Arabia Felix

by Thorkild Hansen

  Most of this carnival went completely over the head of the worthy Niebuhr. He writes in his diary: “I found in Aleppo the most friendly people I had met for years and even a fellow countryman in so far as Herr von Masseyk was born in Holstein and therefore a subject of the King of Denmark. My host spared nothing to make my stay in this town as pleasant as possible. He introduced me to the other Europeans and I found myself surrounded from one day to the next by a host of friends in whose company I soon forgot all the adversities I had been subjected to.”

  In Aleppo Niebuhr also found a bundle of letters from Bernstorff and von Gähler, who in tones of growing anxiety asked for news of the expedition; they feared he had perished with the caravan from Baghdad which was plundered just before it reached Damascus. He hastened to write to von Gähler, who in a special report of 8th August, 1766, sent Bernstorff the reassuring tidings that Niebuhr was safe and sound in Aleppo.

  In addition, the communications from Copenhagen indicated that the King of Denmark, in answer to Niebuhr’s letter from Persepolis, had decided to excuse him from the extra journey to Djebel el-Mokateb; nor did he consider it necessary for him to go to Palestine and Upper Egypt. Instead, he desired him to travel via Cyprus and investigate in greater detail the inscriptions that the Englishman Pocock was said to have discovered on the island and considered to be Phoenician.

  The Danish king’s request involved Niebuhr once more in an exhausting race against time. As he very much wished to go with the big caravan leaving Aleppo for Constantinople before the hard Anatolian mountain winter set in, he decided to go immediately to Cyprus. In 1766 the island was in a state of bloody civil war, but Niebuhr would not cancel his tour on that account: “As news of wars in distant countries is often greatly exaggerated, I hastened to set off for Iskanderun and from there to take a special ship to Larnaca in Cyprus.”

  Niebuhr had been in Aleppo just over two weeks. In this time, he had collected information for a very full chapter about the Druses and their history. On 24th June he pushed on with the caravan via Antioch to the port of Iskanderun or Alexandretta. About noon on 30th June, he reached the town of Beilan, which offered an extensive view over the wooded mountain slopes to the Mediterranean which Niebuhr thus saw for the first time since leaving Alexandria five years before. He had to wait some time in Iskanderun for a ship. At length he found room on a French vessel going to Marseille, which on 18th July put him off at Larnaca.

  The day after his arrival, Niebuhr visited the ruins of Citium, where Pocock claimed to have found the Phoenician inscriptions. He wandered around for a whole day without finding a single letter. Finally, towards evening he caught sight of some stones, inscribed on one side only, which had been removed from their original position and built into a supporting pillar in a church building. Triumphantly, Niebuhr set about copying. That same evening an Italian expert in Larnaca put a damper on his enthusiasm: the inscriptions he had found were not Phoenician; they were Armenian and therefore much more recent.

  Niebuhr could not bear the thought of having made this detour in vain. True, he was able to write an account of the strained relations between the island’s Greek and Turkish inhabitants, but this seemed an inadequate result. He intended to get more out of his trip, and when only eight days after his arrival he discovered another French vessel going to Jaffa, he decided to use this chance of getting an early ship to the mainland as an excuse for evading the royal order not to go to Palestine. The last caravan before the winter left Aleppo for Constantinople as early as the end of August. He had only one month left, and thus only a slender chance of getting there in time, but this could not be helped. The Orient lay behind him like a woman he had lived with for years and whom he wanted to see again before leaving her for good. It was all or nothing, and Niebuhr meant to see Jerusalem. His astrolabe had taken the latitudes of Cairo, Bombay and Baghdad. Now it would be set up at the Holy Sepulchre.

