BOOKS.
THE DESERT AND THE SOWN't THE Syrian desert and the Lebanon, the Druses, the Bedouin, and those strange remnants of broken and mysterious creeds which are part of the religious flora of the northern mountains of Palestine, have once mom given us what sixty years ago they gave us in Eothen,—an enchanting example of travel literature. The qualities which make Miss Gertrude Bell's The Desert and the Sown worthy to stand by the side of Kinglake's immortal book are not difficult to enumerate. Like Kinglake, Miss Bell has a keen sense of humour, and a memorable power of what we may best describe as snapshotting the conversa- tions of the inhabitants of the mountains and the desert who formed her camp or whom she encountered on her travels. Next, she has just that dramatic touch which enables her to record a conversation as a living thing, and to bring before us a vivid picture of the speakers as well as of their words. As we read we are again and again tempted to exclaim
" I see no longer, I myself am there, Sit on the green sward, and the banquet share7— though, to be truthful, the green sward is, as a rule, the wan rock and sand of the desert, and the banquet but a cop of coffee and a crust of bread eaten at tbe door of the tent or beneath a low-browed roof in some "lone Syrian town." To her power of describing scenery and people, and of recording the living talk of men who, though they belong to the wilder- ness, have shrewd and capable brains, Miss Bell adds a wide knowledge of archaeology and a sound instinct for the politics of Asia. Thus, while the general reader will be delighted by the song of the open desert, the antiquarian and the politician may draw most useful information from her pages—pages which, we may incidentally remark, are profusely illustrated with reproductions from photographs taken during her journey. The pictures are not hurled together pell-mell or haphazard, but chosen with a rare instinct for what is worth recording through the camera.
In the course of her journeys Miss Bell was constantly coming across Arabs and Syrians who interrogated her as to
• Greeting. to Cornishmen 111 London, at their Annual Gathering, Feb. lath. 1. The Desert and the Sown. By Gertrude L. Bell. London W. Heinemann. Des. net.] British rule in Egypt, the benefits of which they desired, or believed they desired, to see extended to themselves. One of her friends had a cousin who was a clerk in Alexandria, who had told him of the wonderful growth in riches of the fellaheen, and how the desert had become as peaceful as the cities. Here is a description of the RIZ Britannica in Egypt which is well worth the attention of those who believe, or profess to believe, that our rule in Egypt is a crushing tyranny loathed by the people who have to endure its miseries :— "‘ Blood feud has ceased,' said he, 'and raiding ; for when a man steals another's camels, look you what happens. The owner of the camels come to the nearest konak and lays his complaint, and a zaptieh rides out alone through the desert till he reaches the robber's tent. Then he throws the salaam and enters. What does the lord of the tent do ? he makes coffee and tries to treat the zaptieh as a guest. But when the soldier has drunk the coffee he places money by the hearth, saying, "Take this piastre," and so he pays for all he eats and drinks and accepts nothing. And in the morning he departs, leaving orders that in so many days the camels must be at the konak. Then the robber, being afraid, gathers together the camels and sends them in, and one, may be, is missing, so that the number is short. And the judge says to the lord of the camels, "Are all the beasts here ? " and he replies, "There is one missing." And he says "What is its value ? " and he answers, "Eight liras." Then the judge says to the other, "Pay him eight liras." Wallah! he pays.' Fellah ul 'Isa expressed no direct approval of the advantages of this system, but he listened with interest while I explained the principles of the Fellahin Bank, as far as I understood them, and at the end be asked whether Lord Cromer could not he induced to extend his rule to Syria, an invitation that I would not undertake to accept in his name. Five years before, in the Hearin mountains, a similar question had been put to me, and the answering of it had taxed my diplomacy. The Druze sheikhs of Kanawat had assembled in my tent under shadow of night, and after much cautions beating about the bush and many assurances from me that no one was listening, they had asked whether if the Turks again broke their treaties with the Mountain, the Druzes might take refuge with Lord Cromer in Egypt, and whether I would not charge myself with a message to him. I replied with the air of one weighing the proposition in all its aspects that the Druzes were people of the hill country, and that Egypt was a plain, and would therefore scarcely suit them. The Sheikh el Baled looked at the Sheikh ed Din, and the horrible vision of a land without mountain fastnesses in which to take refuge, or mountain paths easy to defend, must have opened before their eyes, for they replied that the matter required much thought, and I heard no more of it. Nevertheless the moral is obvious all over Syria and even in the desert, whenever a man is ground down