The region which, for want of a more definite name, we may call the Interior includes four large districts. Three of these have been comparatively well explored and mapped, but the fourth is utterly unknown. These districts are: Roba’-el-Khali, Nejran with Wady Dauasir, Nejd proper, and Jebel Shammar.

It is surprising that at the close of the nineteenth century there should remain so many portions of our globe still unexplored. We have better maps of the north pole and of the moon than we have of Southeastern Arabia and parts of Central Asia. A triangle formed by lines drawn from Harrara in Oman to El Harik in Southern Nejd, thence to Marib in Yemen and back to Harrara will measure very nearly 500 miles on each of its upper sides and 800 on the base. This triangle, with an area of 120,000 square miles is as utterly unknown to the world at large as if it were an undiscovered continent in some polar sea. Never has it been crossed by any European traveller or entered by an explorer. It includes all the hinterland of the Mahrah and Gharah tribes, all western Oman and the so-called Roba’-el-Khali (literally, “empty abode”) of the Dahna desert, as well as that mysterious region of El Ahkaf to which the Koran refers and which is said by the Arabs to be a sea of quicksands, able to swallow whole caravans.

On most maps the region in question is left blank; others designate it as an uninterrupted desert from Mecca to Oman; while Ptolemy’s map describes the region as producing myrrh and abounding in Arab tribes and caravan-routes. Whatever we know of the country at present must be the result of Arab hearsay booked by travellers in the coast-provinces. The few names of places given in the Roba’-el-Khali would not lead one to suppose that “uninterrupted desert” was its only characteristic feature. In the north are Jebel Athal (the Tamarisk Mountains), and Wady Yebrin. Wady Shibwan and Wady Habuna seem to extend at least some distance into the triangle from the west, while, in the very centre we have the very unusual names for a desert region Belad-ez-Zohur (Flower-country) and El-Joz (the nut-trees). There is no doubt that a large part of the region is now desert and uninhabited; but it may not always have been so and may hold its own secrets, archÆological and geographical.

An Arab of Wady Fatima told Doughty, what the divine partition of the world was in the following words: “Two quarters Allah divided to the children of Adam, the third part He gave to Gog and Magog, a manikin people, parted from us by a wall, which they shall overskip in the latter days; and then will they overrun the world. Of their kindred be the gross Turks and the misbelieving Persians; but you, the Engleys are of the good kind with us. The fourth part of the world is called Roba’-el-Khali, the empty quarter.” Doughty adds, “I never found any Arabian who had aught to tell, even by hearsay, of that dreadful country. Haply it is Nefud, with quicksands, which might be entered into and even passed with milch dromedaries in the spring weeks. Now my health failed me; otherwise I had sought to unriddle that enigma.” It still awaits solution. In Oman they say it is only twenty-seven days’ caravan march overland to Mecca right through the desert; perhaps from the Oman highlands one could more easily penetrate into the unknown and get safely to Riad if not to Yemen.

Nejran, celebrated as an ancient Christian province of Arabia and sacred by the blood of martyrs, lies north of Yemen and east of the Asir country. Together with the Dauasir-Wady region it forms a strip of territory about 300 miles long and 100 broad, well-watered and even more fertile than the best parts of Yemen[43]. The intrepid traveller, HalÉvy (1870) first visited this region from Yemen and found a large Jewish population in the southern part. He visited the towns Mahlaf, Rijlah and Karyet-el-Kabil, penetrated Wady Habuna but could not succeed in reaching Wady Dauasir. He describes the fertility of the Wadys and the extensive date-plantations of this part of Arabia in terms of greatest admiration. Ruins and inscriptions are plentiful. In Wady Dauasir the Arabs say that the palm-groves extend three dromedary-journeys. The people are all agricultural Arabs but, as in Oman, they live in continual feud and turmoil because of tribal jealousies and old quarrels.

