Amurath to Amurath

by Bell, Gertrude

  My tents were pitched outside the city wall, at the extreme limit of the Roman empire, a frontier line which you must travel far to find. Did Julian, with the ominous news from Gaul in his hand, feel any misgiving when he ordered the building of the bridge over which his army was to pass to the irrevocable destruction that Sallust predicted in his letters? “No human power or virtue,” says Ammianus Marcellinus, “can prevent that which is prescribed by Fate.” Impending disaster, long since fallen, leapt again from his pages and stood spectral upon the banks of the Khâbûr.

  Fig. 20.—SERRÎN, NORTH TOWER TOMB, PLAN AND ELEVATION SHOWING MOULDINGS.

  Fig. 23.—INSCRIPTION IN CAVE NEAR SERRÎN.

  Fig. 24.—WIFE AND CHILDREN OF A WELDEH SHEIKH.

  FIG. 25.

  Fig. 26.—MUNBAYAH, WATER GATE.

  Fig. 27.—MAḤALL ES ṢAFṢAF.

  Fig. 28.—NESHABAH, TOWER TOMB.

  Fig. 29.—ḲAL’AT JA’BAR.

  Fig. 30.—ḲAL’AT JA’BAR, MINARET.

  Fig. 31.—ḲAL’AT JA’BAR, HALL OF PALACE.

  Fig. 32.—ḲAL’AT JA’BAR, BRICK WALL ABOVE GATEWAY.

  Fig. 33.—ḤARAGLAH.

  Fig. 34.—ḤARAGLAH, VAULT. Fig. 35.—RAḲḲAH, EASTERN MINARET.

  Fig. 36.—RAḲḲAH, PLAN OF MOSQUE AND SECTIONS OF PIERS.

  Fig. 37.—RAḲḲAH, MOSQUE FROM EAST.

  Fig. 38.—RAḲḲAH, ARCADE OF MOSQUE, FROM NORTH.

  Fig. 39.—RAḲḲAH, CAPITALS OF ENGAGED COLUMNS, MOSQUE.

  Fig. 40.—RAḲḲAH, PALACE.

  Fig. 41.—RAḲḲAH, DETAIL OF STUCCO ORNAMENT, PALACE.

  Fig. 42.—RAḲḲAH, DOMED CHAMBER IN PALACE.

  Fig. 43.—RAḲḲAH, BAGHDD GATE FROM EAST.

  Fig. 44.—RAḲḲAH, INTERIOR OF BAGHDD GATE.

  Fig. 45.—RAḲḲAH, BAGHDD GATE, RECONSTRUCTED.

  Fig. 46.—ḤALEBÎYEH.

  CHAPTER III

  BUSEIRAH TO HÎT

  March 7—March 18

  At Buseirah we were confronted with one of the difficulties that awaits the traveller in the Jezîreh. Since there is no traffic along the left bank of the river, there are no zaptiehs to serve as escort; my two zaptiehs from Deir were to have been relieved at Buseirah, but there was only one available man there, and he feared the return journey alone, and was therefore extremely reluctant to come with us. We solved the question by carrying off Muṣṭafâ, one of the men from Deir, whereupon Ḥmeidî, the Buseirah zaptieh, consented to bear him company. Both were to return from Abu Kemâl, three days’ journey lower down. This plan suited Ḥmeidî well, for he was a doubly married man, and while one of his wives remained at Buseirah, the other dwelt at Abu Kemâl. His beat was between the two places. “And so,” he explained, “I find a wife and children to welcome me at either end.”

  “That is very convenient,” said I.

  “Yes,” he replied gravely.

  We crossed the Khâbûr in a ferry-boat so badly constructed that loaded animals could not enter it, and in consequence all the packs had to be carried down to the river and re-loaded on the other side. I pitied Cyrus from the bottom of my heart, and regarded Julian’s bridge with feelings very different from those that had been conjured up by the moon of the previous night. The level ground on the opposite side was covered with potsherds, most of them blue and green glazed wares, and all, so far as I saw, Mohammadan. An hour later we passed over another small area strewn thickly with the same pottery, and while I was acquainting Ḥmeidî with the nature of the evidence it supplied, I took occasion to confide to him my belief that the ruin at Buseirah which they call the church dates from the Mohammadan period.

