black beetles around and muddy water to drink! I don’t think you would be your true self under such conditions.”
With permission from her parents and a fresh supply of money (her yearly allowance and the income from her books had run out), she extended her journey, bought a deep-pocketed khaki jacket made for a man, and hired three Kurdish soldiers, along with a cook and a guide. When they reached the town of Jarad she went to the house of Sheikh Ahmed. “I lay on his cushions, and ate white mulberries and drank coffee,” she recalled contentedly. When they pressed a narghile on her, she firmly refused. She had tried it once in Jerusalem. “Never again,” she said of the water pipe; “it’s too nasty.”
B y the following night the grassy plains had disappeared, and in their place stretched thousands of miles of sand. This was her first night to sleep in the silent, endless desert. “The smooth, hard ground makes a beautiful floor to my tent,” she wrote. “Shall I tell you my chief impression—the silence. It is like the silence of mountain tops, but more intense, for there you know the sound of wind and far away water and falling ice and stones; there is a sort of echo of sound there, you know it, Father. But here nothing.”
The sun scorched the daytime air, so for the next two days she and her five men traveled at night, twelve hours each night, without water for either humans or horses. The ride was long and boring across the endlesss sands, and she almost fell asleep in her saddle, but her men kept her awake, telling her grisly tales of Bedouin raids and rumors of the cruel, unyielding desert emir, Ibn Rashid. Their stories whetted her appetite to visit the Nejd, the terrifyingly vacant desert she had read about in Arabia Deserta , a seminal work describing life with the Bedouin by the traveler Charles Doughty.
When they stopped on the third night and she finally could sleep, she climbed into a muslin bag she had made to protect herself from animal bites and sand flies. “I’m very proud of this contrivance,” she wrote, “but if we have a ghazu , a raid, of Arabs I shall certainly be the last to fly, and my flight will be as one who runs a sack race.”
After another day of riding, they reached a spring. She drank the clear, cold water, closing her eyes to avoid seeing the weeds and creatures swimming in it. Her cook made lunch, fried croquettes and a roasted partridge he had killed, and after tea, she climbed into a cave and slept on thistles. A few hours later they were off again, and by sundown the air had turned bitter cold. At the campsite, to keep warm she put on gaiters and a second pair of knickerbockers, and with a covert cloth coat under her thick winter coat, she rolled herself up in a blanket and cape and went to sleep.
The next day she reached the Roman ruins of Palmyra, a “singular landscape … a mass of columns, ranged into long avenues, grouped into temples, lying broken on the sand or pointing one long solitary finger to Heaven. Beyond them is the immense Temple of Baal; the modern town is built inside it and its rows of columns rise out of a mass of mud roofs. And beyond all is the desert, sand and white stretches of salt and sand again, with the dust clouds whirling over it and the Euphrates five days away.”
She spent two days exploring Palmyra, and then set off in the early morning for her return to Damascus. Outside the ancient city of Palmyra she came across a camp of Agail Arabs, a band of dark-skinned, unkempt Bedouin driving a caravan of camels to the flowering capital. They were led by Sheikh Muhammad, who came from Nejd, the cruel desert of central Arabia. But instead of hiding in fear of the scruffy Bedouin, she took a second breakfast with them: dates, camels’ milk and the bitter black coffee of the Arabs (“a peerless drink,” she called it), and talked excitedly with two of the men about Baghdad and the desert. “The interesting part of it is that the
With permission from her parents and a fresh supply of money (her yearly allowance and the income from her books had run out), she extended her journey, bought a deep-pocketed khaki jacket made for a man, and hired three Kurdish soldiers, along with a cook and a guide. When they reached the town of Jarad she went to the house of Sheikh Ahmed. “I lay on his cushions, and ate white mulberries and drank coffee,” she recalled contentedly. When they pressed a narghile on her, she firmly refused. She had tried it once in Jerusalem. “Never again,” she said of the water pipe; “it’s too nasty.”
B y the following night the grassy plains had disappeared, and in their place stretched thousands of miles of sand. This was her first night to sleep in the silent, endless desert. “The smooth, hard ground makes a beautiful floor to my tent,” she wrote. “Shall I tell you my chief impression—the silence. It is like the silence of mountain tops, but more intense, for there you know the sound of wind and far away water and falling ice and stones; there is a sort of echo of sound there, you know it, Father. But here nothing.”
The sun scorched the daytime air, so for the next two days she and her five men traveled at night, twelve hours each night, without water for either humans or horses. The ride was long and boring across the endlesss sands, and she almost fell asleep in her saddle, but her men kept her awake, telling her grisly tales of Bedouin raids and rumors of the cruel, unyielding desert emir, Ibn Rashid. Their stories whetted her appetite to visit the Nejd, the terrifyingly vacant desert she had read about in Arabia Deserta , a seminal work describing life with the Bedouin by the traveler Charles Doughty.
When they stopped on the third night and she finally could sleep, she climbed into a muslin bag she had made to protect herself from animal bites and sand flies. “I’m very proud of this contrivance,” she wrote, “but if we have a ghazu , a raid, of Arabs I shall certainly be the last to fly, and my flight will be as one who runs a sack race.”
After another day of riding, they reached a spring. She drank the clear, cold water, closing her eyes to avoid seeing the weeds and creatures swimming in it. Her cook made lunch, fried croquettes and a roasted partridge he had killed, and after tea, she climbed into a cave and slept on thistles. A few hours later they were off again, and by sundown the air had turned bitter cold. At the campsite, to keep warm she put on gaiters and a second pair of knickerbockers, and with a covert cloth coat under her thick winter coat, she rolled herself up in a blanket and cape and went to sleep.
The next day she reached the Roman ruins of Palmyra, a “singular landscape … a mass of columns, ranged into long avenues, grouped into temples, lying broken on the sand or pointing one long solitary finger to Heaven. Beyond them is the immense Temple of Baal; the modern town is built inside it and its rows of columns rise out of a mass of mud roofs. And beyond all is the desert, sand and white stretches of salt and sand again, with the dust clouds whirling over it and the Euphrates five days away.”
She spent two days exploring Palmyra, and then set off in the early morning for her return to Damascus. Outside the ancient city of Palmyra she came across a camp of Agail Arabs, a band of dark-skinned, unkempt Bedouin driving a caravan of camels to the flowering capital. They were led by Sheikh Muhammad, who came from Nejd, the cruel desert of central Arabia. But instead of hiding in fear of the scruffy Bedouin, she took a second breakfast with them: dates, camels’ milk and the bitter black coffee of the Arabs (“a peerless drink,” she called it), and talked excitedly with two of the men about Baghdad and the desert. “The interesting part of it is that the
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