“God send us rain!” he sighed. “Effendim, at this time of the year I am used to stay my mare at such places as these” (he pointed to the hollows in the barren ground), “and while I smoke a cigarette she will have eaten her fill of grass. But this year there is no spring herbage, and in the season of the rains, forty days have passed without rain. All the waterpools in the Shâmîyeh are exhausted, and the Arabs are crossing to the Jezîreh lest they die, for their flocks can give no milk.”
Presently we met a train of thirsty immigrants driving their goats to the Euphrates. Muḥammad called to them and asked if they would give us a cup of leben, sour milk. A half-starved girl shouted back in answer:
“If we had leben we should not be crossing to the Jezîreh.”
“God help you! ” cried Muḥammad. “Cross in the peace of God.”
A little further we passed through a number of newly-made graves, scattered thickly on either side of the road. “They are graves of the Deleim,” said Muḥammad. “A year ago a bitter quarrel arose within the tribe, and here they fought together and seventy men were slain. They buried them where they fell, the one party on one side of the road, and the other on the other side.”
We travelled fast and in five hours from ’Ânah came down to the river at Fḥemeh, where we found our tents pitched near a ḳishlâ. The guardhouse is the only building here, the village of Fḥemeh being in the Jezîreh about half-an-hour up stream. About the same distance lower down lies the island of Kuro, which is perhaps Julian’s Akhaya Kala, but I saw it only from afar and do not know whether there are still ruins upon it. We had parted at ’Ânah from Cyrus and from Julian; they marched with their armies down the Jezîreh bank, and our road lost much of its charm in losing the shadowy pageants of their advance.
We were tormented during the next three days by an intolerable east wind. It blew from sunrise to sunset, and, for aught we could tell, it might have issued from the mouth of a furnace, so scorching was its dust-laden breath. I heard of ruins at Sûs, a place where the Jerâif own cornfields; but it lay at the head of a peninsula formed by a great bend of the stream, and I had no heart to go so far out of the way.[69] We reached Ḥadîthah in six hours from Fḥemeh and camped there, partly because we were weary of the wind and dust, and partly because Muḥammad had advised me to seek there for a guide into the desert. The nearer we came to that adventure, the more formidable did it appear, and I was beginning to realize that it would be folly to take a caravan across the parched and stony waste, and to revolve plans for sending the muleteers to Kerbelâ and taking only Fattûḥ with me to Kheiḍir. At Ḥadîthah we met an aged corporal, who declared that nothing would be easier than to go straight thence to Ḳaṣr ’Amej, and for water we should find every night a pool of winter rain. He had crossed the desert two years ago and there had been no lack of water.