FROM THE CEDARS OF LEBANON TO BAALBEK.
Returning to Tents—Mountain Spurs and Passes—A Modern
Thermopylae—Two Caravans Meet—A Fight to the Death—How Johnson
Looks—Victory at Last—Into the Valley where the King Lost his
Eyes—Playing at Agriculture—Squalid Poverty—Baalbek—Its Mighty
Temples—Men, Mice and Monkeys—A Poem Writ in Marble.
LEAVING the Cedars, and descending to the base of the mountain where
the tents were left, we start across the beautiful valley lying between
the long mountain of Lebanon and anti-Lebanon. Before reaching the
valley proper we are compelled to cross some rough mountain spurs and
to go through some narrow mountain passes. It so happens that we meet
a train of heavily laden camels. The fanatical and blood-thirsty Arabs
managing the camels stop their caravan and obstinately refuse to give
any part of the pass. Our body-guards come up. A quarrel ensues. A war
of words leads to blows, and we have, enacted before our own eyes, a
second “Battle of the Giants.” It looks to Johnson like the first one.
The two parties, consisting of about forty Arabs, curse, threaten,
close on each other, clinch, fight like fiends, grapple like giants.
They fall to the earth in each other’s embrace, roll over, first one
on top and then the other. They bite, kick and scratch each other.
Together they fall and together they rise again—one bites the dust and
then another. Javelins are used. Stones fly, sabres flash—gods! how
they fight! Heads are mashed and limbs are broken. Hair flies and blood
flows. The horses scare, the women scream and Johnson looks as if he
wants to say:
“Lay on, MacDuff,
And damned be he who first cries, ‘Hold, enough!’”
At last the enemy is repulsed and victory perches upon our banner. The
dust and din of battle are no more. We are relieved; for danger was
imminent and suspense correspondingly great. It is the greatest wonder,
and also the greatest blessing imaginable, that no one was killed.
If one of the natives had been killed, I am sure the whole community
would have been aroused, and would have poured out their indignation
and wrath upon our Christian heads—”Christian dogs,” they call us.
I see from the _London Times_ that only a few weeks ago twenty-four
Christians were killed in a fray with the Arabs, not far from this
place. We would not willingly harm a hair of their heads. All we wanted
was room to pass, and having secured that we continue our journey.
The mountain gap lets us once more into the valley which is, as before
stated, fifteen to eighteen miles wide and some sixty miles long. In
this valley, and not far from here, is Riblah, where Nebuchadnezzar
had his headquarters during the campaign against Jerusalem. When the
holy city fell, Zedekiah, King of Judea, fled to Jericho where he was
captured, thence he was brought to Riblah. Here, after witnessing the
murder of his sons, poor Zedekiah was subjected to the painful ordeal
of having his eyes put out. To this place, also, Pharaoh Necho, after
his brilliant victory over the Babylonians, summoned Jehoahaz from
Jerusalem.
The valley is now used as pastures and farming lands; wheat, oats
and grapes being the principal productions. The river Leontes flows
through the plain, and the fields are watered mostly by irrigation. Yet
these people are only playing with agriculture. The valley is rich and
fertile, and would abundantly reward honest labor. But honest labor is
unknown in Syria. These trifling people anger the soil with their rude
implements of agriculture, and the soil answers with a crop of thorns
and thistles. She thrusts out her claws and thus frights off the lean,
lazy, leisure-loving Bedouin. The people sow the seeds of idleness
and reap the legitimate fruits—hunger, want and starvation. I never
before knew what squalid poverty meant. But if it is to go half naked,
and almost the other half, too; if it is for human beings to live in
the same rock-pens with cows, goats and asses, and that, too, without
a fireplace, without chairs, tables or bedsteads; if it is to live on
half rations of “husks and hominy,”—if this is squalid poverty, I have
seen it and know what it means. Each family seems to be blest with a
dozen or fifteen heirs—heirs of filth and poverty! I am reminded of
the old adage, “poor people for children and negroes for dogs.” These
people and their ancestry have inhabited this country only 4,000 years,
and yet within that short time they have managed to accumulate a mass
of filth and ignorance that is truly astonishing.
We are now encamped in the citadel of Baalbek. This place has much
interest for the traveler and the historian, because of its once mighty
temples. The temples were three in number. They were all built on the
same stupendous substructions. The rock foundations go deep into the
ground, and are traversed by great subterranean passages which look
like railroad tunnels through mountains of granite. The Temple of the
Sun was three hundred feet long, one hundred and sixty feet wide, and
was surrounded by fifty-four columns, six of which are standing at
present. These six are enough for twelve months’ study. They are solid
marble, eight feet in diameter, and together with the entablature which
joins them at the top, ninety feet high! How shapely, how graceful, how
towering and sublime! The carving on the entablature is exquisite. It
looks like stucco work. The other columns are fallen and broken, but
these six look as if they were put up only yesterday.
The Great Temple is better preserved; its potent walls, and
twenty-three of its Corinthian columns, still stand. There is no wood
about the building. Even its vaulted roof, one hundred feet above
you, is marble. The under side of this marble roof is beautifully
chiseled. As one views it with the natural eye, it look like delicate
lace work; but by the aid of field glasses one can trace the designs
of the artist, and see that “there is method in his madness.” One can
see men, animals, leaves, flowers and fruits delicately carved in the
high lifted stone. One sees, or fancies he sees, oaks and acorns, moons
and mares, men, mice and monkeys, doves, dogs and donkeys, bulls, boars
and bears, pigs, ‘possums and puppies, boys and bonnets, ladies and
lizards, all beautifully carved and sweetly blended one with the other.
“‘Tis a vision, ‘tis an anthem sung in stone, a poem writ in marble.”
[Illustration: RUINS OF BAALBEK.]
But probably the thing that most impresses one about the ruins of
Baalbek is the enormous size of the stones used in its buildings. I
have never seen or read of such stones as were used in building these
temples. Many of them are as large as one of our ordinary freight cars.
Three of these stones, lying end to end in the walls of the temple,
measure two hundred and ten feet. I go to the quarry, half a mile away,
from which these colossal stones were taken. There I find a companion
stone to those in the buildings. It is fourteen feet high, seventeen
feet broad and seventy-one feet long. Who ever heard of such stones
being handled! Two six mule teams might be driven side by side on the
stone, and there would be room for a foot path on either side the
wagons. No pigmies they—those builders of Baalbek. A race of giants or
of gods must have handled these stones! No one knows when, how, or by
whom these temples were built. We know this, however, they were built,
not for an age, but for all time.