THE ARAB AT HOME.*

IN 1876-78, an Englishman, with Arab tongue and dress, but disguising neither his nationality nor his faith, went down with the Mecca caravan from Damascus to El-Hejr, six or seven marches from Medina. He lodged some time with the fanatic wayside garrison, then plunged into the desert, where he wandered for seven or eight months with different Bedouin tribes. Four or five months more he spent in residence at the Wahabee towns of Hayil, Teyma, Boreyda, and Aneyza, and three more in Kheybar, "the Apostle's country," above Medina. He came into intimate connection with all men, from the Solubba, or tinkers of the desert, to Wahabee Emirs and Turkish officials, and did not leave the country without making the acquaintance of the Sherif of Mecca himself, by whom he was for- warded from Tilyi to Jiddah,—the end of his travels. He has put the result into two volumes, counting, besides what is given to scientific matter, some eleven hundred pages of narrative. An author who takes Arabia for his field, challenges comparison with the greatest modern writers of travel. It is the highest tribute we can pay Mr. Doughty, to own that, with the charm of Burckhardt and Burton, Palgrave and Palmer undiminished upon us, we judge his book to be the most remarkable record of adventure and research which has been published to this generation. He enjoyed opportunities that the experience of no one of his predecessors combined. He describes the life of the nomads • Travels in Arabia Deserta. By Charles 31. Doughty. 2 vole. Cambridge : truiveralty Prem. 1888. with a minuteness and colour that will make his work stand for the Bedouin what Lane's famous description is for the modern Egyptians, while he succeeds in carving out individual characters from groups and classes in a way that Lane never attempted. The opening passages of the book assure us at once of the strong hands of a master of narrative. The English is of leisurely, antique order, with frequent periods of great stateliness. Mr. Doughty writes like an Elizabethan, with many obsolete words that none but an author who had his Faerie Queens by heart could have so happily used. But the style is too spontaneous and well sustained to have been borrowed from books. It is born of the writer's own per- sonality, and ripened, as some of our best English has been, by the leisure and sunshine of the East. Mr. Doughty has said,— " If any one live with the Aarab, he will have all his life after a feeling of the desert." He has himself caught the desert's august style of speech, and sometimes his sentences fall as if direct from the Arabic. To Palgrave's lighter step, such a style is as the going of a camel to that of a horse; and, indeed, it is a camel's burden, with a camel's own vigour, that it carries. Mr. Doughty has been loading his book for ten years. M. Renan has helped him with his Aramaeic inscriptions. The Marquis de Vogiie has contributed notes on architecture. Sprenger,* Robertson Smith, Wright, De Goeje, and others have "corn.- pared the Arabic words written down from the lips- of the people of Nejd with the literal Arabic." There is a very com- plete index and valuable Arabic glossary, and an excursus (with a large map) on the geology of the peninsula, and some other scientific notes. Itineraries are furnished, and an account is given of the decline of the Wahabee supremacy, and the history of Central Arabia brought down from the date at which Palgrave left it. The statistics we miss are an estimate. of the population of those "200,000 square miles not unknown to me between Mecca and Damascus :" figures are given only for a few tribes and oases. There is a great excess of women over men in Arabia Deserta.

But among the many scientific interests and delightful distractions of this great book, the reader will feel the main fascination to be the author's own personality, thrown out against that terrible background of desert and fanatic Arabia. Through a land in which religion is the fanatic passion of every common man, and your very camel- driver sets himself to be either your missionary or your murderer, where contracts and promises are not held binding towards "the infidel," and even the safeguard of hospitality becomes precarious for him, "Khalil," as he called himself, passed up and down for nearly two years, supported by nothing but his sincerity, eloquence, humour and knowledge of character, with some ingenuity he had of pleading the political alliance between England and the Sultan ; all the time openly confessing his faith, criticising the defects of Islam, and not scrupling to call in question the conduct of unjust persons who had his life in their hands. "The Arabs," he says, "are to be won by gentleness and good-faith ; they yield to just arguments To use our unflattering plainness of speech was also agreeable to the part of sziwahh,, or wandering anchorite in the fable of human life," which he had assumed.

He had difficulty, however, in making them understand his very Western interpretation of a silwahles character,—the col- lecting of knowledge about men and things. But he certified his religiousness by pious maxims, of his own and from the Bible, which their ready Semitic conscience was always quick to acknowledge. He at least confessed that there was no God but God, if he refused to add that Mahommed was his prophet ; and when other arguments failed with the more fanatic, he very cleverly fell back on their own appeal to Providence. He spoke to all Arabs with plainness on the Moslem treat- ment of women, and some of the most engaging incidents of the story are the surprise of poor overladen or tormented housewives at his Christian courtesy. So sweet a Christian, in such frank intimacy with Mahornmedans at the very centre of their power, is an appearance in literature as unique as Robinson Crusoe himself. And "he sticks to his island," where he can be unique : he does not drag us over continents or through dissertations; at the end of two long volumes, though he has been his own single hero, he leaves us neither weary nor suspicions :—

