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They could travel only at night, and when they slept or camped around a spring, there was only a tent for the sick men. Two days' march from Jeddah, the Turkish Government having received word about the crew, sent sixteen good camels. "Suddenly, on the night of April 1, 1915, things became uneasy," said Captain Mücke. "I was riding at the head of the column.
"Sami Bey's wife, it developed, had in the course of the first negotiations, dispatched an Arab boy to Jeddah. From that place the governor had telegraphed to the emir. The latter at once sent camel troops with his two sons and his personal surgeon; the elder, Abdullah, conducted the negotiations, and the surgeon acted as interpreter in French.
Presumably missionary report has confused Jeddah with the smaller pilgrim-port of Yenbo, where there are an island and a sandy spit with a Sheikh's tomb and a select burial-ground for certain privileged Moslems of the holy man's family.
The permanent population, too, of Jeddah is a microcosm of Islam. It is made up of individuals from every nation under heaven. Besides the indigenous Arab, who has given his language and his tone of thought to the rest, there is a mixed resident multitude descended from the countless pilgrims who have remained to live and die in the holy cities.
An interdiction of the Haj, or the threat of such for a single year, would act upon every purse among the Hejazi and neutralize the hostility of the most recalcitrant of resident caliphs or sherifs; while a systematic development of the pilgrimage as a Government undertaking, with the construction of a railway from Jeddah to Mecca, and the establishment of thoroughly well-ordered lines of steamers from the principal Mohammedan ports, all matters which would amply repay their cost, would every year add a new prestige to English influence.
The horrid outrage perpetrated at Jaffa, and the massacre at Jeddah, sufficiently show us what we might have expected. In Syria no Christian is admitted within a mosque, for his foot and touch are considered to carry pollution. But in Egypt we have caused ourselves to be better respected: we thrash the Arabs and pay them, and therefore they are very glad to see us anywhere.
As regards dhows, our rule was to allow coastal traffic from Jeddah and empties returning there, as it tended to distribute food among the Arabs and get it away from the Turks.
Subpose you gibe one fowl he make lucky we get good pearl. Must be white fowl. Black fow!" Months have elapsed since the sacrifice of the white fowl and the pouring of its blood to the accompaniment of droning supplications on the face of the contemptuous sea, and albeit the divination was cheerfully suspicious, the sulky jade still look askance, and Hamed is still far from Jeddah.
He had not come with the Haj, but had been first noticed as a beggar at Mecca ten days before, when he had asked and received an alms of the Sherif, and had since been several times found obtrusively in El Husseyn's path. No one at Jeddah holds the Turkish Governor to have been cognisant of the crime.
A pious Moslem once averred in my presence that the pilgrim-brokers of Jeddah were, in themselves, enough to bring a judgment on the place, and that trenchant opinion is not without foundation.
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