PASS OF THE LEBANON
“THE ruins of Baalbec!” Shall I scatter the vague, solemn thoughts and
all the airy phantasies which gather together when once those words are
spoken, that I may give you instead tall columns and measurements true,
and phrases built with ink? No, no; the glorious sounds shall still
float on as of yore, and still hold fast upon your brain with their own
dim and infinite meaning.
Come! Baalbec is over; I got “rather well” out of that.
The path by which I crossed the Lebanon is like, I think, in its features
to one which you must know, namely, that of the Foorca in the Bernese
Oberland. For a great part of the way I toiled rather painfully through
the dazzling snow, but the labour of ascending added to the excitement
with which I looked for the summit of the pass. The time came. There
was a minute in the which I saw nothing but the steep, white shoulder of
the mountain, and there was another minute, and that the next, which
showed me a nether heaven of fleecy clouds that floated along far down in
the air beneath me, and showed me beyond the breadth of all Syria west of
the Lebanon. But chiefly I clung with my eyes to the dim, steadfast line
of the sea which closed my utmost view. I had grown well used of late to
the people and the scenes of forlorn Asia—well used to tombs and ruins,
to silent cities and deserted plains, to tranquil men and women sadly
veiled; and now that I saw the even plain of the sea, I leapt with an
easy leap to its yonder shores, and saw all the kingdoms of the West in
that fair path that could lead me from out of this silent land straight
on into shrill Marseilles, or round by the pillars of Hercules to the
crash and roar of London. My place upon this dividing barrier was as a
man’s puzzling station in eternity, between the birthless past and the
future that has no end. Behind me I left an old, decrepit world;
religions dead and dying; calm tyrannies expiring in silence; women
hushed and swathed, and turned into waxen dolls; love flown, and in its
stead mere royal and “paradise” pleasures. Before me there waited glad
bustle and strife; love itself, an emulous game; religion, a cause and a
controversy, well smitten and well defended; men governed by reasons and
suasion of speech; wheels going, steam buzzing—a mortal race, and a
slashing pace, and the devil taking the hindmost—taking _me_, by Jove!
(for that was my inner care), if I lingered too long upon the difficult
pass that leads from thought to action.
I descended and went towards the west.
The group of cedars remaining on this part of the Lebanon is held sacred
by the Greek Church on account of a prevailing notion that the trees were
standing at a time when the temple of Jerusalem was built. They occupy
three or four acres on the mountain’s side, and many of them are gnarled
in a way that implies great age, but except these signs I saw nothing in
their appearance or conduct that tended to prove them contemporaries of
the cedars employed in Solomon’s Temple. The final cause to which these
aged survivors owed their preservation was explained to me in the evening
by a glorious old fellow (a Christian chief), who made me welcome in the
valley of Eden. In ancient times the whole range of the Lebanon had been
covered with cedars, and as the fertile plains beneath became more and
more infested by Government officers and tyrants of high and low degree,
the people by degrees abandoned them and flocked to the rugged mountains,
which were less accessible to their indolent oppressors. The cedar
forests gradually shrank under the axe of the encroaching multitudes, and
seemed at last to be on the point of disappearing entirely, when an aged
chief who ruled in this district, and who had witnessed the great change
effected even in his own lifetime, chose to say that some sign or
memorial should be left of the vast woods with which the mountains had
formerly been clad, and commanded accordingly that this group of trees
(which was probably situated at the highest point to which the forest had
reached) should remain untouched. The chief, it seems, was not moved by
the notion I have mentioned as prevailing in the Greek Church, but rather
by some sentiment of veneration for a great natural feature—a sentiment
akin, perhaps, to that old and earthborn religion, which made men bow
down to creation before they had yet learnt how to know and worship the
Creator.
The chief of the valley in which I passed the night was a man of large
possessions, and he entertained me very sumptuously. He was highly
intelligent, and had had the sagacity to foresee that Europe would
intervene authoritatively in the affairs of Syria. Bearing this idea in
mind, and with a view to give his son an advantageous start in the
ambitious career for which he was destined, he had hired for him a
teacher of the Italian language, the only accessible European tongue.
The tutor, however, who was a native of Syria, either did not know or did
not choose to teach the European forms of address, but contented himself
with instructing his pupil in the mere language of Italy. This
circumstance gave me an opportunity (the only one I ever had, or was
likely to have) {296} of hearing the phrases of Oriental courtesy in a
European tongue. The boy was about twelve or thirteen years old, and
having the advantage of being able to speak to me without the aid of an
interpreter, he took a prominent part in doing the honours of his
father’s house. He went through his duties with untiring assiduity, and
with a kind of gracefulness which by mere description can scarcely be
made intelligible to those who are unacquainted with the manners of the
Asiatics. The boy’s address resembled a little that of a highly polished
and insinuating Roman Catholic priest, but had more of girlish
gentleness. It was strange to hear him gravely and slowly enunciating
the common and extravagant compliments of the East in good Italian, and
in soft, persuasive tones. I recollect that I was particularly amused at
the gracious obstinacy with which he maintained that the house in which I
was so hospitably entertained belonged not to his father, but to me. To
say this once was only to use the common form of speech, signifying no
more than our sweet word “welcome,” but the amusing part of the matter
was that, whenever in the course of conversation I happened to speak of
his father’s house or the surrounding domain, the boy invariably
interfered to correct my pretended mistake, and to assure me once again
with a gentle decisiveness of manner that the whole property was really
and exclusively mine, and that his father had not the most distant
pretensions to its ownership.
I received from my host much, and (as I now know) most true, information
respecting the people of the mountains, and their power of resisting
Mehemet Ali. The chief gave me very plainly to understand that the
mountaineers, being dependent upon others for bread and gunpowder (the
two great necessaries of martial life), could not long hold out against a
power which occupied the plains and commanded the sea; but he also
assured me, and that very significantly, that if this source of weakness
were provided against, _the mountaineers were to be depended upon_; he
told me that in ten or fifteen days the chiefs could bring together some
fifty thousand fighting men.