"Two, chiefly, are the perils in Arabia,—famine, and the dreadful-faced harpy of their religion; a third is the rash weapon of every Ishmaelite robber. The traveller must be himself in men's eyes, a man worthy to live under the bent of God's heaven, and were it without a religion : he is such who has a clean human heart and long-suffering under his bare shirt : it is enough; and though the way be full of harms, he may travel to the ends of the world. Here is a dead land, whence, if he die not, he shall bring home nothing but a perpetual weariness to his bones. The Semites are like to a man sitting in a cloaca to the eyes, and whose brows touch heaven. Of the great antique humanity of the Semitic desert, there is a moment in every adventure wherein a man may find to make his peace with them so he know the Arabs. The sour Wahttby fanaticism has in these days cruddled the hearts of the Nomads, but every Beduin tent is sanctuary in the land of Ishmael (so there be not in it some cursed Jael). If the out- landish person come alone to strange nomad booths, let him approach boldly and they will receive him. It is much if they heard of thee any good report : and all the Arabs are at the begin- ning appeased with fair words. The oases villages are more dangerous ; Beduin colonies at first, they have corrupted the ancient traditions of the desert; their souls are canker-weed beds of fanaticism.—As for me who write, I pray that nothing be looked for in this book but the seeing of an hungry man and the telling of a most weary lean; for the rest, the sun made me an Arab, but never warped me to Orientalism."

The utter frankness with which "Khalil" entrusted himself to the Arabians, was bound to receive its reward in the open- ing of their minds to him. Living with the Bedawee, the unsophisticated Semite on his native soil, whom even Mahom- medanism has been able only to veneer, and suffering with him every change of his year, Mr. Doughty has been able to give us a very fine analysis of the Semitic genius —not in those few general formulas in which it has been the fashion of even the most accurate scholars to "bottle" it, but by a hundred vivid portraits that catch their subject at every angle of life, and touch us with each pang of the incessant famine and alarm in which it has been tempered. We may gather up Mr. Doughty's evidence according as it bears on what we conceive to be the three great paradoxes that make the Semitic nature so much of a puzzle to Western minds,—grossness with reverence, subtlety without originality, marvellous resignation with extraordinary quickness of passion. As to the first, he reminds us frequently that the Semite is a shepherd and a cattle-breeder, his own butcher, and lying at night with his beasts about him. "The herds- man's grossness is never out of the Semitic nature, the soul of them is greedy, first of their proper subsistence, and then of their proper increase." The other two contradictions Mr. Doughty helps us to trace, as far as they can be reduced to physical reasons, to the long fasting of the desert life. Of this he draws some eerie pictures :—

"Arabia is a lawless land of famine. Almost as the birds must the poor Beduins live at such times of the year, when the milk is up until the new dates. As the sun's vast flaming eye rose each day upon us with new bringing of suffocating hours, the remem- brance revives within our fainting breasts of our want, with the hollow thought, What shall be for this day's life ?"—and the summer I passed thus fasting and Beduin-wise, lying upon the elbow. Yet in this low state there was hardly a week when some householder had not a sacrifice, whether the year's mind for his ancestors, for the birth of a son, for his recovery from sickness, or for the health of his camels. Then a man's friends assemble to

the distribution of the boiled flesh Bare of all things of which there is no need, the days of our mortality are so easy, and become a long quiescence ! Such is the nomad life, a long holiday, wedded to a divine simplicity, but with this often long tolerance of hunger in the Khala (i.e., desert) The nomads lie every day of their lives on their hungry maws, waiting for the mercy of Allah"

He had numerous opportunities of noting the mental effect of this long famine,—the foxy shiftiness and ingenious malice it will breed, while sapping all originality and spirit for large enterprise :—

"This is the incurious misery of human minds faint with the hunger of generations, and grown barren in the desert. The Aarab, in their suffering manner of life (their cup of life is drawn very low and easily stirred at the dregs) which eagers the blood and weakens the heart, are of a jealous frenetic heat towards their enemies : of this also is the Semitic fanaticism. They are in any warfare, as the wasps of mankind, too much tempted in their nature to sting the adversary ; even though they leave some of their own bowels in them." For "any endeavour that their necessity may cast upon them, they can rouse themselves erect and magnanimous, whence that saying on the oases, The Bedu are all heart,' but the famine upon them, it is a short fit, as man's brains unsettle over the fainting stomach, he submits himself to Allah, and must sit down again."

