Amurath to Amurath

by Bell, Gertrude

  Fig. 8.—ALEPPO, A MAMLÛK DOME. Fig. 9.—ALEPPO, A MAMLÛK DOME.

  Fig. 10.—KHN EL WAZÎR.

  Fig. 11.—KHAN ES SABÛN.

  Fig. 12.—WINDOW OF A TURBEH, FIRDAUS.

  Fig. 13.—GATE OF CITADEL, ALEPPO.

  Fig. 14.—ALEPPO, THE GREAT MOSQUE.

  Fig. 15.—TELL AḤMAR FERRY.

  Fig. 16.—TELL AḤMAR.

  Fig. 17.—CARCHEMISH FROM THE BIG MOUND.

  Fig. 18.—TELL AḤMAR. HITTITE STELA.

  Fig. 19.—TELL AḤMAR. EARTHENWARE JAR.

  Fig. 21.—SERRÎN, NORTHERN TOWER TOMB. Fig. 22.—SERRÎN, SOUTHERN TOWER TOMB.

  CHAPTER II

  TELL AḤMAR TO BUSEIRAH

  Feb. 21—March 7

  The Water of the Euphrates is much esteemed by the inhabitants of its banks. It is, I think, an acquired taste; the newcomer will be apt to look askance at the turgid liquid that issues from the spout of his teapot and to question whether a decoction of ancient dust can be beneficial to the European constitution. Fattûḥ, being acquainted with my idiosyncrasies in the matter of drinking water, accepted without a murmur the sacrilegious decree that that which was destined for my flask must be boiled; whereby, though we did not succeed in removing all solid bodies, we reduced them to a comparative harmlessness. But if it cannot be described as a good table river, the Euphrates is the best of travelling companions, and the revolution of the seasons will never again bring me to the last week of February without setting loose a desire for the wide reaches of the stream and the open levels of the desert through which it flows, the sharp cold of nightfall, the hoar frost of the dawn, and the first long ray of the sun striking a dismantled camp. “There is no road,” said Fattûḥ, “like the road to Baghdâd: the desert on one hand and the water on the other.”

  Our way next morning took us past Ḳubbeh to Mughârah, which we reached in three hours. Here we left the river and climbing the low, rocky hill to the east, found ourselves in a stony and thinly populated country bounded by another ridge of eastern hill. After twenty-five minutes’ riding we saw the hamlet of Ḳayyik Debû about half-a-mile to the left of the track, and in another quarter of an hour we reached a few deserted houses. Four hours from Tell Aḥmar