  “Effendim,” he replied, “what you have honoured us by observing is quite correct. The origin of that church is Arab. It was doubtless built by Nimrod, who lived some years before Hârûn er Rashîd.”

  “That is true,” said I, with a mental reservation as to parts of the statement.

  Between the Khâbûr and the Euphrates, Kiepert marks an ancient canal and names it the Daurîn. According to the map it leaves the Khâbûr at a point opposite to the village of Ḥöjneh and joins the Euphrates opposite Ṣâliḥîyeh. The existence of the canal cutting is well known to all the inhabitants of these parts (they call it the Nahr Dawwarîn), but they affirm that its course is much longer than is represented by Kiepert, and that it touches the Euphrates at Werdî. My route on the first day lay between the canal and the Euphrates, at a distance that varied from an hour to half-an-hour from the river, and though I did not see the Dawwarîn, its presence was clearly indicated by the line of Ḳanâts (underground water conduits) running in a general southerly direction—NNW. to SSE. to be more accurate—across ground that was almost absolutely level. The whole of this region must once have been cultivated, and it had also been thickly populated. Twenty-five minutes’ ride beyond the potsherds where Ḥmeidî had sketched for me the history of Buseirah, we passed some foundations constructed out of the smaller sort of tiles which I had observed in the town. A quarter of an hour further there was a low mound called Tell el Kraḥ, covered with tiles and coloured pottery—indeed the pottery was continuous between the one patch of broken tiles and the other, and Nimrod had evidently been very busy here. The villages represented by these remains had been supplied with water from the Dawwarîn. In another hour and five minutes we reached a considerable mound, Tell Buseyiḥ; it formed three sides of a hollow square, the side turned towards the river being open. We were now close to the Euphrates and could see, about half-a-mile away, a long tract of cultivation and the village of Tiyâna on the water’s edge. We turned slightly inland from Buseyiḥ and in fifty minutes came to the mounds of Jemmah where, so far as identification is possible on a hasty survey, I would place Zeitha. “Here,” says Ammianus Marcellinus, “we saw the tomb of the Emperor Gordian, which is visible for a long way off.” Jemmah consists of a large area surrounded by a wall and a deep ditch; beyond the ditch lies broken ground where, at one point, the Arabs had scratched the surface and revealed what looked like a pavement of solid asphalt; still further away there is an Arab graveyard strewn with fragments of the smaller tiles. Except in the graveyard there are no tiles and very little pottery, none of it characteristically mediæval Mohammadan. The ditch had been fed by a water channel coming from the north-east, no doubt an arm of the Dawwarîn if it were not the canal itself. We rode from Jemmah to the Euphrates in an hour and ten minutes and found the camp pitched immediately below the village of Bustân. The baggage animals had been six hours on the march from the Khâbûr. The climate was changing rapidly as we journeyed south. The last cold day we experienced was March 2, when I had ridden out to Tell esh Sha’îr; on March 7 when we camped at Bustân the temperature at three o’clock in the afternoon was 70° in the shade, but the nights were still cold.

