Breaking up from W. Gârib, we pitched five hours to the S.W. in the Agorra; great was the midsummer heat even in that high ground! Here a womanly fair young wife, so nigh as he could have mind the fifteenth of his many marriages, bore to Tollog her first-born son and recomforted the old heart in his heavy age. The last day of June we descended southward by the haj road; where I saw again the wheel-rut of the Jurdy cannon. Among the bergs, upon our left-hand, stands a bee-hive shaped sandstone mountain, J. Merzûm, which seemed to me capped with basalt, although at some miles from the Harra side. In this desolate passage I saw many blossoming plants of senna, with the head of yellow flowers, nearly like a ground pea. My old nâga cropped the noxious herb, that is not often browsed by camels, and when the nomads see them they drive their beasts further; but those riding next by me looked on with the Beduish malice, and held their peace; afterwards they said, “Wherefore, Khalil, let thy naga eat of that which is venomous!” Somewhat more brave is the desert march of the Moahîb than the ráhla of the Fejîr; for these sheykhly housewives ride gaily mounted in saddle-frames múksir, with some caparison of coloured carpets.

Vous me demandez, Monsieur, de vous donner mon avis sur le style des monuments que vous avez découverts, au prix de si grands efforts et de si grands dangers. Votre question m'embarrasse un peu: je suis à Madère, séparé, depuis plus d'un an, de mes livres et de mes notes: je ne puis done écrire que de souvenir: les réflexions que me suggèrent vos dessins n'auront pas le développement que j'aurais aimé à leur donner: je vous les adresse néanmoins, avec l'espoir qu'elles pourront vous être de quelque utilité.

Le principal intérêt du groupe de tombeaux de Médaiin-Salih réside dans ce fait qu'il est daté: il offre done une base indiscutable pour les rapprochements archéologiques. Tous ces monuments ont été exécutés dans le premier siècle de notre ère, et, pour la plupart, dans la première moitié de ce même siècle. Ils sont d'une remarquable uniformité. On voit qu'ils ont tous été exécutés à la même époque par des artistes de la même école, en possession d'un petit nombre de modèles. On s'étonnerait, à premiere vue, qu'une region aussi anciennement habitée ne renfermât pas de monuments de sa longue existence, si le fait n'était pas général. La Syrie et la Palestine, malgré la grande antiquité de la civilisation dans ces contrées, ne renferment presque plus de monuments antérieurs à l'époque grecque: à part quelques rares exceptions, les innombrables tombeaux, taillés dans le roc, qui sillonnent toutes les montagnes de ces régions, sont posterieurs à Alexandre, et généralement même postérieurs à Jésus Christ.

The women of the hauta loaded the tents and their gear, and I saw our Aarab departing before the morning light. Zeyd rode in upon his mare, from the village where he had slept; ‘If I would go now with him, he would bring me, he said, to the Bishr and bind them for my better security;’ but Zeyd could not dwell, he must follow his Aarab, and I could not be ready in a moment; I saw the Fukara companions no more. A stranger, who passed by, lent me a hand in haste, as I loaded upon my old nâga: and I drove her, still resisting and striving to follow the rest, half a mile about the walls to those Bishr, who by fortune were not so early movers. There, I betook myself to Hayzàn, the man who had agreed to conduct me: and of another I bought the frame of a riding-saddle, that I might lay the load upon my wounded camel. They were charging their cattle, and we set forward immediately.

Leaving Teyma on the right hand, we passed forth, between the Érbah peaks and Ghrenèym, to the desert; soon after the bleak border was in sight of the Nefûd, also trending eastward. We journeyed on in rain and thick weather; at four of the afternoon they alighted, in the wet wilderness, at an height of 600 feet above Teyma, and the hungry camels were dismissed to pasture.

The camels now jezzîn, we wandered without care of great watering places; the people drinking of any small waters of the suffa, or ground rock. There are in all this desert mountain soil pit-like places of rock choked with old blown sand. In these sand-pools a water, of the winter rains, is long time preserved, but commonly thick and ill-smelling in the wet sand, and putrefying with rotten fibres of plants and urea of the nomads’ cattle, which have been watered here from the beginning. Of such the Aarab (they prefer the thick desert water to pure water) now boiled their daily coffee, which is not then ill-tasting. The worst is that blackish water drawn from pits long forsaken, until they have been voided once; and sooner than drink their water I suffered thirst, and very oft passed the nights half sleepless. Strange are the often forms in this desert of wasted sand-jock, spires, needles, pinnacles, and battled mountains, which are good landmarks. I asked Zeyd, ‘Did he know them all?’ Answer: “From my childhood, I know as good as. every great stone upon all our marches,” that may be over three of four thousand square miles. Mountain (jebel in the settled countries) is commonly thulla—“rib,” (and dim. thulleya,) with the nomads;—we say coast almost in like wise.