  Not since Baurenfeind, Kramer, Berggren and he had made the dash through the mountains from Sana to Mocha had he had such a hectic time as in the weeks that followed. On 30th July the French ship anchored in Jaffa, and within two days Niebuhr was riding into Jerusalem, where he stayed with some Franciscan friars. “I have now arrived in Jerusalem, that city which for Christians as well as for Jews is the most remarkable in the world,” he notes in his diary. The monks invited him to attend a Catholic service, and Niebuhr saw no reason to refuse: “ ‘One can thank God for the grace He has shown equally well in a Roman Catholic church,’ I thought, and so I went to Mass. Here in the middle of the Mohammedans’ land I found to my great amazement not only a magnificent organ but also excellent vocal and instrumental music. The organist and the vocalists were all Franciscans and for the most part Germans; and how pleasant it was, after so long, to hear church music once more.”

  Niebuhr was not one for big phrases; but we can well imagine that, of all the encounters now awaiting him after more than five years among Mohammedans, nothing made such a deep impression upon him as hearing church music again, especially as he himself had once dreamed of becoming an organist.

  However, there was not an hour to waste. Numerous other travellers had written exhaustive accounts of Jerusalem, but there was still no proper map of the city, nor had its latitude been accurately determined. During the following days, Niebuhr rectified these omissions. He drew a view of the city as seen from the Mount of Olives, and even managed a trip out to Bethlehem; then, scarcely fourteen days after his arrival, he rode back to Jaffa with six Franciscan friars. The very next day he found a berth on a small coastal vessel which took him up to Acca, just north of Haifa.

  Niebuhr had still not had enough. Now he wanted to see Damascus as well, and at Acca he tried to hire a horse to ride out to the Syrian capital. But the Mecca caravan had just passed through the town and there was not a horse left. On 16th August, Niebuhr continued with another coastal vessel to Sidon, where he once more tried to get to Damascus. This time he found some peasants in the market who allowed him to travel with them; within a few days he had completed a map of Damascus and established its position and by the 27th he was back in Sidon, where he found a third vessel which took him on north via Tripoli to Latakia (Laodicea) which he reached on the 29th about sunset. In Latakia he was met by Herr von Masseyk, and it took them another six days to get to Aleppo. When they got ashore there, Niebuhr discovered that his fears had been realised: the caravan to Constantinople had left eight days before.

  Niebuhr’s drawing of Jerusalem as seen from Mount Olive

  Once again Niebuhr had a difficult choice. He could either take the winter caravan or secure himself a place on a mail-coach. The latter was more comfortable, but it offered little opportunity for making geographical observations and he therefore preferred the caravan, even though it meant travelling through the Anatolian mountains during the worst of the winter. He spent the period of waiting in sociable Aleppo making a fair copy of his map and bringing his diary up to date. At last, in November, the caravan was ready to leave. It consisted mainly of Greek merchants who had come to Aleppo to buy up goods which they later intended to sell at the markets in the various towns the caravan passed through. An experienced Arab merchant was chosen as caravanbashi, and on 20th November, 1766, they left Aleppo to cross Asia Minor to Constantinople.

  Once more Carsten Niebuhr lived the life of the big caravan: buying and preparing food when they stopped; silent departures at dawn; conversations with the other travellers as they rode two by two, trying to shorten the long hours; coffee sellers, who if the road was safe rode on ahead and found a suitable resting-place to have hot coffee ready for the rest of the caravan. And all the time the winter was getting worse. In spite of the cold, they often had to spend the night in the open. Soon they were riding through white and silent villages. It became difficult to get the camels and mules through the two-foot-high drifts, and the traders often had to destroy some exhausted, worn-out animal. When they got higher into the mountains, the snowstorms set i
n. “The winter is now as hard as at home in Denmark,” wrote Niebuhr in his diary. For years his face had been tanned by the desert sun; now he was riding with his head bent against driving snow. He wore a thick sheepskin coat, and over it a cloak of white Venetian canvas with a hood attached which he could pull up over his head, and long sleeves which he could pull down over his stiff, blue, frozen hands. He had bought both in Aleppo, where he had also provided himself with woollen underclothes and some long strips of cloth useful for wrapping round the legs before putting boots on, which were easily dried before the fire in the evening. Finally he had changed his skin water-bottle for a wooden pitcher, which was more solid and stood up better to being placed near the fire when he wanted to thaw out the contents.