The region east of Wady Dauasir is called Aflaj or Felej-el-Aflaj, two days’ journey distant, here there are also palm-oases. It is six days’ journey thence to Riad, but the way is rugged, without villages.[44] It was along Wady Dauasir that I had hoped to make the overland journey from Sana to Bahrein in 1894, once beyond Turkish espionage the way would have been open. According to the testimony of HalÉvy the inhabitants of Nejran and Wady Dauasir are not fanatical. Nowhere in Yemen are the Jews treated so kindly as by the Arabs of Nejran. This entire region must also be classed with the fertile districts of Arabia. Water is everywhere abundant coming down from the Jebel Rian, fifteen days’ journey from Toweyk and from the southern ranges of Jebel Ban and Jebel Tumra. The inhabitants of Nejran and of Southern Dauasir are heretical Moslems. They belong to the Bayadhi sect like the people of Oman,[45] and are supposed to be followers of Abd-Allah-bin-Abad (746 A.D.).

Historically, Nejran is of special interest because here it was that the Roman army of 11,000 men sent by Augustus CÆsar under Ælius Gallus to make a prey of the chimerical riches of Arabia Felix came to grief. The warriors did not fall in battle but, purposely misled by the Nabateans, their allies, they marched painfully over the waterless wastes in Central Arabia six months; the most perished in misery and only a remnant returned. Strabo, writing from the mouth of Gallus himself, who was his friend and prefect of Egypt, gives a description of the Arabian desert that cannot be improved: “It is a sandy waste with only a few palms and pits of water; the acacia thorn and the tamarisk grow there; the wandering Arabs lodge in tents and are camel graziers.”

Nejd—the heart of Arabia, the genuine Arabia, the Arabia of the poets—is properly bounded,—on the east, by the Turkish province of Hasa; on the south by the border of the desert near Yemama; on the west by Hejaz in its widest extent to Khaibar; and on the north by Jebel Shammar. Thus defined it includes the regions of El-Kasim, El-Woshem, El-Aared, and Yemama. The “Zephyrs of Nejd” are the pregnant theme of many an Arab poet and in these highlands, the air is crisp and dry and invigorating, especially to the visitors from the hot and moist coast provinces. It was such a poet who wrote in raptures of the Nejd climate:

As to the real and prosaic features of the country, Nejd is a plateau of which Jebel Toweyk is the centre and backbone. Its general height above the sea is about 4,000 feet, but there are more lofty ledges and peaks, some as high as 5,500 feet. These highlands are for the most clothed with fine pasture; trees are common, solitary or in little groups; and the entire plateau is intersected by a maze of valleys cut out of the sandstone and limestone. In these countless hollows is concentrated the fertility and the population of Nejd. The soil of the valleys is light, mixed with marl sand and pebbles washed down from the cliffs. Water is found everywhere in wells at a depth of not much over fifteen feet and often less; in Kasim it has a brackish taste, and the soil is salty, but in other parts of Nejd there are traces of iron in it. The climate of all Nejd, according to Palgrave, is perhaps one of the healthiest in the world. The air is dry, clear and free from all the malarial poison of the coast; the summers are warm but not sultry, and the winter air is biting cold. The usual monotony of an Arabian landscape is not only enlivened by the presence of the date-palm near the villages, but by groups of Talh, Nebaa’ and Sidr, the Ithl and Ghada Euphorbia—all of them good-sized shrubs or trees.[46]

