we find the journey long. We take steamer to Alexandria, and there
await the first vessel going northwards. We embark in a foreign
steamer, much preferring the Russian, and after passing, perhaps
without sighting, the base of the Nile Delta and the northern terminus
of the Suez Canal, we run rapidly up the coast of the Holy Land. We
are near enough to see certain of its features, and to feel a
throbbing of the heart. Here is Ascalon, the “Bride of Syria,” still
redolent of the days of the lion-hearted king and of the right royal
Saláh-el-Din. There is Jaffa, the Joppa ever full of the memories of
St. Peter. We touch there, but we may not land unless the sea is of
the calmest. Now we steam along the site of Cæsarea, the busy city of
Herod Agrippa, converted into the most silent waste of ruins that it
has ever been our fate to look upon. There we cast anchor for a few
days, at the second station, Hazfa, opposite St. Jean d’Acre, that
“Key of Palestine” from the days of the Crusaders to the times of
Bonaparte, Sir Sydney Smith, and Sir Charles Napier. From this point
we swerve rapidly past the brown headland of Carmel, type of excellent
beauty to the Hebrew poet, past the white Scala Tyrivrum, whose
_promontorium album_ might be a fragment of the white cliffs of
Albion, past the bright little town of Tyre, a phœnix rising a third
time from its ashes, and past Sidon and Lebanon, memorial names
engraved upon our childish hearts too deeply for time or change ever
to erase them from the memory of the man. So memorial, indeed, are all
these regions that the traveller must keep watch and ward upon
himself, under penalty of suffering from what I may call “Holy Land on
the brain.” The essence of it consists in seeing all things, not as
they are, but as they ought to be; for instance, “hanging gardens” at
Damascus, “Roman bridges” in Saracenic arches, and “beautiful blush
marble” in limestone stained with oxide. It wrings the hearts of its
friends when sighting the Plain of Esdraelon, and in gazing upon a
certain mound it exclaims:
What hill is like to Tabor’s hill in beauty and in grace?
This clairvoyance, or idealism, which makes men babble of green fields
where only dust meets the eye of sense is by no means an obscure
disorder of the brain; on the contrary, it is rather aggressive and
violent, whilst writers of guides and handbooks appear abnormally
exposed to it. Hence those who prepare for a pilgrimage to the Holy
Land must temper information and description with many a grain of
salt, or they will undergo no little disappointment. Ideal pleasures
ever excel those of reality; but in this case there is an extra and
inordinate supply of ideality.
We disembark at the hopeless, wind-lashed roadstead of Beyrut, within
the limits of the Land of Promise, but never yet included in the Land
of Possession. The trim little harbour-town, seated upon its sloping
amphitheatre, converted into “_Colossia Julia Augusta Felix Berytus_”
must have been a local Pompeii in the fourth and fifth centuries, and
its feminine bust was found associated with the medallions of
Alexandria and Halicarnassus. During those ages the Roman and Egyptian
galleys jostled one another in the inner port, which now looks like a
dock; their palaces and villas covered the slopes with pillars and
colonnades; paradises and gardens contrasted with proud fanes rising
upon well-wooded and well-watered peaks around――fanes dedicated to
gods and goddesses now remembered only by the classical dictionaries.
In those days, students of philosophy and theology, of law and
language, flocked to Berytus from the most distant lands. But the
terrible earthquake of A.D. 551, which laid waste a pleasant site,
seems to have been the turning-point of its destinies; the roadstead
apparently became shallow, and, despite a noted miracle in the eighth
century, Beyrut saw her glory depart for many a generation. At last,
in the beginning of the nineteenth century, it had sunk to its lowest,
and the petty port, placed under the unimportant Pashalate of Sidon,
numbered barely five hundred souls.
