"Mister! mister! Six! six franc!"
Confound him! He got hold of that bell again and gave it a jingle. I
handed him the six francs. If he had only left it alone, I think I could
have held out.
Still, as I look at it now, hanging here in my state-room, and think of
the long lonely nights and the days of sun and storm it has seen, of the
far journeys it has travelled in its weary way down the years to me, I
do not so much mind that final franc after all.
XXIII
INTO SYRIA
I picked up a cold that rainy day at Ephesus. Not an ordinary sniffling
cold, but a wrenching, racking cold that made every bone and every tooth
jump, and set my eyes to throbbing like the ship's engines. I felt sure
I was going to die when we arrived in the harbor of Beirut, and decided
that it would be better to die on deck; so I crawled out and dressed,
and crept into a steamer-chair, and tried to appreciate the beautiful
city that had arisen out of the sea--the upper gateway to Syria.
The Patriarch came along, highly elate. This was where he belonged; this
was home; this was Phoenicia itself! Fifteen hundred years B.C. Beirut
had been a great Phoenician seaport, he said, and most of the rare
handiwork mentioned in ancient history and mythology had been wrought in
this neighborhood. The silver vase of Achilles, the garment which Hecuba
gave to Minerva, and the gold-edged bowl of Telemachus were all
Phoenician, according to the Patriarch, who hinted that he rather
hoped to find some such things at Beirut; also some of the celebrated
Phoinus, or purple dye, which gave the tribe its name. I said no doubt
he would, and, being sick and suffering, added that he might dye himself
dead for all I cared, which was a poor joke--besides being an
afterthought, when the Patriarch was well out of range.
I had no idea of going ashore. I was miserably sorry, too, for I was
stuffed with guide-book knowledge about Baalbec and Damascus, and had
looked forward to that side-trip from the beginning. I knew how Moses
felt on Mount Pisgah now, and I was getting so sorry for myself I could
hardly stand it, when suddenly the bugle blew the sharp call, "All
ashore!" Laura, age fourteen, came racing down the deck, and before I
knew it I had my bag--packed the night before--and was going down the
ship's ladder into a boat, quarrelling meantime with one of the
Reprobates as to whether Beirut was the Berothai of the Old Testament,
where David smote Hadadezer and took "exceeding much brass," or the
Berytus of the Roman conquest. It was of no consequence, but it gave
life a new purpose, for I wanted to prove that he was wrong. Wherefore I
forgot I was going to die, and presently we were ashore and in a
railway-station where there was a contiguous little train ready to start
for Baalbec and Damascus, with a lot of men selling oranges, of which
Laura and I bought a basketful for a franc, climbed aboard, the bell
rang--and the funeral was postponed.
The road followed the sea for a distance, and led through fields of
flowers. I had never seen wildflowers like those. They were the crimson
anemone mingled riotously with a gorgeous yellow flower--I did not learn
its name. The ground was literally massed with them. Never was such a
prodigality of bloom.
From Beirut to Baalbec is only about sixty miles; but it takes pretty
much all day to get there, for the Lebanon Mountains lie between, and
this is a deliberate land. We did not mind. There was plenty to see all
along, and our leisurely train gave us ample time.
There were the little stations, where we stopped anywhere from five to
fifteen minutes, and got out and mingled with the curious rural life;
there were the hills, that had little soil on them, but were terraced
and fruitful--some of them to the very summit; there was the old
Damascus road, winding with us, or above us, or below us--the road over
which Abraham may have travelled, and Adam, too, for that matter, and
Eve, when they were sent out of their happy garden. Eden lay not far
from here, and the exiles would be likely to come this way, I think. We
saw plenty of groups that might have been Abraham and his household, or
any of the patriarchs. I did not notice any that suggested Adam and Eve.
The road had another interest for me. Forty-two years ago, before the
railroad came this way, the _Quaker City_ pilgrims toiled up through the
summer heat, setting out on the "long trip" through the full length of
Palestine. Nobody makes it in summer now. Few make it at all, except by
rail and in carriages, with good hostelries at the end of every stage.
