Forbidden cities have always exercised a fascination over a certain type of mind both in ancient and in modern times, and for both the cities which are forbidden in our day, namely, Lhassa and Mecca, there is a considerable list of works of travellers who in one disguise or another have penetrated to their sanctuaries, though, as Dr. Margoliouth somewhere remarks, the number of those who have been and survived to tell the tale is but a small percentage of those who have tried and perished in the attempt. Reliable authorities have told us in regard to Mecca, that hardly a pilgrimage season passes without somebody being done to death on the suspicion of being a Christian in disguise.

The latest story of a Christian pilgrim to Mecca is contained in two handsome volumes, "The Holy Cities of Arabia,"¹ which give in simple, readable form the adventures of a young Englishman from Malaysia, Mr. C. E. Rutter, who was in Cairo in 1925 studying Arabic, and who spent the best part of a year in Mecca and Medina, in the disguise of a Syrian Moslem, during the time when Ibn Sa'ud and his Wahhabi forces were in control of the Holy Cities. D. G. Hogarth, writing of the famous European pilgrims who had made the journey up to the time of his writing his "Penetration of Arabia," remarks that those of them who had gone of their own choice had always some wider aim in view than the mere feat of visiting the forbidden cities, but Mr. Rutter, like his immediate predecessor, Major Wavell, seems to have had no other object than the adventure of making the visitation.

The roll of these Christian pilgrims is an interesting one, and their record has a fascination of its own, quite as much from the varied characters of the pilgrims as from the adventurous nature of their journey. First among them comes the Italian gentleman Ludivico di Varthema, who was in Mecca and Medina in 1503, and whose account of his travels has had an extraordinary vogue in Europe, being published in Italian at Rome in 1510, translated into Latin that same year, and into German, French, Spanish, Dutch and English before the close of the century; and edited by G. P. Badger for the Hakluyt Society in 1863. Varthema is famous among geographers for his description of Yemen, which he reached after leaving the Holy Cities, and he confesses that it was love of knowledge that led him to set out on his travels. The decision to visit Mecca was made early in 1503, when he was in Damascus and met a captain of Mamelukes who was on his way to the Holy City. Disguising himself as a Mameluke, he joined the band, travelling the forty days' journey with the caravan, and stopping at Medina en route. Varthema, it is interestmg to note, was the first European to dispel the popular myth that the coffin of Mohammed at Medina hangs in the air suspended between two lodestones.

His account of the ceremonies at Mecca and his description of the city are not very full, for he was more anxious to describe his own adventures than to describe the city. Moreover he was inclined to exaggerate, for he tells us quite casually that he saw two unicorns in the court of the great Mosque, and even gives the length of their horns, so that one is inclined to minimize somewhat his accounts of the profuseness of the gold and silver decoration about the sacred precincts. Varthema has little good to say of Islam. He describes the Medina Library as filled with the "filthy traditions and life of Mohammed and his fellows," and tells us that they left the city "wearied with the filthiness and loathsomeness of the trumperies, deceits, trifles and hypocrisies of the religion of Mohammed." His disguise was penetrated at Mecca by another Mameluke, who had been in Genoa and Venice, and openly charged him with being a Christian. He was forced to admit his nationality, but maintained that he was a convert. When recognized a second time, however, in Aden, and required by the Sultan to make the profession of faith in Islam, he refused, admitting that he never could bring himself to pronounce that creed. He was then imprisoned for many months, and only escaped by pretending madness, in which he contrived to convert a great fat sheep to Mohammedanism, and to kill a jackass for refusing to become a proselyte, thereby bringing the religion of Islam into contempt. Finally he managed to escape to Persia.

The second venturer known to us was Vincent Leblanc, a French sailor from Marseilles, who claims to have made the journey in 1568. The account of his journey is printed in Bergeron's "Voyage Fameux," but is dismissed by most authorities as entirely mythical. He says that life in that French port had kindled in him a desire to see the strange Eastern countries, so that he ran away to sea, and after being shipwrecked off Candia, he fell in with a merchant named Cassis, who was going with his brother Morat to Mecca to sell merchandise. They joined the caravan from Damascus and visited both Mecca and Medina. The object of the journey was trafficking, and he has little to tell us save of the tremendous amount of merchandising done during the pilgrim season.

