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Updated: September 29, 2025
According to the usual practice in the Hedjaz, the camels walk in The Arab, riding foremost, was to lead the troop; but he frequently fell asleep, as well as his companions behind; and his camel then took its own course, and often led the whole caravan astray. After a twelve hours' march, we alighted at the Hadj station called Kolleya, and also Kobeyba.
The water is excellent, much better than that of any other town of the Hedjaz, where the inhabitants are not industrious enough to form similar cisterns. When the winter-rains fail, the inhabitants of Yembo suffer severely, and are obliged to fill their water-skins at the distant wells of Aseylya.
Mohammed Aly, after his return to Cairo, Salt and Mr. Lee, His Majesty's and the Levant Company's consuls, as well as several English travellers of note who passed through Cairo, that he knew per-fectly well, in the Hedjaz, that I was no Moslem, but that his friendship for the English nation made him overlook the circum-stance, and permit me to impose upon the Kadhy.
But southwards there is no such natural line of demarcation; the Arab occupation stretches right down till it reaches the Hedjaz, which already has thrown off the Turkish yoke and, under the Shereef of Mecca, declared its independence. Inset into this long strip of territory lies Palestine.
In the autumn of 1816, several artists and workmen, sent from Constantinople, were employed in the Hedjaz to repair all the damage caused by the Wahabys in the chapels of the saints of that country, as well as to make all the repairs necessary in the mosques at Mekka and Medina.
They lived, during the whole journey, upon rice and salted fish: they boiled the rice in water, without any butter, a dear article in the Hedjaz, but which they did not dislike; for several of them begged my slave to give them secretly some of mine, for seasoning their dish.
Formerly, these serafs were all Jews, as is still the case, with few exceptions, at Cairo, Damascus, and Aleppo; but since the Sherif-Serour drove the Jews out of the Hedjaz, the Djiddawys themselves have taken up the profession, to which their natural disposition and habits incline them. There is usually at each stand a partnership of them, comprising half a dozen individuals.
Soap comes from Suez, whither it is carried from Syria, which supplies the whole coast of the Red Sea with it. The almonds and raisins come from Tayf and the Hedjaz mountains; large quantities of both are exported, even to the East Indies. The almonds are of most excellent quality; the raisins are small and quite black, but very sweet. An intoxicating liquor is prepared from them.
The names of these cities call up, like an incantation, the memory of the civilisations which grew in them to greatness and sank in them to decay: Mesopotamia, a great heart of civilisation which is cold to-day, but which beat so strongly for five thousand years that its pulses were felt from Siberia to the Pillars of Hercules and influenced the taste and technique of the Scandinavian bronze age; the Assyrians, who extended the political marches of Mesopotamia towards the north, and turned them into a military monarchy that devastated the motherland and all other lands and peoples from the Tigris to the sea; the Hebrews, discovering a world-religion in their hill-country overlooking the coast; the Sabaeans, whose queen made the first pilgrimage to Jerusalem, coming from Yemen across the Hedjaz when Mekka and Medina were still of no account; the Philistines and Phoenicians of the Syrian sea-board, who were discovering the Atlantic and were too busy to listen to the Hebrew prophets in their hinterland; the Ionians, who opened up the Black Sea and created a poetry, philosophy, science, and architecture which are still the life-blood of ours, before they were overwhelmed, like the Phoenicians before them, by a continental military power; the Hittites, who first transmitted the fruitful influences of Mesopotamia to the Ionian coasts a people as mysterious to their contemporaries as to ourselves, maturing unknown in the fastnesses of Anatolia, raising up a sudden empire that raided Mesopotamia and colonised the Syrian valleys, and then succumbing to waves of northern invasion.
In A.H. 906, Kansour el Ghoury, Sultan of Egypt, rebuilt the greater part of the side of Bab Ibrahim; and to him the Hedjaz owes several other public edifices. In A.H. 959, in the reign of Solyman Ibn Selim I., Sultan of Constantinople, the roof of the Kaaba was renewed.
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