THE REVOLT OF YEMEN.* THE rising of the tribes of
Southern Arabia against the Turks in 1891 threatened a blow at the prestige of the * A Journey through Yemen. By W. B. Harris. London and Edinburgh ; W. Blackwood and Bons. Sultan perhaps. as irreparable as the loss of Constan- tinople itself. Though Mecca and Medina are separated from the Yemen by a belt of country occupied by semi-inde- pendent tribes, there is little doubt that a successful revolt in the rich and populous plateau' of the southern mountains would have spread to the Hejaz, and that the Shereefian family of Mecca, the true descendants of the Prophet, might have united all the tribes in the effort to oust the Osmanli Sultan from the Caliphate. The revenues extorted from the Yemenis and from the merchants of the Red-Sea coast were considerable. But the true value to the Sultan of his Arabian provinces lies in the undisturbed possession of the holy cities,. where pilgrims from every country of the East hear the name of Abdul Hamid blessed daily in the mosques as the Caliph and successor of Mahomet, in the very birthplace of the Prophet. With an Arab Caliph at Mecca, the race-hatred of the Arab for the Turk might at any moment make a clean sweep of the Osmanli, not only from Arabia, but up to the shores of the Levant ; and Palestine and Syria might be lost to the Turk of Constantinople as the Soudan is lost to the Turk of Cairo. It is an interesting comment on the saying that any Govern- ment is better than no Government, that the Turks in the Yemen came there by the invitation of the people themselves. The Arab population of the Yemen was wealthy, independent, housed in walled cities and prosperous villages, skilled in a system of cultivation more elaborate and expensive than the coffee-gardens of Ceylon, and governed by a race of Imaams of true descent from the Prophet. Yet in 1872, owing to the disunion of the tribes, the roads were unsafe, trade was at a. standstill, and, at the entreaty of the merchants at the capital, Sanaa, the Sultan deposed the Imaam, and quietly entered into possession of Arabia Felix. Without a thought for the fate of the agricultural Arabs, or of anything but the safety of their caravans, the Sanaa merchants imagined that they had done a good stroke of business. The Turkish Pashas rubbed their hands, and thought the same. Twenty years of Turkish government brought the country into a state of rabid insurrection. In many parts of the East the Turkish incubus only kills by inches. Where the population is scanty, or nomad, there is some hope of escaping the tax. gatherer. But the eternal lack of pence at Constantinople makes the weight of taxation absolutely crushing in dis- tricts like Yemen, where centuries of industry have accumu- lated great powers of agricultural production in a limited area. The people were taxed and retaxed, until early in 1892 the tribes rose to exterminate the Turks. In a few months every city in the highlands was retaken by the Arabs, with the exception of the capital, Sanaa, and Amran, both walled fortresses, and the towns upon the sea-coast. The fright and anxiety of the Porte were well concealed ; and though nearly forty thousand troops, partly drawn from Anatolia and Syria, partly irregulars raised on the Arabian coast, were drafted into the country, the rigorous exclusion of all correspondents from the Yemen kept matters quiet. Even when news of the rebellion leaked into European newspapers, the author of the interesting work under review was the only European who succeeded in penetrating to the capital. There he was at once arrested by the General in command, and sent back to the coast, though the Turks were once more in effective occupation. It is difficult to say whether the physical features of this wonderful country, or the character of its people, are the more attractive as we read them in Mr. Harris's brightly written pages. Geographically, Arabia Felix is almost the counterpart of Abyssinia. Like Abyssinia, it is a mountain-plateau, lying at an average height of 8,000 ft. above the sea-level, with a narrow strip of hot plains at its foot between the mountains and the sea. But the parallel ceases with inanimate nature. The Abyssinian is still the least civilised of all Christian races. The Yemeni, whether heathen, Christian, or Musstilman, for each faith has in turn prevailed among these lineal descen- dants of Joktan and of Ishmael, has been for centuries. perhaps the finest example of Eastern humanity, the most industrious, ingenuous, and ingenious, of the pure-blooded Arabian race. Some idea of the country and its people may be gathered from forty-eight hours of the author's experiences when running the gauntlet of Arab hostility to the Turk, and Turkish suspicion of the stranger. A merchant of Men had contracted to " deliver " him at Sanaa, an agreement which was faithfully carried out by camelmen and mountaineers whose sole inducement was often some inborn bias towards honour and humanity. The road lay through the country of the Kabyla.el.Owd, a tribe which had just revolted against the Turks, whose country had not been traversed even by Arab traders for more than three months. An ascent of eight thousand feet had been made, and but a short remnant of the night was left in which to reach a place of safety.
"The sun was nearly up when one of the men pointed out to me, a long way ahead, a solitary tower standing on the edge of a precipice overlooking the river. Once there,' he whispered, we are safe ; they are friends of ours.' But my men bad received timely warning that it would be safer to proceed, and a few hours saw us on our way again."
At last it was deemed well to stop and rest.
