He was followed by my friend the Turkish telegraph clerk, who rejoiced to see me so well encamped, and then by the Muteserrif, pursuing an anxious and tottering course from his carriage through my tent ropes. The latter lent me his victoria that I might visit the parts of the town that lie on the eastern banks of the Orontes, and Kbēs and I drove off with two outriders quite exceptionally free from rags. The eastern quarter, the Hāḍir it is called, is essentially the Bedouin quarter; the city Arabic is replaced here by the rugged desert speech, and the bazaars are filled with Arabs who come in to buy coffee and tobacco and striped cloaks. It contains a beautiful little ruined mosque, said to be Seljuk, called El Ḥayyāt, the mosque of Snakes, after the twisted columns of its windows. At the northern end of the courtyard is a chamber which holds the marble sarcophagus of Abu'l Fīda, Prince of Ḥamāh, the famous geographer. He died in 1331; his tomb is carved with a fine inscription recording the date according to the era of the Hejra.
I gave a dinner party that night to the station-master, the Syrian doctor, Sallūm, and the Greek priest. We talked till late, a congenial if incongruous company. Sallūm had received his training in the American College at Beyrout, from whence come all the medical practitioners, great and small, who are scattered up and down Syria. He was a Christian, though of a different brand from the priest, and Kbēs represented yet another variety of doctrine. On the whole, said the priest, there was little anti-Christian feeling in Ḥamāh, but there was also little respect for his cloth; that very day as he walked through the town some Moslem women had thrown pebbles at him from a house-top, shouting, "Dog of a Christian priest!" Kbēs discussed the benefits conferred by the railway (a remarkably ill-managed concern I fancy) and said that without doubt Ḥamāh had profited by it. Prices had gone up in the last two years, meat that would otherwise have found no market was now sent down to Damascus and Beyrout, and he himself who, when he first came, had been able to buy a sheep for a franc, was now obliged to pay ten.
The Muteserrif of Ḥamāh provided me with the best zaptieh that I was to have on all my travels, Ḥājj Maḥmūd, a native of Ḥamāh. He was a tall broad-shouldered man, who had been in the Sultan's own guard at Constantinople, and had made the pilgrimage three times, once as a pilgrim and twice as a soldier of the escort. He rode with me for ten days, and during that time told me more tales than would fill a volume, couched in a fine picturesque speech of which he was the master. He had travelled with a German archaeologist, and knew the strange tastes of the Europeans in the matter of ruins and inscriptions.