T. E. Lawrence, 'The Kaer of Ibu Wardani'
['The Kasr of Ibn Wardani']

Jesus College Magazine, Vol. I, No. 2, January 1913

Between Aleppo and Hamath the train drags over a monotony of lands, barren to the unskilled eye, but hiding nevertheless in folds villages of clay-domed houses, and black tents of wandering Arabs which from afar look only like larger groups of their herded camels. The caprice of the company has set a station here and there, and at the loneliest of these we got down to avoid the cholera quarantine in force just below. On the platform were the usual people - the station-master and his man - and two Arabs, an old man and a boy, come to look on the train with the patient enduring wonder of their kind. The old man had wrapped himself in a black woollen cloak against the sun, showing only a grizzled beard and dark sparkling eyes: the boy flaunted the plumes of his gaiety before the train-load of strangers:- the broad love-lock on his forehead, his tunic well named the seven kings, and his silk and silver head-cloth of the looms of Hamath. Their horses were tied up outside.

When the train had passed on, leaving us, the old man in place of the usual greeting said half eagerly, 'You are come to see the palace of Ibn Wardani.' We replied, curiously, 'As you will,' and at once quick words of pleasure rushed from his boy's lips. Dahoum checked him shortly, saying aside, 'This is of the kind that know what has been and what will be,' and then to me, 'He has two horses: it will take five hours, and his boy and I will walk: the price will be for you as you are pleased.' And we turned out Eastwards over the slowly-swelling waves of hard burnt grass.

For long we went silently, and each time as we rose to a crest, my eyes sought ground, to find nothing but shapeless colourless hollows with perhaps a few red nodes of basalt slipping out of their thistle-clad sides. In the three or four places where showed faint tints of greenness, the basalt lay in lines and heaps, and at all such the old man was careful to show me 'written stones,' the dull but beautifully cut Byzantine dedications of the fourth century. Once the boys called me to a three-chambered rock-tomb inscribed to Theodora Bizza, with shreds of cloth, white bone-crusts, and some poor little cross-marked lamps, still holding about their clay mouths the smoke-black of fifteen centuries ago. 'These are not the things I care for,' said I to our old guide, disappointedly, but he only nodded his head with a cheerful showing of white teeth. 'No,' said he, 'you are come to see the halls of Ibn Wardani', and he stopped on the next rise to breathe twice or thrice the soft breeze in our faces, afterward saying assuredly, 'We are now near to the place.'

Half an hour later we could see a valley of brighter green, in which were low, brown ruins of thick walls. 'Why,' I said, 'it is of brick, and how sweet the air is here.' Khalil's eyes narrowed with a laugh. 'Did I not know it half-an-hour ago? After rain it is sensible a day's journey off'; and we entered in through an arch whose key-bricks were piled ruinously over the bases of the pillars. The boy then led in speech, and said, 'This is the jasmine court', and as I stood to draw breath and look about its emptiness, I was aware of a soft pervading scent as of half- faded jasmine blossoms. The old Arab took our horses to their stalls in the shadow of the southern wall, and with his boy we passed up a ruinous flight of stairs into the rose-chamber. 'Here,' said the boy, 'was the girst [sic] of the harem: the rest is swept away': and easily enough over the decayed earthen walls, with their nearly-vanished rose-savour, we could trace in the grass the square outlines of the women's quarters. The lad turned to the right, and led us through a succession of rooms, some with walls levelled nearly to the ground, some with remains of arcades in panelled brick and shattered vaulting, but in all of them were strange, indefinable scents, memories of myrtle and oleander, musk, cinnamon and ambergris. At last we came into a great hall, whose walls, pierced with many narrow windows, still stood to more than half their height. 'This,' said he, 'is the liwan of silence: it has no taste', and by some crowning art it was as he had said. The mingled scents of all the palace here combined to slay each other, and all that one felt was the desert sharpness of the air as it swept off the huge uncontaminated plains. 'Among us,' said Dahoum, 'we call this room the sweetest of them all', therein half-consciously sounding the ideal of the Arab creed, for generations stripping itself of all furniture in the working out of a gospel of simplicity. And the secret of the place? Old Khalil told us that night over his hearth-fire, that Ibn Wardani was as a king among the Arabs, and the bricks of his palace were kneaded not with common water, but with those precious oils and essences of flowers which of old the Arab druggists could so well compound. 'He made it as a pleasure house for the bride he took of the children of Roum', and I know no more but that in the ruins was nothing inconsonant with what he said.

C.J.G.