Chapter VII

Grennah, a Charming Retreat. — Pleasant Camping-ground. — Rencontre with an Arab Saint. — The Son of a Rich Prince. — Striking Cures.

After spending six weeks in Grennah, I struck my tent most unwillingly, and made preparations to continue my journey eastwards. It was too late in the autumn longer to sojourn here, as I wished to see the other remains of antiquity which exist in this country. The rains set in usually about the middle of November, and then come down with a violence which no tent can resist. But I cannot quit my pleasant quarters near the fountain without a few words in praise of a country where I have found both recreation and health. I have already told what abundant materials of interest it offers to the antiquarian. The sportsman will find ample employment among the red-legged partridges, quails, and kata’ah, a sort of yellow grouse, and a little further south, he will meet with the gazelle and the houbāra, or bustard; while the lover of a luxurious climate, decked with all the beauties of nature, will sympathise in the story of the Odyssey, and easily picture to himself the difficulty with which the Ithacan tore away his companions from the land of the Lotophagi. A more delightful residence for the summer months cannot be imagined. The nights and mornings are always cool. In the daytime the thermometer ranges from 75° to 98°, the highest I have seen it; but there blows all day a cool breeze from the sea, which renders the heat insensible in the tent, and quite endurable on horseback. The means of comfortable existence are by no means wanting. A sheep costs from 4_s_. 6_d_. to 6_s_., and will keep good for four days; vegetables and fruit can be obtained from Derna, where the grape, the banana, the pear, and the water-melon, are abundant; potatoes, bamias, tomatoes, cucumbers, and many other vegetables, may also be had there. Vegetables are likewise cultivated in this neighbourhood, in the little gardens of the Bedawin; and the milk of their cows affords the richest cream I ever tasted, though the pale butter which is made from it is not very good. A man must, therefore, be very hard to please, as far as the substantial necessaries of life are concerned, if he be not satisfied with such fare as this country affords; of course, wine, beer, biscuits, cheese, and such other superfluities, must be obtained from Malta. There is also to be had here a substitute for the Swiss “_cure de raisins_,” in the camel’s-milk, which, from experience, I can recommend as singularly efficacious. When drunk fresh, it is hardly to be distinguished from the milk of the cow, though richer; but in cooling it acquires a most disagreeable salt-taste. Warm or cold, it is equally efficacious, and might fairly take its place among the remedies prescribed by the faculty. If nowhere else in Europe, it might probably be obtained in Pisa, from the farm of the Grand Duke.

To the traveller who has tarried in Egypt till the spring—who is tired of Syria, and unwilling to go to Europe, a more delightful retreat for summer cannot be suggested. The air is far purer than in any part of Italy, the scenery more beautiful and more varied, and fever and dysentery are unknown. From early spring to the middle of October, no rain ever falls, though the sky after the middle of August is almost always cloudy; a heavy night-dew supplies the moisture which, at this season, covers the hills with a fresh coat of verdure. The distance from Alexandria to Derna is not great, and there is constant communication by sea between the two places. I should recommend for encampment one of the terraces in the eastern part of the Wady Bil Ghadir, a little beyond the first fountain, in descending the Wady from the south, rather than the fountain by which I pitched my tents. There is here a triangular patch of ground, beneath a lofty rock, which shelters it from the mid-day and evening sun; trees rise on every side, and there is a break in the hills, giving a lovely peep of the sea. The ground is dry gravel; along the edge of the terrace runs a streamlet of water from the fountain; and, near at hand, are some caves, which, if cleaned out, would make commodious store-rooms, or would serve other useful purposes. It is not, like the fountain, a place of resort for the camels, oxen, goats, sheep, and Bedawin, in the neighbourhood; and is free, therefore, from the dirt and insects they leave behind them. Where I was, the wind is sometimes disagreeable, raising clouds of dust which filled the tent; the other spot is more sheltered, and even in high wind, is secure from dust. If the traveller is accompanied by such a guide as Mohammed, who spent all his time in buying beeves, let him be prepared to have a hundred objections raised to the situation, as this place is not convenient for such purchases—“_experto crede_.”

From the disagreeable experience I have had of the servants of this country, I should advise travellers to bring with them all the servants they may require, even to a groom, either Maltese, or what is better still, Egyptians. Their ignorance of the roads is of little consequence, as few of the Benghazi people are acquainted with them; for guides it is better to trust the camel-drivers: by doing so the travellers will have servants who know their duty, and who, having no private interests to serve in the country, fear not to displease the people; Mohammed, serving his own, utterly neglected my interests. Egyptian servants would not be more expensive than Benghazini, and they have none of that overweening Moslem pride, which makes the latter regard a Christian as something infinitely beneath them.

There is one nuisance in Cyrene, too characteristic of the country not to be mentioned. A small community of Derwishes, or Marābuts, as they are called here, has established itself lately in one of the largest tombs not far from the fountain. They belong to an order recently founded by a reputed saint, called the Sheikh Es-Senousy, and their president in Grennah is a fanatic of the first water, who will not defile his eyes by even looking at a Christian. He busily employed himself after my arrival here, in impressing upon my servants the degradation of serving me. The consequence was, that they all grew so uncivil—I must except the cook—that I was at last obliged to change them. The groom—an eater of pork and drinker of wine in the town—here missed none of the five prayers; and, between the devotion of my servants and their visitors, the encampment resounded all day long with “Allah akbar!” I was glad to see so much religion among my people; but I could have wished it productive of a little more civility.

