A Scandalous Life: The Biography of Jane Digby (Text only)

by Mary S. Lovell

  The dragoman was Sheikh Selaine, a well-built man of about forty, who spoke several European languages as well as Turkish. When all was ready they set off for Jerusalem, across the great plain of Sharon with its orchards of orange trees and fabled roses. After two days of climbing they reached the last ridge, almost 2,000 feet above the Mediterranean, and saw the walls, fortresses and domes of the City of David.6

  Jane had already stated her intention to visit Damascus and Palmyra, and with Selaine’s help a tour was arranged which wound north in reasonable safety to the Syrian border. The British consul in Jerusalem advised her that Selaine would not be of any use to her in Syria; she would need another dragoman or a bedouin guide, especially for her journey through the desert, assuming she could get anyone to act for an unaccompanied European woman. A message was sent to the consul in Damascus, who duly organised a suitable escort. They were to rendezvous north of Lake Galilee.

  Afterwards Jane always regarded her visit to Jerusalem as the start of her new life – though at the time she was not aware of its significance. She did what all European visitors did: she toured the main features of the city, sat and sketched the town from the Mount of Olives, and walked or rode around the walls. Being in any new place, especially one so full of interest, always brought her to life. When at last Jane and her party left Jerusalem and rode on towards the Jordan they were stopped on the road by a sheikh and made to pay a small ‘toll’ as his payment for keeping the road free of robbers. She was amused to learn that prior to his toll-keeping duties he had been the robber.

  There were few occasions when she could rely on an inn or hotel and Jane always preferred camping out to staying in a dirty hovel. In her diaries Jane hardly mentions the problems that must have arisen regarding the frequent baths which Jane always took in her portable canvas tub, or the days when menstruation must have brought inevitable difficulties for both women. The only reason she ever broke her journeys was because of the intermittent malarial fevers when she was incapable of even standing upright.

  Though her surviving notes of this stage of her journey do not detail what she wore, we know from the journal of a fellow traveller that she rode side-saddle, while Edward Lear, who spent many years in the Levant on sketching tours, recorded in his diary that he met ‘Lady Ellenborough in a crimson velvet Pelisse and a green satin riding habit going up … to Jerusalem’.7 We know from Jane’s packing list that at this point she was still one of those intrepid Victorian women who added to the rigours of any journey in a hot climate by wearing her stays and a full complement of European clothes, and that her luggage contained some of her favourite items of jewellery such as ‘the King’s bracelet’ as well as painting supplies. But Jane could also dress and ride like a Palikare tribesman when she wished to do so.

  From Jerusalem, she headed for Jericho, each day bringing new experiences. She enjoyed the company of the laughing young men, the ‘handsome Jordan set’ as she called her escort, who jostled with each other to ride alongside her white horse and talk to her in Turkish. These men had possibly never seen a European woman before and certainly would never have spoken to one. They were uncomplicated and unsophisticated, and so unashamedly admiring of her person and her riding ability that Jane could not help being amused by them. She had taken along side-saddles and English tack for her and Eugénie, for she preferred this to riding ‘Turkish’ fashion for long distances. But she noted the skilful manner in which these Arabs rode their small, strong, and agile horses, holding them on a single rein attached to a bitless headstall. By 4 May the small group had welded into a friendly party. That morning they rode down from Jericho into the Jordan Valley at Ein-es-Sultan where they encamped. Here they met a group of bedouin Arabs who were travelling in the same direction.

  Heading the group was a man whose name was Saleh, a ruddy, handsome man whose frank visual examination amused rather than embarrassed Jane. He courteously invited Jane’s party to join them for dinner, and after a rudimentary toilet they went to his tent. The diners sat on rugs on the ground, around a dish containing a freshly killed lamb, rice, raisins and herbs; all present helped themselves with their hands. Jane did not then realise how unusual it was for these men to invite a woman to join them. Afterwards Saleh served thick aromatic coffee, and the group sat around the coffee hearth chatting.

