high-minded
young fellow), Mohammed had been given his choice between a round sum of
money, and the honour of becoming “the Beg’s” brother, a choice which he
had chivalrously decided in favour of the brotherhood.  We had then
promised him that, if all went well with us, we would return to Damascus
the following winter, and go in his company to Nejd, where he believed he
had relations, and that we would help him there to a wife from among his
own people.

The idea and the promise were in strict accordance with Bedouin notions,
and greatly delighted both him and his father Abdallah, to whom they were
in due course communicated.  Arab custom is very little changed on the
point of marriage from what it was in the days of Abraham; and it was
natural that both father and son should wish for a wife for him of their
own blood, and that he should be ready to go far to fetch one.  Moreover,
the sort of help we proposed giving (for he could hardly have travelled
to Nejd alone) was just such as beseemed our new relationship.
Assistance in the choice of a wife ranks in Bedouin eyes with the gift of
a mare, or personal aid in war, both brotherly acts conferring high
honour on those concerned.  Mohammed too had a special reason in the
circumstances of his family history to make the proposal doubly welcome.
He found himself in an embarrassing position at home with regard to
marriage, and was in a manner forced to look elsewhere for a wife.  The
history of the Ibn Arûks of Tudmur, the family to which he belonged, will
explain this, and is so curious, and so typical of Arabia, that it
deserves a passing notice here.

It would appear that seven or eight generations ago (probably about the
date of the foundation of the Wahhabi empire) three brothers of the noble
family of Arûk, Sheykhs of the Beni Khaled of south-eastern Nejd,
quarrelled with their people and left the tribe.  The Ibn Arûks were then
a very well-known family, exercising suzerain rights over the important
towns of Hasa and Katif, and having independent, even sovereign, power in
their own district.  This lay between the Persian Gulf and Harik, an
oasis on the edge of the great southern desert, and they retained it
until they and the rest of their fellow Sheykhs in Arabia were reduced to
insignificance by Mohammed Ibn Saoud, the first Wahhabi Sultan of Nejd.
{xiii}

At the beginning of last century, all Arabia was independent of central
authority, each tribe, and to a certain extent each town, maintaining its
separate existence as a State.  Religion, except in its primitive Bedouin
form, had disappeared from the inland districts, and only the Hejaz and
Yemen were more than nominally Mahometan.  The Bedouin element was then
supreme.  Each town and village in Arabia was considered the property of
one or other of the nomade Sheykhs in its neighbourhood, and paid him
tribute in return for his protection.  The Sheykh too not unfrequently
possessed a house or castle within the city walls, as a summer residence,
besides his tent outside.  He in such cases became more than a mere
suzerain, and exercised active authority over the townspeople,
administering justice at the gate daily, and enrolling young men as his
body-guard, even on occasion levying taxes.  He then received the title
of Emir or Prince.  It was in no other way perhaps that the “Shepherd
Kings” of Egypt acquired their position and exercised their power; and
vestiges of the old system may still be found in many parts of Arabia.

In the middle of the eighteenth century, however, Ibn Abd-el-Wahhab, the
Luther of Mahometanism, preached his religious reform in Nejd, and
converted Ibn Saoud, the Ánazeh Sheykh of Deriyeh, to his doctrines.  By
Ibn Abd-el-Wahhab’s help Ibn Saoud, from the mere chief of a tribe, and
sovereign of one city, became Sultan of all Arabia, and reduced one after
another every rival Sheykh to submission.  He even ultimately destroyed
the system of tribute and protection, the original basis of his power,
and having raised a regular army from among the townsmen, made these
quite independent of Bedouin rule.  Arabia then, for the first time since
Mahomet’s death, became a united empire with a centralised and regular
government.  It must have been about the year 1760 that the three Ibn
Arûks, disgusted with the new state of things in Nejd, went out to seek
their fortunes elsewhere.  According to the tradition, partly embodied in
an old ballad which is still current in Arabia, they were mounted all
three upon a single camel, and had nothing with them but their swords and
their high birth to gain them credit among strangers.  They travelled
northwards and at first halted in Jôf, the northernmost oasis of Central
Arabia, where one of them remained.  The other two, quarrelling,
separated; the younger going, tradition knew not whither, while the elder
held on his way still further north, and settled finally at Tudmur
(Palmyra), where he married a woman of the place, and where he ultimately
became Sheykh.  At that time Tudmur consisted but of a few houses.  His
name was Ali, and from him our friend Mohammed and his father Abdallah,
and his uncle Faris, the real head of the family in Tudmur, are
descended.

Mohammed then had some reason, as far as his male ancestry were
concerned, to boast of his birth, and look high in making a “matrimonial
alliance;” but _par les femmes_ he was of less distinguished blood; and,
as purity of descent on both sides is considered a _sine quâ non_ among
the Arabs, the Ibn Arûks of Tudmur had not been recognized for several
generations as _asil_, or noble.  They had married where they could among
the townspeople of no birth at all, or as in the case of Mohammed’s
father, among the Moáli, a tribe of mixed origin.  The Ánazeh, in spite
of the name of Arûk, would not give their daughters to them to wife.
This was Mohammed’s secret grief, as it had been his father’s, and it was
as much as anything else to wipe out the stain in their pedigree, that
the son so readily agreed to our proposal.