In 1607 an Austrian youth, Johann Wild, visited the forbidden cities, but he visited them as a captive. He was taken prisoner by the Hungarians while a youth in the Imperial army, and sold to the Turks. After passing from one master to another, he at last came into the possession of a miserly Persian, who took Wild as his personal servant with him on the pilgrimage with the Egyptian caravan of 1607. They started from Cairo, and went by Suez across the Sinaitic peninsula. His account is of importance because of his description of the dreadful sufferings and privations endured by the pilgrims who travelled by this route. He says that before they reached the half-way stage they had lost fifteen hundred men and nine hundred camels. He was impressed at Mecca by the flagrant immorality of the place more than by anything else.

It was also as a prisoner that the next visitor, Joseph Pitts, an Englishman, made the journey in 1680. He was an Exeter boy who went to sea at the age of fifteen, and on a return journey from Newfoundland in 1678, was sold as a slave, when his ship was captured by Barbary corsairs off the coast of Spain. He was forced by the bastinado to make an outward profession of Islam, but hated the religion, and tells us that he "ate heartily in private of hog." In 1680 his third master, an ancient and corpulent man of kindly nature, took him on pilgrimage to Mecca. Like Wild he started from Cairo, but at Suez they took ship for Jiddah. The glory of Mecca must have dimmed since Varthema's day, for Pitts found little admirable in it. He describes it as a dismal barren place in the midst of many little hills, the buildings being mean and ordinary, with nothing of beauty, and the inhabitants a poor sort, very thin and lean. He was in Mecca four months, and entered the Ka'ba twice, but saw in it nothing worth mentioning. In Mecca Pitts met an Irishman, who had been for thirty years a slave in the galleys, and had then become a Moslem, and came to end his days in peace at Mecca, which was probably the last place in the world where they would be wanting men for galley service.

The next Christian pilgrim we meet is one of the most famous of them all, the Spaniard Domingo Badia y Leblich, who took the name of Ali Bey al-Abbasi, and made the pilgrimage in 1807 in a most princely fashion, giving out that he was a descendant of the Abbassid Caliphs of the West, and travelling in state with a great retinue of servants and attendants, and scattering largesse in all directions as he journeyed. There is much mystery about Ali Bey. Bankes, writing in 1830, roundly asserted that he was a Jew, and many later writers have thought that he was a genuine Moslem of Moroccan origin, but of Spanish education. The fact, however, that when he died in Arabia on his second journey, in 1818, a cross was found under his vest and that he was denied burial by the Arabs on that account, is conclusive proof that he was a Christian, and there is sufficient evidence to more than suspect that he was an emissary of Napoleon, furthering some of the Eastern schemes of that subtle brain. In fact, French writers have asserted that it was information supplied from English sources that brought about his sudden death among the Arabs.

Badia was received in state by Mohammed Ali Pasha in Cairo, and joined the caravan for Mecca in December, 1806, travelling by Suez and Jiddah. At Mecca he lived in a special mansion adjoining that of the Sherif, and he had the unusual honor of assisting the Sherif in the official cleansing of the Ka'ba. The great importance of his visit, however, lies in the fact that he was in the Holy City at the time when the Wahhabis from Najd captured it, and in his pages we have the account of an eyewitness of the atrocities committed by those wild fanatic Puritans from the desert, as they put down with a strong hand what they considered the idolatrous practices of the inhabitants of the city. Badia tried to visit Medina, but was prevented by the Wahhabis.