  Shortly before the sun set, Saleh rose and mounted his horse. The scene that followed lodged in Jane’s memory for many years, and indeed was partly responsible for her long-term enchantment with Arabia. It was for her that Saleh performed the mock combat, a jerid, cantering past his audience with his lance couched. Some hundred yards away he turned and, screaming his battle-cry, kicked the mare into her fastest gallop while he wielded his bamboo lance above his head making it quiver until it almost bent double. His horse galloped at them as though intending to ride them down, stopping abruptly a few feet from them, snorting and pounding the earth with a delicate hoof.

  Saleh had many tricks – galloping his horse while clinging to its side so that from one perspective the horse might have been riderless, then suddenly wheeling without warning and sitting upright as though to confront an attacker. He held his twelve-foot lance, tipped with metal and decorated with a knot of black ostrich feathers, poised for a strike. As he pulled his horse up sharply, again within feet of the seated audience, he plunged it into the sand at Jane’s feet.

  Some of the younger men could not resist joining in and the knots of riders swooped along the plain, lances poised, robes flying, dust rising, to the sound of the shrill warbling shrieks of the riders and the encouragement of some of their audience. The raw excitement of the scene, horses and riders amid the swirling dust lit by the red ball of the setting sun, thrilled Jane and made her all the more determined to acquire one of the sure-footed horses capable of such fleetness of foot and dexterity of movement. No mean rider herself, she was fully appreciative of the horsemanship involved in the pageant she had just witnessed.

  They rode north with Saleh’s caravan, the concatenated group ensuring extra protection for both parties. In the lush Jordan Valley they halted for Jane to visit interesting sites. Selaine was a knowledgeable guide, and Jane found herself more and more enjoying the journey. Each day brought some new diversion: a name from the Bible, a story recalled. Hours spent crossing the barren scree hills called ‘the wilderness’ where Christ fasted, under cloudless skies, ended abruptly when they emerged into a valley flecked with brilliant poppies, fragrant with camomile and lavender, a fringe of pink-flowered oleander bushes bordering a sparkling stream. Oh, she was enchanted with this blessed land.

  She gave only passing thought to Hadji-Petros: ‘Poor Xristos, how is he now?’ she wrote in her journal. ‘Yet why should I say “poor”; was it not all his fault!’8 Hadji-Petros, as it turns out, was not doing too badly. Though much of his current notoriety rested a great deal upon his relationship with Jane, according to Nassau Senior’s contemporary journal,

  the reclaimed robber … is kept in reserve for the next invasion of Turkey. The court have learned nothing from experience, or rather [the Palikare] have learned from experience that they can violate audaciously every principle of public and private morality, and whenever their attempts fail be rewarded with popularity.9

  Had she known, would she have cared? By the time Jane’s party reached Nazareth, after nearly two weeks’ rambling, she was infatuated with Saleh, and appeared to think he returned her affection. At an encampment at a small village called Rihah, said by the inhabitants to date from the time of Herod, she was sure that Saleh felt as she did. ‘Rihah, Rihah!’ she would write in her diary some months later. ‘Oh that name! What memories does it call up … It was at Rihah that I fondly dreamed that [Saleh] loved me … loved as I did!’

  At Nazareth, Jane went to a hotel so that she could bathe. Her party camped outside the town. But the visit was memorable to Jane not for visiting the ‘house of Joseph the carpenter’ nor ‘the house of the virgin’, where she was shown what
was purported to be the angel’s footprint in the floor. At some point during her visit to the hillside town, she went to Salah’s bed. He made love efficiently but distantly, and she was confused and hurt by his coldness. They had been eyeing each other for some days in what she had construed as a meaningful manner. Still, Jane being Jane, the encounter heightened her interest rather than warned her off. Obviously, her love for Hadji-Petros had not had the lasting quality of her feelings for Felix or for Spiros, because it was only a matter of weeks since she had turned her back on him and on Athens.