Nejd is pasture land, so that its breed of sheep are known all over Arabia; their wool is remarkably fine, almost equal to Cashmire in softness and delicacy. Camels abound; according to Palgrave, Nejd is “a wilderness of camels.” The color is generally brownish white or grey; black camels are found westward and southward in the inhospitable Harra-country toward Mecca. Oxen and cows are not uncommon. Game is plenty, both feathered and quadruped. Partridges, quail, a kind of bustard; gazelle, hares, jerboa, wild-goat, wild-boars, porcupine, antelope, and a kind of wild-ox (wathyhi) with beautiful horns. Snakes are not common, but lizards, centipedes and scorpions abound. The ostrich is also found in western Nejd as well as in Wady Dauasir. The Bedouin hunt them to sell the skins to the Damascus feather merchants who come down with the Haj every year to Mecca; forty reals (dollars) was the price paid in Doughty’s time for a single skin—a small fortune to the poor nomad. Mounted on their dromedaries they watch for the bird and then waylay it, matchlock ready to hand. The Arabs esteem the breast of the ostrich good food; the fat is a sovereign remedy with them and half a finjan (the measure of an Arab coffee-cup), is worth half a Turkish mejidie. The ostrich is no longer as common in Arabia as formerly, and in many parts of the peninsula the bird is unknown even by name.

Nejd is a land of camels and horses. But although a fine breed of the latter exist it is a common mistake to suppose that horses are plentiful in Central Arabia and that every Arab owns his steed. Doughty says “there is no breeding or sale of horses at Boreyda or Aneyza nor any town in Nejd.” Most of the horses shipped from Busrah or Kuweit to Bombay are not from Nejd, although originally of Nejd-breed, but come from Jebel Shammar and the Mesopotamian valley. He who would know all about the beauty of the Nejd horse must visit the Hail stables with Palgrave who “goes raving mad” about the animals; or he can read Lady Ann Blunt’s “Pilgrimage to Nejd” in search of horses; better still let him buy that remarkable book by Colonel Tweedie: The Arabian Horse, His country and His people. In this volume the horse is the hero and Arabs are grooms and stable-boys. The Arab is more kind to his horse than to any other animal. No Arab dreams of tying up a horse by the neck, a tether replaces the halter, one of the animal’s hind-legs being encircled about the pastern by a light iron ring or leather strap, and connected with a chain or rope to an iron peg. Nejdi horses are specially valuable for great speed and endurance. They are all built for riding and not for draught, to the unprofessional eye they do not seem at all superior to the best horses seen in London or New York City, but I leave the matter to the authorities mentioned.[47]

The government of Nejd indicates what the independent rulers of Arabia are like. Doughty testifies that the sum of all he could learn from the mouth of the Arabs themselves of Ibn Rashid’s government (now in the hands of Abd-el-Aziz bin Mitaab, his nephew) was this: “He makes sure of them that may be won by gifts, he draws the sword against his adversaries, he treads down them that fear him and he were no right ruler, hewed he no heads off!” Some of the nomads consider the prince of Nejd a tyrant, but the villagers generally are well content. Forsooth it is better for them to have one tyrant than many, as in the days before the political upheaval that unified central Arabia. Other of the more religious folk of Nejd cannot forget the bloody path by which Ibn Rashid gained his seat of power and call him “Nejis, (polluted), a cutter-off of his kinsfolk with the sword.”

Lavish sums in the eyes of the starved Bedouin are spent on hospitality but all guests are pleased and depart from the pile of rice to praise God and the Amir of Nejd. Daily, in the guest-room, according to Doughty, one hundred and eighty messes of barley-bread with rice and butter are served to the men freely; a camel or smaller animal is killed for the first-class guests and the total expense of his famous hospitality is not over £1,500 annually. The revenues are immense and Ibn Rashid’s private fortune had grown large even when Doughty visited him in 1877. He has cattle innumerable and “40,000 camels”; some 300 blooded mares and 100 horses; over 100 negro slaves; besides private riches laid up in silver metal, land at Hail and plantations in Jauf.

