The next day's journey is branded on my mind by an incident which I can
scarcely dignify with the name of an adventure--a misadventure let me
call it. It was as tedious while it was happening as a real adventure
(and no one but he who has been through them knows how tiresome they
frequently are), and it has not left behind it that remembered spice of
possible danger that enlivens fireside recollections. We left Ḳal'at
el Mudīk at eight in pouring rain, and headed northwards to the Jebel
Zāwiyyeh, a cluster of low hills that lies between the Orontes valley
and the broad plain of Aleppo. This range contains a number of ruined
towns, dating mainly from the fifth and sixth centuries, partially
re-inhabited by Syrian fellaḥīn, and described in detail by de
Vogüé and Butler. The rain stopped as we rode up a low sweep of the
hills where the red earth was all under the plough and the villages set
in olive groves. The country had a wide bare beauty of its own, which
was heightened by the dead towns that were strewn thickly over it. At
first the ruins were little more than heaps of cut stones, but at Kefr
Anbīl there were some good houses, a church, a tower and a very large
necropolis of rock-cut tombs. Here the landscape changed, the cultivated
land shrank into tiny patches, the red earth disappeared and was
replaced by barren stretches of rock, from out of which rose the grey
ruins like so many colossal boulders. There must have been more
cultivation when the district supported the very large population
represented by the ruined towns, but the rains of many winters have
broken the artificial terracings and washed the earth down into the
valleys, so that by no possibility could the former inhabitants draw
from it now sufficient produce to sustain them. North-east of Kefr
Anbīl, across a labyrinth of rocks, appeared the walls of a wonderful
village, Khīrbet Ḥass, which I was particularly anxious to see. I
sent the mules straight to El Bārah, our halting place that night,
engaged a villager as a guide over the stony waste, and set off with
Mikhāil and Maḥmūd. The path wound in and out between the rocks, a
narrow band of grass plentifully scattered with stones; the afternoon
sun shone hot upon us, and I dismounted, took off my coat, bound it (as
I thought) fast to my saddle, and walked on ahead amid the grass and
flowers. That was the beginning of the misadventure. Khīrbet Ḥass was
quite deserted save for a couple of black tents. The streets of the
market were empty, the walls of the shops had fallen in, the church had
long been abandoned of worshippers, the splendid houses were as silent
as the tombs, the palisaded gardens were untended, and no one came down
to draw water from the deep cisterns. The charm and the mystery of it
kept me loitering till the sun was near the horizon and a cold wind had
risen to remind me of my coat, but, lo! when I returned to the horses it
was gone from my saddle. Tweed coats do not grow on every bush in north
Syria, and it was obvious that some effort must be made to recover mine.
Maḥmūd rode back almost to Kefr Anbīl, and returned after an hour
and a half empty handed. By this time it was growing dark; moreover a
black storm was blowing up from the east, and we had an hour to ride
through very rough country. We started at once, Mikhāil, Maḥmūd and
I, picking our way along an almost invisible path. As ill luck would
have it, just as the dusk closed in the storm broke upon us, the night
turned pitch dark, and with the driving rain in our faces we missed that
Medea-thread of a road. At this moment Mikhāil's ears were assailed by
the barking of imaginary dogs, and we turned our horses' heads towards
the point from which he supposed it to come. This was the second stage
of the misadventure, and I at least ought to have remembered that
Mikhāil was always the worst guide, even when he knew the direction of
the place towards which he was going. We stumbled on; a watery moon came
out to show us that our way led nowhere, and being assured of this we
stopped and fired off a couple of pistol shots, thinking that if the
village were close at hand the muleteers would hear us and make some
answering signal. None came, however, and we found our way back to the
point where the rain had blinded us, only to be deluded again by that
phantom barking and to set off again on our wild dog chase. This time we
went still further afield, and Heaven knows where we should ultimately
have arrived if I had not demonstrated by the misty moon that we were
riding steadily south, whereas El Bārah lay to the north. At this we
turned heavily in our tracks, and when we had ridden some way back we
dismounted and sat down upon a ruined wall to discuss the advisability
of lodging for the night in an empty tomb, and to eat a mouthful of
bread and cheese out of Mahmūd's saddle-bags. The hungry horses came
nosing up to us; mine had half my share of bread, for after all he was
doing more than half the share of work. The food gave us enterprise; we
rode on and found ourselves in the twinkling of an eye at the original
branching off place. From it we struck a third path, and in five minutes
came to the village of El Bārah, round which we had been circling for
three hours. The muleteers were fast asleep in the tents; we woke them
somewhat rudely, and asked whether they had not heard our signals. Oh
yes, they replied cheerfully, but concluding that it was a robber taking
advantage of the stormy night to kill some one, they had paid small
attention. This is the whole tale of the misadventure; it does credit to
none of the persons concerned, and I blush to relate it. It has,
however, taught me not to doubt the truth of similar occurrences in the
lives of other travellers whom I have now every reason to believe
entirely veracious.