  From Nazareth the group dropped down to the town of Tiberias on the shores of Lake Galilee, the middle sea that feeds the Jordan. Jane had no strong religious leanings; it was many years since she had taken Communion. In the meantime she had attended church when social obligation required it, but her upbringing had instilled in her a thorough knowledge of the Bible and she experienced an unexpected reverence towards the places where Christ was known to have walked and preached.

  By 20 May the group had travelled well north of the inland sea to the point where Saleh and his group were to part from them. Notwithstanding his apparent reticence at Nazareth, Jane felt she had reason to believe that Saleh returned her affection. When they parted he took with him Jane’s promise that though she had to return to Greece in July she would return to the Lebanon in the winter and visit him at his winter camp near Hebron. Saleh must have made her believe that he would welcome this, for the thought of it coloured her plans through many long months.

  At a nearby well, fed from an underground cistern, they came across some low black bedouin tents – the camp of her new escort. Here Jane met Sheikh Medjuel el Mezrab, who was to conduct her through Syria to Palmyra. Dressed in the flowing robes of a bedouin sheikh, a scarlet cloak with the gold insignia of a desert prince, Medjuel presented a striking figure. He was an intelligent young man in his late twenties, roughly the age that – had he lived – Jane’s first son Arthur would have been. He spoke several languages, including Turkish and a little Italian, the lingua franca of the eastern Mediterranean, and unusually for a bedouin could read and write Arabic, having been taught at his father’s insistence. He was softly spoken and extremely cultured, according to other travellers who met him.

  Jane liked him immediately, but with visions of Saleh still filling her mind she did not recognise Medjuel as an important figure in her life. Selaine and his Jordan Arabs departed, having arranged to meet again on her return journey, to conduct her to Beirut. She made several sketches of Selaine in her notebook, sorry to part with her handsome escort, and went on with Medjuel.

  There are two great tribes of bedouin in Arabia, the Anazeh and the Shemmar. They are deadly enemies. The Mezrabs were a small but noble branch of the Sebbah, a sub-tribe of the Anazeh. They earned a living by virtue of the fact that they controlled the desert around Palmyra, an important oasis, and protected the town from the raids of other tribes, receiving from the Palmyrans an annual tribute of 150 camels. The caravan trade routes from the East, in particular between Baghdad and Damascus, pre-dated the Roman Empire, and invariably called at Palmyra, where a toll was levied on travellers entering the walled enclosure and access to the springs. In addition to the trader caravans, any travellers wishing to use the desert routes to Palmyra needed an escort from the Mezrab tribe, for only they knew the position of the wells.

  Medjuel was not the head of his tribe. That position was held by his elder brother Sheikh Mohammed; however, the bedouin laws of succession are based not on primogeniture but on ability. It was well known that Medjuel, Mohammed’s favourite brother, would be the next leader, and meanwhile he bore the title of sheikh as his birthright. Mohammed lived with the tribe, while Medjuel escorted travellers and maintained the Mezrabs’ ancient rights to do so by repelling repeated attacks by marauders.

  This escort duty was a vital source of income for the small tribe, enabling them to buy supplies which they could not otherwise produce such as rice or material for clothes. Recently a few intrepid European travellers had begun to arrive in Damascus wishing to visit Palmyra. A handful had been granted that rare privilege, and in the year prior to Jane’s arrival half a dozen European men had preceded her there. The ‘Franks’ paid well, but even so Medjuel did not accept all comers.

  Like all bedouin Arabs of pure stock, Sheikh Medjuel was short in height – about 5 feet 6 inches – but he was slim and well proportioned and moved gracefully. He was a magnificent rider and Jane quickly noted the respect paid to him by the bedouins he had brought with him. They always hailed him with the deferential ‘O, Sheikh’, and in his tents a strict etiquette was observed:

  When the Sheikh enters every person rises, and stands till he bades [sic] them be seated, and they do not permit him when encamped to do any menial work; but out in the plain a Sheikh would be greatly despised who made any difference between himself and his people, or who did not attend to his own camel and eat the same food as the others.10

  Initially, it was Medjuel’s horse that caught her eye, for it was just such a horse that Jane wanted for herself. When she raised the matter with him he told her that few mares were sold outside the tribes, for they were a precious commodity and guarded jealously to ensure the purity of lineage. The history of every thoroughbred mare and stallion was known among the tribes and, although occasionally a horse might be exported at a huge price, he thought it unlikely she would get a really good one. Jane told him she would pay almost any price for such a horse. It was perhaps not a sensible thing to say to an Arab she had just met.

