Jeddah
had pleased us, on our way to the Consulate: so after lunch, when it was
a little cooler, or at least when the sun was not so high, we wandered
out to see the sights under the guidance of Young, Wilson's assistant, a
man who found good in many old things, but little good in things now
being made.
It was indeed a remarkable town. The streets were
alleys, wood roofed in the main bazaar, but elsewhere open to the sky in
the little gap between the tops of the lofty white-walled houses. These
were built four or five stories high, of coral rag tied with square
beams and decorated by wide bow-windows running from ground to roof in
grey wooden panels. There was no glass in Jidda, but a profusion of good
lattices, and some very delicate shallow chiselling on the panels of
window casings. The doors were heavy two-leaved slabs of teak-wood,
deeply carved, often with wickets in them; and they had rich hinges and
ring-knockers of hammered iron. There was much moulded or cut
plastering, and on the older houses fine stone heads and jambs to the
windows looking on the inner courts.
The style of architecture was like crazy
Elizabethan half-timber work, in the elaborate Cheshire fashion, but
gone gimcrack to an incredible degree. House-fronts were fretted,
pierced and pargetted till they looked as though cut out of cardboard
for a romantic stage-setting. Every storey jutted, every window leaned
one way or other; often the very walls sloped. It was like a dead city,
so clean underfoot, and so quiet. Its winding, even streets were floored
with damp sand solidified by time and as silent to the tread as any
carpet. The lattices and wall-returns deadened all reverberation of
voice. There were no carts, nor any streets wide enough for carts, no
shod animals, no bustle anywhere. Everything was hushed, strained, even
furtive. The doors of houses shut softly as we passed. There were no
loud dogs, no crying children: indeed, except in the bazaar, still half
asleep, there were few wayfarers of any kind; and the rare people we did
meet, all thin, and as it were wasted by disease, with scarred, hairless
faces and screwed-up eyes, slipped past us quickly and cautiously, not
looking at us. Their skimp, white robes, shaven polls with little
skull-caps, red cotton shoulder-shawls, and bare feet were so same as to
be almost a uniform.
The
atmosphere was oppressive, deadly. There seemed no life in it. It was
not burning hot, but held a moisture and sense of great age and
exhaustion such as seemed to belong to no other place: not a passion of
smells like Smyrna, Naples or Marseilles, but a feeling of long use, of
the exhalations of many people, of continued bath-heat and sweat. One
would say that for years Jidda had not been swept through by a firm
breeze: that its streets kept their air from year's end to year's end,
from the day they were built for so long as the houses should endure.
There was nothing in the bazaars to buy.
In the evening the telephone rang; and the Sherif
called Storrs to the instrument. He asked if we would not like to listen
to his band. Storrs, in astonishment, asked What band? and congratulated
his holiness on having advanced so far towards urbanity. The Sherif
explained that the headquarters of the Hejaz Command under the Turks had
had a brass band, which played each night to the Governor General; and
when the Governor General was captured by Abdulla at Taif his band was
captured with him. The other prisoners were sent to Egypt for
internment; but the band was excepted. It was held in Mecca to give
music to the victors. Sherif Hussein laid his receiver on the table of
his reception hall, and we, called solemnly one by one to the telephone,
heard the band in the Palace at Mecca forty-five miles away. Storrs
expressed the general gratification; and the Sherif, increasing his
bounty replied that the band should be sent down by forced march to
Jidda, to play in our courtyard also, 'And,' said he, 'you may then do
me the pleasure of ringing me up from your end, that I may share your
satisfaction.'
Next day Storrs visited Abdulla in his tent out by
Eve's Tomb; and together they inspected the hospital, the barracks, the
town offices, and partook of the hospitality of the Mayor and the
Governor. In the intervals of duty they talked about money, and the
Sherif's title, and his relations with the other Princes of Arabia, and
the general course of the war: all the commonplaces that should pass
between envoys of two Governments. It was tedious, and for the most part
I held myself excused, as after a conversation in the morning I had made
up my mind that Abdulla was not the necessary leader. We had asked him
to sketch the genesis of the Arab movement: and his reply illuminated
his character. He had begun by a long description of Talaat, the first
Turk to speak to him with concern of the restlessness of Hejaz. He
wanted it properly
subdued, and military service, as elsewhere in the Empire, introduced.