Sir Charles Napier, the sailor, changed all that. In the autumn of
1840 he made Beyrut his headquarters, whence he and his gallant crews
ranged the hill country around and blockaded the ports, till the
career of Ibrahim Pasha was unfortunately cut short. Thereupon the hat
began at once to take precedence of the turban, even of the green
turban. The headquarters of the Pashalate were transferred from Sidon
to Beyrut; European merchants established country houses; missionaries
opened schools for both sexes; the different consular corps contended
for the construction of roads and the abatement of nuisances; whilst
the port was regularly visited by four lines of steamers. Briefly,
Beyrut became the only Europeanised place in Syria, and she will
probably remain so for many years.
The old part of the city still retains some marks of Orientalism; the
old part, with its alleys, wynds, and closes, its wretched lanes, its
narrow and slippery thoroughfares, resembling unroofed sewers, is
peculiarly sombre and Syrian, full of dead men’s bones and all
uncleanliness. Nothing can be meaner than the Customs House, where
millions of piastres annually change hands. Of the stately buildings
which once adorned it no traces remain but three granite monolithic
columns, still towering above modern misery. But the new town which
surrounds the ancient archery is Levantine――that is to say, almost
Italian; the points of difference being a scatter of minarets and a
sprinkling of tropical vegetation, which tells you that you are
somewhat nearer the sun. There are houses and hospitals large enough
each to lodge its battalions; piano and bugle sounds catch the ear;
the carriage is taking the place of the horse and the mule――here, as
in South America, a sure sign of civilisation; and Orientalism is
essentially at a discount. You must not think of Beyrut as an Eastern
city.
Life is easy and death is easier in these sub-tropical regions. Men do
little during six days, and carefully rest on the seventh. For eight
months they saunter through the tepid air of the Mediterranean
seaboard; the other four are spent upon “the mountain” (_i.e._
Lebanon), whose pure, light air is a tonic. The little world of Beyrut
rises rather late, and its business hours are but before the noontide
breakfast, for here, as amongst the classics, the meals are two per
diem. They would be called by our grandfathers dinner and supper; we
say breakfast and dinner. Then a little more work precedes a drive or
a ride: the stroll is not unknown, the constitutional is. The evenings
are spent either in a _café_ or in visits, where whist at times puts
in an appearance, and a profound stillness, like that of Lime Street,
City, begins to reign about 10 p.m. The theatre has not been imported,
although an enterprising Syrian Christian――Moslems cannot originate
such things――has, after a visit to Italy, written several comedies in
the classical style, unfortunately adopting the French rhymed couplet.
The tea party, the little music, and the _soirée dansante_, flourish
in what the Beyrutines are pleased to call the “Paris of Syria.” The
_jeunesse dorée_, in patent leather boots, “boiled shirts,” fold
collars, white ties, and lemon-coloured gloves, loves to don the
sables which the English gentleman affects. When he goes forth to make
merry, he enters gloves in hand; he prefers round dances to square,
and he imitates Europe very literally. But as the Romans kept up the
time-honoured and homely eggs as the end of their richest banquets, so
the “golden youth” of Beyrut prefers the ugly and unpleasant fez or
tarbush. For the rest, young Syria’s ambition is to marry a European
wife, and he does not always get the best of _that_ bargain.
In these lands Society still preserves the fragmentary nature which
belonged to the ancient world. Beyrut, the port, at the time whereof I
write, is distant a single day’s ride from Damascus, the capital of
Syria, yet there is no trace of sympathy between the two, and the
inland say of the seaboard city:
Its sun cracks [wood or teak],
And its water is salt,
And its falls are cloud de Paris [dirty of lead].
Again Damascus jeers:
Perish Beyrut, for the reason that her heat resembles Sakar [the
eighth hell].
No flowing of milk is found in her, though her sons are [stupid
as] cows.
Whereto Beyrut retorts:
At Aleppo man is a dandy and vain,
At Shan [Damascus] he is niggard and mean,
And the Nizri [Egyptian] is simply a rascal.
