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Updated: June 28, 2025
We tried to get leave to go to Saihut in the Mahri country, but that was impossible, and at last it really was settled that we should go to Bir Borhut and Kabr Houd. We were highly delighted, and fear broke out badly again among the servants, who dreaded the very name of those places. They gladly took permission to remain behind.
We shipped ourselves in a ship called the Tiger of London, in which we went to Tripoly in Syria, whence we went with the caravan to Aleppo in seven days. Bir is a small town, but abounding in provisions, near which runs the river Euphrates.
The other rests on less direct evidence; but there are indications of it in the trade of Harran with Tyre which is mentioned by Ezekiel, and in the Assyrian remains near Seruj, which is on the route from Harran to the Bir fordway.
To our surprise at twelve o'clock we stopped at a well, Bir al Ghuz, when our men began to unload the camels. They said they were only just waiting for the Hamoumi siyara to come up, and that they had already arrived at Sa'ah. The Hamoumi are a small, poor tribe of Bedouin, who occupy the lower end of Wadi Adim. They hire out camels to caravans, and do a great deal of the carrying business.
This source is called Bir Mahab, and there are several of a similar nature on the coast around: the Kaseifah spring and others. There is such a spring in the harbour of Syracuse, about twenty feet under the sea. The legend is that in the time of Merwan, a chief, Ibn Hakim, from Katif, wished to marry the lovely daughter of a Bahrein chief.
The wall bears the name of El Hatym, and the area which it encloses is called Hedjer, or Hedjer Ismayl, on account of its being separated from the Kaaba: the wall itself, also, is sometimes so called; and the name Hatym is given by the historians to the space of ground between the Kaaba and the wall on one side, and the Bir Zemzem and Makam Ibrahim on the other.
I always wore two pocket handkerchiefs round my head, under my straw hat, and continually used a parasol. From Bir to Jabrud, where we rested for a few hours, we travelled for six hours through a monotonous and sterile country. We had still a good four hours' ride before us to Nablus, our resting-place for the night.
We calculated that at the cheapest, for soldiers and siyara and camels, Bir Borhut would cost 130l. Saleh had put all the servants in a most terrible fright, and a soldier had told them that if we went beyond Shibahm we should all be killed, and that we should find no water by the way. So we had to explain to them the plan of going by Wadi bin Ali, and to comfort them as well as we could.
I suppose they would have fired if we had not been introduced to them. We were glad to reach Bir Baokban at 11.30. It is a well in a bare place at the mouth of a valley.
At four hours and a quarter the mountains again close, and a narrow pass called El Mazomeyn or El Medyk leads across them for half an hour, after which the view opens upon the plain of Arafat. At the end of four hours and three quarters, we passed, in this plain, a tank called Bir Basan, constructed of stone, with a small chapel adjoining. Here the country opens widely to the north and south.
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