Abdulla, to forestall him, had made a plan of
peaceful insurrection for Hejaz, and, after sounding Kitchener without
profit, had dated it provisionally for 1915. He had meant to call out
the tribes during the feast, and lay hold of the pilgrims. They would
have included many of the chief men of Turkey besides leading Moslems of
Egypt, India, Java, Eritrea, and Algiers. With these thousands of
hostages in his hands he had expected to win the notice of the Great
Powers concerned. He thought they would bring pressure on the Porte to
secure the release of their nationals. The Porte, powerless to deal with
Hejaz militarily, would either have made concessions to the Sherif or
have confessed its powerlessness to the foreign States. In the latter
event, Abdulla would have approached them direct, ready to meet their
demands in return for a guarantee of immunity from Turkey. I did not
like his scheme, and was glad when he said with almost a sneer that
Feisal in fear had begged his father not to follow it. This sounded good
for Feisal, towards whom my hopes of a great leader were now slowly
turning.
In the evening Abdulla came to dine with Colonel
Wilson. We received him in the courtyard on the house steps. Behind him
were his brilliant household servants and slaves, and behind them a pale
crew of bearded, emaciated men with woe-begone faces, wearing tatters of
military uniform, and carrying tarnished brass instruments of music.
Abdulla waved his hand towards them and crowed with delight, 'My Band'.
We sat them on benches in the forecourt, and Wilson sent them
cigarettes, while we went up to the dining room, where the shuttered
balcony was opened right out, hungrily, for a sea breeze. As we sat
down, the band, under the guns and swords of Abdulla's retainers, began,
each instrument apart, to play heartbroken Turkish airs. Our ears ached
with noise; but Abdulla beamed.
Curious the party was. Abdulla himself,
Vice-President in partibus of the Turkish Chamber and now Foreign
Minister of the rebel Arab State; Wilson, Governor of the Red Sea
Province of the Sudan, and His Majesty's Minister with the Sherif of
Mecca; Storrs, Oriental Secretary successively to Gorst, Kitchener and
McMahon in Cairo; Young, Cochrane, and myself, hangers-on of the staff;
Sayed Ali, a general in the Egyptian Army, commander of the detachment
sent over by the Sirdar to help the first efforts of the Arabs; Aziz el
Masri, now Chief of
Staff of the Arab regular army, but in old days Enver's rival, leader of
the Turkish and Senussi forces against the Italians, chief conspirator
of the Arab officers in the Turkish army against the Committee of Union
and Progress, a man condemned to death by the Turks for obeying the
Treaty of Lausanne, and saved by The Times and Lord Kitchener.
We got tired of Turkish music, and asked for
German. Aziz stepped out on the balcony and called down to the bandsmen
in Turkish to play us something foreign. They struck shakily into
'Deutschland uber Alles' just as the Sherif came to his telephone in
Mecca to listen to the music of our feast. We asked for more German
music; and they played 'Eine feste Burg'. Then in the midst they died
away into flabby discords of drums. The parchment had stretched in the
damp air of Jidda. They cried for fire; and Wilson's servants and
Abdulla's bodyguard brought them piles of straw and packing cases. They
warmed the drums, turning them round and round before the blaze, and
then broke into what they said was the Hymn of Hate, though no one could
recognise a European progression in it all. Sayed Ali turned to Abdulla
and said, 'It is a death march'. Abdulla's eyes widened; but Storrs who
spoke in quickly to the rescue turned the moment to laughter; and we
sent out rewards with the leavings of the feast to the sorrowful
musicians, who could take no pleasure in our praises, but begged to be
sent home. Next morning I left Jidda by ship for Rabegh.
