we were with photographs of them, we were struck with surprise when
we climbed up into the great court, that is, to the platform of the
temples. The platform extends over eight hundred feet from east to west,
an elevated theatre for the display of some of the richest architecture
in the world. The general view is broad, impressive, inspiring beyond
anything else in Egypt or Syria; and when we look at details, the ruins
charm us with their beauty. Round three sides of the great court runs a
wall, the interior of which, recessed and niched, was once adorned
with the most elaborate carving in designs more graceful than you would
suppose stone could lend itself to, with a frieze of garlands of vines,
flowers, and fruits. Of the so-called great Temple of Baal at the west
end of the platform, only six splendid Corinthian columns remain. The
so-called Temple of the Sun or Jupiter, to the south of the other and
on a lower level, larger than the Parthenon, exists still in nearly its
original form, although some of the exterior columns have fallen,
and time and the art-hating Moslems have defaced some of its finest
sculpture. The ceiling between the outer row of columns and the wall
of this temple is, or was, one of the most exquisite pieces of
stone-carving ever executed; the figures carved in the medallions seem
to have anticipated the Gothic genius, and the exquisite patterns
in stone to have suggested the subsequent Saracenic invention. The
composite capitals of the columns offer an endless study; stone roses
stand out upon their stems, fruit and flowers hang and bloom in the
freedom of nature; the carving is all bold and spirited, and the
invention endless. This is no doubt work of the Roman period after the
Christian era, but it is pervaded by Greek feeling, and would seem to
have been executed by Greek artists.
In the centre of the great court (there is a small six-sided court to
the east of the larger one, which was once approached by a great flight
of steps from below) are remains of a Christian basilica, referred to
the reign of Theodosius. Underneath the platform are enormous vaults,
which may have served the successive occupants for store-houses. The
Saracens converted this position into a fortress, and this military
impress the ruins still bear. We have therefore four ages in these
ruins: the Phoenician, the Greek and Roman, the Christian, and the
Saracenic. The remains of the first are most enduring. The old builders
had no other method of perpetuating their memory except by these
cyclopean constructions.
We saw the sunset on Ba'albek. The clouds broke away and lay in great
rosy masses over Lebanon; the white snow ridge for forty miles sparkled
under them. The peak of Lebanon, over ten thousand feet above us, was
revealed in all its purity. There was a red light on the columns and
on the walls, and the hills of Anti-Lebanon, red as a dull garnet, were
speckled with snow patches. The imagination could conceive nothing more
beautiful than the rose-color of the ruins, the flaming sky, and the
immaculate snow peaks, apparently so close to us.
On our return we stopped at the beautiful circular temple of Venus,
which would be a wonder in any other neighborhood. Dinner awaited us,
and was marked by only one novelty,—what we at first took to be
brown napkins, fantastically folded and laid at each plate, a touch of
elegance for which we were not prepared. But the napkins proved to be
bread. It is made of coarse dark wheat, baked in circular cakes as thin
as brown paper, and when folded its resemblance to a napkin is complete.
We found it tolerably palatable, if one could get rid of the notion that
he was eating a limp rag. The people had been advertised of our arrival,
and men, women, and boys swarmed about us to sell copper coins; most
of them Roman, which they find in the ruins. Few are found of the
Greeks'. the Romans literally sowed the ground with copper money
wherever they went in the Orient. The inhabitants are Moslems, and
rather decent in appearance, and the women incline to good looks,
though not so modest in dress as Moslem women usually are; they are all
persistent beggars, and bring babies in their arms, borrowing for that
purpose all the infants in the neighborhood, to incite us to charity.
We yielded to the average sentiment of Christendom, and sallied out in
the cold night to see the ruins under the light of a full moon; one
of the party going simply that he might avoid the reproach of
other travellers,—“It is a pity you did not see Ba'albek by
moonlight.” And it must be confessed that these ruins stand the dim
light of the moon better than most ruins; they are so broad and distinct
that they show themselves even in this disadvantage, which those of
Karnak do not. The six isolated columns seemed to float in the sky;
between them snowy Lebanon showed itself.
The next morning was clear and sparkling; the sky was almost as blue as
it is in Nubia. We were awakened by the drumming of a Moslem procession.