Not content with giving such good lessons to the servants, his saintship was, it seems, seriously annoyed by my presence here; and particularly at my having once or twice passed before the cave which he inhabits. He sent some of his people here, to say that, if I or my Christian servant again passed before his door, he would fire upon us; but Mohammed, who received the message, knew me too well to deliver it. By chance, that same afternoon, whilst I was engaged below, among some of the other tombs, my servant took this path, little suspecting that he should thereby incur the holy man’s displeasure. Two Arabs, armed with large stones, came to oblige him to turn back; but he, luckily, had his gun in his hand, and they consequently retreated. Next morning, I sent to Abou Bekr, to complain of the insult offered to me, assuring him that not a day should pass thenceforward without my taking the tabooed road. It was too delicate a matter, it seems, for him to deal with directly, the church assuming here, as elsewhere, a separate jurisdiction; he, therefore, sent one of his sons to the superior of the chief convent, with letters to request the punishment of the offenders. Meantime, I kept my word, and, in going out in the evening, I took this road; when I found an assemblage of some thirty Arabs, of all ages, prepared to bar my passage. As I advanced quietly, they drew on one side, but as I passed them, one small stone was thrown at, but missed me; on which I turned, and, going straight among them, desired to know the name of the fellow who had thrown the stone. This information, naturally enough, I could not obtain from them; but I had seen the man who threw the stone, remarking that he was more than ordinarily ugly; I, therefore, threatened that I would have both him and them punished.

The next day the offenders were brought before the great Sheikh’s secretary—a man, I discovered, of good sense and manners—who condemned them, with their superior, to fifty strokes a-piece of his three-tailed courbaj—a punishment which was immediately administered, and will not, I hope, be soon forgotten. It was really necessary to enforce such punishment, however painful to one’s own feelings; for lenity to these people, whose chief intelligence lies in the soles of their feet, would only have emboldened them to more serious attacks. The next day, Hamed, son of Abou Bekr, arrived to enforce their superior’s orders on the Derwishes; and he then came to pay me a visit, to make his father’s excuses for not having returned mine; his soldiers, he said, were busy collecting the miri, so that he could not assemble a sufficient escort to enable him to come with safety. This excuse, though strange, was perfectly true, for, in fact, this Arab Sheikh and Bey could not venture beyond the walls of his castle, even to his hareem, at the distance of a bow-shot, without a guard. His visit, including the dinner, did not occupy more than four hours, a very reasonable visitation from an Arab. He seemed not wanting in intelligence; and yet he could not, or would not, tell me the number of men under his father’s jurisdiction, nor even the number of tribes. Indeed, he appeared to have doubts as to the exact number of his ten brothers: first, he said they were nine; then, on counting them all over on his fingers, eleven, but he included himself. This son of a prince of great comparative wealth—Abou Bekr being worth at least some 5000_l_. a year—the possessor of wives, and herds, and flocks, wore a shirt as filthy as the Catholic Isabella’s, a cotton skull-cap to match, a burneau far from clean, and a pair of slippers as shabby and worn as the meanest Bedawy’s. At the end of the visit, he told me he was badly off for soap, as his appearance too plainly testified, and asked for a square, which, with not a little grumbling, my servant gave him. Poor fellow! he has an abscess in the side, which threatens him with consumption, unless the favourite remedy for all inward complaints in this country—burning with a hot iron—should effect a cure. He promised to consult a medical man who is at Derna at present; but I know that he will not do so, for fear of having to pay for a consultation or the medicines. The Arabs are fond enough of taking medicine when they can procure it gratis, but to pay for it seems against their creed. When the purse-strings are to be drawn, then they say, as he did, “Allah houa es-shafry”—“God is the curer,” to which I answered him, by completing the sentence, as it is inscribed over the pharmacy of the Benfratelli in Rome, “_Nos remedium, Deus salutem_.”

The people of the country, when seriously ill, will go long distances to obtain advice from a European doctor; but rather than pay for the medicine he orders, they will hand over more than its price to one of their Fikkehs for an amulet or an incantation. These are the learned men generally employed as tutors, or schoolmasters, or readers of the Koran. They ascribe all illnesses to Satanic influence; and their exorcisms are directed to drive the Devil out of the patient. I am somewhat incredulous as to this origin of disease; but I confess that the cures they sometimes perform are astonishing. When called to a sick person, they generally begin by telling his friends that he has so many devils; then, after a time, they will say only so many remain; and, finally, after further exorcisms, not unaccompanied by an increased honorary (no pay, no pater-noster), they sometimes really succeed in effecting a perfect cure. Even Jews and Christians resort to them; and I heard a well-authenticated instance from a medical man, who had himself visited the patient, of a rheumatic fever cured in this way. On this occasion the invalid was confined to bed, unable to move, and his Fikkeh assured him he was held down by many devils. He, therefore, after some prayers, belaboured them soundly with a courbaj, to make them depart. The strokes intended for the devils, naturally enough, made the patient also smart; and the pain of the flogging exceeding, I suppose, that of the rheumatism, the sick man at last started up to escape it, and the devils were declared to be expelled; but next day they returned, when the Fikkeh was again summoned, his remedy was again applied with undiminished energy, and the man was really cured. Poor old Keate would have been as great a Fikkeh in the East as he was in the West. Whilst I was in Benghazi, a Jewish girl who had been mad for a long time, was restored to her senses by one of these men; but on this occasion only prayers and fumigations were used. I have not seen any of these cures performed; but relying fully on the sources from which I obtained my information, have no doubt of their truth; admitting certain of the strange mental phenomena produced by so-called animal magnetism, I do not see, indeed, why I need disbelieve them. Whilst on the subject of wonders, I may mention, that discoverers of stolen property are not less frequently met with here than in Egypt; and that they often succeed in indicating either the thief, or the place where the missing goods are concealed, but never both, though more frequently the latter than the former, which indicates pretty clearly that their knowledge is to be attributed to the fears of the culprit.