Whilst “the lying of Damascus” is an illustration in the mouth of
every Beyrutine. We have a rhyme of the kind touching one――
Sir Vicary Gibbs,
The inventor of fibs.
But Damascus says of herself, when describing a man who has became
civilised: “He hath been Damascus’d.” These sharp sayings, indeed, are
not confined to the capital and the port. As of old upon the
Sorrentine Plains, to speak of no other place, every town had a
nickname, a rhyme, or a tale attached to it, which “kinder ryled up”
the inhabitants, so it is the case throughout modern Syria. Thus of
Jerusalem men say, as of Meccah:
Her soil is sacred, her sons are soiled.
Of Tiberias, a town built of basalt:
Her stones are black, and her people are Jews.
Of the Naw’arinah, or people of the Auranitis (the great Hauran
Valley), we are told that:
They thrice bewildered the Apostle of Allah [Mohammed].
The modern inhabitants of ancient Heliopolis, where Burckhardt found
the handsomest woman in Syria, is dubbed:
A Ba’albak bear.
The Halbem village near Damascus is a standing joke with the witty
citizens on account of the huge woollen turbans, the loud voice, and
the peculiar dispositions of the people. They make “kass,” or
lamp-wicks, for Damascus, and it is said that on one occasion, when
their shaykh was imprisoned, they threatened, by withholding the
supply, to keep the city in total darkness. Also, as a bride was being
led home, mounted on an ass, when the doorway was found too low, the
popular voice said that her head should be cut off, till some local
wise man of Gotham suggested that she might dismount.
Beyrut in my day was connected with Damascus by the only carriageable
road in the Holy Land, which was supposed to boast of two others, the
Jaffa-Jerusalem and the Alexandretto-Aleppo. These two, however, are
utterly unfit for wheels, the reason being that they were laid out by
native engineers and administered by the Turks, a nation that has
succeeded in nothing but destruction. The distance is forty-seven and
a half geographical miles, prolonged to sixty by the old road and to
seventy-two by the new one.[8]
We could travel to Damascus by night coach or by day diligence,
preferring the latter, which enables us to see the land. At 4 a.m. we
leave the harbour-town, and we shall reach our destination at 6 p.m.
The section between the Mediterranean and Damascus, the sea and the
Euphrates Desert, is an epitome of Syria, which has been described to
be an epitome of the whole world; a volume might be easily written
upon what is seen during that day’s journey. After a couple of miles
through suburbs, cemeteries, and scattered villas, orchards of
mulberry and olive, lanes hedged with prickly pear and dense clumps of
young stone-pines, the road begins to ascend the westward, or
maritime, slope of the Lebanon. It works gradually towards the left
bank of the great gorge called Wady Hammánah, in one of whose hamlets
Lamartine lived and wrote. After some twelve miles from the Beyrut
Plain, we reach the watershed of the Jurd, or Highlands of the
Lebanon. Here we are about 5,500 feet above sea-level, and feel
immensely relieved, in fine weather at least, from the damp heat of
the malarious seaboard, which robs the stranger of appetite and rest.
The view, too, is charming: a glimpse of sparkling sea, a well-wooded
sandstone region, and a long perspective of blue and purple chain and
peak, cut and torn by valley, gorge, and ravine, scarring both flanks
of the prism. Looking eastward, we sight for the first time that
peculiar basaltic bed which gives rise to the Jordan, the Orontes, and
the Litani (a river of Tyre). It appears to be a volcanic depression
sunk in the once single range of secondary limestone, and splitting it
into two parallel chains, the Libanus and the Anti-Libanus. Viewed
from above it is a Spanish viga, a plain of wondrous wealth and
fertility, whilst the surface appears smooth as a lake. It is,
however, in places dangerously swampy, and though raised some 2,500 to
3,000 feet above sea-level, it is an unwholesome and aguish site,
alternately very hot and very cold, curiously damp and distressingly
dry. And the same may be said of Damascus, which has to the east the
scorching desert, and to the west mountains, mostly snowy: it is no
wonder that the old author called it the “windy.” But the climate of
Damascus is complicated by perhaps the worst and hardest water in
Syria, by the exceeding uncleanliness of the place, and by the habits
of the population. To say that man can exist there at all speaks
volumes in his favour.