It was the great annual fête day, upon which was to be performed the
miracle of riding over the bodies of the devout. The ceremony took
place a couple of miles away upon the hill, and we saw on all the paths
leading thither files of men and women in white garments. The sheykh,
mounted on horseback, rides over the prostrate bodies of all who throw
themselves before him, and the number includes young men as well as
darwishes. As they lie packed close together and the horse treads upon
their spinal columns, their escape from death is called miraculous. The
Christians tried the experiment here a year or two ago, several young
fellows submitting to let a horseman trample over them, in order to
show the Moslems that they also possessed a religion which could stand
horses' hoofs.
The ruins, under the intense blue sky, and in the splendid sunlight,
were more impressive than in the dull gray of the day before, or even in
the rosy sunset; their imperial dignity is not impaired by the excessive
wealth of ornamentation. When upon this platform there stood fifty-eight
of these noble columns, instead of six, conspicuous from afar, and the
sunlight poured into this superb court, adorned by the genius of Athens
and the wealth of Rome, this must have been one of the most resplendent
temples in existence, rivalling the group upon the Acropolis itself!
Nothing more marks the contrast between the religions of the Greeks and
Romans and of the Egyptians, or rather between the genius of the two
civilizations, than their treatment of sacred edifices. And it is all
the more to be noted, because the more modern nations accepted without
reserve any god or object of veneration or mystery in the Egyptian
pantheon. The Roman occupants of the temple of Philæ sacrificed without
scruple upon the altars of Osiris, and the voluptuous Græco-Romans of
Pompeii built a temple to Isis. Yet always and everywhere the Grecians
and the Romans sought conspicuous situations for the temples of
the gods; they felt, as did our Pilgrim Fathers, who planted their
meeting-houses on the windiest hills of New England, that the deity was
most honored when the house of his worship was most visible to men; but
the Egyptians, on the contrary, buried the magnificence of their temples
within wall around wall, and permitted not a hint of their splendor to
the world outside. It is worth while to notice also that the Assyrians
did not share the contemporary reticence of the Egyptians, but built
their altars and temples high above the plain in pyramidal stages; and
if we may judge by this platform at Ba'albek, the Phoenicians did not
imitate the exclusive spirit of the Pharaonic worshippers.
We lingered, called again and again by the impatient dragoman, in this
fascinating spot, amid the visible monuments of so many great races,
bearing the marks of so many religious revolutions, and turned away with
slow and reluctant steps, as those who abandon an illusion or have not
yet thought out some suggestion of the imagination. We turned also with
reluctance from a real illusion of the senses. In the clear atmosphere
the ridge of Lebanon was startlingly near to us; the snow summit
appeared to overhang Ba'albek as Vesuvius does Pompeii; and yet it is
half a day's journey across the plain to the base of the mountain,
and a whole day's journey from these ruins to the summit. But although
this illusion of distance did not continue as we rode down the valley,
we had on either hand the snow ranges all day, making by contrast with
the brilliant colors of the plain a lovely picture.
XII.—ON THE ROAD TO DAMASCUS.
THE station at Stoura is a big stable and a dirty little inn, which has
the kitchen in one shanty, the dining-room in another, and the beds in a
third; a swift mountain stream runs behind it, and a grove of poplars
on the banks moans and rustles in the wind that draws down the Lebanon
gorge. It was after dark when we arrived, but whether our coming put the
establishment into a fluster, I doubt; it seems to be in a chronic state
of excitement. The inn was kept by Italians, who have a genius for this
sort of hotel; the landlord was Andrea, but I suspect the real authority
resided in his plump, bright, vivacious wife. They had an heir, however,
a boy of eight, who proved to be the tyrant of the house when he
appeared upon the scene. The servants were a tall slender Syrian girl,
an active and irresponsible boy, and a dark-eyed little maid, in the
limp and dirty single garment which orphans always wear on the stage,
and who in fact was an orphan, and appeared to take the full benefit of
her neglected and jolly life. The whole establishment was on a lark, and
in a perpetual giggle, and communicated its overflowing good-humor even
to tired travellers. The well-favored little wife, who exhibited the
extremes of fortune in a diamond ring and a torn and draggled calico
gown, sputtered alternately French and Italian like a magpie,
laughed with a contagious merriment, and actually made the cheerless
accommodations she offered us appear desirable. The whole family waited
on us, or rather kept us waiting on them, at table, bringing us a dish
now and then as if its production were a joke, talking all the while
among themselves in Arabic, and apparently about us, and laughing at
their own observations, until we, even, came to conceive ourselves as a
party in a most comical light; and so amusing did we grow that the slim
girl and the sorry orphan were forced to rush into a corner every few
minutes and laugh it out.
