A Pilgrimage to Nejd: Vol. 1

"You have been a great traveller, Mercury?" "I have seen the world." "Ah, a wondrous spectacle.  I long to travel." "The same thing over again.  Little novelty and much change.  I am wearied with exertion, and if I could get a pension would retire." "And yet travel brings wisdom." "It cures us of care.  Seeing much we feel little, and learn how very petty are all those great affairs which cost us such anxiety." Ixion in Heaven. The charm of Asia-A return to old friends-Desert news-The Palmyrene colony at Damascus-New horses and camels-Mrs. Digby and her husband Mijuel the Mizrab-A blood feud-Abd el-Kader's life-Midhat Pasha discourses on canals and tramways-He fails to raise a loan. Damascus, Dec. 6, 1878.-It is strange how gloomy thoughts vanish as one sets foot in Asia.  Only yesterday we were still tossing on the sea of European thought, with its political anxieties, its social miseries and its restless aspirations, the heritage of the unquiet race of Japhet-and now we seem to have ridden into still water, where we can rest and forget and be thankful.  The charm of the East is the absence of intellectual life there, the freedom one's mind gets from anxiety in looking forward or pain in looking back.  Nobody here thinks of the past or the future, only of the present; and till the day of one's death comes, I suppose the present will always be endurable.  Then it has done us good to meet old friends, friends all demonstratively pleased to see us.  At the coach office when we got down, we found a little band of dependants waiting our arrival-first of all Mohammed ibn Arûk, the companion of our last year's adventures, who has come from Palmyra to meet and travel with us again, and who has been waiting here for us, it would seem, a month.  Then Hanna, the most courageous of cowards and of cooks, with his ever ready tears in his eyes and his double row of excellent white teeth, agrin with welcome.  Each of them has brought with him a friend, a relation he insists on calling him, who is to share the advantage of being in our service, and to stand by his patron in case of need, for servants like to travel here in pairs.  Mohammed's cousin is a quiet, respectable looking man of about five and thirty, rather thick set and very broad shouldered.  He is to act as head camel man, and he looks just the man for the place.  Hanna's brother bears no likeness at all to Hanna.  He is a young giant, with a rather feckless face, and great splay hands which seem to embarrass him terribly.  He is dressed picturesquely in a tunic shaped like the ecclesiastical vestment called the "dalmatic," and very probably its origin, with a coloured turban on his head.  He too may be useful, but he is a Christian, and we rather doubt the prudence of taking Christian servants to Nejd.  Only Ferhan, our Agheyl camel-driver, is missing, and this is a great disappointment, for he was the best tempered and the most trustworthy of all our followers last year.  I fancy we may search Damascus with a candle before we find his like again.