An Arab Pilgrimage

by Algernon Blackwood

All day long in the blazing heat the camels have come shuffling and slouching through the sand past Helouan, for the March full moon is here and five thousand Bedouins are making their annual pilgrimage to the Tomb in the Desert, where the Sheikh Abou Seria (“Father of Speed”) fulfils the function of an Arab Lourdes. From far and near with their , their wives and children, their tents and goats, their plaintive piping reeds and their incessant tapping of drums, the procession has been struggling in since sunrise. Hundreds of donkeys trip beside the stately camels, and the separate lines of dust radiate like the spokes of in invisible wheel towards the great encampment just below Helouan, to merge later in the single stream that journeys forty miles southeast to the Tomb itself. To the music of this soft, gay piping the camels come swaying in beneath their enormous loads. Tents spring up over acres of yellow sand; camps are pitched, all separate yet all touching; the donkeys roll in the hot soil; the children laugh and play; the men, grave as the camels, sit round against the walls of bersim and water-jars and baggage that lie in heaps; and the women whisper to one another behind their veils how their little ones shall all be healed presently, and more⁠—that the childless wives among them shall at last become mothers. At the Tomb of Abou Seria these things come to pass at the March full moon. It is a time of great rejoicing.

Shortly after dawn the first stragglers came in⁠—fellaheen on tired donkeys many, too, on foot. They came from villages on the other side of Cairo. For the poor travel slowly, and start first. The wealthy Bedouin sheikhs, swathed in white, with circlets of gold about their turbaned heads, come later on their grand white camels, wives and retainers close behind them. And from dawn, all through the burning heat of noonday and afternoon, the horde of fellaheen troop straggling in till the crimson sunset, dying behind the Lybian Desert, falls on an encampment grown wide and deep. The palm grove along the Delta cast long shadows. The lizards sing among the dunes. The women start their wild and curious ululating shrill as an animal cry and hardly human. And suddenly the moon shows her huge yellow disc above the Mokattam Hill and draws a marvellous sweetness out of the Desert, sheeting the spread encampment with a silvery veil.

It is a wonderful sight. The camels seem twice their natural size among the piled-up fodder. Little fires spring up, built over stones. Voices are low; noises die down one by one⁠—braying of donkeys, gurgling grunts of camels, bleating of goats and kids soon to be sacrificed. Groups gather closely round he fires, for the night air nips. Coffee is made in tiny china cups, and the gaunt heads of the camels thrust forward over the very shoulders of their owners They chew and chew and chew. Those dark bundles in the sand lying apart by themselves, are men already asleep, wrapped from head to feet in sheets of black and blue and white and yellow. No one treads on them. The bare feet silently to and fro, picking their way so carefully. And everywhere dark faces gleam in the moonlight, eyes flash like stars and white teeth shine.

Little visits are paid from group to group. A bearded fellow with face of night enters a circle where all are seated round the fire and coffeepot. “Are you happy?” “I am happy because of your existence.” “Coffee?” handing him a cup. “Coffee forever,” as he sip it slowly. We outsiders watch and stare and question, yet get no nearer to them. Centuries lie between. The courtesy is perfect. They accept cigarette, lighting it with flint and steel, offering the latter as a present that may not be refused. The young man, playing his reeds so softly to a group of listeners, hands them over to an admirer who has praised them, with “Please accept them from me.” ’ Behind, in the sand, men are praying on their knees toward Mecca. “Sing to us, kindly,” asks an Englishman, who knows Arabic, of another man. The singer is shy, but only requires coaxing, and when the Englishman suggests a certain song the other hesitates. “It is not pleasing that I should sing such a song before gentlemen and ladies.” “They don’t understand a word.” “But I cannot do it. Whether they understand or no, I find it not pleasing.” And, after this lesson in sweet delicacy, between the verses of a song he finally chants, always this question: “Does my voice please you, O gentleman?” Yet these are merely fellaheen, the peasant toilers of the Delta, who accompany the great Bedouin Pilgrimage to the Desert Tomb of Abou Seria, Father of Speed, one of Muhammad’s generals⁠ ⁠… And after midnight one or two of them rise quietly und resume their journey. “Our camels travel better in the nighttime.” Off they go, with their donkeys, goats and children, carrying all they possess in this world with them. The unmeasured desert swallows them. No sound comes back. They vanish in the moonlight as softly as they came. One thinks of that Bedouin who loved an Englishman, and paid him the great honour of taking him home. “I will show you my home,” he said, and they travelled three days and nights across the desert. Beneath a limestone boulder he pointed to the ground. “Now you are in my home,” he said, proudly, and with the stately dignity of a great Prince of the Desert. And the Englishman saw a little pile of ashes at his feet. It was summer, tent unnecessary; the wife and flocks were away. This square foot of sand in the enormous wilderness was Home.