by injustice or mastered by his own incompetence, he wishes that he were under the rule that has given wealth to Egypt, and our occupation of that country, which did so much at first to alienate from us the sympathies of Mohammedans, has proved the finest advertisement of English methods of government*" Most delightful are the instances of desert lore which are scattered up and down. Miss Bell's book. Unfortunately, we have only space to allude to one example. Our author notes that the desert is no homeless vacant track for the Arab, but rather a place thronged with every sort of association. "The plain is covered with places wherein I rested," said an Arab to her, and Miss Bell shows us by quotations from Arab poets that this desert consciousness has always possessed the race and still possesses them. Though our authoress is much attached to the Bedouin, it is clear that the people who chiefly won her regard are the Druses, and this in spite of her complete realisation of their fierceness and cruelty. Whether it is their mountain origin and their love of freedom, or the happy chance which has emancipated their womenfolk from the deadening effects of strict isolation, the fact remains that the Druses have many noble qualities as well as very great intelligence. It was during the journey recorded in this volume that Miss Bell had the good fortune to see the young men of a Druse settlement gathered around a beacon-fire at the platform of an old castle preparatory to one of their raids. Climbing in the darkness round the old castle wall, she suddenly "came out into the full moonlight upon the wildest scene that eyes could see " :— " A crowd of Druzes, young men and boys, stood at the edge of the moat on a narrow shoulder of the hill. They were all armed with swords and knives and they were shouting phrase by phrase "o The present unrest in Egypt may seem to throw a doubt upon the truth of these observations. bet I do not believe this to be the case. The Egyptian. have forgotten the miseries from which our administration rescued them, the Syrians and the people of the desert are still labouring under them, 8.12a their eyes the position of their neighbours is one of unalloyed and enviable ease. But when once the wolf is driven from the door, the restraints imposed byes immutable law eat into the temper of a restless. unstable population accustomed to reckon with misrule. end to profit by the frequent laxity Ind the occasional opportunities of undeeerved advancement which characterise it, Justice is a capital thing when it guards yoUr legal rights, but most damnable when you wish to usnrp the rights of others. FolIOS ul 'Isa and his kind would not be slow to discover its defects." a terrible song. Each line of it was repeated twenty times or more until it seemed to the listener that it had been bitten, as an add bites the brass, on to the intimate recesses of the mind.
' Umle l o swords!
tenuponthem ! oh Lord our God I that the foe may fall is ewathes Upon them, upon thorn! that our spears may drink at their hearts Let the babe leave his mother's breast
Let the young man arise and be rose!
Upon them, upon them! oh Lord our God! that our swords may drink at their hearts. . .
So they sang, and it was as though the fury of their anger would never end, as though the castle walls would never cease from echoing their interminable rage and the night never again know silence, when suddenly the chant stopped and the singers drew apart and formed themselves into a circle, every man holding his neighbours by the hand. Into the circle stepped three young Brazes with bare swords, and strode round the ring of eager boys that enclosed them. Before each in turn they stopped and shook their swords and cried 'Are you a good man ? Are you a true man ?' And each one answered with a shoat: 'Ifs! ha!' The moonlight fell on the dark faces and glittered on the quivering blades, the thrill of martial ardour passed from hand to clasped hand, and earth cried to heaven : War ! red war! And then one of the three saw me standing in the eircle, and strode up and raised his sword above his head, as though nation saluted nation. 'Lady !' he said, 'the English and the Druse are one.' I said : Thank God ! we, too, are a fighting race.' Indeed, at that moment there seemed no finer thing than to go out and kill your enemy."
Very delightful is the whole of the chapter that deals with Damascus. Those who have had the good fortune to ride into that memory-haunted city—probably the city which has the oldest continuous record of habitation in the whole world —will be amused and interested by Miss Bell's remark that for some reason or other, whether you try to enter it by a short cut or by a high road, it is always farther away than any known place. Certainly the experience of the present writer fully confirms Miss Bell. He still remembers vividly seeing the town of rushing streams and green groves lying like a stain upon the horizon, and as hour after hour of galloping, trotting, walking, and ambling passed, noting that the enchanted towers and domes grew, in appearance at any rate, no nearer. The weariest river, however, "winds somewhere safe to sea," and even Damascus is reached at last. And when it is reached, how well it repays all the efforts to approach it !