Still, I am glad those first pilgrims made it, or we should not have had
that wonderful picture of Syrian summer-time, nor of "Jericho" and
"Baalbec." Those two horses are worth knowing--in literature--and I
tried to imagine that little early party of excursionists climbing the
steep path to Palestine on their sorry nags.
It is warm in Syria, even now, but we were not too warm, riding;
besides, we were going steadily uphill, and by-and-by somebody pointed
out a white streak along the mountain-top, and it was snow. Then, after
a long time, we got to a place where the vegetation was very scanty and
there were no more terraced hills, but only barren peaks and sand, where
the wind blew cold and colder, and presently the snow lay right along
our way. We had reached the highest point then--five thousand feet above
the sea. In five hours we had come thirty-six miles--thirty-five in
length and one straight up in the air. Somebody said:
"Look, there is Mount Hermon!"
And, sure enough, away to the south, though nigh upon us it seemed--so
close that one might put out his hand and touch it, almost--there rose a
stately, snow-clad elevation which, once seen, dominated the barren
landscape. It was so pure white against the blue--so impressive in its
massive dignity--the eye followed it across every vista, longed for it
when immediate peaks rose between, welcomed it when time after time it
rose grandly into view.
With an altitude of between nine and ten thousand feet, Mount Hermon is
the highest mountain in Syria, I believe--certainly the most important.
The Bible is full of it. The Amorites and the Hivites, and most of the
other tribes that Joshua buried or persuaded to go away, had their lands
under Mount Hermon (all of them in sight of it), and that grand old hill
looked down on Joshua's slaughter of men and women and little children,
and perhaps thought it a puny performance to be undertaken in the name,
and by the direction, of God.
Joshua established Mount Hermon as the northern boundary of Palestine,
and from whatever point the Israelite turned his face northward, he saw
its white summit against the blue. It became symbolic of grandeur,
stability, purity, and peace. It was to one of its three peaks that
Christ came when, with Peter, James, and John, He withdrew to "an high
mountain apart" for the Transfiguration. So it became sanctified as a
sort of holy judgment-seat.[5]
Down the Lebanon slope and across the valley to Reyak, a Syrian village
in the sand, at the foot of the Anti-Lebanon range. Reyak is the parting
of the ways--the railways--that lead to Damascus and Baalbec, and there
is a lunch-room there--a good one by Turkish standards. It was our first
complete introduction to Turkish food--that is a diet of nuts, dates,
oranges, and curious meat and vegetable preparations--and I ate a good
deal for a dying man. Then I went outside to look at the population, and
wonder what these people, who scratch a living out of the sand and stone
barrens, would do in a fertile country like America. They would consider
it heaven, I thought.
At the end of the station sat a drowsy, stoutish man in semi-European
dress, holding a few pairs of coarse home-knit socks, evidently for
sale. I stopped and talked to him. He spoke English very well, and when
he told me his story I marvelled.
He had been in America; in Brooklyn; had carried on business
there--something in Syrian merchandise--and had done very well. He had
married there--a Syrian woman; his children were born there--Americans.
Then one day he had sold out and brought them all to this flat-topped
mud village in the Syrian sand. Why had he done it? Well, he could
hardly tell; he had wanted to see Syria again--he could think of no
other reason. No, his wife did not like it, nor the children--not at
all.
He pointed out his mud hut a little way from the station, and I could
not blame them. He would go back some day--yes, certainly. Meantime, his
wife is earning money for the trip by knitting the coarse socks which he
sells around the station at Reyak at a few piastres a pair.
Our train was about ready to start for Baalbec, and I was lingering over
a little collection of relics which a blind pedler offered, when I felt
a hand on my shoulder and heard my name called. I turned and was face to
face with the artist Jules Gurin, of New York. I had known nothing of
his presence in Syria, he had known nothing of our coming. He was going
in one direction, I in another. In this remote waste our lines had
crossed. He was so glad to see me--he thought I had a supply of cigars.
I never saw a man's enthusiasm die so suddenly as his did when I told
him how I had been sick that morning and forgotten them.
Altogether that was a curious half hour. Reyak is the most uninteresting
place in Syria, but I shall always remember it.