Contrasted with the Turkish provinces of Arabia the subjects of the Amir of Nejd enjoy light taxation and even the Bedouin warriors who are in the service of the Nejd ruler receive better wages than the regular troops of the Sultan. From the descrip-

tion of Mr. and Mrs. Blunt and Doughty at Hail, one cannot but feel that the government of Nejd is much more liberal and less fanatical than it was in the old days of the Wahabis as described by Palgrave. The old Wahabi power is now broken forever and Nejd is getting into touch with the world through commerce. Kasim already resembles the border-lands and the inhabitants are worldly-wise with the wisdom of the Bombay horse-dealers. Many of the youth of Nejd visit Bagdad, Busrah and Bahrein in their commercial ventures. Says Doughty, “all Nejd Arabia, east of Teyma, appertains to the Persian Gulf traffic and not to Syria [as does western Nejd]: and therefore the foreign color of Nejd is Mesopotamian.” He marvelled at the erudition of the Nejd Arabs in spite of their isolation until he found that even here newspapers had found their way in recent years. English patent medicines are sold in the bazaar of Aneyza and the Arabs are somewhat acquainted with the wonders of Bombay and Calcutta. Palgrave found the inhabitants of Kasim and southern Nejd far more intelligent than those of the north. Except for the four large towns of Hail, Riad, Boreyda and Aneyza, Nejd has no large centres of population. Bedouin tribes are found everywhere and villagers cultivate the fertile oases even in the desert; but the population is not as dense as in Oman or Yemen nor even as in Nejran and Wady Dauasir.

Hail, the present capital of Nejd, may have a population of ten thousand within its walls. It lies east of Jebel Aja, a granite range 6,000 feet high ending abruptly at this point. The city is on a table-land 3,500 feet above the sea. The Amir’s castle is a formidable stronghold occupying a position of immense natural strength in the Jebel Aja. Blunt visited this place in 1878, but does not give its exact site, “lest the information might be utilized by the Turks under possible future contingencies.” We have three pen-pictures of Hail: that of Palgrave who drew a plan of the city; the description of Doughty with his plan of the Amir’s residence and

guest-house; and the sketches of Lady Ann Blunt on her pilgrimage. It is a walled town with several gates, a large market-place, the palaces overtopping all and mosques sufficient for the worshippers. It is a clean, well-built town, according to Doughty and pleasant to live in save for the awe of the tyrant-ruler. Its circuit may be nearly an hour, in the centre of the walled enclosure stands the palace; near it the great mosque and directly opposite the principal bazaar. The great coffee-hall where the Amir gives his audiences is eighty feet long with lofty walls and of noble proportions. It has long rows of pillars “upholding the flat roof of ethel timbers and palm-stalk mat-work, goodly stained and varnished with the smoke of the daily hospitality. Under the walls are benches of clay overspread with Bagdad carpets. By the entry stands a mighty copper-tinned basin or ‘sea’ of fresh water with a chained cup, from thence the coffee-server draws and he may drink who thirsts. In the upper end of this princely kahwa (coffee-house) are two fire-pits, like shallow graves, where desert bushes are burned in colder weather; they lack good fuel, and fire is blown commonly under the giant coffee-pots in a clay hearth like a smith’s furnace.”

The palace castles are built in Nejd with battled towers of clay-brick and whitened on the outside with jiss or plaster; this in contrast with the palm-gardens in the walled-enclosure give the town a bright, fresh aspect. Outside the walls, the contrast of the Bedouin squalor and the rusty black basalt rocks lying in rough confusion is intense. Hail lies in the midst of a barren country and is an oasis not by nature but by the pluck and perseverance of its founders. The Shammar Arabs settled here from antiquity and the place is mentioned in the ancient poem of Antar.