  The caravan made slow progress. By 11th December they had reached Konia, barely half-way to Constantinople. All the travellers were so exhausted that they had to stay and rest in the town for nearly two weeks. It was not until Christmas Eve 1766 that the journey was resumed. Snowstorms raged and the camels slipped on the icy mountain roads. Despite the rest in Konia, the pace was even slower. Niebuhr’s table of distances shows how it was going; while for the first part of the trip they averaged nine hours a day and covered thirty miles, the corresponding average figures for the last part are only six hours and twenty miles. A slight rise in temperature brought rain and sleet and made the roads even worse. The first part of the caravan made its way somehow, but it ruined the road for the rest so that the camels and horses sank up to their bellies in slush. The travellers reached the miserable villages soaking wet. There was scarcely room for them all to lodge, and rarely anywhere to dry their clothes properly. But the end was in sight, and eventually on 13th January, 1767, they rode down through the chestnut forests near Brusa. From there it was only a few days’ journey to Constantinople; but Niebuhr was so worn out that he did not go on, although in the Turkish capital he could expect every comfort staying with von Gähler. Instead, he found an inn in Brusa which had a cosy room and a good stove, and once more prepared to have a good rest, doing some writing and making finished drawings. But the farther he got, the more his journey recalls the return from Troy. Scarcely had he settled himself in Brusa when the town was shaken by a terrible earthquake! He had to crawl out of the inn on all fours, while the roof-tiles hurtled down all round him.

  It was now early in 1767; nearly two years had passed since Niebuhr copied the cuneiform inscriptions at Persepolis and a new Ramadan had begun. The inhabitants of the shattered town of Brusa, like all Mohammedans, must take food only during the night hours; during the day the streets were practically deserted and Niebuhr could walk about undisturbed and take his measurements. It was not until a month after his arrival that he felt strong enough to ride on to the port of Mudania, where he took a little Greek ship to Constantinople, arriving in the evening of 16th February.

  His Danish Majesty’s emissary in Constantinople, our old friend von Gähler, was away when the last survivor of the expedition he had accommodated six years before returned to the Turkish capital. The welcome Niebuhr received in Aleppo was not repeated. There was nobody there but the legation secretary, Horn, who received Niebuhr in the same room where Forsskål and von Haven had once embraced each other in the summer of 1761. At that time Niebuhr himself had been so weakened by his dysentery that he had not carried out any survey or compiled any account of the town. He now stayed there for more than four months to repair this omission. Turkey was still a great, though waning power, whose boundaries stretched well into Europe, and Niebuhr’s very comprehensive account of the country’s institutions, administration, military system and trade must be seen in relation to this. To-day his papers make dry reading; at the time they were highly topical reports from a little-known country which was nevertheless a constant threat to the rest of Europe.

  At the beginning of the summer this work was finally concluded and Niebuhr could at last think seriously about going home. There were four possibilities: he could sail to Marseille or Genoa; he could travel by mail-coach via Venice or via Belgrade and Vienna; or he could ride home via Bucharest and Warsaw. The first way was very slow, and there was a risk that the routes via Venice or Vienna would take equally long, as travellers from the East coming to a Christian land usually had to spend forty days in quarantine. The last route was the most precarious because of the bad roads, but it was also the fastest, as the Poles rarely insisted on the quarantine requirements. Also, it was the route that went through the least-known regions. Niebuhr therefore rejected the pleasant and safe routes via Marseille, Venice and Vienna, and chose to ride home through Eastern Europe.

  At last he could embark on the long final stage. On 8th June, 1767, he rode out of the capital of Turkey with a caravan bound for Adrianople, near the present Bulgarian frontier. As he passed through the gates of the town he saw, on each side of the road, a man nailed to a post—highway robbers. For the present, however, the roads seemed to be safe. They rode on between fertile fields where the peasants were peacefully ploughing with their oxen, and after only four days’ journey reached Adrianople. There were not many caravans going farther north from there. It was impossible, however, to continue alone. In Europe, bandits were not content to rob their victims as did robbers in the desert; there, to be safe, the travellers were first shot down from behind. From Adrianople, Niebuhr therefore continued in company with a Turkish official, who was also going north and who was travelling with a bodyguard of sixteen well-armed soldiers. One week later they crossed the Danube and continued through fertile Wallachia towards Moldavia. Rain had set in; they often had to take long detours because of floods, and they did not reach Bucharest until 28th June.