While the Wahhabis were still in possession, or at least in control of Mecca, in 1809, it was visited by a Russian subject of Teutonic origin, Ulrich Jaspar Seetzen, a man who had had twenty years of training in Germany for Eastern exploration. He was a competent Arabist, and a botanist of European reputation, and, as a Councillor in the Russian Embassy, not unsuspected of having some political motives for his journey. In any case his pilgrimage to Mecca was only part of the preparation for a much wider project of Eastern travel, particularly in the Khanates of Turkestan and Central Asia, which were of peculiar interest to the Russian Chancellery. After spending some time in Constantinople, Aleppo and Damascus, he made an exploration of the Dead Sea on foot, in the guise of a beggar, and published the first scientific account and map of that area. Thence he travelled across Sinai to Cairo. It was his intention to proceed from Suez to Yambu and thence to Medina before going to Mecca, but the ship captain was afraid of Wahhabi troubles emanating from Medina, and sailed straight to Jiddah. Seetzen remained some time in Jiddah, and then travelled on foot to Mecca to make his first reconnaissance. Returning to Jiddah he journeyed from there to Medina, getting back to Jiddah in time to join the annual pilgrimage group of 1810. The crowd, he says, was so great that his caravan could hardly enter the city.

Seetzen's thirst for acquiring scientific information brought him into suspicion both at Medina and at Mecca. At Medina he was summoned before the Amir and questioned as to who and whence he was, why he carried so many books, and what he was doing poking around in all the odd corners of the city. At Mecca also he was cross-questioned, and on his further journeyings in South Arabia his collection of snakes preserved in spirits, his botanical and geological specimens were considered as magic, he was accused of having caused a serious drought in that area, and assassinated as he set out for Mascat.

Five years later there appeared at Mecca the Swiss explorer John Lewis Burckhardt, who shares with Doughty pride of place among all travellers and explorers in Arabia. Burckhardt was educated at Leipzic and Göttingen, and later studied in London and Cambridge. He was a born Orientalist, whose Oriental character fits him like a glove, and gives us no sense of incongruity such as is so apparent in the accounts of travellers of recent years. After travelling for some years in Syria, Nubia and Egypt, he left for Jiddah in 1814 in the disguise of a beggar. Mohammed Ali Pasha was at Ta'if at the time, and Burckhardt having been recognized by some people who had known him in Cairo, was summoned to the Pasha's presence. There were considerable suspicions as to his Moslem orthodoxy, but when the Pasha summoned two of the ablest Professors of Islamic Law then resident in Arabia to examine him in the Koran, they concluded that not only was he a Moslem, but a most learned one. He still, however, did not escape the suspicion of being a spy of the English, who had now conquered Napoleon, and who the Pasha feared would turn their attention to Eastern conquest, so that Burckhardt had to walk warily the rest of his stay in both Mecca and Medina.

Burckhardt had had quite unusual scholarly preparation for his task of describing the Holy Cities and the rites of the pilgrimage. Thus he was able after only a limited sojourn in the cities to describe them with a minuteness and accuracy that leave nothing to be desired. In fact when Sir Richard Burton, who took some pride in improving on everyone else, came to write his account of Mecca and the pilgrimage, he found nothing to add to or to improve on Burckhardt and simply quotes his great predecessor's account. No other writer has painted so vividly the life of the Meccan community which lives on the blood it can suck from the pilgrims, and he has no high opinion of this parasitic community. The guides he describes as the idlest, most impudent and vilest individuals in the city, and the whole community, he says, squanders its gains in dress, feasting and sensual gratification. No wealthy Meccan, he avers, prefers domestic peace to the gratification of his passions. He found little learning and much hypocrisy there, and both Mecca and Medina he characterizes as the Paradise of beggars, to whose importunities there is no end. While Burckhardt was still in Mecca in 1814, another European adventurer entered the Holy City. This was the Italian Giovanni Finati. During Napoleon's occuppation of Italy Finati, who was studying for the priesthood, was conscripted and attached to the army in the Tyrol. He deserted, but was recaptured and sent to Dalmatia, where he deserted again, and was captured by the Turks, among whom he became pipe-bearer to a Turkish officer. His life was comfortable enough in his new position, but he was caught in an intrigue with one of his master's harim and had to flee hurriedly to Cairo, where he enlisted as an Albanian in the army of Mohammed Ali Pasha. He served in the expedition against the Mamelukes, and then was sent in the army of Toussoun Pasha, which proceeded to Arabia to put down the Wahhabis. There he took part in the capture of Yambu, and was one of the few survivors from the debacle a few days later. Returning to Cairo he joined the next expedition of Mohammed Ali against the Wahhabis, but when once in Arabia, fearing the destruction of that army at the hands of the Wahhabi fanatics, he deserted and made his way to Mecca. He was in Mecca during the time of the annual pilgrimage, and there met Mohammed Ali, who enrolled him again in the army, where he took part in the final defeat of the Wahhabis, and twice more visited Mecca before returning to Cairo. It was in Cairo that he met an English traveller named Bankes, for whom he acted as interpreter, and through whom his narrative was published in 1830.

