Chapter V: The Tent and “home.”

Few sounds awaken more pleasing associations than the tent of the Arab. Palace, castle, tower call up visions of events; but “tent” drives the imagination back upon itself to discover in its own nature the resemblances and the method of the noblest men and the simplest manners. The tent, not the camel, is the ship of the desert; the moveable home that makes the strangest spot familiar, the wildest habitable. One other word alone can be placed beside it--our English “_Home_.”

Engaged in this reflection I inquired the Arabic name, and was answered, _Heyme_! Home is in English an exotic. It is used adverbially as well as substantively. It applies in a manner inconsistent with a fixed abode, and evidently pertains to the system of Celtic ministry and nomade habits, rather than to feudalism. It belongs to a family with a moveable habitation.

Home stands by itself as the name of a place--“Ham House,” “the Ham Town,” as in Nort_ham_pton, Notting_ham_, Bucking_ham_, _Ham_pstead. I had observed that such names generally applied to a low, or a protected site. In the Highlands of Scotland, within the memory of man, the pasturage was distributed between the two seasons; the cattle being taken to the higher regions in the summer, the lower portions being reserved for their support during the winter. The _shieling_ was erected for the farm service in the summer; the homestead, or _hame_, was the winter abode; I had, therefore, concluded that home or hame was derived from _hyems_. I had been struck by a similar analogy in the Turkish word for castle, _kishla_, from _kish_. Winter was first applied to the solid buildings of the winter farm as contrasted with the _yazin_, or light shielings erected on the summer pasturage.

This word, so peculiarly English, is not confined to England. It is used nearly in our adverbial sense throughout the north of Europe, and in our topographic sense in France. There is _Ham_, _de Ham_, as the names of places, and every village is their _hameau_.

In Africa we have the same thing. _El Ham_, the name of a place (Algeria). _Hamma_ (Breber) for village, or quarter of a town. In Judæa, _hammoth_, _hamma_, Laga.[304] The home of Arab independence is _Tihama_.[305]

There could not be in French, English, German, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, and Breber, a word implying both a state of weather and a habitation, by accident. In the early times there was no difficulty in transferring usages and names. Each region was not replenished, nor each tongue complete.

_Hayme_ may come either from heat or cold; it may mean “the hot” or the “shady” place. Chem or Ham, also, is hot. Ham was the name given to Egypt from its black soil. In northern India, Hima is cold.[306] Home serves as protection against cold and snow--against sun and heat. The tent may appear to us, with our city habits, the most primitive of dwellings; but in considering the matter I should, I think, have arrived at an opposite conclusion, even if we had not had another distribution laid down in the oldest of books. There is first the emblem of a garden--a refuge under its bowers; next, in the person of Cain, comes the planting of seeds; then follows close, Abel tending the most peaceable of milk-giving animals--sheep. A third generation arrives, who make dwellings: they build a city. A period of multiplication elapses, and then Adah bears unto Lamech, Jabal, the “father _of such as dwell in tents and have cattle_.” The nomade life was, therefore, a variety; and the subjecting of cattle to the plough was the second agricultural state, where wandering and shepherd tribes settled themselves down on pleasant lands which they had discovered, or in territories they had overrun. Jabal’s brother was Jubal, the inventor of the harp and minstrelsy. Joyousness then followed the tent; and immediately after comes industry with its forges and its cares, its sweats and profits; and Tubal Cain taught men to smelt and puddle, and presented them with brass and steel.