[Illustration 116: A HOUSE AT EL BĀRAH]
[Illustration 117: MOULDING AT EL BĀRAH AND LINTEL AT KHIRBET HĀSS]
Intolerable though El Bārah may be by night, by day it is most
marvellous and most beautiful. It is like the dream city which children
create for themselves to dwell in between bedtime and sleep-time,
building palace after palace down the shining ways of the imagination,
and no words can give the charm of it nor the magic of the Syrian
spring. The generations of the dead walk with you down the streets, you
see them flitting across their balconies, gazing out of windows wreathed
with white clematis, wandering in palisaded gardens that are still
planted with olive and with vine and carpeted with iris, hyacinth and
anemone. Yet you may search the chronicles for them in vain; they played
no part in history, but were content to live in peace and to build
themselves great houses in which to dwell and fine tombs to lie in after
they were dead. That they became Christian the hundreds of ruined
churches and the cross carved over the doors and windows of their
dwellings, would be enough to show; that they were artists their
decorations prove; that they were wealthy their spacious mansions their
summer houses and stables and out-houses testify. They borrowed from
Greece such measure of cultivation and of the arts as they required,
find fused with them the spirit of Oriental magnificence which never
breathed; without effect on the imagination of the West; they lived in
comfort and security such as few of their contemporaries can have known,
and the Mahommadan invasion swept them off the face of the earth.
[Illustration 118: TOMB, SERJILLA]
I spent two days at El Bārah and visited five or six of the villages
round about, the Sheikh of El Bārah and his son serving me as guides.
The Sheikh was a sprightly old man called Yūnis, who had guided all the
distinguished archæologists of his day, remembered them, and spoke of
them by name--or rather by names of his own, very far removed from the
originals. I contrived to make out those of de Vogüé and Waddington,
and another that was quite unintelligible was probably intended for
Sachau. At Serjilla, a town with a sober and solid air of respectability
that would be hard to match, though it is roofless and quite deserted,
he presented me with a palace and its adjacent tomb that I might live
and die in his neighbourhood, and when I left he rode with me as far as
Deir Sanbīl to put me on my way. He was much exercised that day by a
disturbance that had arisen in a village near at hand. A man had been
waylaid by two others of a neighbouring village who desired to rob him.
Fortunately a fellow townsman had come to his assistance and together
they had succeeded in beating off the attack, but in the contest the
friend had lost his life. His relations had raided the robbers' village
and carried off all the cattle. Maḥmūd was of opinion that they
should not have taken the law into their own hands.
"By God!" said he, "they should have laid the case before the
Government."
But Yūnis replied, with unanswerable logic:
"Of what use was it to go to the Government? They wanted their rights."
In the course of conversation I asked Yūnis whether he ever went to
Aleppo.
"By God!" said he. "And then I sit in the bazaars and watch the consuls
walking, each with a man in front clothed in a coat worth two hundred
piastres, and the ladies with as it were flowers upon their heads." (The
fashionable European hat, I imagine.) "I always go to Aleppo when my
sons are in prison there," he explained. "Sometimes the gaoler is
softhearted and a little money will get them out."
[Illustration 119: SHEIKH YŪNIS]
I edged away from what seemed to be delicate ground by asking how many
sons he had.
"Eight, praise be to God! Each of my wives bore me four sons and two
daughters."
"Praise be to God!" said I.
"May God prolong your life!" said Yūnis. "My second wife cost me a
great deal of money," he added.
"Yes?" said I.
"May God make it Yes upon you, oh lady! I took her from her husband, and
by God (may His name be praised and exalted!) I had to pay two thousand
piastres to the husband and three thousand to the judge."
[Illustration 120: HOUSE AT SERJILLA]
This was too much for Ḥājj Maḥmūd's sense of the proprieties.