Almost thirty years elapse before we read of our next Christian pilgrim, a French officer Leon Roches. Roches's father was a pioneer farmer in Algeria, and one of the many pioneers who failed to make a living. He himself joined the army in Algeria, and for several years, in the guise of a convert to Islam, lived as a secret service agent in the camp of the renowned religious maniac and warrior Abd al-Qadir. It was after his escape from the camp of Abd al-Qadir that he became convinced, after long conversations with some of the native chieftains, that the only basis of a lasting peace would be a fatwa, signed by the learned Doctors of Islam, to the effect that armed resistance to the French occupation of Algeria was not a religious duty incumbent on all the Moslem tribes Such a fatwa was secured in Algeria, and with it Roches proceeded to Cairo to procure the approval and signatures of the great doctors of Al-Azhar. These were obtained with some difficulty, but was intimated to Roches that to make the fatwa really complete and authoritative he should obtain the signatures of the great doctors of Medina, Damascus and Baghdad, who would be assembled at Mecca for the annual pilgrimage. Accordingly in November, 1841, he set off in disguise with the pilgrim caravan, landing at Yambu and proceeding first to Medina and then on to Mecca. Like Burckhardt he comments strongly on the extortions of the Meccans, and on the tawdriness of the city and the hypocrisy and blatant immorality of its inhabitants. He secured his fatwa, however, and made his way to Arafat for the concluding rites of the pilgrimage. Here unfortunately he came across two Algerian rascals whom he had been instrumental in having condemned to imprisonment while an interpreter to the army in Algiers. Also, having to perform the greater ablution in public, in spite of his precautions he was recognized as uncircumcized, and the cry of "Seize the Christian" was raised. The negro bodyguard of the friendly Sherif, however, under pretence of arresting him, rescued him and packed him off on swift camels to Jiddah, where he could take ship for Egypt.

The Finnish traveller and Orientalist Wallin is the next on our list. After studying Arabic, Persian and Turkish at St. Petersburg, he came to Cairo in the summer of 1843, and two years later in Moslem disguise set off on his travels through North Arabia, reaching Hail, and intending to cross the Najd desert to the Persian Gulf. Funds ran short, however, so he picked up the Persian and Mesopotamian caravan and travelled with them to Medina and Mecca. If for no other reason, his account of his journey is of importance for the picture it gives us of the tribulations endured by the Shi'a pilgrims on their way to and at the Sunni shrines.

His successor is the most famous and popular of all the Christian pilgrims - Sir Richard Burton, one of the most romantic figures of his generation, whose volumes on the pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah have become classics, and have been published in numerous de luxe, library and popular editions. Burton was a rebel from the beginning, and the mere fact that a city was a forbidden one was sufficient to induce him to visit it. After having been sent down from Oxford for deliberate violation of a stupid and annoying regulation, he finally broke with his family's determination that he should enter the Church, and secured a commission in the army in India. He had already acquired fluency in a number of European tongues, and in India immediately commenced breaking all army records in the acquirement of Oriental languages. In 1853 he got leave for exploration, and came to Cairo disguised as a Persian to make preparations for the pilgrimage. Realizing, however, that the dangers of discovery would be much greater if he went as a Persian, he changed his disguise to that of an Afghan doctor from India. Burton's story is too well known to need recapitulation. From Yambu they travelled to Medina and thence to Mecca, by the caravan.

