Chapter XV

The rival Sheikhs. — Weary Days at Augila. — Chain of Oases. — Marriage Feasts. — Marriage Gifts.

With bitter maledictions against the fathers of all the Majabra, I saw my luggage loaded to return to Augila, and then started with a single servant for the district called Ijherri, إِجهرّي, eighteen miles to the north-east. It is a large village of square palm-branch huts, lying in the midst of date-trees, and is almost deserted at the present moment, as not a dozen persons remain in it during the winter; its situation among trees renders it more picturesque than either Jalo or Augila, and the trees themselves are remarkable as the first specimens I had seen of untrimmed, perfectly wild date-trees. The Arabs are too lazy to pay the slight attention to the cultivation of the trees which the Wagily pay to theirs; and on many of them the dead boughs of the last twenty years could be seen drooping in a thick fringe round their stems. I found that the very few people who still lingered behind the rest of their tribes, were inveterate _lagby_ drinkers, and had stayed behind to indulge in their favourite vice.

The next day I turned backwards south-west to Augila, where I was warmly welcomed by Sheikh Othman, who could not conceal his pleasure at my applying to him, in preference to taking camels from Yunes. There had been an old feud between them when Othman’s father was Sheikh of Jalo as well as Augila; the Majabra, however, revolted from his authority, applied to the Pacha of Tripoli, and obtained an independent government, but not before Yunes, with some of his friends, had waylaid and murdered their old sheikh. How the quarrel was made up I shall afterwards have occasion to tell. Othman pretended that I was not the first victim of the insolence of the Majabra, as the last Turkish commissioners of the census had been treated still worse, and had only been enabled to return to Benghazi through his means. Othman el Fadil is a perfect specimen of an African Sheikh-el-bilad, the most despicable combination of cringing servility and insolent tyranny that barbarism has produced. These good qualities in him are combined with extreme cunning and no small amount of natural talent. After being despoiled of his hereditary authority, he made shift to repossess himself of it; he even managed to resist the authority of the Turkish Pacha of Tripoli, after the deprivation of the last native Governor; and he now contrives by art rather than violence to maintain himself in his position. He is probably wealthy, for half the cultivated land in the oasis belongs to him, and he has also possessions in Jalo and in Fezzan. As a proof of his shrewdness, I may mention, that since the death of the last Cadi, which took place fifteen years ago, he has persuaded the people to do without this functionary, so that all marriages and other contracts are now made in his presence. He gains immensely in influence by this arrangement, and the people probably do not lose by it; for as the appointment of the Cadi is in the hands of the Cadi of Tripoli, who buys his office in Constantinople, and as he in turn sells all the posts depending upon him, it is not improbable that the purchaser sells the justice he dispenses.

During my long stay here, his attentions were, after his fashion, unceasing; he rarely omitted paying at least one visit a day to my tent, and frequently sent supplies of vegetables, or fresh baked bread, or new drawn _lagby_, for all which he took care to exact handsome payment, asking for and carrying off everything he saw which struck his fancy, which was a most miscellaneous one. He pretended that he could speak four of the languages of the interior, as well as Turkish, but I never could induce him to let me see the vocabulary of them, which he said he had drawn up; more than once I had, in other matters, occasion to admire the liveliness of his imagination, so that he may very possibly be mistaken in his assertions. Whatever the amount of his learning, it is unquestioned by his subjects, who look up to him as a prodigy of wisdom. He was particularly fond of taking a peep through my sextant, and of astonishing any of his people who might be in the tent, by giving them explanations of the use of the “Astrolabe,” which would have astonished Hadley, and been new to Sawitsch.

Time wore slowly away at Augila, and the fifteen days, before whose expiration I had been assured my messenger would have returned from Benghazi, had passed without bringing any news of him. A dull Christmas was to be expected in such a heathen place; but what I was not prepared for was the extreme cold of the nights, during which the thermometer sometimes sank to zero; and in the long evening, from dark till bedtime, I occasionally had as much difficulty in keeping out the cold, as in finding occupation. The Wagily, unless there be a _fantasia_ on foot, go early to bed, and the Sheikh’s conversation was not sufficiently instructive to make me wish for his company; he was shy of speaking about the customs of his people, and they seem to have preserved no tradition of their origin or former history.

I have already described the oasis of Augila as extending in a half circle of about six miles in a hollow, around the foot of a range of compacted sand lying over a white limestone. In this space is comprised a large tract of brown morass, covered with a crust of saline earth, beneath which are bitter waters. Such a morass is described by Beechey on the coast of the Syrtis, and I had reason to respect the propriety of the warning given him by his guide, as only a yard from the path which runs across it the thin crust gave way under my horse, who began to flounder, and was only able by a violent effort to extricate himself. In general, the water of the wells in Augila is very good; the salt which it contains being almost imperceptible to a person accustomed to that of Jalo.

I had encamped on a hill used as a burial-ground, to the east of the town, and water was drawn for me from a well close at hand, which was used to water one of the Sheikh’s fields. I was astonished one morning, soon after I arrived, by finding the water of my sponge bath sensibly warm, and, on inquiry, I found that, instead of standing as usual all night ready for use, it had only just been drawn from the well. The thermometer, when immersed in it, showed, two hours after sunrise, a temperature of 74°, while the external air was 52°. Many of the wells have this degree of warmth; others are quite cold, and these are either brackish or very salt. At some distance from the modern town, following the inside of the curve of plantations and to the left of it, there are in a small field some remains of reticulated brickwork, and the ground in the neighbourhood is full of broken pottery. What remains is too little to authorise a conjecture as to its use.

