Part 7
The Sultan has also a town residence in half decay like all the other stone-built but mud-cemented houses of the natives. The only residences well-built and durable are those of the British resident and the American consul. The former occupies the choice location, in a rock cleft, where breezes blow from two directions. The bazaar of Muscat has little to boast of; one of the chief industries is the manufacture of _Hilawi_ or Muscat candy-paste, which to the acquired taste is delicious, but to the stranger smells of rancid butter and tastes like sweet wagon-grease.
The town is cut off from the plain behind by a substantially built wall which stretches from hill to hill. This wall is pierced with two gates which are always guarded and closed a couple of hours after sunset. The moat outside the wall is dry. Beyond it are houses and hundreds of mat huts principally inhabited by Beluchis and Negroes. The American mission house is also outside of the wall, in this quarter. About a third of a mile beyond are the gardens of Muscat and the wells, protected by a tower and guard. “The gardens” are always visited at sunset by the strollers for exercise, but they are hardly large enough “to supply a week’s food for 100 self-respecting locusts of normal appetite.”
The population of Muscat is of very mixed character, Arabs, Beluchis, Banian-Traders, Negroes, Persians, and every other nation that frequents this port of transit. The Arabic spoken in all Oman is a dialect quite different from that of Nejd or Yemen but the Arabic of Muscat is full of pigeon-English and pigeon-Hindustani. The extensive and long intercourse with Zanzibar and East Africa has also had its influence on the speech and habits of the Muscat Arab trader. The present trade is still very considerable, although less than a century ago. It is mostly with India, there being little direct trade with England. The chief exports are dates, fruit, shark-fins, fish, and salt; the imports, rice, sugar, piece-goods, coffee, silk, petroleum and arms. The largest export is of dates which nearly all go to the American Market. Besides the large number of steamers which call at this port, the native merchants own several old British sailing vessels, some of them noted clippers in their day, which make one or two voyages a year and bring profit to their owners. Native boats also transport cargoes landed at Muscat, to the less frequented ports. This adds to the importance of Muscat as an _entrepôt_ for Oman. Mattra is the terminus of the caravan-routes from the interior and is in communication with Muscat by a narrow mountain path and by sea.
The so-called Pirate coast stretches along the northern boundary of Oman on the Persian Gulf from El Katar to Ras Musendum and was, even as early as Ptolemy’s day, inhabited by wild, lawless Arabs. On his map of Arabia they are named _Ichthiophagoi_, or fish-eaters. Niebuhr wrote of this part of Oman, “Fishes are so plentiful upon the coast and so easily caught, as to be used not only for feeding cows, asses, and other domestic animals, but even as manure for the fields.” Sir John Malcolm, in his quaint sketches of Persia wrote forty years ago: “I asked who were the inhabitants of the barren shore of Arabia that we saw. He answered with apparent alarm, ‘they are of the sect of Wahabees and are called Jowasimee. But God preserve us from them, for they are monsters. Their occupation is piracy, and their delight murder, and to make it worse they give you the most pious reasons for every villainy they commit. They abide by the letter of the sacred volume, rejecting all commentaries and traditions. If you are their captive and offer all to save your life they say, No! It is written in the Koran that it is not lawful to plunder the living; but we are not prohibited from stripping the dead—so saying they knock you on the head.’”
Thanks to English commerce and gunboats these fanatic Wahabis have become more tame, and most of them have long given up piracy and turned to pearl-diving for a livelihood. Hindu traders have settled among them, foreign commerce reaches their bazaars, and the black tent is making room for the three or four important towns of Dabai, Sharka, Abu Thubi and Ras-el-Kheima, with growing population and increasing wealth.
The cape of Musendum and the land back of it, called Ras-el-Jebel is very mountainous, but beyond Ras-el-Kheima, the coast is low and flat all the way up the gulf. The villages are all built near the entrance of salt-water creeks or marshes, which serve as harbors at high-tide. For the most part the coast is unfertile, but near Sharka there are palm-groves, and further inland are oases. The islands off this coast are most of them uninhabited.
The Batina coast is the exception to all the maritime plains that surround so large a part of the peninsula; in western and eastern Arabia these low sandy plains are nearly barren of all vegetation, but here extensive date plantations and gardens extend almost to the very ocean beach. Back of the rising plain are the lofty ranges of Jebel Akhdar. This fertile coast begins at Sib, about twenty-five miles from Muscat, and extends for 150 miles to the neighborhood of Khor Kalba with an average width of about twelve miles. It has many towns and villages; the principal ones are the following. Sib is a scattered town chiefly built of mat-huts with two small detached forts. It has a very small bazaar, but extensive date-groves and gardens. Back of Sib on the way up the coast one sees the great bluff of Jebel Akhdar, 9,900 feet high, and visible over 100 miles out at sea. Barka has a lofty Arab fortress, but for the rest mat-huts among date-plantations characterize its general appearance. Large quantities of shell fish are collected and sent inland; the bazaar is good and some Banian traders are settled here. Passing several islands the next town is Suaik. After it the larger town of Sohar, with perhaps 4,000 people. This town is walled with a high fort in the middle, the residence of the Sheikh. A high conical peak, of light color, rises conspicuously about twelve miles west of the town, and with the surrounding date gardens and other trees makes a pretty picture, altogether more green than one would expect on Arabian coasts. Beyond Sohar the chief villages are, in order, Shinas, Al Fujaira, Dibba. The two latter are already beyond the Batina and are between the high cliffs and the deep sea.