Rapidly we run down the eastern, or landward, counterslope of the
Lebanon, remembering the anti-Jacobin couplet:
And down thy slopes romantic Ashdown glides
The Derby dilly carrying six insides.
Before its lowest folds we find the fifth station, Shtóra; here, as it
is now 10 a.m., we breakfast. We at once realise what will be the bill
of fare in the interior. Bread? perhaps. Potatoes? possibly. Beef or
veal? impossible. Pig? ridiculous. Little, in fact, but lean kid and
lamb, mutton, and fowls whose breast-bones pierce their skins. Wine?
yes――dear and bad. Beer or porter, seltzer or soda? decidedly no. In
the winter game is to be had, woodcock and wild duck, hares and
gazelles; but the diet is held to be heating and bilious. Vegetables,
however, are plentiful, and, during the season, fruit is abundant,
with the usual drawback in half-civilised lands: wall fruit is all but
unknown, and, with the exception of the excellent grapes and the
unwholesome apricots, each kind lasts only a few days.
After breakfast we spin by a straight road――such as old Normandy knew
and modern Canada still knows――the breadth of the valley. It is laid
out in little fields, copiously irrigated. The little villages which
stud the plain are, like those of Egypt, not of Syria, built on
mounds, and black with clay plastered over the wicker-work. Every mile
or so has some classical ruin: on our right a Báal temple; to our left
Chalcis ad Belum; whilst six hours of slow riding northwards, or up
the valley, place you at immortal Báalbak, which the Greeks still call
Heliopolis.
A rising plane and a bend to the right land us at the first of the
Anti-Libanus. Instead of ascending and descending this range, as we
did with the Lebanon prism, we thread a ravine called by the Druzes
the Valley of Silk, from their favourite article of plunder. An easy
up-slope leads to Sahlat Judaydah, the dwarf plateau about 3,600 feet
high, where the watershed changes from west to east; farther on to the
wild gorge Wady el Karn (“of the Thorn”), so called from its rich
ribbings and the wreathing and winding of the bed. We find a stiff
climb or a long zigzag at the Akabat el Tin (the Steep of Lime).
The descent of the steep ends with the Daurat el Billau (Zigzag of the
Camel Thorn), and thence we fall into the Sahrat el Dimas, so called
from a village which may have borrowed a name from the penitent thief.
This Sahara has been described with prodigious exaggeration in order
to set off by contrast the charms of the so-termed “sublime Gorge of
Abana,” to which it leads. Measuring some ten kilometres, it is
undoubtedly a rough bit of ground, dry as dust in the summer, and in
winter swept by raving winds and piled with sleet and snow. At its
eastern end the Sahara at once dips into a deep, lateral gorge, which
feeds, after rains, the Barada Valley, and here we remark that curious
contrast of intense fertility with utter, hopeless barrenness which
characterises inner Spain. Life is in that thick line of the darkest
and densest evergreen, which, smiling under the fierce and fiery
sun-glare, threads the side of the valley, in the wholesome perfume of
the wild plants, and in the gush and murmur of waters making endless
music. Death is represented by the dull grey formation standing up in
tombstones, by the sterile yellow lime-rock, and by the chalk,
blinding white; and the proportion of good to bad is as one to twenty.
This verdure is, the Arabs say, a cooling to the eye of the beholder;
it is like the aspect of the celadon-coloured sea that beats upon the
torrid West African shores. With the author of that charming book
“Eothen,” “you float along (for the delight is as the delight of
bathing) through green, wavy fields and down into the cool verdure of
groves and gardens, and you quench hot eyes in shade as though in
deep, rushing waters.”