FOOTNOTES:
[5] One tradition places the Transfiguration on Mount Tabor, but Tabor
is fifty miles away whereas Cesarea Philippi, to which the little group
descended, lies at the foot of Hermon.
XXIV
THE HOUSE THAT CAIN BUILT
It was well along in the afternoon when we reached Baalbec, and drove
through a cloud of dust to a hotel which stands in a mud village near
the ruins. Long before we arrived we could make out massive remnants of
what was once a wonder of the world, and remains no less so to-day. We
could distinguish sections of the vast wall, and, towering high above
them, the six columns of the Temple of the Sun.
I knew those six columns. I had carried a picture of them in my mind
ever since that winter so long ago when the old first edition of the
_New Pilgrim's Progress_ became familiar in our household. I know they
were seventy-five feet high and eight feet through, and had blocks of
stone on the top of them as big as our old-fashioned parlor at home;
also, that they were probably erected by giants. Those items had made an
impression that had lasted. Now, here they were, outlined against the
sky, in full view and perfectly familiar, but never in the world could
they be as big as the book said. Why, these were as slender and graceful
as fairy architecture! I recalled that there were some big stones to
see, stones laid by Cain and his giants when the world was new. Perhaps
they would not be so very big, after all. I had a feeling that we ought
to hurry.
We did hurry--Laura and I. We did not wait for the party, but set out
straight for the ruins, through narrow streets and byways, with beggars
at our heels. By-and-by we came to a rushing brook, and just beyond it
were the temple walls.
I remembered now. There had been a wonderful garden outside the temples
in the old days, and this stream had made it richly verdant and
beautiful. There was no garden any more. Only some grass and bushes,
such as will gather about an oasis.
They would not let us into the temple enclosure until our party came, so
we wandered around the outer walls and gazed up at cornices and capitals
and entablatures as beautiful, we thought, as any we had seen at Athens.
Then the party arrived, and there was a gatekeeper to let us in.
It would take a man in perfect health to carry away even an approximate
impression of Baalbec. Trying to remember now, I seem to have spent the
afternoon in some amazing delirium of tumbling walls and ruined
colonnades; of heaped and piled fragments; of scarred and defaced
sculpture; of Titanic masonry flung about by the fury of angry gods.
Athens had been a mellowed and hallowed dream of the past; Ephesus a
vast suggestion of ancient greatness buried and overgrown; Baalbec was a
wild agony of destruction and desecration crying out to the sky.
[Illustration: FROM THE TIME OF ADAM BAALBEC BECAME A PLACE OF ALTARS]
It is a colossal object-lesson in what religions can do when they try.
Nobody really knows who began to build temples here, but from the time
of Adam Baalbec became a place of altars. Before history began it was
already a splendid Syrian city, associated with the names of Cain,
Nimrod, and Abraham, and it may have been Cain himself who raised the
first altar here when he made that offering for which the Lord "had not
respect." More likely, however--and this is the Arab belief--it was the
city of refuge built by Cain, whose fear must have been very large if
one may judge from the size of the materials used.
Cain could not fail to build a temple, however. He would try to ease the
punishment which he declared was greater than he could bear, and with
burnt offering and architecture would seek to propitiate an angry God.
How long the worship inaugurated by him lasted we can only surmise--to
the flood, maybe--but the Phoenicians came next, and set up temples to
their Gods, whoever they were, and after the Phoenicians came Solomon,
who built a temple to a sort of compromise god by the name of Baal--a
deity left over by the Phoenicians and adapted to Judean needs and
ceremonies--hence the name, Baalbec. Solomon built the temple to Baal to
satisfy certain of his heathen wives, and he made the place a strong
city to rival Damascus--the latter having refused to acknowledge his
reign.
After Solomon, the Romans. Two hundred years or so after Christ--in the
twilight of their glory and their gods--the Romans under Elagabalus
brought the glory of Grecian architecture to Baalbec, named the place
Heliopolis, and set up temples that were--and are--the wonder of the
world.