  A strip of irrigated land and numerous villages lay along the river for the first two hours of the succeeding day’s march. We were forced to ride outside the cornfields that we might avoid the water conduits, but I do not think we missed anything of importance, for every twenty or thirty years the Euphrates rises high enough to submerge the cultivation, and the floods must have destroyed all vestiges of an older civilization. The low-lying fields cannot have been, within historic times, a former bed of the stream, as was the case above Buseirah; an occasional mound near the river showed that the bank had long been inhabited. We passed on the high ground a tell that looked like the site of an ancient village which had received its water from the Nahr Dawwarîn. An enormous amount of labour is expended upon the irrigation of the cornfields; sometimes there is a double system of jirds, those nearest the river watering the lowest fields and filling deep channels whence the water is again lifted by another series of jirds to the higher level. In the lower ground the peasants grow a little corn and clover for early pasture and sow a second crop when the spring floods have retreated. After two hours’ riding we entered a long stretch of sand heaped up into little hills which were
held together by tamarisk thickets; it is apt to be submerged when the river is high, and we saw more than one overflow channel filled with pools of stagnant water. On the Syrian side the Euphrates is hemmed in here by hills whereon stands the castle of Ṣâliḥîyeh. In this wilderness we came upon some Arabs who were ploughing up a desolate spot in search of locusts’ eggs.

  “Are there many locusts here?” said I, for locusts are not accustomed to lay their eggs in sand.

  “No,” they answered, “there are none here; but, as God is exalted! there are thousands lower down.”

  “Then why do you plough here?” I asked, with the tiresome persistence of the European.

  “The government ordered it,” said they, and resumed their task.

  In another hour we reached Tell ech Cha’bî (el Ka’bî?) where there is an Arab cemetery, the graves covered with unglazed potsherds. Ḥmeidî told me that when the Arabs bury their dead in such places they dig into the mound and extract broken pottery to strew upon the graves; the Bedouin use no pottery, their water-vessels being of copper or of skin. While we sat upon the top of the tell lunching and waiting for the caravan, which was delayed for nearly an hour in the loose sand, Ḥmeidî gave me his views on politics.

  “Effendim,” said he, “we do not care what sultan we have so long as he is a just ruler. But as for ’Abdu’l Ḥamîd, he keeps three hundred women in his palace, and, look you, they have eaten our money.” Wherein he wronged the poor ladies; it was not they who scattered the revenues of the State.

  In thirty minutes we came to Tell Simbal, a small sandy mound; in one hour and fifteen minutes more to Tell el Hajîn, with a village by the river, and after another hour and twenty minutes to Tell Abu’l Ḥassan, where we camped, seven and a quarter hours from Bustân. Abu’l Ḥassan is marked in Chesney’s map as “mound.” It is a very striking tell rising fifty feet above the river; upon the summit are Arab graves strewn with coarse pottery and with undressed stones dug out of the hill, and for a distance of a quarter of an hour’s walk to the north and east there are fragments of brick upon the ground. The graves are those of the Jebbûr, who, said Ḥmeidî, left this district thirty years ago and migrated to the Tigris, where I subsequently saw them. Nearly all the Silmân have also gone away, and though their camping grounds are marked by Kiepert on the Euphrates, their present quarters are on the Khâbûr. The Deleim and the Ageidât, a base-born tribe, together with the Bu Kemâl, now occupy the Euphrates’ banks, and the ’Anazeh come down to the river in the summer. There was no living thing near our camp except an enormous pelican, who was floating contentedly on the broad bosom of the stream. Our advent roused in him the profoundest interest, and as he floated he cast backward glances at us, to see what we were doing in his wilderness.