Going from southeast Muscat down the coast toward Ras-el-Had we first pass the little village of Sudab and Bunder Jissa. The latter is of interest as the place the French were trying to acquire for a coaling-station from the Sultan of Muscat last year. It has a good anchorage, is only five miles from Muscat, and an island precipice, 140 feet high, guards the entrance. After this, Karyat, Taiwa, Kalhat and smaller villages passed, we reach Sur. This large, double town is situated on a khor or backwater, with two forts to the westward. The inhabitants, numbering perhaps 8,000, consist of two clans of the Bni Bu Ali and the Bni Janaba, often at feud with each other. The country inland is partly cultivated and date groves abound. Sur has always been a place of trade and enterprise and its buggalows visit India, Zanzibar and the Persian Gulf. The people are all bold sailors since many generations. But Sur also has the unenviable reputation of being even now the centre of illicit slave-trading. Beyond Sur is the headland of Jebel Saffan and Ras-el-Had, the easternmost point of Arabia, almost reaching the sixtieth degree of longitude.
For a knowledge of the coast beyond Ras-el-Had we are indebted to the papers of Assistant Surgeon H.J. Carter in the journal of the Bombay branch of the Royal Asiatic Society.[29] The two great Arab tribes that dwell on this coast are the Mahrah and the Gharah; the former really belong to Hadramaut, but the boundaries drawn on the maps are purely artificial and have no significance. Neither tribe is dependent on the Oman Sultan or acknowledges any allegiance to him. The Mahrah are descended from the ancient Himyarites and occupy a coast-line of nearly 140 miles from Saihut to Ras Morbat; their chief town is Damkut (Dunkot) on Kamar bay. In stature the Mahrahs are smaller than most Arabs, and by no means handsome; in their peculiar mode of Bedouin salutation they put their noses side by side and breathe softly! They subsist by fishing and are miserably poor; their plains, mountains and valleys, except close to Damkut, are sandy and barren. Religion they have scarcely any, and Carter says that they do not even know the Moslem prayers, and are utterly ignorant of the teachings of Mohammed. Their dialect is soft and sweet, and they themselves compare it to the language of the birds; it is evidently a corrupted form of the ancient Himyaric and therefore of great importance in the study of philology.[30]
The Gharah tribe inhabit the coast between Moseirah island and the Kuria-Muria islands. Their country is mountainous and cavernous and consists of a white stratified limestone formation 4,000 or 5,000 feet above the sea-level. The upper part of the mountains are covered with good pasturage and their slopes with a dense thicket of small trees among which frankincense and other gum trees are plentiful. The whole tribe are _troglodytes_, “cave-dwellers,” since nature gives them better dwellings than the best mud-hut, and cooler than the largest tent of Kedar. They are largely nomadic, however, and shift from cave to cave in their wanderings. Their wardrobe is not an incumbrance as it consists of a single piece of coarse blue cotton wrapped around the loins like a short kilt. The women wear a loose frock of the same texture and color with wide sleeves, reaching a little below the knee in front and trailing on the ground behind; the veil is unknown. Children go about entirely naked. Both men and women tattoo their cheeks. For weapons they have swords, spears, daggers, and matchlocks. Their food consists of milk, flesh and honey with the wild fruits of the mountains.
This entire region has been justly celebrated for honey since the days of the Greek geographers who enumerate honey and frankincense as its chief products. The wild honey of South Arabia collected from the rocks and packed in large dry gourds, is fit for an epicure. On Ptolemy’s map of Arabia the region inland from this coast is called _Libanotopheros Regio_, the place of incense; and by Pliny is termed _regio thurifera_, the region of frankincense. From the earliest times this has been the country that produces real frankincense in abundance. Once its export was a source of wealth to the inhabitants, for incense was used in the temples of Egypt and India as well as by the Jews, and by all the nations of antiquity. So important was this commerce in the early history of the world that Sprenger devotes several pages in his Ancient Geography of Arabia to describing the origin, extent, and influence of frankincense on civilization. The Arabs were then the general transport agents between the east and the west, _i.e._, India and Egypt. The Queen of Sheba’s empire grew rich in frankincense-trade; she brought to Solomon “spices in abundance,” nor was there “any such spice” or brought in “such abundance” as that which Queen Sheba gave to Solomon. (B.C. cir. 992.)