"You took her from her husband?" said he. "Wāllah! that was the deed of
a Noṣairi or an Ismaili. Does a Moslem take away a man's wife? It is
forbidden."
"He was my enemy," explained Yūnis. "By God and the Prophet of God,
there was enmity between us even unto death."
"Had she children?" inquired Maḥmūd.
"Ey wāllah!" assented the Sheikh, a little put about by Maḥmūd's
disapproval. "But I paid two thousand piastres to the husband and three
thousand----"
"By the Face of God!" exclaimed Maḥmūd, still more outraged, "it was
the deed of an infidel."
And here I put an end to further discussion of the merits of the case by
asking whether the woman had liked being carried off.
"Without doubt," said Yūnis. "It was her wish."
We may conclude, therefore, that ethics did not have much to do with the
matter, though he indemnified so amply both the husband and the judge.
This episode led us to discuss the usual price paid for a wife.
[Illustration 121: TOMB OF BIZZOS]
"For such as we," said Yūnis, with an indescribable air of social
pre-eminence, "the girl will not be less than four thousand piastres,
but a poor man who has no money will give the father a cow or a few
sheep, and he will be content."
After he left us I rode round by Ruweiḥā that I might see the famous
church by which stands the domed tomb of Bizzos. This church is the most
beautiful in the Jebel Zāwiyyeh, with its splendid narthex and carved
doorways, its stilted arches and the wide-spanned arcades of its
nave--how just was the confidence in his own mastery over his material
which encouraged the builder to throw those great arches from pier to
pier is proved by the fact that one of them stands to this day. The
little tomb of Bizzos is almost as perfect as it was when it was first
built. By the doorway an inscription is cut in Greek: "Bizzos son of
Pardos. I lived well, I die well and well I rest. Pray for me." The
strangest features in all the architecture of North Syria are the
half-remembered classical motives that find their way into mouldings
that are almost Gothic in their freedom, and the themes of a classical
entablature that grace church window or architrave. The scheme of Syrian
decoration was primarily a row of circles or wreaths filled with whorls
or with the Christian monogram; but as the stone-cutters grew more
skilful they ran their circles together into a hundred exquisite and
fanciful shapes of acanthus and palm and laurel, making a flowing
pattern round church or tomb as varied as the imagination could
contrive. The grass beneath their feet, the leaves on the boughs above
their heads, inspired them with a wealth of decorative design much as
they inspired William Morris twelve hundred years later.
There is another church at Ruweiḥā scarcely less perfect than the
Bizzos church, but not so splendid in design. It is remarkable for a
monument standing close to the south wall, which has been explained as a
bell tower, or a tomb, or a pulpit, or not explained at all. It is
constructed of two stories, the lower one consisting of six columns
supporting a platform, from the low wall of which rise four corner piers
to carry the dome or canopy. The resemblance to some of the North
Italian tombs, as, for instance, to the monument of Rolandino, in
Bologna, is so striking that the beholder instinctively assigns a
similar purpose to the graceful building at Ruweiḥā.
We camped that night at Dāna, a village that boasts a pyramid tomb with
a porch of four Corinthian columns, as perfect in execution and in
balanced proportion as anything you could wish to see. On our way from
Ruweiḥā we passed a mansion which I would take as a type of the
domestic architecture of the sixth-century. It stood apart, separated by
a mile or two of rolling country from any village, with open balconies
facing towards the west and a delightful gabled porch to the north, such
a porch as might adorn any English country house of to-day. You could
fancy the sixth-century owner sitting on the stone bench within and
watching for his friends--he can have feared no enemies, or he would not
have built his dwelling far out in the country and guarded it only with
a garden palisade. At Ḳaṣr el Banāt, the Maidens' Fortress as the
Syrians call it, I was impressed more than at any other place with the
high level that social order had reached in the Jebel Zāwiyyeh, for
here were security and wealth openly displayed, and leisure wherein to
cultivate the arts; and as I rode away I fell to wondering whether
civilisation is indeed, as we think it in Europe, a resistless power
sweeping forward and carrying upon its crest those who are apt to profit
by its advance; or whether it is not rather a tide that ebbs and flows,
and in its ceaseless turn and return touches ever at the flood the
self-same place upon the shore.