The beginning of the end is at the tenth and last station, El Hamah,
meaning the Head of the Valley, and we halt here for a cup of coffee.
The next place of note is Dummar; here we cross the Barada torrent.
This place is, despite its low site and hot and cold air, a favourite
for villas; and certain wealthy Damascus usurers have here built large
piles, as remarkable for the barbarity of their outer frescoes as for
the tawdry decoration of the interior. The witty Damasceines call them
“traps,” because they are periodically let to high officials for other
considerations than hire. And now, with its slate-coloured stream,
garnished with weirs on our right, the valley becomes broader and more
important; the upper cliff’s are tunnelled into cut caves, Troglodyte
dwellings and sepulchres of the ancients; seven veins at high levels
and at low levels branch off from the main artery; and, after passing
a natural gateway formed by two shield-like masses of rock, we suspect
that Damascus is before us.
The first sight of Damascus was once famous in travel. But then men
rode on horseback, and turned, a little beyond Damascus, sharply to
the left of the present line. They took what was evidently the old
Roman road, and which is still, on account of its being a short cut,
affected by muleteers. Now it is nothing but an ugly climb up
sheet-rock and rolling stones, with bars and holes dug by the armed
hoof of many a generation. They then passed through El Zaarub (the
Spout); this is the old way, sunk some ten feet deep in the rock till
it resembles an uncovered tunnel, and polished like glass by the
traffic and transit of ages. At its mouth you suddenly turn a corner
and see Damascus lying in panorama, a few hundred feet below you. “A
flint set in emeralds” is the Damascus citizen’s description of what
El Islam calls, and miscalls, the “smile of the Prophet” (Mohammed).
Like Stambul, it is beautiful from afar, as it is foul and sore
within, morally and physically. The eye at once distinguishes a long
head, the northern suburb “El Salituzzah”; a central nucleus,
crescent-shaped and fronting the bed of the Barada; and a long tail,
or southern suburb, “El Maydan.” These three centres of whitewashed
dwellings and skyline, fretted with dome and minaret, are surrounded
and backed by a mass of evergreen orchard, whose outlines are sharply
defined by irrigation, whilst beyond the scatter of outlying villages,
glare the sunburnt yellow and the parched rich brown of the desert,
whose light blue hillocks define the eastern horizon.
The prosaic approach by the French road shows little beyond ruins and
graveyards: Damascus outside is a mass of graveyards, the “Great” and
“Little Camps” of Constantinople, only without their cypresses; whilst
within it is all graveyards and ruins, mixed with crowded and steaming
bazaars. This world of graves reminds one of Job’s forlorn man
dwelling “in desolate cities, and in houses which no man inhabiteth,
which are ready to become heaps.” The Barada in olden times had its
stone embankment; the walls are now in ruins. On our right is a ruined
bridge once leading to a large coffee-house, both also in ruins. As we
advance we pass other ruins. But though it was prophesied that
Damascus should be a “ruinous heap,” her position forbids
annihilation. The second of Biblical cities, she has been destroyed
again and again; her houses have been levelled with the ground, and
the Tartar has played hockey with the hearts of her sons. Still she
sits upon the eastern folds of the Anti-Libanus and on her
gold-rolling river, boldly overlooking the desert at her base.
Damascus, not Rome, deserves, if any does, to be entitled the Eternal
City.
I passed twenty-three months (October 1st, 1869, to August 20th,
1871), on and off, at this most picturesque and unpleasant of
residences. It was then in the transitional state, neither of Asia nor
of Europe. To one who had long lived in the outer East, a return to
such an ambiguous state of things was utterly disenchanting. Hassan,
digging or delving in long beard and long clothes, looks more like an
overgrown baby than the romantic being which your fancies paint him.