I spent a pleasant hour in the kitchen,—an isolated, smoke-dried room
with an earth floor,—endeavoring to warm my feet at the little fires
of charcoal kindled in holes on top of a bank of earth and stone, and
watching the pranks of this merry and industrious family. The little
heir amused himself by pounding the orphan, kicking the shins of the
boy, and dashing water in the face of the slim girl,—treatment which
the servants dared not resent, since the father laughed over it as an
exhibition of bravery and vivacity. Fragrant steam came from a pot, in
which quail were stewing for the passengers by the night mail, and each
person who appeared in the kitchen, in turn, gave this pot a stir; the
lively boy pounded coffee in a big mortar, put charcoal on the fire, had
a tussle with the heir, threw a handspring, doing nothing a minute at
a time; the orphan slid in with a bucket of water, slopping it in all
directions; the heir set up a howl and kicked his father because he was
not allowed to kick the orphan any more; the little wife came in like
a breeze, whisking everybody one side, and sympathized with dear little
Hobby, whose cruel and ugly papa was holding the love from barking his
father's shins. You do not often see a family that enjoys itself so
much as this.
It was late next morning when we tore ourselves from this enchanting
household, and went at a good pace over the fertile plain, straight
towards Anti-Lebanon, having a glimpse of the snow of Mount Hermon,—a
long ridge peering over the hills to the? southeast, and crossing in
turn the Litany and the deep Anjar, which bursts forth from a single
fountain about a mile to the north. On our left we saw some remains of
what was once a capital city, Chalcis, of unknown origin, but an old
city before it was possessed by the Ptolemies, or by Mark Antony, and
once the luxurious residence of the Herod family. At Medjel, a village
scattered at the foot of small tells rising in the plain, we turned into
the hills, leaving unvisited a conspicuous Roman temple on a peak above
the town. The road winds gradually up a wady. As we left the plain,
and looked back across it to Lebanon, the colors of Bukâ'. and the
mountain gave us a new surprise; they were brilliant and yet soft, as
gay and splendid as the rocks of the Yellowstone, and yet exquisitely
blended as in a Persian rug.
The hill-country was almost uninhabited; except the stations and an
occasional Bedaween camp there was small sign of occupation; the ground
was uncultivated; peasants in rags were grubbing up the roots of cedars
for fuel. We met Druses with trains of mules, Moslems with camels and
mules, and long processions of white-topped wagons,—like the Western
“prairie schooner”—drawn each by three mules tandem. Thirty
and forty of these freight vehicles travel in company, and we were
continually meeting or passing them; their number is an indication of
the large trade that Damascus has with Beyrout and the Mediterranean.
There is plenty of color in the people and in their costume. We were
told that we could distinguish the Druses by their furtive and bad
countenances; but for this information I should not have seen that
they differed much from the Maronites; but I endeavored to see the
treacherous villain in them. I have noticed in Syria that the Catholic
travellers have a good opinion of the Maronites and hate the Druses,
that the American residents think little of the Maronites, and that the
English have a lenient side for the Druses. The Moslems consistently
despise all of them. The Druse has been a puzzle. There are the same
horrible stories current about him that were believed of the early
Christians; the Moslem believes that infants are slain and eaten in his
midnight assemblies, and that once a year the Druse community meets in a
cavern at midnight, the lights are extinguished, and the sexes mingling
by chance in the license of darkness choose companions for the year. But
the Druse creed, long a secret, is now known; they are the disciples of
Hâkim, a Khalif of the Fatimite dynasty; they believe in the unity of
God and his latest manifestation in Hakim; they are as much a political
as a religious society; they are accomplished hypocrites, cunning in
plotting and bold in action; they profess to possess “the truth,”
and having this, they are indifferent to externals, and are willing to
be Moslems with the Moslems and Christians with the Christians, while
inwardly feeling a contempt for both. They are the most supercilious of
all the Eastern sects. What they are about to do is always the subject
of anxiety in the Lebanon regions.
At the stations of the road we found usually a wretched family or two
dwelling in a shanty, half stable and half café, always a woman with
a baby in her arms, and the superabundant fountains for nourishing it
displayed to all the world; generally some slatternly girls, and groups
of rough muleteers and drivers smoking. At one, I remember a Jew who
sold antique gems, rings, and coins, with a shocking face, which not
only suggested the first fall of his race, but all the advantages he has
since taken of his innocent fellows, by reason of his preoccupation of
his position of knowledge and depravity.