[Illustration 122: CHURCH AND TOMB, RUWEIḤĀ]
Late at night one of Sheikh Yūnis's sons rode in to ask us whether his
father were still with us. On leaving us that enterprising old party had
not, it seemed, returned to the bosom of his anxious family, and I have
a suspicion that his friendly eagerness to set us on our way was but
part of a deep-laid plot by means of which he hoped to be able to take a
hand in those local disturbances that had preoccupied him during the
morning. At any rate he had made off as soon as we were out of sight,
and the presumption was that he had hastened to join in the fray. What
happened to him I never heard, but I am prepared to wager that whoever
bit the dust at the village of El Mughāra it was not Sheikh Yūnis.
Three rather tedious days lay between us and Aleppo. We might have made
the journey in two, but I had determined to strike a little to the east
in order to avoid the carriage road, which was well known, and to
traverse country which, though it might not be more interesting, was at
least less familiar. Five hours' ride from Dāna across open rolling
uplands Brought us to Ṭarutīn. We passed several ancient sites,
re-occupied by half-settled Arabs of the Muwāli tribes, though the old
buildings were completely ruined. All along the western edges of the
desert the Bedouin are beginning to cultivate the soil, and are
therefore forced to establish themselves in some fixed spot near their
crops. "We are become fellaḥīn," said the Sheikh of Ṭarutīn. In
some distant age, when all the world is ploughed and harvested, there
will be no nomads left in Arabia. In the initial stages these new-made
farmers continue to live in tents, but the tents are stationary, the
accompanying dirt cumulative, and the settlement unpleasing to any of
the senses. The few families at Ṭarutīn had not yet forgotten their
desert manners, and we found them agreeable people, notwithstanding the
accuracy with which the above remarks applied to their village of hair.
[Illustration 123: ḲAṢR EL ḂANĀT]
I had not been in camp an hour before there was a great commotion among
my men, and Mikhāil came to my tent shouting, "The Americans! the
Americans!" It was not a raid, but the Princeton archæological
expedition, which, travelling from Damascus by other ways than ours, was
now making for the Jebel Zāwiyyeh; and a fortunate encounter my camp
thought it, for each one of us found acquaintances among the masters or
among the muleteers, and had time to talk, as people will talk who meet
by chance upon an empty road. Moreover, the day I spent at Ṭarutīn
provided me with an admirable object lesson in archæology. As the
members of the expedition planned the ruins and deciphered the
inscriptions, the whole fifth-century town rose from its ashes and stood
before us--churches, houses, forts, rock-hewn tombs with the names and
dates of death of the occupants carved over the door. Next day we had a
march of ten hours. We went north, passing a small mud village called
Ḥelbān, and another called Mughāra Merzeh, where there were the
remains of a church and rock-cut tombs of a very simple kind. (None of
these places are marked on Kiepert's map.) Then we turned to the east
and reached Tulūl, where we came upon an immense expanse of flood
water, stretching south at least twelve miles from the Maṭkh, the
swamp in which the River Kuweēk rises. At Tulūl some Arab women were
mourning over a new-made grave. For three days after the dead are buried
they weep thus at the grave side; only at Mecca and at Medina, said
Maḥmūd, there is no mourning for those who are gone. There when
breath leaves the body the women give three cries, to make known to the
world that the soul has fled; but beyond these cries there is no
lamentation, for it is forbidden that tears should fall upon the head of
the corpse. The Lord has given and He has taken away. So we went south
along the edge of the high ground to a little hill called Tell Selma,
where we turned east again and rounded the flood water and rode along
its margin to a big village, Moyemāt, half tents and half beehive huts
built of mud. There is no other material but mud in which to build; from
the moment we left the rocky ground on which Ṭarutīn stands we never
saw a stone--never a stone and never a tree, but an endless unbroken
cornfield, with the first scarlet tulips coming into bloom among the
young wheat. It was heavy going, though it was soft to the horses' feet.
If there were a little more earth upon the hills of Syria and a few more
stones upon the plain, travelling would be easier in that country; but
He, than whom there is none other, has ordered differently. From
Moyemāt we rode north-east until we came to a village called Hober, at
the foot of a spur of the Jebel el Ḥaṣṣ, and here we tried to
camp, but could get neither oats nor barley, nor even a handful of
chopped straw; and so we went on to Kefr 'Ābid, which is marked on the
map, and pitched tents at six o'clock. The villages unknown to Kiepert
are probably of recent construction, indeed many of them are still half
camp. They are exceedingly numerous; about Hober I counted five within a
radius of a mile or two. The Arabs who inhabit them retain their nomad
habits of feud. Each village has its allies and its blood enemies, and
political relations are as delicate as they are in the desert. My diary
contains the following note at the end of the day: "Periwinkles, white
irises of the kind that were blue at El Bārah, red and yellow
ranunculus, storks, larks." These were all that broke the monotony of
the long ride.
