By Desert Ways to Baghdad. Louisa Jebb Wilkins

we arrange everything beforehand, as everybody else does, we are apt to get pushed aside; you must, therefore, take your place in the general hustle and secure your bed and your dinner and your right to look at sights by ticket long before you are in need of them. In short, you must make a plan. But in the untravelled parts of the East you reign supreme; there is no need to go about securely chained to a gold watch which metes out with inexorable exactitude the dictates of railway time-tables, steamers, diligences, and table d'hôte summonses. Ignore Time, and he is at once your servant; treat him with respect, and he at once becomes your master. In those countries where Time has become master he develops a system of locomotion to which you must conform or lose its benefits; it will not accommodate itself to you. But in the East, do you but recognise the principle of making Time your own and at once plans become unnecessary. Systems of locomotion, for instance, spring up in answer to a preliminary wish in your brain; and their existence being solely due to you, it is possible to use them when and where you will. You want to get from one point to another: your wish is passed on, and a mule or an araba appears at your door; and whether it be punctual, or whether, as is more usual in the East, it be late, it is of no consequence, for Time is waiting for you and will wait for ever. Once you are started, moreover, the stopping-places are not arbitrary; you have merely to wish, and at once the mule or the araba stops. In the same way when you wish to sleep your bed is where you make it; and when you wish to eat you need wait for no summons. And should it so happen that you have been misguided enough to make a plan, it is of no consequence should you think fit to change it. One only asks, "Why have made the plan?"

      Thus it was that, without any more preparation than this preliminary idea of our route, X and I were able to carry it out in detail exactly as we had sketched it in the rough.

      The drawbacks of course were there. Sometimes we had nothing to eat through not having arranged for food; and sometimes we slept out in the wet. But does this never happen to those who have made elaborate plans against all possible contingencies? And have they not had the worst of it after all, for they have had the planning with no result, and have suffered the annoyance of having their best laid plans mislaid.

      Is it possible, moreover, to judge this method of travel by our standard of ideas in the West? In a civilised country where beds abound and it is merely a matter of arrangement to acquire one, there is no delight in passing the night under a damp hedge with drips down your back; there is shelter round the corner, and you merely curse yourself for your own stupidity, or pretend you like it, and take care not to do it again. But when you lie on your back on a sandy desert with nothing within measurable distance of you, and the rain beats mercilessly down or the wind howls through the crevices of your garments, you are conscious of battling against great primeval forces akin to the unknown elements of your own being; you cannot escape from them, for there is no shelter round the corner: you are brought up face to face with something fundamental; all the little accessories with which we have learnt to shield ourselves fall away, and you are just there, stripped yourself, and in the middle of naked realities. And if only you have been wet enough, or cold enough, or hungry enough, it has been worth while, for you never forget it; and the remembrance of it will come to you ever and anon when you are once more tied up in the bonds of convention and are struggling to keep a true idea of what is a reality and what is not.

      So it is, perhaps, that in setting out to write any account of such a journey, one is dominated by the remembrance chiefly of facts which in this country seem trivial. All the little details of life take on an exaggerated form; for what in civilisation we are apt to ignore and take as a matter of course, occurring almost unnoticed in the ordinary routine of daily life, becomes out there of enormous importance. A good meal, for instance, seems of far greater moment than an attack by brigands, because of its rarer and more unexpected occurrence.

      If you are travelling for no particular purpose, with people whose language you do not understand, and in a country where the manners and customs are not familiar to you and you are merely moving on slowly from day to day—all you can get is a passing impression of outside things. If you are not a scientist or an archæologist or a politician striving to catalogue each new acquisition on your particular subject; if, in fact, you have no particular knowledge of any sort, but your pores are wide open to receive passing impressions, what you get is a vivid idea of the appearance of things. This is all that you can hope to pass on.

      In the following pages I do not propose to give a connected account of the various places we visited or of the many adventures which befell us; this is not a travel book. I shall have no intelligent remarks to make on the historic spots we passed, journeying slowly through this country so rich with still undiscovered monuments of ancient times; a country which is also destined to become, as civilisation advances with the Baghdad Railway, the centre of future political interest. What justification is there then for writing a book at all?

      The Danes have given us a definition of their idea of education: "It is," they say, "what is left after everything that has been learnt is forgotten." So it is with any form of travel; the value of it to the traveller himself is what is left after lapse of time has effaced all recollection of minor incidents and softened the vividness of strong impressions. In very slow travelling through desert countries, where day after day the same trivial events occur in similar yet different settings, the essential facts of that country sink into you imperceptibly, until at the end they are so woven into the fibres of your nature that, even when removed from their influence, you will never quite lose them.

      There are certain notes in the East which form part of a tune sung all the world over, but which give a clearer and more definite sound in the land which first gave them birth. The sketches given in the following pages are framed on them; they are what I have left, and what I would fain pass on to the reader.

      If I have succeeded in striking these notes true, there is no need of an apology to those who have already heard them in the country whence they spring; for any one who has ever travelled in the East welcomes anything that will once more touch that particular chord, at whatever time or place. And if I have succeeded in striking them so that here and there amongst those to whom the East is still but a name, there are some who may hear a faint echo of the real thing, I shall feel that there has been some justification for this contribution to the literature of the desert.

      PART I

      BRUSA TO DIARBEKR

      "It avails not, time nor place—distance avails not,

      I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence.

      Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt;

      Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd;

      Just as you are refresh'd by the gladness of the river and the bright flow, I was refresh'd;

      Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the swift current, I stood, yet was hurried." …

      BY DESERT WAYS TO BAGHDAD

CHAPTER I

       Table of Contents

      DISENTANGLEMENT

      It was our first night in camp; little mysterious hillocks shut us into a world of our own; we had it all to ourselves and only the stars overhead knew, and they seemed to be congratulating us on our escape; they twinkled and winked and beckoned. Constantin had lit a fire, and this at once became the centre of our world; the door of our tent looked out on it, the muleteers, the Zaptiehs, and our men sat round it, our supper was cooking on it, and we all thought about that; the horses and mules, tethered in a semicircle, turned that way and blinked at it; far away a jackal saw it and barked. It drew us all together, and its smoke went quietly up towards the beckoning stars.

      They would be eating their dinner now in the hotel at Brusa just the same as last night; the thin young man who had asked us what we should do if it rained, the old lady who wanted to know if we were doing it for pleasure, and the middle-aged spinster who thought we had no business to expose ourselves to such dangers unless it were for missionary