Page:The Northern Ḥeǧâz (1926).djvu/124

 with covetous eyes, asked what our intentions were, and wished to conduct us immediately to their chief who was encamped a few kilometers to the south. Ismaʻîn and Slîmân declared that we would remain at al-Bedʻ that day to let our hungry camels graze and to rest ourselves a little, so that we could not visit the chief until the morrow. When the men and women had departed, we were joined by a youth about sixteen years old (Fig. 37) in a tattered shirt, who invited us to enter his palm hut. Thanking him for his courtesy, I offered him our hospitality. We were in urgent need of a companion belonging to the rapacious Mesâʻîd, who would protect us from his fellow tribesmen. Knowing that he could obtain from us his fill of bread—which, he asserted, he had not tasted for more than a year—the youth began to drive our camels together, urging us not to camp by the water, because if we stayed there we should be stung by gnats during the night. I asked him to lead us to the caves Moṛâjer Šuʻejb (Fig. 38).

At 5.40 we left the meadow, through which flows the stream al-ʻEfâr, mounted a slope about ten meters high, and proceeded to the ruins of Ḥawra. These ruins are nearly five-tenths of a kilometer long from southwest to northeast and about four hundred meters broad. Half a kilometer to the south there are similar ruins, composed of piles of old building material, long, white foundation walls, and a quantity of débris. Not a single building had been preserved. They were constructed of soft limestone, which, though very easy to work with, could not resist the wind, sand, and rain. It has disintegrated into fine dust, some of which still lies in small heaps, while the rest has been carried away by the wind.