The Syrian Hadj was encamped on the south and south-west side of the
mountain; the Egyptian on the south-east. Around the house of the
Sherif, Yahya himself was encamped with his Bedouin troops, and in its
neighbourhood were all the Hedjaz people. Here it was that the two Yemen
caravans used formerly to take their station. Mohammed Aly, and Soleyman
Pasha of Damascus, as well as several of their officers, had very
handsome tents; but the most magnificent of all was that of the wife of
Mohammed Aly, the mother of Tousoun Pasha and Ibrahim Pasha, who had
lately arrived from Cairo for the Hadj, with a truly royal equipage,
five hundred camels being necessary to transport her baggage from Djidda
to Mekka. Her tent was in fact an encampment consisting of a dozen tents
of different sizes, inhabited by her women; the whole enclosed by a wall
of linen cloth, eight hundred paces in circuit, the single entrance to
which was guarded by eunuchs in splendid dresses. Around this enclosure
were pitched the tents of the men who formed her numerous suite. The
beautiful embroidery on the exterior of this linen palace, with the
various colours displayed in every part of it, constituted an object
which reminded me of some descriptions in the Arabian Tales of the
Thousand and One Nights. Among the rich equipages of the other hadjys,
or of the Mekka people, none were so conspicuous as that belonging
to the family of Djeylany, the merchant, whose tents, pitched in a
semicircle, rivalled in beauty those of the two pashas, and far exceeded
those of Sherif Yahya. In other parts of the East, a merchant would
as soon think of buying a rope for his own neck, as of displaying his
wealth in the presence of a pasha; but Djeylany has not yet laid aside
the customs which the Mekkawys learned under their old government,
particularly that of Sherif Ghaleb, who seldom exercised extortion upon
single individuals; and they now rely on the promises of Mohammed Aly,
that he will respect their property.