The plan of our journey was necessarily vague, as it included the search
after two families of relations of whom nothing had been heard for nearly
a hundred years.  The last sign of life shewn by the Ibn Arûks of Jôf had
been on the occasion of Abdallah’s father’s death by violence, when
suddenly a member of the Jôf family had appeared at Tudmur as avenger in
the blood feud.  This relation had not, however, stayed longer there than
duty required of him, and having slain his man had as suddenly
disappeared.  Of the second family nothing at all was known; and, indeed,
to the Ibn Arûks as to the other inhabitants of Tudmur, Nejd itself was
now little more than a name, a country known by ancient tradition to
exist, but unvisited by any one then living connected with the town.

These singular circumstances were, as I have said, the key-note of our
expedition, and will, I hope, lend an interest beyond that of our own
personal adventures to the present volumes.  To Mohammed and the Arabs
with whom we travelled, as well as to most of those we met upon our
journey, his family history formed a perpetual romance, and the _kasid_
or ballad of Ibn Arûk came in on every occasion, seasonable and
unseasonable, as a chorus to all that happened.  But for it, I doubt
whether the journey could ever have been accomplished; and on more than
one occasion we found ourselves borne easily on by the strength of it
over difficulties which, under ordinary conditions, might have sufficed
to stop us.  By extreme good luck, as will be seen in the sequel, we lit
upon both branches of the family we set out in search of, the one
citizens of the Jôf oasis, the other Bedouins in Nejd, while the further
we got the better was the Arûk name known, and relations poured in on us
on all sides, eager to shew us hospitality and assistance.  We were thus
passed on from kinsman to kinsman, and were everywhere received as
friends; nor is it too much to say that while in Arabia we enjoyed the
singular advantage of being accepted as members of an Arabian family.
This gave us an unique occasion of seeing, and of understanding what we
saw; and we have only ourselves to blame if we did not turn it to very
important profit.

So much then for the romance.  The profit of our expedition may be
briefly summarised.

First as to geography.  Though not the only Europeans who have visited
Jebel Shammar, we are the only ones who have done so openly and at our
leisure, provided with compass and barometer and free to take note of all
we saw.  Our predecessors, three in number, Wallin, Guarmani, and
Palgrave, travelled in disguise, and under circumstances unfavourable for
geographical observation.  The first, a Finnish professor, proceeded in
1848, as a Mussulman divine, from the coast of the Red Sea to Haïl and
thence to the Euphrates.  The account of his journey, given in the
Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society, is unfortunately meagre,
and I understand that, though one more detailed was published in his own
language, he did not live long enough to record the whole body of his
information.  The second, Guarmani, a Levantine of Italian origin,
penetrated in disguise to Jebel Shammar, commissioned by the French
Government to procure them horses from Nejd; and he communicated a lively
and most interesting account of his adventures to the “Société de
Géographie” in 1865.  He too went as a Turkish mussulman, and, being
rather an Oriental than a European, collected a mass of valuable
information relating chiefly to the Desert Tribes through which he
passed.  It is difficult, however, to understand the route maps with
which his account is illustrated, and, though he crossed the Nefûd at
more than one point, he is silent as to its singular physical features.
Guarmani started from Jerusalem in 1863 and visited Teyma, Kheybar,
Áneyzeh, Bereydah, and Haïl, returning thence to Syria by Jôf and the
Wady Sirhán.  Mr. Palgrave’s journey is better known.  A Jesuit
missionary and an accomplished Arabic scholar, he was entrusted with a
secret political mission by Napoleon III. and executed it with the
permission of his superiors.  He entered Nejd, disguised as a Syrian
merchant, from Maan, and passing through Haïl in 1864 reached Riad, the
capital of the Wahhabi kingdom, and eventually the Persian Gulf at Katif.
His account of Central Arabia is by far the most complete and life-like
that has been published, and in all matters of town life and manners may
be depended upon as accurate.  But his faculty of observation seems
chiefly adapted to a study of society, and the nature he describes is
human nature only.  He is too little in sympathy with the desert to take
accurate note of its details, and the circumstances of his journey
precluded him from observing it geographically.  He travelled in the heat
of summer and mostly by night, and was besides in no position, owing to
his assumed character and the doubtful company in which he was often
compelled to travel, to examine at leisure what he saw.  Mr. Palgrave’s
account of the physical features of the Nefûd, and of Jebel Shammar, the
only one hitherto published, bears very little resemblance to the
reality; and our own observations, taken quietly in the clear atmosphere
of an Arabian winter, are therefore the first of the kind which have
reached Europe.  By taking continuous note of the variations of the
barometer while we travelled, we have been able to prove that the plateau
of Haïl is nearly twice the height supposed for it above the sea, while
the granite range of Jebel Shammar exceeds this plateau by about 2000
feet.  Again, the great pilgrim-road from the Euphrates, though
well-known by report to geographers, had never before been travelled by
an European, and on this, as on other parts of our route, we have
corrected previous maps.  The map of Northern Arabia appended to the
first volume of our work may be now depended upon as within its limits
substantially accurate.

In geology, though possessing a superficial knowledge only of our
subject, we have, I believe, been able to correct a few mistakes, and to
clear up a doubt, much argued by Professor Wetzstein, as to the rock
formation of Jebel Aja; while a short memoir I have appended, on the
physical conformation of the great sand desert, will contain
original—possibly valuable—matter.  The sketches, above all, which
illustrate these volumes, may be relied on as conscientious
representations of the chief physical features of Central Arabia.

Botanists and zoologists will be disappointed in the meagre accounts of
plants and animals I am able to give.  But the existence now proved of
the white antelope (_Oryx Beatrix_) in Nejd is, I believe, a fact new to
science, as may be that of the _Webber_, a small climbing quadruped
allied to the marmots.

A more important contribution to knowledge will, I hope, be recognised in
a description of the political system to which I have just alluded under
the name of Shepherd rule, and which is now once more found in Central
Arabia