  A pleasant four hours’ march, mostly through tamarisk thickets that were full of ducks, pigeons and jays, brought us to the ferry opposite Abu Kemâl. When we had pitched our tents near the reed-and mud-built village of Werdî, Fattûḥ and Selîm went across to buy corn and Ḥmeidî to report our arrival and ask for fresh zaptiehs. The village of Abu Kemâl has recently been removed to a distance of about a mile from the right bank, because the current has undermined the foundations of the original village, which now stands deserted and in ruin. But it is chiefly on the left bank that the river has played tricks with the land. Within the circuit of a great bend in the channel, the ground for three miles or so is extremely low, and is partially submerged when the stream comes down in flood. The low ground is bounded on its eastern side by a rocky ridge which crosses the desert from a point a little to the south of the Khâbûr, passes behind what I suppose to be the course of the Dawwarîn, and terminates in the bold bluffs of Irzî above the Euphrates, at the lower limit of the Werdî bend. When the river is exceptionally high it covers the whole area up to the hills; my informant, one ’Isâ, an Arab of the Bu Kemâl, remembered having once seen this occur; but in ordinary seasons it merely overflows a narrow belt and fills a canal that lies immediately under the eastern hills. The canal is fed by two branch canals from the river and joins the Euphrates under the bluff of Irzî. The river rises “at the time of the flowering of pomegranates,” said ’Isâ, “for unto all things is their season,” that is, about the middle of April; but the big canal under the hills was still half full of water when I saw it in March, and the crops were irrigated from it by jirds. It is known locally as the Werdîyeh, but I was informed that it was in fact the lower end of the Dawwarîn which joins the Euphrates here and not at Ṣâliḥîyeh. The site of Werdî is generally believed to be that of Xenophon’s Corsote, “a large deserted city which was entirely surrounded by the Mascas.” The river Mascas was a plethron (100 ft.) in breadth; the army of Cyrus stayed there three days and the soldiers furnished themselves with provisions. By the Mascas, Xenophon is understood to have meant a loop canal, and I think it probable that the canal was not merely a small loop enclosing the bend of the river, but that it is represented to this day by the Dawwarîn and the irrigation system connected with it.

  But if Werdî be the descendant of Corsote, at least one other town must be placed between these two in the genealogical table. The bluff at the lower end of the river bend is covered with the ruins of Irzî, which have been remarked by every traveller who has passed by, either on the river or on the west bank. Balbi, who descended the Euphrates in 1579, says that the ruins occupied a site larger than Cairo and appeared to be the massive walls and towers of a great city. So far as I know no one has examined them closely, and when I climbed up the hill I found, not the bastioned walls that I had expected, but a number of isolated tower tombs. They stand in various stages of decay round the edge of the bluff and over the whole extent of a high rocky plateau which cannot be seen from below. There are no traces of houses, nor any means of obtaining water from the river, nor any cisterns for the storage of rain. Balbi’s city is a city of the dead; it is the necropolis of a town that stood, presumably, in the irrigated country below. The towers were all alike (Fig. 47). They are built of irregular slabs of stone, the shining gypsum of which the hill is formed, laid in beds of mortar. Each tower rests upon a square substructure, about 1·70 m. high; in this substructure are the tombs, hollowed out of the solid masonry, irregular in number and in position. In the best preserved of the towers I could see but one tunnel-like grave opening on the west side (Fig. 48), while there were two or three to the north and east. The tombs are covered by a small vault made of two stones leaning against one another. Above the substructure the walls are broken by corner piers of small projection, with two engaged columns between them. The columns are crowned by capitals made of a single projecting slab, above which a slightly projecting band of plaster forms an entablature. Then follows a plain piece of wall about a metre high upon which stands an upper order of engaged columns, half as large as those below, so that there was place for five between the corner piers, if these were repeated on the upper part of the tower. A door between the corner pier and one of the engaged columns opens on to a winding stair which leads to the top of the tower. No rule was observed as to the direction of the compass in which the doors were placed. The towers cannot be as old as Xenophon’s time; they are more likely to date from the first or second century of the Christian era; therefore the town to which they belonged must have been later than Corsote, and Corsote, it will be remembered, was deserted when he saw it. It is easy to understand that a city lying in the low ground might have been destroyed by inundations, and to imagine that a region so favourably situated for purposes of cultivation, and provided with an elaborate system of irrigation, should have been repopulated in a later age. And this is the explanation which I offer.

  The practice of burying the dead above “the common crofts, the vulgar thorpes,” is still observed by the Arabs. All their graves lie loftily upon the nearest height, even if it should be only a mound by the river. From my camp I watched one of their funeral processions making its slow way from the village of Abu Kemâl towards some barre
n hills. Three or four miles the dead man was carried across the desert to find his resting-place among the graves of his ancestors, and no tribesman would have been content to lay him at the village gates, like a Turk or a town dweller. They carried him to the hills and so performed, as in the days of the Irzî city, their final service.