Tales from the Bait as Shar
We had spent the day with Sabbah Eed, long time friend and Bedouin guide extraordinaire, exploring dramatic rock canyons in a remote corner of Rum. Driving back, we stopped off to visit another old friend, Hamed, a true Bedouin of the desert, his black Bait as Shar tent (lit. House of Hair) concealed behind a dune.
As we arrived, Hamed rung the final melodic chimes from the big brass ‘nijr’ (Bedouin pestle and mortar) to announce the freshly roasted coffee beans were ground. They were added to the crushed cardamom and put to simmer in the brass coffee pot in the embers of the fire. The sun was setting behind the ragged jebels that formed a barrier of black, broken teeth to the west. Darkness crept across the red sands of the desert; it was story time!
“How’s your foot?” someone asked an old man in the corner of the tent, after the formalities of coffee drinking were over.
Sabbah Eed explained, “He was in the rocks underneath the cliffs of Draif al Muragh about three months ago when he was bitten by a snake; not the desert viper - the sand coloured one with the horns - but the dark one that lives in the rocks. His wife put a tourniquet on and tried to get the poison out but the foot swelled and he was in pain for forty days. Even now after three months he still has a limp.”
Which was well worth knowing - we had seen this ‘rock-snake’ (the Palestinian viper) many times in the mountains of Rum, in Rakabat and Makhman Canyons, on Jebel Khazali and on Jebel Rum. Once we had to climb around one on Sheikh Hamdan’s Route and just a few days ago one was seen on Hammads Domes, also on Jebel Rum; it was obviously a snake to beware of!
Another Bedu, sipping a glass of sweet tea in the half glow of the fire had a different story to tell. “I saw a really strange thing the other day” he said. “One of those snakes was lying in the shade of a rock and I was watching it, when a big black scorpion crept up behind it”. He demonstrated with his fingers in the sand, chuckling at the memory, then stabbed the air suddenly with his curved forefinger. “The scorpion stung the snake in the head which rose up quickly in the air, but the snake saw nothing and it lay down again. The scorpion then stung it twice more and it died, then the scorpion sucked its blood from it. I had never seen anything like it and I was worried that this new creature, now half snake, half scorpion might be really dangerous, so I killed it!” Everyone nodded their approval but there was more to come.
“I once saw something even stranger” another man said. “You remember when my tent was by Jebel Khush Khashah? Well, I kept seeing the track of a big snake near our camp. I thought it would be dangerous for the children, so one day I followed the trail to its hole and dug down. It was very deep, but eventually I saw the snake and managed to pull it out with a long stick. It was very big and black, but the strangest thing was, it had eyelids and eyelashes, like one of the monsters that people say live under the ground and guard buried treasure!
Because of this, I was afraid to kill it, in case it changed into something even more terrible, perhaps even a Djinn, so I sacrificed a goat and poured the blood into its hole. It came out quickly and disappeared across the desert and never came back!”
No one was surprised by this bizarre tale of dragons and hidden treasure and again, all agreed he had taken the right course of action.
There was time for one more story before the ‘mensef’ was carried in by four boys, struggling with the metre wide dish of unleavened bread, which was heaped with mutton and crowned with the head of the unfortunate sheep, its open jaws laughing at the moon.
“I have a friend who is one of those Bedouin who can cure scorpion stings by kissing them away” another man told the attentive audience, now into their third round of tea. “One day his old mother-in-law came to him, saying she had sat on a scorpion which stung her. ‘Can you cure it for me?’ she asked, adding ‘it’s very painful’. ‘No problem’ my friend said. ‘Just show me the place’. But, when he saw it, he had to tell her it couldn’t be done. ‘Why was that?’ I asked him. ‘Because’, he replied, chuckling, ‘I would have had to put my nose exactly in the middle of her bottom!’”
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