  we pitched camp on the further bank of a small stream near the village of Serrîn, for I wished to examine two towers which stand upon the crest of a high ridge about half-an-hour to the east. They are called by the Arabs the Windmills, but in reality they are tower tombs. The more northerly, which is the best preserved, is 4·20 m. square and two storeys high (Fig. 20). The walls of the lower storey rise in solid masonry to a height of about six metres and are crowned by a plain course of projecting stones, which serves as cornice (Fig. 21). On the east and west sides, just below the cornice, there is a pair of gargoyles, much weathered. They represent the head and fore-quarters of lions. A little below the pair of heads on the west side is a Syriac inscription, dated in the year 385 of the Seleucid era, i. e. A.D. 74, which states that the tomb was built by one Manu for himself and his sons. The second storey is decorated with fluted engaged columns, four on either side, the outer pair forming the angles. The bases of these columns rest upon a course of masonry adorned with three fasciæ: it is to be noted that the mouldings are not carried straight through to the angles, but are returned one within the other like the mouldings of a door lintel. The Ionic capitals carry a plain Ionic entablature consisting of an architrave with fasciæ, which are here taken through to the corners, a narrow frieze and a cyma of considerable projection. Probably the whole was surmounted by a stone pyramid. There are two burial chambers, one in each storey. The lower chamber can be entered by a door in the east wall which was originally closed by a large block of stone. The entrance to the upper chamber, high up in the east wall between the columns, was closed in the same fashion, and the block of porphyry which sealed it is still intact. Pognon, who has given the best description and illustrations of the monument, mentions five other examples of tower tombs crowned with pyramids, one of them being the southern tower at Serrîn. The well-known tower tombs of Palmyra and the Ḥaurân are not capped by a pyramid, nor is the face of their walls broken at any point by engaged columns. I believe the type illustrated at Serrîn to be compounded of the simple tower tomb and the canopy, or cyborium, tomb. The cyborium tomb exists in an infinite number of variations in Syria, in the mountain district near Birejik (whence M. Cumont has supplied me with four examples, three of them as yet unpublished ), in Asia Minor and in the African Tripoli. Sometimes the columns stand free, sometimes they are engaged in the walls, sometimes they are represented only by engaged angle piers, sometimes by free standing angle piers, and occasionally column and pier have dropped away and the plain wall alone remains, but the pyramidal roof is an almost constant feature, which, even in the simplest of these tombs, recalls the original canopy type. In the hill side near the tower I noticed several rock-cut mausoleums, now half-choked with stones and earth, and the hill was no doubt the necropolis of a town lying in the low ground that stretches down to the modern village by the stream. The second tower, of which only the south wall remains, is situated on the southern end of the ridge, half-an-hour’s ride from the first (Fig. 22). It differs slightly in detail from the other. In the lower storey a shallow engaged pier stands at either angle, while in the upper storey, in place of the porphyry block, there is an arched niche between the two central engaged columns. The fasciæ returned at the corners reappear, but the columns are not fluted. The hill top commands a wide view over country which appears to be entirely desert. My guide, who was a Christian from Aleppo, an agent of the Liquorice Trust for the Serrîn district, said that there was no settled population to the east of us, and that the few Arab encampments which were visible upon the rolling steppe were those of the Benî Sa’îd, a subdivision of the Benî Faḥl. As we sat in the sunshine under the tower, Jirjî related tales of his neighbours, the Arab sheikhs, for whom he entertained, as the townsman will, feelings that ranged between contempt and fear—contempt for their choice of a black tent in the desert as a dwelling-place, and fear inspired by the authority which they wielded from that humble abode. But chiefly his simple soul was exercised by the swift downfall of Ibrahîm Pasha, who for so many years had been, as the fancy prompted him, the scourge or the mighty protector of all the inhabitants of northern Mesopotamia, a man with whom the government had to make terms, while the great tribes stood in awe of him and the lesser tribes fled at the whisper of his name. Jirjî, like many another, refused to believe that he was dead, and entertained us with wild surmises as to the manner of his possible return from the unknown refuge where he lay in hiding. “God knows he was a brave man,” said he. “Oh lady, do you see Ḳal’at en Nejm yonder?” And he pointed west, where across the Euphrates the walls and bastions of the fortress crowned the precipitous bank. “There he forded, he and eight hundred men with him, when he hastened back from Damascus to his own country, hearing that the government was against him. They swam the river with their horses and rested that night at Serrîn. But the Pasha was grave and silent: God’s mercy upon him, for he befriended us Christians.” Ḥâjj ’Alî shook his head. “He wrecked the world,” said he. “Praise God he is dead.” Somewhere between the two opinions lies the truth. I suspect that though the way in which his overthrow was accomplished left much to be desired, the Millî Kurds, of whom he was the chief, had gained under his bold leadership a pre-eminence in lawlessness which no government was justified in countenancing. But since he is dead, peace to his memory, for he knew no fear.

  We could not see the river from Serrîn, but next morning I rode down to it and looked across to the splendid walls of Ḳal’at en Nejm. The castle, seated upon a rocky spur, encloses the steep slopes with its masonry until it seems like a massive buttress of the hill, as ageless and no less imperishable than the rock itself. We turned away from this stern ghost of ancient wars and rode from the Euphrates up a bare valley wherein we came upon a great
cave, inhabited by a few Arabs. It contained three large chambers,

  the opening of which had been fenced in by the latest inhabitants with screens made of rushes. Upon one of the walls I found a curious inscription written in characters not unlike those seen by Sachau in a cave near Urfah (Fig. 23). The Arab women with their children in their arms clamoured round me, and I distributed among them what small coins I had with me, without satisfying the claims of all. One scolding wench ran after us up the valley vociferating her demand that ten paras should be given to her swaddled babe. We had not ridden far before Jûsef’s horse slipped and fell upon a smooth stone, dismounting his rider, who was at no time too certain of his seat. “Allah!” ejaculated Ḥâjj ’Alî; “it was the woman’s curse that brought him down.” But the malediction had missed fire, or perhaps it was only ten paras’ worth of damnation, for Jûsef and his horse scrambled up together unhurt. At the head of the valley we came out on to a green sward. The rains on this side of the river had been scanty and the grass had scarcely begun to grow, but already there were a few encampments of the Faḥl in sheltered places which later in the season would be set thick with the black tents of the ’Anazeh, who do not come down to the river until the rain pools are exhausted in their winter quarters. The thin blue smoke of the morning camp fires rose out of the hollows and my heart rose with it, for here was the life of the desert, in open spaces under the open sky, and when once you have known it, the eternal savage in your breast rejoices at the return to it. As we rode near the tents a man galloped up to us and begged for a pinch of tobacco. He was clothed in a ragged cotton shirt and a yet more ragged woollen cloak, but Ḥâjj ’Alî looked after him as he turned away and observed, “His mare is worth £200.”