Augila is on the caravan road from Fezzan to Egypt and Benghazi; the intermediate stations between Augila and Murzuk are Maradah, an oasis three days distant, and Zalla as much further on. At an hour and a half, on the road to Maradah, which follows a north-west direction in leaving Augila, I found, at a considerable elevation above the cultivated land, a number of small groups of rock of volcanic origin, forming an irregular oval like the remains of a crater. The rocks are gray and black lava, as heavy and compact as basalt. Ten hours before reaching Maradah, مَراَده, there is a small oasis, Jabna, جَبْنه, and two hours further Hairaigab, حيَريَقه, both inhabited by Arabs of the tribes of Hamud and Zowayah. In Maradah there is one of those curious wells whose water contains a salt, doubtless of iron, which imparts to it the property of dyeing cotton and woollen cloths black. I think it is Belzoni who mentions the existence of such a spring in the little oasis, without, however, stating that the stuff to be dyed is first boiled in a decoction of bark. There is another well of the same kind in Fezzan, at a place called Agar, which, like this one at Maradah, is called ’Ain essobagh, or the Dyer’s Well. At Zalla tame ostriches are kept in the houses, and it must be in this way that the finer feathers, imported into Europe, are obtained, for those of birds killed in the chase and brought to market, are almost always soiled and broken. A Fezzan Fikhy, who came to me while in Siwah, supplied me with one other fact concerning Fezzan: the place where sulphur is found is called Wady ’ain Ghadga (غدقه), near a hill called ’Angud (عنقود), ten days east of Murzuk.

Whilst I was in Augila two marriages took place, one of them that of the Sheikh (only his thirteenth) with the daughter of my friend Yunes. She was old and a widow; the only attraction I could discover seemed to be the relation in which their respective fathers had stood to each other, of which I have already spoken. The festivities were commenced, some evenings before the marriage, with the loud shrill cries of women, accompanied by occasional musket shots. On inquiry, I was told that all the female friends of the bridegroom were assembled in his house, each bringing her mill to help in grinding wheat to make bread for the marriage feast. The usual quantity ground is from six to eight hundredweight, but sometimes, if the Sheikh might be believed, as much as eighty hundredweight is consumed on such occasions. This bread is partly sent to the houses of the principal people, like our old-fashioned wedding-cake, and partly eaten at the feast, which consists chiefly of dates and large supplies of _lagby_.

The evening before the wedding, the young men and boys of the village assembled with all the donkeys which they could procure, and, loading them with fine sand from the hill where I was encamped, brought it to the bridal house, and strewed it in the rooms. In the intervals between the departure and return of the donkeys, the boys who remained danced to the sound of their own voices and the beating of a drum; this drum is made of a circle of wood about the size of a tambourine, on each side of which a gazelle-skin is stretched; it is beaten with a knotted rope. The first marriage was that of a young girl, a relation of Othman’s, but as she belonged to the town, there was nothing remarkable in the bridal procession: it was, as usual, accompanied by the Zaghaghit and firing of guns. The arrival of the Sheikh’s bride with a _cortège_, including all the men in the place, but none of her own relations, was a much more solemn affair. She was carried in state in a closely-veiled carmout, covered with white cotton hangings, round which an old red silk scarf was tied; a man on horseback preceded her, carrying a white flag. When the _cortège_ arrived in sight of the town, several halts were made, during which there were rude dancing, firing of muskets, and evolutions of the three or four horsemen whom the place furnished. While the lady was thus being brought in procession to her new home, the gallant bridegroom was quietly seated in my tent looking on, and it was not until the _cortège_ entered the town that he betook himself to his house.

Here, when the camel knelt at the door, before the howdah containing its precious burthen was removed from its back, a sheep’s throat was cut over its right knee, in manner of sacrifice. The Sheikh, after many ineffectual hints which I would not understand, at last boldly begged of me a sash woven with gold which he had one day see me wear; this he wished to form part of the corbeil, and in letting him have it I took the opportunity of inspecting the ornaments destined for the bride. They consisted of two pairs of broad silver bands to be worn as bracelets, weighing respectively ten and fourteen ounces, and a pair of very curious silver earrings of Tunis make. They were in shape like the young moon, two inches and a half in diameter, two-thirds of the circumference being covered with filigree bosses, from which five pear-shaped filigree pendents hung, each earring weighing 160 grammes. I felt a great curiosity to see the cartilage capable of supporting such a weight. The marriage feast was diversified by dancing to the sound of the drum, and a curious double clarionet, formed of the leg bones of the eagle or vulture, which discoursed sweet music in the tone of a very broken-winded bagpipe. The dancing, like that of the Egyptian Alnach (in whom youth, good looks, and sex hardly excuse the peculiar style), was here performed by a hideous man, and was utterly disgusting. When the bride had entered the house, the festivities were terminated by a discharge of fire-arms, and the company retired, to meet again the next evening, and to renew the eating and dancing.

It is no uncommon thing to find men in these countries who have married twenty or thirty times, the sum given for a wife rarely exceeding six or eight dollars. When tired of a spouse, or if she do not prove fruitful, a divorce follows as a matter of course, and the lady does not suffer in general estimation; having borne children seems to be no protection against the caprice of the men. This licence is utterly opposed to Turkish habits, for divorce is more disreputable to a man among the Osmanli than with us, but the assertors of the rights of women in Europe would find this régime very congenial to their theories, for a woman can always force her husband to a divorce, even without laying her slipper at the Cadi’s feet.