The rise of Islam, the overthrow of the old Himyarite kingdom, the discovery of the passage round the Cape of Good Hope, all these coöperated to destroy the ancient importance and prosperity of Southern Arabia. At present, frankincense is still exported, but not in large quantities. The gum is procured by making incisions in the bark of the shrub in May and December. On its first appearance it comes forth white as milk, but soon hardens and discolors. It is then collected by men and boys, employed to look after the trees by the different families who own the land on which they grow.
[Illustration: A BRANCH OF THE INCENSE TREE.]
IX
THE LAND OF THE CAMEL
“To see real live dromedaries my readers must, I fear, come to Arabia, for these animals are not often to be met with elsewhere, not even in Syria; and whoever wishes to contemplate the species in all its beauty, must prolong his journey to Oman, which is for dromedaries, what Nejd is for horses, Cashmere for sheep, and Tibet for bulldogs.”—_Palgrave._
All Oman, but especially the region just described, is called among the Arabs _Um-el-ibl_, “mother of the camel.” Palgrave, Doughty and other Arabian travellers agree that the Oman dromedary is the prince of all camel-breeds, and Doughty says they are so highly esteemed at Mecca as to fetch three times the price of other camels.
Unless one knows something about the camel one can neither understand the Arab nor his language; without the camel, life in a large part of Arabia would at present be impossible; without the camel the Arabic language would be vastly different. According to Hammer Purgstall, the Arabic dictionaries give this animal 5,744 different names; there is not a page in the lexicon but has some reference to the camel.
The Arabs highly value the camel, but do not admire its form and shape. There is an Arab tradition, cited in Burton’s “Gold Mines of Midian,” to the effect that when Allah determined to create the horse, He called the South Wind and said, “I desire to draw from thee a new being, condense thyself by parting with thy fluidity.” The Creator then took a handful of this element, blew upon it the breath of life, and the noble quadruped appeared. But the horse complained against his Maker. His neck was too short to reach the distant grass blades on the march; his back had no hump to steady a saddle; his hoofs were sharp and sank deep into the sand; and he added many similar grievances. Whereupon Allah created the camel to prove the foolishness of his complaint. The horse shuddered at the sight of what he wanted to become, and this is the reason every horse starts when meeting its caricature for the first time. The camel may not be beautiful, (although the Arabic lexicon shows that the words for “_pretty_” and “_camel_” are related) but he is surpassingly useful.
This animal is found in Persia, Asia Minor, Afghanistan, Beluchistan, Mongolia, Western China, Northern India, Syria, Turkey, North Africa and parts of Spain, but nowhere so generally or so finely developed as in Arabia. The two main species, not to speak of varieties, are the Southern, Arabian one-humped camel and the Northern, Bactrian two-humped camel. Each is specially adapted to its locality. The Bactrian camel is long-haired, tolerant of the intense cold of the steppes and is said to eat snow when thirsty. The Arabian species is short-haired, intolerant of cold, but able to endure thirst and extreme heat. It is incredible to Arabs that any camel-kind should have a double hump. A camel differs from a dromedary in nothing save blood and breed. The camel is a pack-horse; the dromedary a race-horse. The camel is thick-built, heavy-footed, ungainly, jolting; the dromedary has finer hair, lighter step, is easy of pace and more enduring of thirst. A caravan of camels is a freight-train; a company of Oman _thelul_-riders is a limited express. The ordinary caravan travels six hours a day and three miles an hour, but a good dromedary can run seventy miles a day on the stretch. A tradesman from Aneyza told Doughty that he had ridden from El Kasim to Taif and back, a distance of over 700 miles, in fifteen days! Mehsan Allayda once mounted his dromedary after the Friday midday prayer at El-Aly and prayed the next Friday in the great Mosque at Damascus about 440 miles distant. The Haj-road post-rider at Ma’an can deliver a message at Damascus, it is said, at the end of three days; the distance is over 200 miles.
The Arabs have a saying that “the camel is the greatest of all blessings given by Allah to mankind.” One is not surprised that the meditative youth of Mecca who led the camels of Khadiyah, to Syria and back by the desert way, should appeal to the unbelievers in Allah and His prophet in the words, “_And do ye not look then at the camel how she is created?_” (Surah lxxxviii. 17 of the Koran.)