In the morning, with the rising sun, the Bedouin arrive. Before Helouan is awake their white headdress was visible far down the sandy waste that meets the fringe of Delta towards Cairo. But Helouan soon comes down to see. Few of them tarry here; they go straight through; the Bedouin do not like the people, houses, tourists. They resent the cameras, flourish their whips of buffalo-hide and trot past almost fiercely. There is scorn in their eyes, as they circle about their wives. High on their splendid camels, they have a regal air, making the great brutes turn and double as easily as horses, and shouting angrily if anyone goes near the water-sellers. This is their last watering-place before the Tomb is reached, and to trifle with a Bedouin’s water is like trifling with his wives. And no wonder they wear this princely mien, for the whole Imperial Desert is their home. Upon the slower camels in their lordly train, sometimes four abreast, their women, all carefully veiled, sit with the little children. Some are hidden from sight in tent-like canvas gorgeously striped and coloured. It sways to and fro with the enormous knee-stroke of the camels like a boat at sea. Solemnly the Muslim world files past across the sands. And we outsiders get no nearer, ask, stare, and follow as we may. The gulf is not bridged that lies between our minds and theirs. In vain we try, wondering what they think and feel, and what emotions hide behind those fine bronze faces. Their politeness veils it all, their own deep world; their courtesy screens revelation. They move, like the camels, at the pace of a thousand years, unchanging. We watch them across barriers, that is all. Note that old man praying alone there, behind the munching camel. He has washed his hands and feet: his carpet is spread on the sand, and his shoes are off. Mind, heart and soul are concentrated. He is oblivious to the world about him as he bows towards the East and his forehead taps the ground.

As the moon rises higher and night becomes all white the fun begins in earnest⁠—Fantasia, as they call it, borrowing a foreign word. A couple of mounted police from Helouan come down to keep order and see that the few inquisitive tourists from the hotels are not molested. But their services are not once required. Only the little children trot round with their incessant demand for baksheesh. The Arabs take no notice of us outsiders, beyond making way when we approach, offering here and there a word of explanation or inviting us to drink coffee with them when we draw near to their fire-circles. The Fantasia grows fast and furious, while the crouching camels munch and the cries of goats and donkeys mingle with the women’s weird ululating. In one corner a ring is formed and the band begins to play⁠—two pipes and a tomtom. To the endless repetition of a single phrase, half melody, half chant enters a Sheikh upon his Arab horse. The gold and silver trappings gleam in the moonlight. His headdress shines; the horse’s metal necklace chinks and rattles. Holding the reins in one hand, the other grips a staff with its point in the sand; round this he circles in and out, making a figure of eight, the animal taking its small steps proudly, neck arched, tail flying head held gracefully erect. Suddenly the rider swings a gun round from his back, and fires it off into the sand with one hand; the people watch in silence; the horse prances out; another Sheikh enters the ring and goes through a similar performances.

In another direction a circle several hundred strong, packed close as herrings, sit round upon the sand, and a storyteller stands in the centre, reciting wonderful adventures with many wild gesticulations. He carries a waving stick, and his voice falls and rises with a wailing note. All those faces in the moonlight watch and listen with rapt attention. A burst of laughter comes, then exclamations of delight, then long-drawn “ohs!” Tales of Arabian Nights go floating across the desert air⁠—towards another group, where the dancing-girls, who accompany the Pilgrimage from Cairo, are performing to yet another circle of onlookers.

Further off, upon the outskirts of the camp, rows of tall shapely men stand waving their arms, swaying to and fro bending their thin and graceful necks as they recite their songs of a semi-religious, semi-erotic character, towards the East. They suddenly kneel and bow, then rise again: the singing goes on and on for hours, and from the distance the chanting of other groups comes in upon the breeze. It is a mournful sound. A few hundred yards outside the encampment these various chanting groups combine in a single tone that holds the monotony of wind blowing among the boulders of the desert.

And the Fantasia continues far into the night, while the moon climbs higher, the old Nile flows slowly by and the desert listens solemnly all round. Numbers sleep through it; here and there some rise up and disappear across the sand; everywhere are the outlines of the humped and pointed little tents, the grotesque heads and necks of camels and sheeted human figures passing softly to and fro through the moonlight. All know that strangers stand and watch them, but, while aware of it, they are utterly indifferent. The rejoicing is among themselves, no question of display or showing off for others. They simply do what they have done for centuries, and will do for centuries to come. A sense of something eternal, and infinite as the desert itself, rises from the camp. It stirs the blood. Somewhere in it there is a touch of awe.

At sunrise the tents are struck, and the entire mass moves on across the sand in single file, a procession stretching for miles. At the Tomb itself, two days later, to the light of a thousand camp fires, the Fantasia is renewed in full earnest The animals are sacrificed. There is endless praying, dancing, singing, acting and the rest. Then all return the way they went. The Bedouin scatter again to their various resting-places in the desert-home. The camels come slouching and shuffling through the sands past Helouan.

What remains with me, however, is not so much the memory of their Fantasia and wild rejoicing, as the moonlit: picture of the little families who left the camp to continue their journey beneath the stars. For the sight stirred old deep yearnings that every Nature-lover knows too well. So quietly they stole away into the immeasurable desert! All their possessions in this world they carried easily with them, and in their hearts this ancient Faith the ages cannot change. The camels padded off, veiled women in the swaying tents upon their backs. The silhouettes were strange and mysterious against the brilliant stars. Like dreams of a forgotten world they melted into the distance swift!y. Moonlight, sand and desert took them home.