Er-Riadh or Riad (the “gardens-in-the-desert”) was the Wahabi metropolis of Eastern Nejd and of all the Wahabi empire. The city lies in the heart of the Aared country, enclosed north and south by Jebel Toweyk and about 280 miles southeast of Hail. It is a large place (according to Palgrave of 30,000 population!), but nothing is known of its present state, as no European traveller has visited it since Palgrave. The general appearance of Riad, according to our guide is like that of Damascus. “Before us stretched a wide open valley, and in its foreground, immediately below the pebbly slope on whose summit we stood, lay the capital, large and square, crowned by high towers and strong walls of defence, a mass of roofs and terraces, where, overtopping all, frowned the huge but irregular pile of Feysul’s royal castle, and hard by it rose the scarce less conspicuous palace, built and inhabited by his eldest son, Abdallah. All around for full three miles over the surrounding plain, but more especially to the west and south, waved a sea of palm-trees above green fields and well-watered gardens; while the singing, droning sound of the water-wheels reached us even where we had halted at a quarter of a mile or more from the nearest town-walls. On the opposite side southward, the valley opened out into the great and even more fertile plains of Yemama, thickly dotted with groves and villages, among which the large town Manhufah, hardly inferior in size to Riad itself, might be clearly distinguished.... In all the countries which I have visited, and they are many, seldom has it been mine to survey a landscape equal to this in beauty, and in historical meaning, rich and full alike to the eye and the mind. The mixture of tropical aridity and luxuriant verdure, of crowded population and desert tracts, is one that Arabia alone can present, and in comparison with which Syria seems tame and Italy monotonous.”[48]

Undoubtedly the population of Riad has diminished since the seat of government was transferred to Hail; at present it has even less trade and importance than Hofhoof (Hassa) since the Turkish occupation.

Jebel Shammar and the northwestern desert, remain to be considered. The chief characteristics of this region are the extensive Nefuds or sandy-deserts and the nomad population. Jebel Shammar more than any part of Arabia is the tenting ground for the sons of Kedar. Everywhere are the black-worsted booths—the houses of goat-hair, so celebrated in Arabic poetry and song. Place-names on the map of this country are not villages or cities but watering-places for cattle and encampments of the tribes from year to year. From the Gulf of Akaba to the Euphrates, and as far north as their flocks can find pasture, the nomads call the land their own. Many of them are subject to the government of Nejd and pay a small annual tribute; some are nominally under Turkish rule and others know no ruler save their Sheikh and have no law save that of immemorial Bedouin custom.

Burckhardt discourses of these people like one who has dwelt among them, tasting the sweet and bitter of their hungry, homely life. He describes their tents and their simple furniture, arms, utensils, diet, arts, industry, sciences, diseases, religion, matrimony, government, and warfare. He tells of their hospitality to the stranger; their robbery of the traveller; their blood-revenge and blood-covenants; their slaves and servants; their feasts and rejoicings; their domestic relations and public functions; their salutations and language; and how at last they bury their dead in a single garment, scraping out a shallow grave in hard-burned soil and heaping on a few rough stones to keep away the foul hyenas.

Burckhardt devotes a considerable portion of his book to an enumeration of the Bedouin-tribes and their numerous subdivisions. These will prove of great service to those who visit or cross the northern part of the Peninsula. The most important tribe is that of the Anaeze. They are nomads in the strictest acceptation of the word, for they continue during the whole year in almost constant motion. Their summer quarters are near the Syrian frontiers and in winter they retire into the heart of the desert or toward the Euphrates. When the tents are few they are pitched in a circle and called dowar, in greater numbers, they encamp in rows, one behind the other, especially along a rivulet or wady-bed; such encampments are called Nezel. The Sheikh’s or chief’s tent has the principal place generally toward the direction whence guests or foes may be expected. The Anaeze tents are always of black goat’s-hair; some other tribes have stuff striped white and black. Even the richest among them never have more than one tent unless he happen to have a second wife who cannot live on good terms with the first; he then pitches a smaller tent near his own. But polygamy is very unusual among the Bedouin Arabs, although divorce is common. The tent furniture is simplicity itself; camel-saddles and cooking utensils with carpets and provision skins, are all the Arab housewife has to look after.