The Moorish tent is quite different from the Arab. It is of white cotton, and of the ordinary form of the officers’ tent in all European armies. The curtain is more upright, and the roof slants up. The mechanism is different. The cover and the curtain are in separate parts. The roof spreads out with a fringe hanging round it; if shade only is required the curtains are not added. It stands as a large umbrella; the stem nine or ten feet high, and the top thirty feet in circumference. Against high winds they have guys or stays, which, like our cables of a ship, they lay out to windward. The operation of pitching commences with securing those stays, which are three in number; then the cords of the umbrella are spread, and then the curtain is fitted round. It is between five and six feet deep, of double cloth, strengthened by thin rods like the bones of ladies’ stays, and one to each cord of the roof. This curtain is in one piece--is carried in a roll, and when fitted, the roll is set upright, and the right side of the place left for the door, and so unwound and laced all round till it is brought to the door on the other side; it is then fastened below by small pegs. There is a strong binding round the top, and this, with the rods, gives solidity to the edifice, without in any perceptible degree increasing the weight or cumbersomeness for carriage. It is much more easily managed from being in two parts, and the superior and moveable stays are of the greatest advantage. Having cut out tents, and having more than once had to repair the loss of them by the work of my own servants, I am, perhaps, qualified beyond most dwellers in houses to speak on the subject. Putting aside magnificence or grandeur, and having in view use and adaptation, I may say I never knew what a tent was until I had seen those of Morocco.[307] It is ornamented with a golden ball; the flaming sword on the cloths of the roof and the valance imitates the crenulated top of a battlement. The colour of these devices is blue.

In the description of the Jewish Tabernacle we have exactly the Moorish manner of pitching. Blue is the first colour mentioned; purple and red follow. But these may have been added as distinctive to the sacred tent, as they were to the priestly garments; and as blue distinguished the common clothing of the Israelites, so might it be expected to be the mark of his tent. The manner of lacing the curtain to the roof is precisely that described in Exodus, xxv. 45: “Thou shalt make loops of blue upon the edge of the one curtain from the selvage in the coupling, and also on the other curtain. Fifty loops shalt thou make in the one curtain, and fifty loops shalt thou make in the other, so that the loops shall take hold of one another.” These fifty loops were to be of the length of twenty-eight cubits, so that they would be ten inches apart. This is precisely the manner in which the curtain of the Moorish tent is fitted to the roof, loop through loop all the way round, and the loops are not far from the above distance; and, probably, in the larger fittings of the Sultan’s establishment, they coincide with the dimensions laid down by Moses.

While at Rabat I had failed in every endeavour to see the Shereffean encampment. I at last was gratified, as on quitting the city we passed through it. I, however, neglected to take note of it in these nightly memoranda, having been too absorbed by the new life that was presented to me.

Ten thousand cavalry--the horses picketed close down, or rather packed, in front and rear of the line of tents--were encamped in one enormous and unbroken figure. It was an oblong, lengthways stretching east and west. The centre was kept clear and unencumbered, and there stood the Sultan’s tents, though untenanted by him: the appearance presented was that of a miniature fortress, in the centre of a clear esplanade--the wall or curtain about nine feet, the turrets at the corners a little more; the cornices pointed to represent the crenulated battlements. Over this the tops of seven or eight turrets appeared, their golden balls glittering in the sun.

After the description I have given of the curtains or wall of my own tent, stiffened with lath and pointed to imitate a battlement, this enclosure of the Sultan’s will be easily understood, and it corresponds, even to the dimensions, with that which surrounded the tabernacle of the Jews in the wilderness, which was an hundred cubits long, fifty broad, and five high; the length was also from east to west.

END OF THE FIRST VOLUME.

LONDON:
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FOOTNOTES:

[304] The Jews, even after their sojourn of centuries in the Holy Land, did not lose the habit of dwelling in tents, and probably, as here, there was a city and a nomade population; as, for instance, “The dwellers in tents,” Psa. lxxxiii. 6. “The tents of Israel,” Zech. xii. 7. “The tents of Kedar,” Song i. 5.

[305] “Tihama, the abode of the sons of Maad. There they came for the winter.”--_Song on the death of Koulayb_. Tihama is derived from تهم Taham. See Edressi, _Georg._; Drummond’s _Origines_, vol. iii. p. 260. Ham’am--bath--is derived from the same word.

[306] An equally near approach is _caldo_, cold. In the Greek, _Phrygia_, “burnt up”--the Latin, _frigus_.

[307] I find that this is much the plan used in India, even to the ornaments.

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Transcriber’s Notes

Obvious errors and inconsistencies in punctuation have been corrected.

Page 14: “none of the lascivousness” changed to “none of the typo for lasciviousness”

Page 272: The author used the wide version of final-mem in םרע. This has been replaced with the regular version.

Page 422: “Without dentrifices” changed to “Without dentifrices”