[Illustration 124: TOMB, DĀNA]
[Illustration 125: A BEEHIVE VILLAGE]
About half an hour to the north of Kefr 'Ābid there is a little beehive
village which contains a very perfect mosaic of geometrical patterns.
The fragments of other mosaics are to be found scattered through the
village, some in the houses, and some in the courtyards, and the whole
district needs careful exploration while the new settlers are turning up
the ground and before they destroy what they may find. We reached Aleppo
at midday, approaching it by an open drain. Whether it were because of
the evil smell or because of the heavy sky and dust-laden wind I do not
know, but the first impression of Aleppo was disappointing. The name, in
its charming Europeanised form, should belong to a more attractive city,
and attractive Aleppo certainly is not, for it is set in a barren,
treeless, featureless world, the beginning of the great Mesopotamian
flats. The site of the town is like a cup and saucer, the houses lie in
the saucer and the castle stands on the upturned cup, its minaret
visible several hours away while no vestige of the city appears until
the last mile of the road. I stayed two days, during which time it
rained almost ceaselessly, therefore I do not know Aleppo--an Oriental
city will not admit you into the circle of its intimates unless you
spend months within its walls, and not even then if you will not take
pains to please--but I did not leave without having perceived dimly that
there was something to be known. It has been a splendid Arab city; as
you walk down the narrow streets you pass minarets and gateways of the
finest period of Arab architecture; some of the mosques and baths and
khāns (especially those half ruined and closed) are in the same style,
and the castle is the best example of twelfth-century Arab workmanship
in all Syria, with iron doors of the same period--they are dated,--and
beautiful bits of decoration. There must be some native vitality still
that corresponds to these signs of past greatness, but the town has
fallen on evil days. It has been caught between the jealousies of
European concession hunters, and it suffers more than most Syrian towns
from the strangling grasp of the Ottoman Government. It is slowly dying
for want of an outlet to the sea, and neither the French nor the German
railway will supply its need. Hitherto the two companies have been
busily engaged in thwarting one another. The original concession to the
Rayak-Ḥamāh railway extended to Aleppo and north to Birijik--I was
told that the tickets to Birijik were printed off when the first rails
were laid at Rayak. Then came Germany, with her great scheme of a
railway to Baghdad. She secured a concession for a branch line from
Killiz to Aleppo, and did what she could to prevent the French from
advancing beyond Ḥamāh, on the plea that the French railway would
detract from the value of the German concession--my information, it may
be well imagined, is not from the Imperial Chancery, but from native
sources in Aleppo itself. Since I left, the French have taken up their
interrupted work on the Rayak-Ḥamāh line, though it is to be carried
forward, I believe, not to Birijik, but only as far as Aleppo.[11] It
will be of no benefit to the town. Aleppo merchants do not wish to send
their goods a three days' journey to Bey rout; they want a handy seaport
of their own, which will enable them to pocket all the profits of the
trade, and that port should be Alexandretta. Neither does the Baghdad
railway, if it be continued, offer any prospect of advantage. By a
branch line already existing (it was built by English and French
capitalists, but has recently passed under German control) the railway
will touch the sea at Mersina, but Mersina is as far from Aleppo as is
Beyrout. That a line should be laid direct from Aleppo to Alexandretta
is extremely improbable, since the Sultan fears above all things to
connect the inland caravan routes with the coast, lest the troops of the
foreigner, and particularly of England, should find it perilously easy
to land from their warships and march up country. Aleppo should be
still, as it was in times past, the great distributing centre for the
merchandise of the interior, but traffic is throttled by the fatal
frequency with which the Government commandeers the baggage camels. Last
year, with the Yemen war on hand and the consequent necessity of
transporting men and military stores to the coast that they might be
shipped to the Red Sea, this grievance had become acute. For over a
month trade had been stagnant and goods bound for the coast had lain
piled in the bazaar--a little more and they would cease to come at all,
the camel owners from the East not daring to enter the zone of danger to
their beasts. Here, as in all other Turkish towns, I heard the cry of
official bankruptcy. The Government had no funds wherewith to undertake
the most necessary works, the treasuries were completely empty.
