Subtitled "The Nomads of the "Houses of Hair" Offer Unstinted Hospitality to an American”
Our house was perched on the highest point of the north city wall, close to the Damascus Gate. Built like a miniature stone castle, with upper and lower domed courts, it surrounded an open, stone-flagged patio.
I can just remember Ali Diab (Ali the Wolf), at that time the powerful Sheik of the Belka Bedouins. Our elders used to visit his Trans-Jordan camps. He, in turn, accompanied by a retinue of lesser chiefs, spearmen, and Negro slaves, used to pass days at a time at our home.
Arriving from a 40- or 60-mile trek, they would stride into the patio, the iron heels of their red top boots clattering on the stone pavement. First, they disarmed, for they said ours was a house of peace. On hat pegs in the closed court they hung a long row of silver-sheathed scimitars, Morocco holsters with twin flintlock pistols, and an occasional broad-mouthed blunder-buss. Each horseman planted his long spear in one of the rose boxes in the patio.
Well can I remember mounting the steps to the upper court when no one was around, climbing into a flower box, and with difficulty leaning far over the iron railing to grasp the spearhead. Brushing aside the plume of black ostrich feathers, I felt with boyish joy the keen edge of the long, wicked blade.
Thus from an early age I was intimate with the Bedouins. Since then I have even been adopted into their tribes. Often have I partaken of unstinted desert hospitality in their black tents. Weeks and months I have passed riding on horseback, or on swift racing camels, or, more recently, in comfortable American automobiles, through their deserts and oases.
Trans-Jordan, where I have enjoyed many interesting experiences among the Bedouins, is a little country. Separated from Palestine by the great valley of the Jordan, the Dead Sea, and Wadi el Araba on the west, it is hemmed in by the Levant States, Iraq, and Arabia. It is a British protectorate ruled by His Highness the Emir Abdullah Ibn Hussein, son of the Jate King Hussein of Hejaz and brother of the late King Feisal of Iraq.
A little fringe along the Jordan and Dead Sea depression is fertile because of perennial streams. Otherwise all is waste. It is a rolling plateau desert, mostly composed of white chalk and sandy soil. Flint chips and lumps of basalt are widely scattered.
There are no rivers. The Bedouin gets his water from ancient rock-cut water cisterns, from pools that collect in the wadi beds in winter, or from deep wells.
After winters of abundant rains and snows, the valleys and wadies may be lush with vegetation and aglow with wild flowers. In summer the whole desert is parched and dry. Scorching hot during the day, it is often bitterly cold at night.
Camel herders and shepherds who pass the night in the open, with only an old coat to sleep in, complain of the temperature changes. So did Jacob when he said, "In the day the drought consumed me, and the frost by night" (Genesis 31:40).
The Bedouin inhabitants of Trans-Jordan are divided into three classes: the peasant farmers who live in villages and cultivate the soil, the seminomads who live in tents and have flocks and farm lands, and, lastly, the true Bedouin nomads, who live off their flocks and herds and migrate…"
These are pages carefully removed from an actual 1937 magazine.
37A2
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