Fatima, with a coloured kerchief (not a nose-bag) over her face,
possibly spotted for greater hideousness, with Marseilles gloves and
French bottines of yellow satin, trimmed with fringe and bugles,
protruding from the white calico which might be her winding-sheet, is
an absurdity: she reminded me of sundry “kings” on the West African
shore, whose toilet consists of a bright bandanna and a chimney-pot
hat, of the largest dimensions, coloured the liveliest sky-blue.
The first steps to be taken at Damascus were to pay and receive
visits, to find a house, to hire servants, to buy horses, and, in
fact, to settle ourselves. It proved no easy matter. Certain persons
had amused themselves with spreading a report that my pilgrimage to
Meccah had aroused Moslem fanaticism, and perhaps might cost me my
life. They, as well as I, knew far better, so I was not surprised at
the kind and even friendly reception given to me by Emir Abdel Kadir,
of Algerine fame, and by the Dean of the great Cathedral el Amahi, the
late Shaykh Abdahah el Halati. And I remember with satisfaction that,
to the hour of my quitting Damascus, the Moslems never showed for me
any but the most cordial feeling.
Other British consuls had been of a stay-at-home disposition, seeing
nothing beyond the length of their noses. I was of a roving one, and
determined to see all I could, and penetrate to the inner heart of
Syria. To be shut up in Damascus was to be in prison; the breath of
the desert was liberty. I soon wandered afield. One of my earliest
excursions was to Palmyra. Until the spring of 1870 a traveller
visiting Syria for the express purpose, perhaps, of seeing Palmyra,
“Tadmor in the Wilderness,” after being kept waiting for months at
Damascus, had to return disappointed. Only the rich could afford the
large Bedouin escort, for which even six thousand francs and more have
been demanded. Add to this the difficulties, hardships, and dangers of
the journey, the heat of the arid desert, want of water, chances of
attack, the long forced marches by night and hiding by day, ending
with a shabby halt of forty-eight hours at a place for which so many
sacrifices had been made, and where a fortnight is the minimum
required.
Since the beginning of the last century the Porte has had in view a
military occupation of the caravan route between Damascus and the
Euphrates. “The Turk will catch up your best hare on the back of a
lame donkey,” say the Arabs, little thinking what high praise they
award to the conquering race. The _cordon militaire_ was to extend
from Damascus, _viâ_ Jayrud, Karyatayn, Palmyra, and Sukhnah, to Daye
on the great rim. The wells were to be commanded by block houses, the
roads to be cleared by movable columns, and thus the plundering
Bedouin, who refuse all allegiance to the Sultan, would be kept,
perforce, in the dan, or desert, between the easternmost offsets of
the Anti-Libanus and the pitch uplands of Nijd. This project was
apparently rescued from the fate of good intentions by Osman Bey, a
Hungarian officer who had served the Porte since 1848. He moved from
Hamah with a body of some 1,600 men――enough to cut his way through
half the vermin in Araby the Unblest. Presently, after occupying
Palmyra, building barracks, and restoring the old Druze Castle, he
proceeded eastward to Sukhnah, whence he could communicate with the
force expected to march westward from Baghdad. The welcome
intelligence was hailed with joy: Palmyra, so long excluded from the
Oriental tour, lay open to the European traveller; half a step had
been taken towards a Euphrates Valley Railway; at Damascus men
congratulated themselves upon the new line of frontier, which was
naturally expected to strengthen and to extend the limits of Syria;
and the merchant rejoiced to learn that his caravan would be no longer
liable to wholesale plunder.
A fair vision, doomed soon to fade! After six months or so of
occupation, Osman Bey, whose men were half starving, became tired of
Palmyra, and was recalled to Damascus. The garrison was reduced to two
hundred men under a captain, whose only friend was the raki bottle,
and the last I saw of the garrison was his orderly riding into Hauran,
with the huge, empty demijohns dangling at his saddle-bow. The Bedouin
waxed brave, and, in the spring of 1871, I was obliged to send
travellers to Palmyra by a long circuit, _viâ_ the north and the
north-west.[9]