We made always, except in the steep ascents, about ten miles an hour.
The management of the route is the perfection of French system and
bureaucracy. We travel with a way-bill of numbered details, as if we
were a royal mail. At every station we change one horse, so that we
always have a fresh animal. The way-bill is at every station signed by
the agent, and the minute of arrival and departure exactly noted; each
horse has its number, and the number of the one taken and the one left
is entered. All is life and promptness at the stations; changes are
quickly made. The way-bill would show the company the exact time between
stations; but I noticed that our driver continually set his watch
backwards and forwards, and I found that he and the dragoman had a
private understanding to conceal our delays for lunch, for traffic with
Jews, or for the enjoyment of scenery.
After we had crossed the summit of the first ridge we dashed down the
gate of a magnificent canyon, the rocks heaved up in perpendicular
strata, overhanging, craggy, crumbled, wild. We crossed then a dreary
and nearly arid basin; climbed, by curves and zigzags, another ridge,
and then went rapidly down until we struck the wild and narrow gorge of
the sacred Abana. Immediately luxuriant vegetable life began. The air
was sweet with the blossoms of the mish-mish (apricot), and splendid
walnuts and poplars overshadowed us. The river, swollen and rushing amid
the trees on its hanks, was frightfully rapid. The valley winds sharply,
and gives room only for the river and the road, and sometimes only for
one of them. Sometimes the river is taken out of its bed and carried
along one bank or the other; sometimes the road crosses it, and again
pursues its way between its divided streams. We were excited by its
rush and volume, and by the rich vegetation along its sides. We came to
fantastic Saracenic country-seats, to arcaded and latticed houses set
high up over the river, to evidences of wealth and of proximity to a
great city.
Suddenly, for we seemed to have become a part of the rushing torrent
and to share its rapidity, we burst out of the gorge, and saw the river,
overpassing its narrow banks, flowing straight on before us, and beyond,
on a level, the minarets and domes of Damascus! All along the river, on
both banks of it, and along the high wall by the roadside, were crowds
of men in Turkish costume, of women in pure white, of Arabs sitting
quietly by the stream smoking the narghileh, squatting in rows along
the wall and along the water, all pulling at the water-pipe. There were
tents and booths erected by the river. In a further reach of it men
and boys were bathing. Hanks and groups of veiled women and children
crouched on the damp soil close to the flood, or sat immovable on some
sandy point. It is a delicious holiday for two or three women to sit
the livelong day by water, running or stagnant, to sit there with
their veils drawn over their heads, as rooted as water-plants, and as
inanimate as bags of flour. It was a striking Oriental picture, played
on by the sun, enlivened by the swift current, which dashes full into
the city.
As we spun on, the crowd thickened,—soldiers, grave Turks on
caparisoned horses or white donkeys, Jews, blacks, Persians. We crossed
a trembling bridge, and rattled into town over stony pavements, forced
our way with difficulty into streets narrow and broken by sharp turns,
the carriage-wheels scarcely missing men and children stretched on the
ground, who refused, on the theory of their occupation of the soil prior
to the invention of wheels, to draw in even a leg; and, in a confused
whirl of novel sights and discordant yells, barks, and objurgations, we
came to Dimitri's hotel. The carriage stopped in the narrow street; a
small door in the wall, a couple of feet above the pavement, opened,
and we stepped through into a little court occupied by a fountain and
an orange-tree loaded with golden fruit. Thence we passed into a large
court, the centre of the hotel, where the Abana pours a generous supply
into a vast marble basin, and trees and shrubs offer shelter to
singing birds. About us was a wilderness of balconies, staircases,
and corridors, the sun flooding it all; and Dimitri himself, sleek,
hospitable, stood bowing, in a red fez, silk gown, and long gold chain.
XIII.—THE OLDEST OF CITIES.
IT is a popular opinion that there is nothing of man's work older
than Damascus; there is certainly nothing newer. The city preserves
its personal identity as a man keeps his from youth to age, through the
constant change of substance. The man has in his body not an atom of
the boy; but if the boy incurred scars, they are perpetuated in the man.
Damascus has some scars. We say of other ancient cities, “This part
is old, that part is new.” We say of Damascus, its life is that of a
tree, decayed at heart, dropping branches, casting leaves, but always
renewing itself.