What satisfactory gods they must have been to deserve temples such as
these--each shrine a marvel of size and beauty--more splendid even than
those of the Acropolis of Athens in their lavish magnificence! This
carved doorway to the Temple of Jupiter; this frieze of the Temple of
Bacchus; these towering six columns of the Temple of the Sun; still
holding their matchless Corinthian capitals and amazing entablature to
the sky--where else will one find their equals, and what must they have
been in their prime, when these scarred remnants can still overpower the
world!
It was another religion that brought ruin here--early
Christianity--presently followed by early Mohammedanism--each burning
with vandalic zeal. It was the good Emperor Constantine that first upset
the Roman gods and their temples. Then Theodosius came along and pulled
down the great structures, and out of the pieces built a church that was
an architectural failure. Then all the early Christians in the
neighborhood took a hand in pulling down and overturning; hacking away
at the heathen sculpture and tracery--climbing high up the walls to scar
and disfigure--to obliterate anything resembling a face. Then pretty
soon the early Mohammedans came along and carried on the good work, and
now and then an earthquake took a hand, until by-and-by the place became
the ghastly storm of destruction it appears to-day.
I was ill when I saw Baalbec. My flesh was burning and my pulse
throbbing with fever. Perhaps my vision was distorted and the nightmare
seemed worse than it really is, but as I stood in that field of
mutilation and disorder, gazing along its wrecked and insulted glory,
and through tumbling arch and ruined door caught vistas of fertile and
snow-capped hill, I seemed to see a vision of what it had been in the
day of its perfection. Also, I felt an itch to meet one or two of those
early enthusiasts--some night in a back alley when they were not looking
for me and I had a piece of scantling--I felt a sick man's craving, as
it were, to undertake a little damage and disfiguration on my own
account. Oh, well, it's all in the eternal story. Religions established
these temples; religions pulled them down. The followers of one faith
have always regarded as heathen those which preceded them. There lies a
long time ahead. Will the next religion restore Baalbec or complete its
desolation?
Some little Syrian girls beset Laura on the way back to the hotel and
tried to sell her some bead embroidery which it seems they make in a
mission-school established here by the English. One of them--a little
brown madonna of about ten--could speak English quite well. Laura asked
her name.
"Name Mary," she said.
"But that's an English name."
She trotted along silently, thinking; then said:
"No, Syria--Mary Syria name."
Sure enough, we had forgotten. The first Mary had indeed been Syrian,
and I imagined her, now, a child--brown, barefoot and beautiful, like
this Mary, with the same pathetic eyes. Laura--young, fair-skinned and
pink-cheeked--was a marvel to these children. They followed her to the
door, and when she could not buy all their stock in trade they insisted
on making her presents, and one of them--little Mary--begged to be taken
to America.
We saw the celebrated "big stones" next morning. Several of them are
built into the lower tiers of the enclosing temple wall, and three of
these--the largest ones--measure each from sixty-two to sixty-four feet
long and are thirteen feet thick! They rest upon stones somewhat
thicker, but shorter--stones about the size of a two-story cottage--and
these in turn rest on masonry still less gigantic. Evidently it was the
intention of the builders to increase the size of their material as they
went higher, and the big block still in the quarry carries out that
idea.
Authorities differ as to when these big stones were laid, and how. Some
claim that they were put here by the Romans, because they find Greek
axe-marks on the ones below them. But then I found American jack-knife
marks on them too, and the names of certain of my countrymen, which
proves nothing except that these puny people had been there and left
their measurement. If these monster stones had been laid by the Romans
only two thousand years ago, we should have had some knowledge of the
means by which they were transported and lifted into place. There is no
such record, and nowhere else at least did the Romans ever attempt
structure of such gigantic proportions. That is precisely the word,
"gigantic," for there were giants in the days when these stones were
laid--stones that could have been there six thousand years as well as
two thousand, being of such material as forms the foundations of the
world.
If Cain did any building at Baalbec, he did it here. He did not finish
the work, it would seem, or at least not in these proportions. Perhaps
his giants deserted him--struck, as we say to-day. Perhaps the hands of
men were no longer against him and the need of this mighty bulwark about
his place of refuge ceased. At all events, the first stone hewn out for
the next layer stands in the quarry still.