[Illustration 126: THE CASTLE, ALEPPO]
Though my stay was short I was not without acquaintances, among whom the
most important was the Vāli. Kiāzim Pasha is a man of very different
stamp from the Vāli of Damascus. To the extent that the latter is,
according to his lights, a real statesman, in so far is Kiāzim nothing
but a _farceur._ He received me in his harem, for which I was grateful
when I saw his wife, who is one of the most beautiful women that it is
possible to behold. She is tall and stately, with a small dark head, set
on magnificent shoulders, a small straight nose, a pointed chin and
brows arching over eyes that are like dark pools--I could not take mine
from her face while she sat with us. Both she and her husband are
Circassians, a fact that had put me on my guard before the Vāli opened
his lips. They both spoke French, and he spoke it very well. He received
me in an offhand manner, and his first remark was:
"Je suis le jeune pasha qui a fait la paix entre les églises."
I knew enough of his history to realise that he had been Muteserrif of
Jerusalem at a time when the rivalries between the Christian sects had
ended in more murders than are customary, and that some kind of uneasy
compromise had been reached, whether through his ingenuity or the
necessities of the case I had not heard.
"How old do you think I am?" said the pasha.
I replied tactfully that I should give him thirty-five years.
"Thirty-six!" he said triumphantly. "But the consuls listened to me. Mon
Dieu! that was a better post than this, though I am Vāli now. Here I
have no occasion to hold conferences with the consuls, and a man like me
needs the society of educated Europeans."
(Mistrust the second: an Oriental official, who declares that he prefers
the company of Europeans.)
"I am very Anglophil," said he.
I expressed the gratitude of my country in suitable terms.
"But what are you doing in Yemen?" he added quickly.
"Excellency," said I, "we English are a maritime people, and there are
but two places that concern us in all Arabia."
"I know," he interpolated. "Mecca and Medina."
"No," said I. "Aden and Kweit."
"And you hold them both," he returned angrily--yes, I am bound to
confess that the tones of his voice were not those of an Anglo-maniac.
Presently he began to tell me that he alone among pashas had grasped
modern necessities. He meant to build a fine metalled road to
Alexandretta--not that it will be of much use, thought I, if there are
no camels to walk in it--like the road he had built from Samaria to
Jerusalem. That was a road like none other in Turkey--did I know it? I
had but lately travelled over it, and seized the opportunity of
congratulating the maker of it; but I did not think it necessary to
mention that it breaks off at the bottom of the only serious ascent and
does not begin again till the summit of the Judæan plateau is reached.
This is all that need be said of Kiāzim Pasha's methods.
A far more sympathetic acquaintance was the Greek Catholic Archbishop, a
Damascene educated in Paris and for some time cure of the Greek Catholic
congregation in that city, though he is still comparatively young. I had
been given a letter to him, on the presentation of which he received me
with great affability in his own house. We sat in a room filled with
books, the windows opening on to the silent courtyard of his palace, and
talked of the paths into which thought had wandered in Europe; but I
found to my pleasure that for all his learning and his long sojourn in
the West, the Archbishop had remained an Oriental at heart.
"I rejoiced," said he, "when I was ordered to return from Paris to my
own land. There is much knowledge, but little faith in France; while in
Syria, though there is much ignorance, religion rests upon a sure
foundation of belief."
The conclusion that may be drawn from this statement is not flattering
to the Church, but I refrained from comment.
He appeared in the afternoon to return my call--from the Vāli downwards
all must conform to this social obligation--wearing his gold cross and
carrying his archiepiscopal staff in his hand. From his tall brimless
hat a black veil fell down his back, his black robes were edged with
purple, and an obsequious chaplain walked behind him. He found another
visitor sitting with me in the inn parlour, Nicola Ḥomṣi, a rich
banker of his own congregation. Ḥomṣi belongs to an important
Christian family settled in Aleppo, and his banking house has
representatives in Marseilles and in London. He and the Archbishop
between them were fairly representative of the most enterprising and the
best educated classes in Syria. It is they who suffer at the hands of
the Turk,--the ecclesiastic, because of a blind and meaningless official
opposition that meets the Christian at every turn; the banker, because
his interests call aloud for progress, and progress is what the Turk
will never understand. I therefore asked them what they thought would be
the future of the country. They looked at one another, and the
Archbishop answered:
"I do not know. I have thought deeply on the subject, and I can see no
future for Syria, whichever way I turn."