We have little fear of readers who take Miss Bell's book in hand laying it down without reading every word. It is therefore perhaps superfluous to advise them not to miss this or that. In case, however, of accidents, we may note that they should be specially careful not to miss her description of how she met and conversed with two Turkish prisoners, who proved to belong to what for want of a better word we must call the sect of the Assassins, though it is perhaps as well to point out that the followers of the Old Man of the Mountain are neither more nor less murderous than other Syrians. In India they are known as the adherents of the Aga Khan, a cultivated Indian gentleman, or rather Prince, who has been accorded the appellation of " Highness " by the Indian Government, and whose wide culture permits him to write articles in British magazines. For example, the Aga Khan has a striking paper in this month's National Review. To make our readers realise the full interest of this encounter with the followers of the Aga Khan we must, however, quote once more from Miss Bell. When sh& was leaving Horns the Kaimakam sent an escort with her, and took advantage of that escort to send also two prisoners to the great prison at Tripoli, in Syria. The prisoners, clothed in ragged cotton clothes and handcuffed together, marched with her camp :— "As they trudged along bravely through dust and mud, I proffered a word of sympathy, to which they replied that they hoped God might prolong my life, but as for 'them it was the will of their lord the Sultan that they should tramp in chains. One of the Kurds interrupted with the explanation: • They are deserters from the Sultan's army may God reward them accord- ing to their deeds! Moreover, they are Ismailis from Selemiyyeh, and they worship a strange god who lives in the land of Hind. And some say she is a woman, and for that reason they worship her. And every year she sends an embassy to this country to collect the money that is due to her, and even the poorest of the Iamailis provide her with a few piastres. And yet they declare that they are Muslims who knows what they believe ? Speak, oh Khudr, and tell us what you believe.' The prisoner thus addressed replied doggedly We are Muslims ; ' but the soldier's words had given me a (due which I was able to follow up when the luckless pair crept close to my horse's side and whispered
• Lady, lady ! have you journeyed to the land of Hind ?'—' Yes,' said May God make it Yes upon you! Have you heard there
of a great king called the King Muhammad ? ' Again I was able to reply in the affirmative, and even to add that I myself knew him and had conversed with him, for their King Muhammad was no other than my fellow subject the Agha Khfin, and the religion of the prisoners boasted a respectable antiquity, having been founded by him whom we call the Old Man of the Mountain. They were the humble representatives of the dreaded (and probably maligned) sect of the Assassins. Khudr caught my stirrup with his free hand and said eagerly • Is he not a great king ? ' But I answered cautiodtly, for though the Agha Khan is some- thing of a great king in the modern sense, that is to say he is exceedingly wealthy, it would have been difficult to explain to Ins disciples exactly what the polished, well-bred man of the world was like whom I had last met at a London dinner party, and who had given use the Marlborough Club as his address. Not that these things, if they could have understood them, would have shocked them; the Agha Khan is a law unto himself, and if he chose to indulge in far greater excesses than dinner parties hie actions would be sanctified by the mere fact that they were Ins. His father used to give letters of introduction to the Angel Gabriel, in order to secure for his clients a good place in Paradise ; the son, with his English education and his familiarity with European thought, has refrained from exercising this privilege, though he has not ceased to hold, in the opinion of his followers, the keys of heaven. They show their belief in him in a sub- stantial manner by subscribing in various parts of Asia and Africa a handsome income that runs yearly into tens of thousands."
Miss Bell, we expect, under rather than overestimates the income derived by the Aga Khan from his followers. We have heard it put at something like £100,000 a year. In any case, what could better illustrate the picturesque side of the British Empire ? Here is Miss Bell, as she says, a fellow- subject of the Aga Khan, meeting in Turkey two unfortunate subjects of the Sultan who regard as almost divine the polished gentleman who may be met nearly any season at London dinner-parties, and who has had secured to him, as long as British rule shall last in Asia, complete protection and complete security for receiving the comfortable adoration of his followers,—followers who are in various degrees persecuted throughout the rest of the Mohammedan world. When the Jesuits were expelled from every other European country, Frederick the Great opened Prussia to them. As he cynically observed, he wished to preserve the breed from extinction. Not so much from policy as from that genuine tolerance which is the mark of British rule, wo,have preserved not only the breed of the followers of the Old Man of the Mountains—i.e., the followers of his Highness the Aga Khan—but the Fire- worshippers, and many another strange and cryptic sect. And at times it has even looked as if ours might be the only county in which the greatest of persecuted peoples —the children of Israel—would be free from insult and oppression.
We can only end our review of Miss Bell's delightful book by expressing the hope that she will soon give us another, and that in her next book, as in this, she will pay special attention to reporting the conversations of her Oriental friends. Dialogues of the Desert is a title which we venture to offer her for that next book.
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