Burton has described his journey and adventures in great detail, and though in his description of Mecca he found little that he could add to that of Burckhardt, his personal impressions of the place and the pilgrimage have permanent value. He expatiates on the extravagance with which the Meccans expend their easily won gains of the pilgrimage season, and on their pride, immorality and irreligiousness, though he has words of praise for their courage, intelligence and good manners.

On Burton's return to Cairo, he met at Shepherd's Hotel a young German named von Maltzan, who was already planning a trip to Mecca. It was seven years later, however, before he actually started on his journey, in the character of a Moor. In this one respect his pilgrimage is unique, for he borrowed another man's passport and personality for the journey. In Algiers he met and became friends with a Moor who was fatally addicted to hashish. In return for a sufficient sum to enable him to indulge for six months, he handed over his passport and papers to von Maltzan, who in his new character sailed to Malta and then to Alexandria, where he joined some Moslems proceeding to the Hijaz. From Suez they sailed to Yambu, and then coasted to Jiddah. His description of the ceremonies of the pilgrimage at Mecca is that it was a sight to be expected nowhere outside a lunatic asylum - thousands of semi-naked people, half crazed from the heat of the sun on their shaven heads, frantic with religious excitement, covered with dust and perspiration, panting, sweating, yelling, sobbing, sometimes screaming in delirium, as, tired to death with all the ceremonies, they still plodded on with the performance of the rites. On the return from Arafat, von Maltzan was suspected of being a Christian, and had to make a hurried exit from Mecca to Jiddah, and give up the hope of seeing Medina.

In 1877 another Englishman, John Fryer Keane reached Mecca. He had run away to sea as a boy, and lived for seven years among Mohammedans before he ventured into the forbidden territory. Keane was no scholar of any kind, and the sole interest of his two fascinating volumes is the personal interest, for he has the faculty of making his readers, live the journey with him. At Jiddah he attached himself to the suite of an Indian prince who was doing the pilgrimage in style, and thus escaped many of the minor tribulations of pilgrims who travelled alone. Keane's visit is famous to the world at large because of his discovery of a white woman at Mecca. Her name was Mackintosh, and she was a girl of the lower classes who had been taken prisoner at the siege of Lucknow and added to the harim of one of the rebels. When the rebels were defeated, and the English had set a price on this man's head, he sought refuge at Mecca, and brought her with him. She had been living there for a considerable number of years when Keane found her, and had almost forgotten the English tongue. Keane had several narrow escapes of recognition as a Christian, but managed to accompany his Indian patron to Medina and ultimately to Bombay.

Our standard scientific work on Mecca and the pilgrimage we owe to the next Christian pilgrim on our roll, Prof. C. Snouck Hurgronje, the Dutch Orientalist, who still lives at Leiden, though retired from his Professorship. His treatise on the origin and nature of the pilgrimage was written in 1880, and in 1885, after having spent five months in the Dutch Consulate at Jiddah, he journeyed to Mecca, where for six months he lived as a student of the Koran, and gathered the material for his monumental work on that city. As Burckhardt had been mainly interested in the topography of the city, and the pilgrimage ceremony, Snouck Hurgronje interested himself particularly in a social study of the Meccan community, and so complete is his work that he has left nothing to later writers save to note the changes made by passing years.

His sojourn in Mecca was cut short as a result of international jealousy over the possession of the famous Taima stone. Doughty had heard of this famous inscribed stone at Taima, but the first European to see it was the French Alsatian traveller Charles Huber, who was at Taima in 1879. Huber found the stone built into an old well, but he was no epigraphist and could make nothing of the inscription. In 1883 he returned to Taima, taking with him Julius Euting, the renowned epigraphist from Strasburg, who made a copy of the inscription. Between them they bargained for the purchase of the stone and sent it with their baggage to Hail. At El-Ala they separated, Euting going to Jerusalem, and Huber back to Hail, on the road to which he was assassinated. The French Consul at Jiddah, who was commissioned to recover Huber's effects, got it into his head that Hurgronje was working to get the stone for the Germans, and so gave information to the Moslem authorities that the latter was in Mecca in disguise. Naturally further stay in the city was impossible, so he had to leave without witnessing the pilgrimage.