We drove over there. It was half a mile away, at least--possibly a mile,
down hill and rather rough going. The stones we saw in the wall were
brought up that road. The one standing in the quarry had been lifted and
started a little, and would have been on its way presently, if the
strike, or the amnesty, had not interfered.
It is seventy-two feet long and seventeen feet thick. Try to think of a
plain box building, a barn or a store-house, say, of that size, then
mentally convert it into a solid block of stone. Mark Twain likens it to
two freight-cars placed end to end, but _it is also as high and as
wide_. _Eight freight-cars set four and four_ would just about express
it! Think of that! Think of moving a stone of that size!
It is squared and dressed and ready to be taken to the temple wall. It
will never be taken there. Perhaps that last item is gratuitous
information, but at least it is authentic. We have no means of moving
that stone half a mile up a rough hill in these puny times, and the
speculations as to how Cain did it have been mainly hazy and
random--quite random.
One writer suggests that such stones were "rolled up an inclined plane
of earth prepared for the purpose." I should love to see a stone like
that rolled. I'd travel all the way to Baalbec again for the sight, and
they could prepare the inclined plane any way they pleased. An Oriental
authority declares that these stones were moved and laid by the demon
Echmoudi, which is better than the rolling idea. I confess a weakness
for Echmoudi, but I fear hard cold science will frown him out of court.
It has taken an Englishman to lead the way to light. He says that Cain
employed mastodons to do his moving. Now we are on the way to truth, but
we must go further--a good deal further. Cain did employ mastodons, but
only for his light work. Even mastodons would balk at pulling stones
like these. Cain would use brontosaurs for such work as that. There were
plenty of them loafing about, and I can imagine nothing more impressive
than Cain standing on a handy elevation overlooking his force of giants
and a sixteen-span brontosaur team yanking a stone as big as a bonded
warehouse up Baalbec hill.
Truly, there is no reason why those monster stones should not have been
quarried a million or so years ago and moved by the vast animal
creatures of that period. We have biblical authority for the giants, and
I have seen a brontosaur in the New York Museum that seemed to go with
stones of about that size. Think of any force the Romans could summon
rolling a three-million-pound square stone up an inclined plane.
Preposterous! The brontosaur's the thing.
XXV
GOING DOWN TO DAMASCUS
There is a good deal of country, mainly desert, between Baalbec and
Damascus, and a good many barren hills. Crossing the Anti-Lebanon
mountains there is a little of water and soil and much red, rocky waste.
Here and there a guide pointed out a hill where Cain killed Abel--not
always the same hill, but no matter, it was a hill in this neighborhood;
any one of them would make a good place. Occasionally the train passed a
squalid village, perched on a lonely shelf--a single roof stretching
over most of the houses--the inhabitants scarcely visible. We wondered
where they got their sustenance. They were shepherds, perhaps, but where
did their flocks feed?
Across the divide, between snow-capped hills, and suddenly we are face
to face with green banks and the orchard bloom of spring. We have
reached the Abana, the river which all the ages has flowed down to
Damascus with its gift of eternal youth. For as the desert defends, so
the river sustains Damascus, and the banks of the Abana (they call it
the Barada now) are just a garden--the Garden of Eden, if old tales be
true.
It is not hard to believe that tradition here, at this season. Peach,
apricot, almond, and plum fairly sing with blossom; birch and sycamore
blend a cadence of tender green; the red earth from which Adam was
created (and which his name signifies) forms an abundant underchord. If
we could linger a little by these pleasant waters we might learn the
lilt of the tree of life--its whisper of the forbidden fruit.
We are among our older traditions here--the beginnings of the race. We
have returned after devious wanderings. These people whom we see leading
donkeys and riding camels, tending their flocks and bathing in the
Abana, they are our relatives--sons and daughters of Adam. Only, they
did not move away. They stayed on the old place, as it were, and
preserved the family traditions, and customs. I am moved to get out and
call them "cousin" and embrace them, and thank them for not trailing off
after the false gods and frivolities of the West.
[Illustration: SO THE PATRIARCHS JOURNEYED; SO, TWO THOUSAND YEARS
LATER, JOSEPH AND MARY TRAVELLED INTO EGYPT]