How old is Damascus? Or, rather, how long has a city of that name
existed here on the banks of the Abana? According to Jewish tradition,
which we have no reason to doubt, it was founded by Uz, the son of
Aram, the son of Shem. By the same tradition it was a great city when a
remarkable man, of the tenth generation from the Deluge,—a person of
great sagacity, not mistaken in his opinions, skilful in the celestial
science, compelled to leave Chaldea when he was seventy-five years old,
on account of his religious opinions, since he ventured to publish the
notion that there was but one God, the Creator of the Universe,—came
with an army of dependants and “reigned” in the city of Uz. After
some time Abraham removed into Canaan, which was already occupied by the
Canaanites, who had come from the Persian Gulf, established themselves
in wall-towns in the hills, built Sidon on the coast, and carried their
conquests into Egypt. It was doubtless during the reign of the Hittites,
or Shepherd Kings, that Abraham visited Egypt. Those usurpers occupied
the throne of the Pharaohs for something like five hundred years, and it
was during their occupancy that the Jews settled in the Delta.
Now, if we can at all fix the date of the reign of the Shepherd Kings,
we can approximate to the date of the foundation of Damascus, for Uz
was the third generation from Noah, and Abraham was the tenth. We do
not know how to reckon a generation in those days, when a life-lease was
such a valuable estate, but if we should assume it to be a century, we
should have about seven hundred years between the foundation of Damascus
and the visit of Abraham to Egypt, a very liberal margin. But by the
chronology of Mariette Bey, the approximate date of the Shepherds'
invasion is 2300 B.C. to 2200 B. C., and somewhat later than that time
Abraham was in Damascus. If Damascus was then seven hundred years old,
the date of its foundation would be about 3000 B.C. to 2900 B.C.
Assuming that Damascus has this positive old age, how old is it
comparatively? When we regard it in this light, we are obliged to
confess that it is a modern city. When Uz and his friends wandered out
of the prolific East, and pitched their tents by the Abana, there was
already on the banks of the Nile a civilized, polished race, which had
nearly completed a cycle of national existence much longer than the
duration of the Roman Empire. It was about the eleventh dynasty of the
Egyptian kingdom, the Great Pyramid had been built more than a thousand
years, and the already degenerate Egyptians of the “Old Empire” had
forgotten the noble art which adorned and still renders illustrious the
reigns of the pyramid-builders..
But if Damascus cannot claim the highest antiquity, it has outlived all
its rivals on the earth, and has flourished in a freshness as perennial
as the fountain to which it owes its life, through all the revolutions
of the Orient. As a necessary commercial capital it has pursued a pretty
uniform tenor under all its various masters. Tiglath-Pileser attempted
to destroy it; it was a Babylonian and then a Persian satrapy for
centuries; it was a Greek city; it was the capital of a Roman province
for seven hundred years; it was a Christian city and reared a great
temple to John the Baptist; it was the capital of the Saracenic Empire,
in which resided the ruler who gave laws to all the lands from India to
Spain; it was ravaged by Tamerlane; it now suffers the blight of Turkish
imbecility. From of old it was a caravan station and a mart of exchange,
a camp by a stream; it is to-day a commercial hive, swarming with an
hundred and fifty thousand people, a city without monuments of its past
or ambition for its future.
If one could see Damascus, perhaps he could invent a phrase that would
describe it; but when you have groped and stumbled about in it for a
couple of weeks, endeavoring in vain to get a view of more than a
few rods of it at a time, you are utterly at a loss how to convey an
impression of it to others.
If Egypt is the gift of the Nile, the river Abana is the life of
Damascus; its water is carried into the city on a dozen different
levels, making it literally one of fountains and running water.
Sometimes the town is flooded; the water had only just subsided from the
hotel when we arrived. This inundation makes the city damp for a long
time. Indeed, it is at all times rather soaked with water, and is—with
all respect to Uz and Abraham and the dynasty of the Omeiyades—a sort
of habitable frog-pond on a grand scale. At night the noise of frogs,
even at our hotel, is the chief music, the gentle twilight song, broken,
it is true, by the incessant howling and yelping of savage dogs, packs
of which roam the city like wolves all night. They are mangy yellow
curs, without a single good quality, except that they sleep all the
daytime. In every quarter of the city you see ranks and rows of them
asleep in the sun, occupying half the street and nestling in all the
heaps of rubbish. But much as has been said of the dogs here, I think
the frogs are the feature of the town; they are as numerous as in the
marshes of Ravenna.