  During their journey Medjuel and Jane spoke of many things and fell into an easy comradeship. He told her of Damascus, called the ‘Pearl in the Desert’, which had been open to Europeans and Christians only twenty years earlier; of Tadmor, which Jane learned was the Arabic name for the 3rd Century AD ruins near the present Arab town of Palmyra, to which only the Mezrab tribe had passage rights; of the bedouin way of life; of his two wives; of his small son Schebibb. Jane told him of her attraction to Sheikh Saleh; of the things she had seen on her tour and her journey across the Mediterranean. She was surprised to learn that Medjuel had never seen the sea, and also to learn in one long conversation that Muslims held Christ in high esteem. As a contemporary writer put it, ‘They accept the history of Christ, except his crucifixion, believing that he passed to heaven without death … they call him Roh-Allah, meaning Spirit of God, and consider him, after Mahomet, as the holiest of prophets.’11

  Medjuel had deliberately ensured that Jane’s first view of Damascus was the best possible one – from the camomile-covered slopes of Salhiyeh.12 No one looked down upon that view in the soft cool air of sunrise without a catch at the heart, and the Prophet Mohammed is said to have turned away at this point, declining to go further, saying that as man could only enter one paradise he preferred to wait for Allah’s. Damascus was called Esh-Sham (or simply Sham) by the bedouins, Medjuel told her, and had been founded by Uz, son of Aram, son of Shem, son of Noah. It already existed at the time of Abraham and was the oldest inhabited city in the world.

  It was bewitching with its fragile white minarets tapering into the blue sky. Its swelling domes and gilded palaces, set among thirty square miles of lush orchards and gardens, seemed opalescent in the morning light. The wide River Barada flowed through the city past flat verdant banks where travellers set up tents and refreshed themselves and their animals. Every house in the city had its own direct water supply, and myriads of waterways, siphoned off the river, gurgled and flashed in the sun as the water plashed from pool to pool along stone culverts.13 To the west was Mount Hermon, ice-capped even in June; a long way to the south were the mauve-tinted mountains of the Hauran, while to the east – where Medjuel pointed out the route to Palmyra – were the sands of the Syrian desert, ‘as if nature had drawn a line between green and yellow’.

  After the barren mountains the massive oasis was stunning. The silence hitherto broken only by birdsong and sheepbells was suddenly filled by th
e haunting call to the first prayer of the day as the muezzin’s voice echoing from the minaret of the Great Mosque of the Umayyeds and bouncing off the hillside behind them, was taken up from minarets all over the city: ‘God is great. There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet! Let us kneel before him, and to him alone be the glory! Come to prayer, there is no God but Allah … God is great …’

  A messenger was sent ahead to warn of their arrival, and the party rode eagerly towards the city. From Salhiyeh to Damascus was a ride of half an hour or so through cool gardens and orchards. Roses and pomegranate bushes, with flowers like handfuls of crumpled scarlet silk, were all around them. Despite the early hour, when they reached the outskirts of the city people turned out to welcome Medjuel, who was obviously a well-known personage, and to see the unusual sight of two ‘Frank’ ladies who were neither missionaries nor yet accompanied by husbands. A fresh horse was brought out to meet the sheikh and he dashed about on it, showing off the horse and generally performing with his tribesmen. A darabouka (drum) was produced by one of the bedouin outriders and provided a throbbing background as they processed through the fabled gardens to the city wall. For Jane such exuberance was a tonic and she was happy and elated. Within the ancient walls, the city of Damascus did not always live up to the exquisite view from the hills. But Jane was not in a mood to be critical on this occasion, and Damascus would always be to her that first sight from Salhiyeh.