Seabrook - Adventures In Arabia

First published in 1928, few Westerners have succeeded in identifying themselves so completely with Arabian life as the author of this volume. He went to Arabia for no political, humanitarian or reasonable purpose, but purely for the joy of it.

A born adventurist, W. B. SEABROOK did not allow his first few attempts to see Arabia be his only ones. Later in life, while married, this Westerner entered the family bosoms of Arabian society.

First published in 2000 by

Kegan Paul International

This edition first published in 2010 by

Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, 0X14 4RN

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada

by Routledge

711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Kegan Paul International, 2000

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 10: 0-7103-0678-4 (hbk)

ISBN 13: 978-0-7103-0678-4 (hbk)

Publishers Note

The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original copies may be apparent. The publisher has made every effort to contact original copyright holders and would welcome correspondence from those they have been unable to trace.

TO

AMIR AMIN ARSLAN

ARAB OF THE ARABS

F OR hospitality, friendship, and protection, I wish to thank:

Mitkhal Pasha el Fayiz, hereditary sheikh of sheikhs and overlord of the allied Beni Sakhr Bedouin tribes ; and Mansour, the slave.

The Amir Abdullah, ruler of Transjordania.

Sultan Pasha Atrash, war-chief of the Druses.

Hussein Pasha Atrash, lord of Anz.

Ali Bey Obeyid, civil judge of Souieda, in the Moun-tain of the Druses.

Sitt Nazira el Jumblatt, the Veiled Lady of Mukh-tara.

Suleiman Bey Izzedin, the Druse historian, and Daoud Izzedin, his son.

The Most Reverend and Holy Sheikh Shefieh el Melewi, Governor-General of the Whirling Dervishes in Syrian Tripoli.

Howeja Mechmed Hamdi of Bagdad ; Dr and Sitt Mirza Yacoub of Bagdad ; and Prince Suleiman Pashati of Bagdad.

The Mir Said Beg, ruler of the Yezidees ; and Nadir- Lugh, high-priest in the temple of Satan at Sheikh-Adi.

The late Dr Arthur Dray of Brumana.

I wish to thank the editor of Asia for permission to publish in altered form certain chapters of this book.

W. B. S.

W HEN a man goes wandering into outlandish places he usually has a reason. At any rate, reasonable people feel that he should have one. Therefore it seems necessary and proper in this preface to explain why I went to Arabia.

Actually I have never understood the why of anythingmy own obscure but insistent motivations least of all.

One of my first memories is a picture-book my grandmother gave me in early nursery days. Its frontispiece showed three majestic figures from another world, cloaked mysteriously, riding upon the backs of strange, towering beasts, following a star.

That picture filled my childish mind with indescribable excitement. A second picture showed a baby, with people kneeling. It failed to interest me. My grandmother explained that this was a particular sort of babybut I was stubborn. I kept turning back to the three men on camels.

Some years later, when I was nine or ten, we moved from Maryland out to Kansas, and were living in Abilene, a prairie town. The prairie was flat in all directions to the skyline. The nearest town, an adjacent county-town, was called Enterprise. The town itself was hidden by the curve of the globe, but on very clear days the top of a small church-steeple could be vaguely seen. To the boys of Abilene Enterprise spelled mystery. It was before the day of motor-cars. To walk there, across the prairie, was a long-discussed adventure. We had a Daisy air-rifle and an old bowie-knife, and persuaded ourselves that we might encounter Indians. Six of us planned to start, unknown to our parents, at dawn on a certain morning. But the night before, behind my father' barn, where we gathered for conference, dissension broke out. Enterprise, the gang agreed, should be the World's Fair at Chicago. But I obstinately insisted that Enterprise should be Samarkand.

I had read The Arabian Nights and Marco Polo. I tried to tell them what we should find at Samarkandtemples and palaces, golden domes, black giants with curved swords, and beautiful Circassian slaves chained to marble columnsbut they derided me, voted to leave me behind, and marched off the next morning to the World's Fair at Chicago, singing Ta-ra-ra-ra boom-de-ay.

Ten years passed, and after college, when my beard had begun to stiffen, I made a second effort to take the road for Samarkandwhich was to me a symbol rather than a placeand suffered a second disappointment. I had crossed on a cattle-boat to Cherbourg with the idea of tramping round the world. I had been begging, stealing, occasionally working my way through France, down the valley of the Rhone, and came at last to Marseilles. On that amazing waterfront, the Quai de la Joliette, I saw, for the first time in flesh and blood, hawk-nosed Arab merchants in striped robes who had come with dates from the coast of the Red Sea; turbanned Nubians and red-fezzed Turks ; once a tall-hatted Dervish from Bagdad. I scraped acquaintance with a youth of my own age who wore a bright red tarboosh and greasy overalls. He was a Moslem from Smyrna, a wiper and assistant to the lamptrimmer on a Messageries Maritimes boat that made all Near Eastern ports. Next trip it would touch at his home city on the Turkish coast. I had about 200 francs (the equivalent then of 8) sewn in a little leather sack hung round my neck, saved for emergency. I believed that if I got to Smyrna I could tramp my way across Turkey as I had done through France. My young friend saw a way to help me and gain a little profit for himself. A small bribe, shared between him and the lamp-trimmer, got me aboard as their helper. They assured me I would pass unnoticed by the officers. But at Naples I was caught and kicked ashore. I fell ill in Naples, and the adventure ignominiously ended. I had to cable for help and return to Americabut vowing that some day I would do it, and not as a vagabond either.

Normal events intervened. I was married in Atlanta, gassed a little at Verdun, and came to New York to write, while my dreams slept.

The writing was not astonishingly successful, and Katie, my wife, opened a sort of coffee-house at 156 Waverly Place, in Greenwich Village, where queer and sometimes famous people occasionally dropped in from all corners of the world.

One night there came a young Oriental with sad black eyes and exquisite mannersDaoud Izzedin by name. He was from Arabia, a Druse, a gentle member of that strange, fierce race of painted warriors who were then as legendary in America as the hosts of Gog and Magog, but who have since become more definitely known because of the wild revolt they led recently against the French in Syria.