  In three hours from Serrîn we caught up the baggage animals at the last village we were to see until we reached Raḳḳah. Mas’ûdîyeh is its name. On a mound close to the river Oppenheim found three mosaic pavements, parts of which are still visible, but the most beautiful of the three has been almost destroyed and nothing remains of it but a simple geometrical border of diagonal intersecting lines. Beyond Mas’ûdîyeh we crossed a long belt of sand, lying in a bend of the river; we left a small mound (Tell el Banât) a mile to the east, climbed a ridge of bare hill and dropped down into a wide stretch of grass country, empty, peaceful and most beautiful. It was enclosed in a semicircle of hills that stood back from the river, and from out of the midst of it rose an isolated peak known to the Arabs as Ḳuleib. This land is the home of the Weldeh tribe, and not far from the Euphrates we found a group of their tents pitched between green slopes and the broad reaches of sand which give the spot its name, Rumeileh, the Little Sands. It was the encampment of Sheikh Ṣallâl, and no sooner had we arrived than the sheikh’s son, Muḥammad, came out to bid us welcome and invite us to his father’s tent. The two zaptiehs and I took our places round the hearth while Muḥammad roasted and pounded the coffee beans, telling us the while of the movements of the great tribes, where Ḥâkim Beg of the ’Anazeh was lying, and where Ibn Hudhdhâl of the Amarât, and similar matters of absorbing interest. Sheikh Ṣallâl was in reduced circumstances by reason of a recent difference of opinion with the government. His brother had been enlisted as a soldier and had subsequently deserted, whereupon the government had seized Ṣallâl’s flocks and clapped the sheikh into gaol, and finally he had sold “the best mare left to us, wallah!” for £T37 and with the money procured his own release.

  “Eh billah!” said Ḥâjj ’Alî, shaking his head over the confused tale in which, as is usual in these episodes, the wrongdoing seemed to be shared impartially by all concerned. “Such is the government!”

  “And now, oh lady,” pursued the sheikh, “we have neither camels nor sheep, for the government has eaten all.”

  “How do you live?” said I, looking round the circle of dark, bearded faces by the camp fire.

  “God knows!” sighed the sheikh, and turning to Ḥâjj ’Alî he asked him what was this new government of which he heard, and liberty, what was that?

  “Liberty?” said Ḥâjj ’Alî, evading the question; “how should there be liberty in these lands? Look you, they talk of liberty, but there is no change in the world. In Aleppo many men are murdered every week, and who knows what they are doing, those envoys whom we sent to Constantinople?”

  In spite of his misfortunes Sheikh Ṣallâl designed to entertain me at dinner and had set aside for that purpose an ancient goat. My attention was attracted to it by the sound of bleating in the women’s quarters and I was just in time to save its life, expending myself, however, in protestations of gratitude. Muḥammad ibn Ṣallâl took me round the encampment before the light failed and pointed out the foundations of a number of stone-built houses. Behind my tents the summits of some grassy mounds were ringed round with circles of great stones, of the origin of which he knew nothing. I counted five of them; in the largest lay foundations of small rectangular chambers.

  As we walked back to the tents Muḥammad said reproachfully:

  “Oh lady, you have not laughed once, not when I showed you the ruins, nor when I told you the name of the hills.”