"I had only been asleep an hour or two," writes Mr. Harris, " when I felt myself quietly shaken. I asked who was there P— `Hush, do not speak !' I struck a light, and as a wild, long- haired creature leant over me to blow it out, I had just time to see that the man was a stranger.—' Get up,' said the voice, you are in danger. Not a word ; give me your bedding and your carpet. Your mules are being already laden,' he added, seizing me by the hand, 'follow me.'—I followed him out into the quiet moonlit streets, and found my mules already saddled."
At 1 o'clock in the morning, after a night-march guided by the stranger, they found a resting-place in a caravanserai well within the Turkish bounds, and slept till morning.
"Calling to Said, I told him to send in the man who had led us the night before. He had gone ! Never a word of thanks Never a reward! He had left me sleeping, and gone back to his own affairs, and his own life. My men had tried to stop him, had tried to keep him till I was awake ; bad promised him a reward. But he had laughed and shaken his raven curls, and, spear in hand, girded up his loins and vanished."
It transpired afterwards that forty men were lying in wait for the Turks' visitor, resolved on his execution and the plunder of his goods. The following picture of the scene which met the author's eyes on first awakening in Arabia Felix will give some idea of this natural paradise. It is the home of Rasselas raised from the valley to the mountain :— " Below ins lay the great valley up which we had been travel- ling the last two nights. Over its green fields floated a trans- parent, hazy mist, through which I could watch the river sparkling and flashing like a silver serpent as it passed on its way to the desert and the sea. On either side lay terraced fields, rising step by step from the water's edge, to where the mountain-slopes be- came too steep for cultivation. There they were covered with thick jungle undergrowth, while above rose precipice upon preci- pice, crowned, thousands of feet up in the pink morning sky, by broken crags and pinnacles of rock touched with snow, At my very feet, for I was on the house-top, the villagers, rejoicing in the glorious morning, were passing out to their labours. As I gazed, the mists rose, and every detail in the valley stood out distinct. Little villages far below, crowning the rocky mounds on which the Arabs of the Yemen so love to build, stood out from the green fields, all grey and severe, each a fortress in itself, with its battle- ments and towers. Around the pink-stud-gold crags hovered little fleecy clouds, attracted by the small patches of snow, now hiding, now disclosing, the grandeur of the mountain pinnacles."
The industry of the Yemenis may be judged from the following :— " The land, carefully terraced to allow of more cultivation, presented from a distance the appearance of an immense flight of steps. At one spot I counted one hundred and thirty-seven of these terraces on the side of a mountain, one above the other. In other parts of the Mahommedan world, the Arabs are ex- ceedingly fond of making and planting gardens. It is not unusually a want of experiment so much as a want of continuing, that is the ruin of so many Arab peoples. But not so in these valleys of the Yemen. Here every supporting wall was in excel- lent repair, every little artificial channel brimmed over with water, and the whole wore the appearance not only of great laborious skill, but of the idea being present to the people of maintaining the results of their labours.'
Yet these people can scarcely keep the necessaries of life, for Turkish rule is re-established in the Yemen. " There is nothing like the Turks for crushing a rebellion," writes Mr. Harris. The Osmanli troops under Ahmed Pazi Pasha scaled the passes, dragged their cannon up defiles hardly to be scaled by mules, and strong in the practical use of modern arms which seems to be the one form of intelligence native in the Turk, they forced the defiles and relieved Sanaa. That fortress had been defended by the Turkish garrison against the whole force of the Yemen tribes. The walls of the city were surrounded at a distance by small marten° towers, each defended by a cannon, and garrisoned by a handful of Turkish infantry. The resemblance to the defences of Melilla, now besieged by the Moors of the Riff, is very close. It is characteristic of Turkish ingratitude that the conscript soldiers who had fought " more like devils than men" to maintain the rule of the Sultan, were robbed by their officers of pay, provisions, and clothes, and were dying of fever, starvation, and cold in the very cities which they had reconquered from the rebels. The Arabs themselves took pity on them, and while cursing the Pashas, often helped the Turkish deserters with food, money, and transports to make their way to the coast at Aden, whence they worked their way home to their native cities in Asia Minor or Syria. The people of the least accessible parts of the Yemen are still un- subdued. But we cannot agree with Mr. Harris that there is any prospect of their maintaining their freedom. The tribes will "come in" one by one. The same course of grinding oppression will go on, and the Yemen is doomed for this generation. No agricultural people of the East can long resist the "creeping paralysis" of Turkish tactics ; and the strangely bloated trade of our waterless rock at Aden, which now reaches five millions of exports and imports annually, will continue to benefit by the folly of the Turks in piling up customs.dues at their Arabian seaports. Mr. Harris sup- plements his personal experiences by a careful epitome of the history and antiquities of the ancient Sabaia, compiled mainly from the works of Niebuhr, Playfair, Muller, and Glaser. The Yemen has long been recognised as the natural successor of Assyria and Egypt as a field for the archaeologist; but the author's account of the art-treasures of China and Japan hoarded in the once wealthy homes of Arabia Felix will be new to many European collectors,
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