A PILGRIM RAILWAY

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXXIII, Issue 18763, 30 December 1930, Page 2

A PILGRIM RAILWAY

THE HOLY ROAD TO MECCA. Eight hundred miles of railway that beings in a desert, runs through a desert and ends in a desert, carries no freight, and whose only potential passengers are pilgrims, may soon be running again. Mohammedans of all complexions, Persians, Egyptians, Turks, Syrians. Moroccans, Algerians, Iraqui, Javanese and Tunisians have petitioned Ibn Saud. King of Hejaz, to reconstruct the Damascus-Medina Hadj Railway that was destroyed during the World War. Glistening black “Abdul Hamid” puffing and blowing smoke, with its whistle screaming to an empty desert, pulled its first string of coaches, loaded with robed sheiks from the desert, and fezzed, besworded, gilt-braided Turks from Damascus into Medina in 1908, but only after three sheep had been sacrificed by high priests in front of its "camel catcher.” Medina, the terminus is only 200 miles north of holy Mecca. Ordered by the Sultan, paid for by faithful Mohammedans throughout the world, designed by a German engineers, built by Italian, Polish, Hungarian and Turk engineers, using Italian, Greek. Turk and Montenegrin labour, the completed pilgrimage express ran regularly until Bedouins began planting bombs in 1917. Some of its rails were made in America, some in France, some in Belgium; the cars the pilgrims rode in were manufactured in Belgium, while “Abdul Hamid” and the other engines that hurled them through desolation were German. Christians equipped it, but they could not ride on the railway of the "faithful.” The pilgrim railway banished one of the npst remarkable processions in the w'orld, one witnessed by few Christians because the great Mecca caravan whose weary, toiling legions once numbered more than 10,000 men and thousands of camels opened its tents only to Mohammedans. Every true Mohammedan burns with hope to make the Hadji, that is, the trip to Mecca and Medina, holiest of Islam holies. If the journey costs his life, as well as his fortune, so much the better. There is greater glory in paradise for those who die making the Hadji. Many of those who travel by land gather at Damascus in Syria. To go by sea, as thousands do in our softer civilised days, earns the pilgrim less merit than to make the strength-sap-ping, overland Journey through sunburned valleys between black rock walls, balanced on an evil-tempered camel, drinking the lukewarm water of desert wells, and risking cholera. Once outside Damascus the great caravan used to halt until all companies assembled and until the caravan leader had buttered the palm of the desert Bedouins. To pass safely through the desert, free from attacks by the crafty Bedouins, fat bribes were paid every year. Convoying a pilgrim army 1000 miles through an almost waterless desert was no easy task. Everything was minutely organised. The Persian tents were grouped together; Syrians kept to their section; sects and tongues and nationalities split the seemingly confused mass into manageable units. Camel boys waited for orders to bring their grumbling beasts to the riders; the tent corps was prepared to tear down the camp and rush it ahead to the next desert well the moment the caravan marched. There was even a market street that keen Syrian merchants from Damascus set up the moment the host halted, a noisy smelly market, where pilgrims bought food and where Bedouins of the desert flocked to buy cloth and bright trinkets. At night the camp twinkled in the plain as hundreds of candles were lighted within paper lanterns that swung from poles before tent doors. Before dawn a cannon shot echoed over the camp. The signal! Men cursed in many tongues as they stumbled over tent ropes in their haste to be off. Squealing camels bent their knees, protesting against the riders climbing up. Dogs barked, stray Damascus dogs that went with the caravan annually to Mecca like dogs that ally themselves to hunters walking through forests. Tied nose to tail in long files the camels swung along to the tinkling music of a pilgrimage song by the lells tied to the ugly beasts. The great caravan was on the march; no journey for a weakling. Sometimes it traf , led as much as 50 miles by steady going 22 hours out of 24.

Some of the camels carried huge curtained litters on their backs for women, for wealthy pilgrims and for dying pilgrims. When a pilgrim on Hadji felt the spirit leaving his body he willingly spent the last of his savings to die in luxury, so he hired one of the camels bearing the lurching compartment reserved for dying men. Friends lifted his sickening body in. When the caravan stopped they would look in, find him dead, roll out the body, bury it in the sand that has received so many bodies of men and camels, and prepare the litter for the next weary traveller.

Travel of a vast pilgrim army in picturesque array ended with the coming of the railway. Then in 1914 came the World War and Turkey used the pilgrim railway as an iron whip to keep Arabia loyal. Mountain ranges between the railway and the Red Sea protected it from attacks by the Allies until the insurrection.