  I hastened to amend my ways, and thus encouraged he enumerated a string of ruined sites in the neighbourhood and accepted an invitation to serve us as guide next morning. He prepared himself for the journey by slipping on four cartridge belts, one over the other, although our whole road lay in the Weldeh country, and the worst enemy we encountered was a raging wind which sent the Euphrates sands whirling about us and obscured the landscape near the river. In about an hour we climbed up on to the higher ground of the grass plain at a point called Shems ed Dîn, where among a heap of cut stones I found fragments of an entablature carved with dentils and palmettes. Perhaps the ruins were the remains of a tower tomb. At Tell eẓ Ẓâher, an hour further south, we saw heaps of unsquared building-stones. Above this site stood Sheikh Sîn, a steep hill which we ascended, but found no trace of construction on it. I sent my zaptieh down to stop the baggage and bid Fattûḥ camp at the mound of Munbayah near the river, and with Muḥammad turned inland to a hill called by him Jernîyeh, some five miles to the east. Muḥammad rode across the downs at a hand gallop in the teeth of the wind, and I behind him, too much buffeted by the storm to call a halt. The immediate reason for our haste, as I presently discovered, was a couple of pedlars from whom he desired to buy soap, a commodity of which he stood in great need. The two men were Turks; they greeted me with effusion as a fellow alien in those wastes, and at parting pressed upon me a handful of raisins with their blessings. We galloped on faster than before and arrived breathless at Jernîyeh which lifts its solitary head a hundred feet or more above the surrounding plain. On the summit are three large mounds into which the Arabs had dug and uncovered fine cut stones; I conjecture that there may have been here watch towers or tower tombs belonging to the town of which the ruins lie below, to the south of the hill. These ruins comprise a large low mound ringed round with a wall and a ditch, and a considerable area covered with remains of buildings made of unsquared stones. Occasionally the plan of house or court was marked out upon the grass and Muḥammad showed me several deep cisterns—altogether a very remarkable ruin field though it is not named on Kiepert’s map. On our way back to the river we climbed Tell el Ga’rah and found the foundations of a fort on the top of it. Here we picked up a much-weathered Byzantine coin and a quantity of sherds of glazed Arab pottery, blue and green and purple. Munbayah, where my tents were pitched—the Arabic name means only an elevated spot—has been conjectured to be the Bersiba of Ptolemy’s catalogue of place names. It is an irregularly-shaped double enclosure, resting on one side on the river (Fig. 25). The line of the walls is marked by high grass mounds, but here and there a bit of massive polygonal masonry, large stones laid without mortar, crops out of the soil. The outer enclosing wall is not continued along the north side, but ends in a heap of earth and stones which looks like the ruins of a tower or bastion. To the south there is a c
learly-marked gate in the outer wall, corresponding with a narrower opening in the inner line of fortification; another gate leads out to the north, and facing the river there are traces of a broad water gate, protected on either side by a wall that drops down the slope towards the stream (Fig. 26). Twenty minutes further down the bank lies another mound, Tell Sheikh Ḥassan. There are vestiges of construction by the water’s edge between the two mounds, and south of Tell Sheikh Ḥassan the ground is broken by a large stretch of ruin mounds, among which I saw a rude capital. In another half-hour down stream, at ’Anâb, there is again an enclosure of grassy heaps strewn with stones. For a distance of about three miles, therefore, the left bank of the river would seem to have been inhabited and guarded, though possibly at different dates. Jernîyeh and Munbayah are by far the most interesting sites which I saw on the little-known stretch of the river between Tell Aḥmar and Ḳal’at Ja’bar; it is useless to conjecture in what way, if at all, they were connected with each other, but in both places I should like to clear away the earth and see what lies beneath.

  If it had been possible to cross the Euphrates I would have examined the high tell of Sheikh ’Arûd which had been all day the fixed point for my compass, but though there was a boat to be had, the intolerable wind continued till nightfall and made the passage impracticable. The mental exasperation produced by wind when you are living and trying to work out of doors, passes belief. The blast seizes you by the hand as you would hold your compass steady, dances jigs with your camera and elopes with your measuring tape, and when after an exhausting struggle you return vanquished to your tent, it is only to find your books and papers buried in sand. Moreover, commissariat arrangements were complicated by the interruption of communications with the opposite side of the river. Fortunately I had foreseen that there would be little food for man or beast on the left bank, where no travellers pass, and contrary to my habits had laid in a provision of tinned meats, for which we had reason to be thankful. The baggage animals were lightly loaded and could carry four days’ corn besides their packs; when this ran short Fattûḥ went foraging in every Arab encampment, but occasionally the horses were without their full allowance, for at this time of the year the Arabs themselves are very scantily supplied. We soon learnt to place no reliance on assurances, however emphatic, that the next sheikh down the river would be well furnished, and as our road led us into regions that had suffered more and more severely from the lack of rain, we gave up all hope of ekeing out our corn with the grass which never grew that year. The corn, too, became dearer, until at Baghdâd it touched famine prices. On the upper parts of the river there is no fuel and we carried charcoal for cooking purposes; but when the tamarisk bushes began to appear, about a day’s march north of Raḳḳah, the muleteers boiled their big rice pot over a fire of sticks and the zaptiehs warmed their hands in the sharp chill of the early morning at the heap of embers that had been kept alive all night. The zaptiehs are supposed to feed themselves, but except on the rare occasions when we were on a high road, they shared the meals of my servants. I would find them sitting in the dark round the steaming dish served up by Ḥâjj ’Amr, and with them the Arab who had been our guide that day, or one who had dropped in towards supper time to give us information of the road, or any aged person considered by Fattûḥ to be worthy of our hospitality. We held many a frugal feast under the stars where the waters of the Euphrates roll through the wild.