To describe the camel is to describe God’s goodness to the desert-dwellers. Everything about the animal shows evident design. His long neck, gives wide range of vision in desert marches and enables him to reach far to the meagre desert shrubs on either side of his pathway. The cartilaginous texture of his mouth, enables him to eat hard and thorny plants—the pasture of the desert. His ears are very small, and his nostrils large for breathing, but are specially capable of closure by valve-like folds against the fearful Simoon. His eyes are prominent, but protected by a heavy overhanging upper-lid, limiting vision upward thus guarding from the direct rays of the noon sun. His cushioned feet are peculiarly adapted for ease of the rider and the animal alike. Five horny pads are given him to rest on when kneeling to receive a burden or for repose on the hot sand. His hump is not a fictional but a _real_ and acknowledged reserve store of nutriment as well as nature’s packsaddle for the commerce of ages. His water reservoirs in connection with the stomach, enable him when in good condition to travel for five days without water. Again, the camel alone of all ruminants has incisor-teeth in the upper jaw, which, with the peculiar structure of his other teeth, make his bite, the animal’s first and main defence, most formidable. The skeleton of the camel is full of proofs of design. Notice, for example, the arched backbone constructed in such a way as to sustain the greatest weight in proportion to the span of the supports; a strong camel can bear 1,000 pounds’ weight, although the usual load in Oman is not more than 600 pounds.
The camel is a _domestic_ animal in the full sense of the word, for the Arabian domicile is indebted to the camel for nearly all it holds. All that can be obtained from the animal is of value. Fuel, milk, excellent hair for tents, ropes, shawls and coarser fabrics are obtained from the living animal; and flesh-food, leather, bones and other useful substances from the dead. Even the footprints of the camel though soon obliterated, are of special value in the desert. A lighter or smaller foot would leave no tracks, but the camel’s foot leaves data for the Bedouin science of _Athar_—the art of navigation for the ship of the desert. Camel tracks are gossip and science, history and philosophy to the Arab caravan. A camel-march is the standard measure of distance in all Arabia; and the price of a milch-camel the standard of value in the interior. When they have little or no water the miserable nomads rinse their hands in camel’s water and the nomad women wash their babes in it. Camel’s-milk is the staple diet of thousands in Arabia even though it be bitter because of wormwood pasturage.
As to the character of the camel and its good or evil nature authorities differ. Lady Ann Blunt considers the camel the most abused and yet the most patient animal in existence. Palgrave, on the other hand, thus describes the stupidity and ugly temper of the beast: “I have, while in England, heard and read more than once of the docile camel. If docile means stupid, well and good; in such a case the camel is the very model of docility. But if the epithet is intended to designate an animal that takes an interest in its rider so far as a beast can, that obeys from a sort of submissive or half fellow-feeling with its master, like the horse and elephant, then I say that the camel is by no means docile, very much the contrary. He will never attempt to throw you off his back, such a trick being far beyond his limited comprehension; but if you fall off, he will never dream of stopping for you; and if turned loose it is a thousand to one he will never find his way back to his accustomed home or pasture. One only symptom will he give that he is aware of his rider, and that is when the latter is about to mount him, for on such an occasion, instead of addressing him in the style of Balaam’s more intelligent beast, ‘Am not I thy camel upon which thou hast ridden ever since I was thine unto this day?’ he will bend back his long snaky neck toward his master, open his enormous jaws to bite, if he dared, and roar out a tremendous sort of groan, as if to complain of some entirely new and unparalleled injustice about to be done him. In a word he is from first to last an undomesticated and savage animal rendered serviceable by stupidity alone. Neither attachment nor even habit can impress him; never tame, though not wide-awake enough to be exactly wild.” We can bear witness that the camels we have ridden in Hassa and Yemen were altogether more kindly than the ugly creature of Palgrave.
The chief authorities on the interior of Oman were, until recent date, Niebuhr, Wellsted (1835), Whitelock (1838), Eloy (1843) and Palgrave, (1863). Palgrave, however, only visited the coast and his account of the interior and its history is pure romance. Later travellers have visited the chief cities of Jebel Achdar and corroborated the accuracy of Lieutenant Wellsted in his “Travels in Arabia.” Unfortunately Wellsted’s acquaintance even with colloquial Arabic was very limited and he frankly avows that he encountered serious difficulties in understanding the people. “Wellsted’s map,” says Badger, “is the only one of the province which we possess drawn up from personal observation and ... it affords little or no certain indication of the numerous towns and villages beyond the restricted routes of the travellers. It is remarkable and by no means creditable to the British Government in India, that, notwithstanding our intimate political and commercial relations with Oman, for the last century, we know actually less of that country beyond the coast than we do of the Lake districts of Africa.”[31] Badger wrote in 1860, but although Colonel Miles and others have visited the region of Jebel Achdar, all the country beyond is still largely _terra incognita_. No one has ever made the journey beyond the range of mountains or solved the mystery of Western Oman, which is still a blank on the best maps; nor do we know anything of the land 100 miles southwest of Muscat, save by Arab hearsay.