Hurgronje seems to have enjoyed the freest intercourse with all strata of society in Mecca, and with an adequate scholarly preparation for his task has been able to make Meccan social life a thing of living interest to us. No other writer has so clearly pictured the condition of a society which is welded from an unusually varied conglomeration of nationalities, and which has been affected by the superstitions and prejudices of them all. His picture of the blatant immorality of the city is blacker even than Burckhardt's, and is the evidence of a witness who certainly cannot be accused of prejudice against Islam.

Almost ten years later the French Algerian, Gervais Courtellemont, a photographer of some note, visited Mecca on some secret commission from the French Government. He had several years of apprenticeship to living among Moslems before setting out on his journey, but even from his own account he was almost unbelievably tactless and awkward, and his companion Akli was in constant terror of his being discovered and getting into trouble. On more than one occasion, indeed, he was hailed before the authorities, and it needed all Akli's Arab eloquence to straighten things out. Courtellemont's personal account of his adventures is interesting and diverting, but his only addition to our knowledge of the Holy City is that he managed to take a number of excellent photographs, which make a welcome addition to those contained in Hurgronje's Bilderatlas.

Another Englishman, Major A. J. B. Wavell, made the pilgrimage in 1908. He had fought in the South African War in 1900, and in the succeeding years had travelled much with native companions in Swaziland, Tongaland and parts of Zululand, and later in East Africa in the hinterland of Mombasa. By the time he came to set out on his pilgrimage he was thoroughly conversant with Arabic and Swahili and with Moslem customs. Wavell journeyed with two companions, a Mombasa Swahili and an Arab from Aleppo who had lived for some time in Berlin. He joined the pilgrimage group in Damascus, and went to Medina by the Hijaz Railway, the first Christian pilgrim to travel in such luxury.

Lastly comes the pilgrim with whom we started, and whose account in these two sumptuous volumes, while of no particular value to scholarship, has three special claims on our interest. Firstly, Rutter entered Mecca from the south, crossing the Red Sea very much further south than is usually the practice, and coming up by land by way of Al-Gahm, Al-Lith and Yalamlam; whereas all the other travellers we know of entered the city from the other direction. His description of the journey up is therefore something quite new in the records of travellers to Mecca. Secondly, he was in Mecca and Medina at the time of the second Wahhabi occupation, and even had an interview with Ibn Sa'ud himself, so that it is of no little interest to compare his account with that of Ali Bey, who visited the cities during the first Wahhabi occupation over a hundred years earlier. Wahhabi iconoclasm seems not to have lost any of its intensity during the interval. Thirdly, he has gone into some detail in his description of both cities, and thus enables us to note the many changes that time has wrought since Burckhardt's day. The main interest of the book, however, is in his personal narrative, which is written in a pleasing fashion and occasionally with no little humor. It was curious to note that though Rutter was recognized and had to confess his nationality quite early in his sojourn in Mecca, he was yet able to continue there, and in fact spend a longer period in the forbidden city than any other European.

These are by no means all the Christian pilgrims who have visited Mecca and Medina, nor indeed all whom we know of, but are all who have left us any published account of their journey. The positive result is that we have a very complete and accurate account of the cities and of the rites of the pilgrimage, such as until recent years it was impossible to get from Oriental sources. And, more important than this, these travellers of Christian faith, not being hypnotized by the glamour of these being holy cities, have been able to reveal to us very fully the psychological significance of the pilgrimage to the crowds who annually visit the shrines, and also let us see the inevitable reaction of pilgrim psychology on the inhabitants of the cities themselves.

Cairo

ARTHUR JEFFERY.

¹ G. P Putnam's Sons, London and New York $15.00

Material by Arthur Jeffery
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