Here the 19—20 November our tents were stiffened by the night's frost. Mount Seir or J. Sherra before us (sherra is interpreted high), is high and cold, and the Arabs' summer clothing is as nakedness in the winter season. The land is open, not a rock or tree or any good bush to bear off the icy wind; it is reported, as a thing of a late memory, that wayfaring companies and their cattle have starved, coming this way over in the winter months. In the night they perished together, and the men were found lying by the cold ash-pits of their burned-out watch-fires. Not far from this wady, in front, begins that flint beach, which lies strewn over great part of the mountain of Esau; a stony nakedness blackened by the weather: it is a head of gravel, whose earth was wasted by the winds and secular rains. This land-face of pebbles shines vapouring in the clear sun, and they are polished as the stones and even the mountains in Sinai by the ajdj or dust-bearing blasts. The wide-spread and often three-fathom deep bed of gravel, is the highest platform of land in all that province; the worn flint-stones are of the washed chalk rock lying beneath, in which are massy (tabular) silicious veins: we see such gravel to be laid out in shallow streaming water, but since this is the highest ground, from whence that wash of water?

In this menzil, because the people must march from the morrow, the booths were struck and their baggage had been made up before they slept. The Beduin families lay abroad under the stars, beside their household stuff and the unshapely full sweating water-skins. The night was cold, at an altitude of 3600 feet. I saw the nomads stretched upon the sand, wrapped in their mantles: a few have sleeping carpets, ekîm, under them, made of black worsted stuff like their tent-cloth, but of the finer yarn and better weaving, adorned with a border of chequerwork of white and coloured wool and fringes gaily dyed. The ekîms of Teyma have a name in this country.

It was chill under the stars at this season, marching before the sun in the open wilderness. The children of the poor have not a mantle, only a cotton smock covers their tender bodies; some babes are even seen naked. I found 48° F., and when the sun was fairly up 86°. It was a forced march; the flocks and the herds, et-tursh, were driven forth beside us. At a need the Beduw spare not the cattle which are all their wealth, but think they do well to save themselves and their substance, even were it with the marring of some of them; their camel kine great with young were now daily calving.

When this day's sun was setting, Mufarrij called me to the Mothîf gallery, where a supper-dish was set before me of mutton and temmn. When 1 came again into the coffee-hall, as the cup went round there began to be questioning among the Beduin guests and those of the castle service, of my religion. I returned early to my beyt, and then I was called away by his servants to see one, whom they named “The Great Sheykh”.— ‘Who was, I asked, that great sheykh?’ they answered “El-Emir!” So they brought me to a dar, which was nearly next by, and this is named Kahwat Abeyd. They knocked and a Galla slave opened the door. We passed in by a short entry, which smelled cheerfully of rose-water, to that which seemed to my eyes full of the desert a goodly hall-chamber. The Oriental rooms are enclosures of the air, without moveables, and their only ornaments are the carpets for sitting-places, here laid upon the three sides of the upper end, with pillowed places for “the Emir“and his next kinsman. All was clay, the floor is beaten clay, the clay walls I saw were coloured in ochre; the sitters were principal persons of the town, a Beduin sheykh or two, and men of the princely service; and bright seemed the civil clothing of these fortunate Arabs.—They had said ‘The Emir’! and in the chief place I saw a great noble figure half lying along upon his elbow!—but had I not seen the Prince Ibn Rashid himself this morning?

Finally, after other days of great heat, which were the last of that summer, the 28th of August, the Aarab removed from el-Héjr. Once more their “faces were toward” the Teyma country, and I mounted among them with such comfort of heart as is in the going home from a scurvy school-house;—delivered, at length, from the eye-sore and nose-sore of those mawkish mummy-house cliffs, the sordid kella and perilous Moghrâreba of Medáin Sâlih. Now, leaving the Turkish haj-road country, I had Nejd before me, the free High Arabia!

We passed the enclosed plain to the south-eastward. I saw many falcons carried out by the thel^l riders in this ráhla; they had purchased the birds of the gate Arabs; and there are Beduin masters who in the march carry their greyhounds upon camel-back, lest the burning sand should scald their tender feet. Four days we journeyed by short marches to the eastward, and the nomads alighting every forenoon dismissed their cattle to pasture. The summer heat was ended for us in those airy uplands. At the morrow's sunrise whilst we sat a moment, before the rálila, over a hasty fire, I read the thermometer, 73° F.; yet it seemed a cold wind that was blowing upon us.

Three and a half hours after midnight we departed from this station:—from henceforth begin the great journeys of the Haj in Arabia. Little before day at a gunshot in front the caravan halted, and whilst we rested half an hour the great ones drink coffee. Two hours above the Akaba before us is a site, Khân ez-Zebîb; Mohammed Saîd Pasha in the last returning Haj, riding out upon his mare in advance of the caravan, (the Arabian spring already beginning), here lighted upon a great assembling of gazelles and killed with his pistol shots so many that venison was served that evening in all the great haj officers’ pavilions. We approached at noon the edge of the high limestone platform of J. Sherra, Masharîf es-Shem of the old Mohammedan bookmen, “The brow of Syria or the North.” And below begins Arabia proper, Béled el-Aarab:—but these are distinctions not known to the Beduish inhabitants.

The haj road descending lies in an hollow ground, as it were the head of a coomb, of sharp shelves of plate-flint and limestone. We are about to go down into the sandstones,—whereof are the most sands of Arabia. A ruinous kella and cistern are here upon our left hand. The caravan column being come to the head of the strait passage, we are delayed in the rear thirty minutes.