Since the days of Job the Bedouin have been a nation of robbers. “The oxen were plowing and the asses feeding beside them; and the Sabeans fell upon them and took them away, yea they have slain the servants with the edge of the sword.” (Job i. 14.) The Bedouin’s hand is against every man in all Jebel Shammar to this day. The tribes are in a state of almost perpetual war against each other; it seldom happens, according to Burckhardt, that a tribe enjoys a moment of general peace with all its neighbors, yet the war between two tribes is not of long duration. Peace is easily made and easily broken. In Bedouin parlance a salt covenant is only binding while the salt is in their stomachs. General battles are rarely fought, and few lives are lost; to surprise an enemy by sudden attack, or to plunder a camp, are the chief objects of both parties. The dreadful effects of “blood-revenge” (by which law the kindred of the slain are in duty bound to slay the murderer or his kin) prevent many sanguinary conflicts. Whatever the Arabs take in their predatory excursions is shared according to previous agreement. Sometimes the whole spoil is equally divided by the Sheikh among his followers; at other times each one plunders for himself. A Bedouin raid is called a ghazu, and it is worthy of remark that the earliest biographer of Mohammed, Ibn Ishak, so designates the wars of the prophet of God with the Koreish. The Anaeze Bedouin never attack by night, for during the confusion of a nocturnal assault the women’s apartments might be entered, and this they regard as treachery. The female sex is respected even among the most inveterate enemies whenever a camp is plundered, and neither men, women nor slaves are ever taken prisoners. It is war only for booty. The Arabs are robbers, seldom murderers; to ask protection or dakheil is sure quarter, even when the spear is lifted. Peace is concluded generally by arbitration in the tent of the Sheikh of a third tribe friendly to both combating tribes. The most frequent cause of war is quarrels over wells or watering-places and pasture grounds, just as in the days of the patriarchs.

“The Bedouins have reduced robbery,” says Burckhardt, “in all its branches to a complete and regular system, which offers many interesting details.” These details are very numerous, and the stories of robbery and escape given by the Arabian chroniclers, or told at the camp-fires, would fill a volume. One example will suffice us. Three robbers plan an attack on an encampment. One of them stations himself behind the tent that is to be robbed, and endeavors to excite the attention of the nearest watch-dogs. These immediately attack him; he flies, and they pursue him to a great distance from the camp, which is thus cleared of those dangerous guardians. The second robber goes to the camels, cuts the strings that confine their legs and makes as many rise as he wishes. He then leads one of the she-camels out of the camp, the others following as usual, while the third robber has all this time been standing with lifted club before the tent-door to strike down any one who might awake and venture forth. If the robbers succeed they then join their companion, each seizes the tail of a strong leading-camel and pulls it with all his might; the camels set up a gallop into the desert and the men are dragged along by their booty until safe distance separates them from the scene of robbery. They then mount their prey and make haste to their own encampment.

Before we lightly condemn the robber we must realize his sore need. According to Doughty and other travellers three-fourths of the Bedouin of Northwestern Arabia suffer continual famine and seldom have enough to eat. In the long summer drought when pastures fail and the gaunt camel-herds give no milk they are in a sorry plight; then it is that the housewife cooks her slender mess of rice secretly, lest some would-be guest should smell the pot. The hungry gnawing of the Arab’s stomach is lessened by the coffee-cup and the ceaseless “tobacco-drinking” from the nomad’s precious pipe. The women suffer most and children languish away. When one of these sons-of-desert heard from Doughty’s lips of a land where “we had an abundance of the blessings of Allah, bread and clothing and peace, and, how, if any wanted, the law succored him—he began to be full of melancholy, and to lament the everlasting infelicity of the Arabs, whose lack of clothing is a cause to them of many diseases, who have not daily food nor water enough, and wandering in the empty wilderness, are never at any stay—and these miseries to last as long as their lives. And when his heart was full, he cried up to heaven, ‘Have mercy, ah Lord God, upon Thy creature which Thou createdst—pity the sighing of the poor, the hungry, the naked—have mercy—have mercy upon them, O Allah!’”

As we bid farewell to the tents of Kedar and the deserts of North Arabia let us say amen to the nomad’s prayer and judge them not harshly in their misery lest we be judged.