That is the only credible answer I have heard to any part of the Turkish
question.
The air of Aleppo is judged by the Sultan to be particularly suitable
for pashas who have fallen under his displeasure at Constantinople. The
town is so full of exiles that even the most casual visitor can scarcely
help making acquaintance with a few of them. One was lodged in my hotel,
a mild-mannered dyspeptic, whom no one would have suspected of
revolutionary sympathies. Probably he was indeed without them, and owed
his banishment merely to some chance word, reported and magnified by an
enemy or a spy. I was to see many of these exiles scattered up and down
Asia Minor, and none that I encountered could tell me for what cause
they had suffered banishment. Some, no doubt, must have had a suspicion,
and some were perfectly well aware of their offence, but most of them
were as innocently ignorant as they professed to be. Now this has a
wider bearing on the subject of Turkish patriotic feeling than may at
first appear; for the truth is that these exiled pashas are very rarely
patriots paying the price of devotion to a national ideal, but rather
men whom an unlucky turn of events has alienated from the existing
order. If there is any chance that they may be taken back into favour
you will find them nervously anxious, even in exile, to refrain from
action that would tend to increase official suspicion; and it is only
when they have determined that there is no hope for them as long as the
present Sultan lives, that they are willing to associate freely with
Europeans or to speak openly of their grievances. There is, so far as I
can see, no organised body of liberal opinion in Turkey, but merely
individual discontents, founded on personal misfortune. It seems
improbable that when the exiles return to Constantinople on the death of
the Sultan they will provide any scheme of reform or show any desire to
alter a system under which, by the natural revolution of affairs, they
will again find themselves persons of consideration.
There is another form of exile to be met with in Turkey, the honourable
banishment of a distant appointment. To this class, I fancy, belongs
Nāzim Pasha himself, and so does my friend Muḥammad 'Ali Pasha of
Aleppo. The latter is an agreeable man of about thirty, married to an
English wife. He accompanied me to the Vāli's house, obtained
permission that I should see the citadel, and in many ways contrived to
make himself useful. His wife was a pleasant little lady from Brixton;
he had met her in Constantinople and there married her, which may, for
ought I know, have been partly the reason of his fall from favour, the
English nation not being a _gens grata_ at Yildiz Kiosk. Muḥammad 'Ali
Pasha is a gentleman in the full sense of the word, and he seems to have
made his wife happy; but it must be clearly understood that I could not
as a general rule recommend Turkish pashas as husbands to the maidens of
Brixton. Though she played tennis at the Tennis Club, and went to the
sewing parties of the European colony, she was obliged to conform to
some extent to the habits of Moslem women. She never went into the
streets without being veiled; "because people would talk if a pasha's
wife were to show her face," said she.
We reached the citadel in the one hour of sunlight that shone on Aleppo
during my stay, and were taken round by polite officers, splendid in
uniforms and clanking swords and spurs, who were particularly anxious
that I should not miss the small mosque in the middle of the fortress,
erected on the very spot where Abraham milked his cow. The very name of
Aleppo, said they, is due to this historic occurrence, and there can be
no doubt that its Arabic form, Ḥaleb, is composed of the same root
letters as those that form the verb to milk. In spite of the deep
significance of the mosque, I was more interested in the view from the
top of the minaret. The Mesopotamian plain lay outspread before us, as
flat as a board--Euphrates stream is visible from that tower on a clear
day, and indeed you might see Baghdad but for the tiresome way in which
the round earth curves, for there is no barrier to the eye in all that
great level. Below us, were the clustered roofs of bazaar and khān,
with here and there a bird's-eye glimpse of marble courtyards, and here
and there the fine spire of a minaret. Trees and water were lacking in
the landscape, and water is the main difficulty in Aleppo itself. The
sluggish stream that flows out of the Maṭkh dries up in the summer,
and the wells are brackish all the year round. Good drinking water must
be brought from a great distance and costs every household at least a
piastre a day, a serious addition to the cost of living. But the climate
is good, sharply cold in winter and not over hot for more than a month
or two in the summer. Such is Aleppo, the great city with the
high-sounding name and the traces of a splendid past.
[Footnote 11: The line is now completed as far as Aleppo.]
[Illustration 127: A WATER-CARRIER]