It was often his only safety to stand firmly against a crowd inclined to hustle him to death, for "they blench when we turn upon them, knowing that the Frenjies exceed them in the radical heat and force of the spirit." He estimates every third man in the desert as a "little broken-headed" through this hunger ; but "seldom is the great offence of man's desolate spirit committed amongst them. How should his soul despise or despair of God's providence unto whom there enters not a doubt of the religion ?" The long fasting, besides, has its effects of refinement as well as irritability :—

" Languor of hunger, the desert disease, was in all the tents. M4ana /on, We have nothing left,' said the people one to another. The days passed by days in this weakness of famine, in forgetful- ness of the distant world and the wasting life of the body. The summer night's delightful freshness in the mountain is our daily repast : and lying to rest amidst wild basalt-stones under the clear stars, in a land of enemies, I have found more refreshment than upon beds and pillows in our close chambers.—Hither lies no way from the city of the world; a thousand years pass as one daylight; we are in the world and not in the world, where Nature brought forth man an enigma to himself, and an evil spirit sowed in him the seeds of dissolution. And, looking thus upon that infinite spectacle, this life of the wasted flesh seemed to be ebbing, and the spirit to waver her eyas wings into that divine obscurity.—I thought I might number twenty and more flitting meteors in every hour."

It was thus, then, that the Semite was trained for his great vocation as the religious teacher of the world. Born in these deserts, the youth of the race, like the probation of their

greatest prophets, was passed in a long fast, which lent their spirit a wonderful ease of detachment from this world and of religious imagination, tempered their will to long-suffering, but touched their blood with a rancour that breaks out in every Semitic literature. The "cursing Psalms," it is well to remember, are the work of the hungry sons of starved ancestors,—men whose racial temper, originally set on edge by the physical fasts of the desert, easily resumed its sharp- ness under the analogous spiritual conditions,—that famine of righteousness and hunger for the deferred justice of God from which most of those Psalms are to be dated.

Mr. Doughty is also very interesting on that other Semitic characteristic, the utter want of government within the tribe.

His close observations of the relations of the Sheikh to the adult men of the tribe, are the plainest reasons we have seen for the extraordinary rapidity with which Arab armies go to pieces when led by their own chiefs. A people scattered loose on a sparse soil, they have no polity. Religious custom and respect for public opinion—and this more than that—keep men orderly, hospitality certain, and women safe. Murder, of course, is left to be dealt with by the law of blood. It is curious to read how much the dread of a reputation for inhospitality works upon irreligious householders. But even where the crowd murmured for his death, and public opinion would probably have acquitted any man who denied the Christian the sanctuary of his hearth, Mr. Doughty had but to touch the

religious conscience of any individual with the formula, Ana dakh.ilak, "I am thy visitor," and he was sure of protection.

We have not space to do more than indicate some of the other attractions of these Travels. The chapters on the Haj are very vivid descriptions. it is a great weariness, with the

worst moral results,—the beasts overworked, the men on the march too tired and thirsty to speak aught but curses. So Mr. Doughty's gorge rises at the one man's word that has laid this demoralising fatigue, with nothing but fanaticism as its religious result, upon so many generations. On the other hand, his charming pictures of life in Aneyza, where he spent two months, present Mahommedanism under sweet and whole- some aspects. Upon the future of the religion, Mr. Doughty's views are extremely interesting. Few have felt, or can so sympathetically state, its best and worst as he has done. But we do not see how, with his sense of Islam's power of social conquest, and its condescension to the "natural man," he maintains the opinion that it requires only the fall of the Turk and the violation of the sacred cities by "the infidel," to reduce Islam to the position and influence of Judaism. For an account of the rapid decline of the Wahabee supremacy, and of the limits of the Turkish power in Central Arabia, lately advancing inland, one must refer to the work itself.

We cannot close without mentioning three delightful characteristics of Mr. Doughty's narrative. One is the perfect perspicuity and humour with which he describes individual characters. The second is a small group of fin stories, some of which are quite of Arabian Nights' rank. And the third is Mr. Doughty's most sympathetic and vivid pictures of

animal life. These are charming :—of the dogs, Damascus street-dogs, that of themselves accompany the Haj to Mecca

and return, and are held by the pilgrims to be "in their beasts' wit, among God's witnesses of the true religion ;" of the cock that went on pilgrimage with the Persians, that "pasha bird, it was piteous that men carried none of his hareem along with him ;" of camels in every posture and condition, so that a "Book of the Camel" might be made from Mr. Doughty's volumes, not needing illustration, with their statuesque sentences; and of horses in the nomad encampments. Mr. Doughty's information about the Arab horse is valuable. None are bred in the Nejd towns : they are all bought by Nejd brokers from the Bedouin, who bring them up with the utmost care in, one might say, their own tents. It is a great comfort to have our golden beliefs of the singular relation between the Arab and his horse vindicated. To every Bedouin horse a foster-camel is set apart, and his master will milk first for him, intolerant as he is of thirst and without corn in the desert. Horses are so gentle, that they are trusted in tents with children and among sleepers. The disturber of this idyll is the Nejd broker, with his reals, who carries the horse off to one of the oases, fits him by a course of vetches for the diet of Hindustan, and bears him across the desert by fourteen or fifteen marches to Kuweyt, where he is shipped for Bombay.