  Bucharest was the first really European town Niebuhr came to on his homeward journey. Just as when the organ pealed forth in Jerusalem, he was overwhelmed by all the familiar impressions that strike a traveller homeward-bound from the Orient. Church bells at sunset, women with unveiled faces, real coaches and carriages in the streets—was not this Europe? But still Carsten Niebuhr’s journey resembled the return from Troy: there were other things to meet him in Bucharest than church bells, carriages and beautiful women. There was plague. People collapsed in the streets; everywhere drivers shouted their warnings as they carried off cartloads of dead. Niebuhr decided to continue, regardless of the fact that he could get no one to accompany him apart from his servant from Aleppo and his guide from Adrianople. He had not travelled far, however, before the occasional itinerant trader began to join up with him. Soon they had formed a little caravan of four; in the evenings they knocked on doors in the villages and asked the peasants for accommodation for the night. In one place Niebuhr even had the privilege of sleeping in the same room as the farmer, his wife and daughter. The farmer blowing out the light, the four people all creeping into their own alcoves, the uncomplicated relationships between the sexes—was not this Europe?

  A couple of days later on the road they met a wandering musician who travelled from market to market playing his bagpipes. Niebuhr and his companions jumped down from their horses and asked him to play to them. This is now he describes the scene in his diary:

  “I do not know if it was because I had not heard any proper music for so many years, or whether it was that the young man knew how to handle his instrument, but this singer standing there in the middle of the country road with his bagpipes gave me as much pleasure as the most beautiful aria in any opera house. I gave the musician a coin for the pleasure he had given me, but that was not the end. Now he began playing again, the merchants began to dance, I promptly joined them, and there we were all dancing Bulgarian and Wallachian folk-dances in the middle of the road, until our guide reminded us that we must press on.”

  Each day took them farther north. On 5th July Niebuhr crossed the border between Wallachia and Moldavia near Focsani. There the customs officials told him that because of the plague in Bucharest he would have to remain in quarantine for seven days, while the merchants who had not been in th
e plague-stricken town were allowed to proceed. Niebuhr, who did not want to run the risk of spending yet another winter on the road, protested vehemently against the decision; he had no wish to be delayed in Focsani. The customs officials stuck to their guns, and only after a very lengthy discussion did Niebuhr succeed in getting the quarantine period reduced to three days. On 8th July he set off northward again, and in the evening, at the inn, he caught up with the three merchants with whom he had danced folk-dances on the road to Focsani. But now he thanked his Maker that he had been delayed several days and had not succeeded in travelling straight on. The whole thing had happened quickly, cynically and effectively; the blood was only just washed from the corpses. The three men had been killed by highway robbers.

  Once more Niebuhr had to continue his journey alone except for his servant. They made slower progress now; he had another attack of his “cold,” developed fever, and at regular intervals he had to dismount to be sick. He writes in his diary: “As there was now hope of reaching Christian soil again soon, I did not bother myself about a slight indisposition but thanked God who during my long journey through so many different countries had already saved me from so many terrible diseases and dangers. For me the borders of Poland were as good as the borders of Denmark, and I therefore hurried on as fast as I could.”

  He was as yet still in Turkey. Not until 18th July when he crossed the river Dniester near Khotin, now in the U.S.S.R., did he once more set foot on Christian soil. Here he took leave of his servant and his guide, and took a short break in what is now Kamenetz Podolsk. After about ten days the crisis was past and he rode on alone to Lemberg (Lwow), reaching it on 1st August. Now his way led through cultivated fields and clean, trim villages. On 8th August he passed through Lublin, and ten days later he reached Warsaw, where he was received by the Polish King, Stanislaus Poniatowski, a great literary and scientific scholar, who gathered information about the expedition in a series of conversations, subsequently continued in an exchange of letters over many years.