Chapter 10

CHURCH AND TOMB, RUWEIḤĀ

Late at night one of Sheikh Yūnis's sons rode in to ask us whether his father were still with us. On leaving us that enterprising old party had not, it seemed, returned to the bosom of his anxious family, and I have a suspicion that his friendly eagerness to set us on our way was but part of a deep-laid plot by means of which he hoped to be able to take a hand in those local disturbances that had preoccupied him during the morning. At any rate he had made off as soon as we were out of sight, and the presumption was that he had hastened to join in the fray. What happened to him I never heard, but I am prepared to wager that whoever bit the dust at the village of El Mughāra it was not Sheikh Yūnis.

Three rather tedious days lay between us and Aleppo. We might have made the journey in two, but I had determined to strike a little to the east in order to avoid the carriage road, which was well known, and to traverse country which, though it might not be more interesting, was at least less familiar. Five hours' ride from Dāna across open rolling uplands Brought us to Ṭarutīn. We passed several ancient sites, re-occupied by half-settled Arabs of the Muwāli tribes, though the old buildings were completely ruined. All along the western edges of the desert the Bedouin are beginning to cultivate the soil, and are therefore forced to establish themselves in some fixed spot near their crops. "We are become fellaḥīn," said the Sheikh of Ṭarutīn. In some distant age, when all the world is ploughed and harvested, there will be no nomads left in Arabia. In the initial stages these new-made farmers continue to live in tents, but the tents are stationary, the accompanying dirt cumulative, and the settlement unpleasing to any of the senses. The few families at Ṭarutīn had not yet forgotten their desert manners, and we found them agreeable people, notwithstanding the accuracy with which the above remarks applied to their village of hair.

ḲAṢR EL ḂANĀT

I had not been in camp an hour before there was a great commotion among my men, and Mikhāil came to my tent shouting, "The Americans! the Americans!" It was not a raid, but the Princeton archæological expedition, which, travelling from Damascus by other ways than ours, was now making for the Jebel Zāwiyyeh; and a fortunate encounter my camp thought it, for each one of us found acquaintances among the masters or among the muleteers, and had time to talk, as people will talk who meet by chance upon an empty road. Moreover, the day I spent at Ṭarutīn provided me with an admirable object lesson in archæology. As the members of the expedition planned the ruins and deciphered the inscriptions, the whole fifth-century town rose from its ashes and stood before us—churches, houses, forts, rock-hewn tombs with the names and dates of death of the occupants carved over the door. Next day we had a march of ten hours. We went north, passing a small mud village called Ḥelbān, and another called Mughāra Merzeh, where there were the remains of a church and rock-cut tombs of a very simple kind. (None ofthese places are marked on Kiepert's map.) Then we turned to the east and reached Tulūl, where we came upon an immense expanse of flood water, stretching south at least twelve miles from the Maṭkh, the swamp in which the River Kuweēk rises. At Tulūl some Arab women were mourning over a new-made grave. For three days after the dead are buried they weep thus at the grave side; only at Mecca and at Medina, said Maḥmūd, there is no mourning for those who are gone. There when breath leaves the body the women give three cries, to make known to the world that the soul has fled; but beyond these cries there is no lamentation, for it is forbidden that tears should fall upon the head of the corpse. The Lord has given and He has taken away. So we went south along the edge of the high ground to a little hill called Tell Selma, where we turned east again and rounded the flood water and rode along its margin to a big village, Moyemāt, half tents and half beehive huts built of mud. There is no other material but mud in which to build; from the moment we left the rocky ground on which Ṭarutīn stands we never saw a stone—never a stone and never a tree, but an endless unbroken cornfield, with the first scarlet tulips coming into bloom among the young wheat. It was heavy going, though it was soft to the horses' feet. If there were a little more earth upon the hills of Syria and a few more stones upon the plain, travelling would be easier in that country; but He, than whom there is none other, has ordered differently. FromMoyemāt we rode north-east until we came to a village called Hober, at the foot of a spur of the Jebel el Ḥaṣṣ, and here we tried to camp, but could get neither oats nor barley, nor even a handful of chopped straw; and so we went on to Kefr 'Ābid, which is marked on the map, and pitched tents at six o'clock. The villages unknown to Kiepert are probably of recent construction, indeed many of them are still half camp. They are exceedingly numerous; about Hober I counted five within a radius of a mile or two. The Arabs who inhabit them retain their nomad habits of feud. Each village has its allies and its blood enemies, and political relations are as delicate as they are in the desert. My diary contains the following note at the end of the day: "Periwinkles, white irises of the kind that were blue at El Bārah, red and yellow ranunculus, storks, larks." These were all that broke the monotony of the long ride.

TOMB, DĀNA

A BEEHIVE VILLAGE

About half an hour to the north of Kefr 'Ābid there is a little beehive village which contains a very perfect mosaic of geometrical patterns. The fragments of other mosaics are to be found scattered through the village, some in the houses, and some in the courtyards, and the whole district needs careful exploration while the new settlers are turning up the ground and before they destroy what they may find. We reached Aleppo at midday, approaching it by an open drain. Whether it were because of the evil smell or because of the heavy sky and dust-laden wind I do not know, but the first impression of Aleppo was disappointing. The name, in its charming Europeanised form, should belong to a more attractive city, and attractive Aleppo certainly is not, for it is set in a barren, treeless, featureless world, the beginning of the great Mesopotamian flats. The site of the town is like a cup and saucer, the houses lie in the saucer and the castle stands on the upturned cup, its minaret visible several hours away while no vestige of the city appears until the last mile of the road. I stayed two days, during which time it rained almost ceaselessly, therefore I do not know Aleppo—an Oriental city will not admit you into the circle of its intimates unless you spend months within its walls, and not even then if you will not take pains to please—but I did not leave without having perceived dimly thatthere was something to be known. It has been a splendid Arab city; as you walk down the narrow streets you pass minarets and gateways of the finest period of Arab architecture; some of the mosques and baths and khāns (especially those half ruined and closed) are in the same style, and the castle is the best example of twelfth-century Arab workmanship in all Syria, with iron doors of the same period—they are dated,—and beautiful bits of decoration. There must be some native vitality still that corresponds to these signs of past greatness, but the town has fallen on evil days. It has been caught between the jealousies of European concession hunters, and it suffers more than most Syrian towns from the strangling grasp of the Ottoman Government. It is slowly dying for want of an outlet to the sea, and neither the French nor the German railway will supply its need. Hitherto the two companies have been busily engaged in thwarting one another. The original concession to the Rayak-Ḥamāh railway extended to Aleppo and north to Birijik—I was told that the tickets to Birijik were printed off when the first rails were laid at Rayak. Then came Germany, with her great scheme of a railway to Baghdad. She secured a concession for a branch line from Killiz to Aleppo, and did what she could to prevent the French from advancing beyond Ḥamāh, on the plea that the French railway woulddetract from the value of the German concession—my information, it may be well imagined, is not from the Imperial Chancery, but from native sources in Aleppo itself. Since I left, the French have taken up their interrupted work on the Rayak-Ḥamāh line, though it is to be carried forward, I believe, not to Birijik, but only as far as Aleppo.[11]It will be of no benefit to the town. Aleppo merchants do not wish to send their goods a three days' journey to Bey rout; they want a handy seaport of their own, which will enable them to pocket all the profits of the trade, and that port should be Alexandretta. Neither does the Baghdad railway, if it be continued, offer any prospect of advantage. By a branch line already existing (it was built by English and French capitalists, but has recently passed under German control) the railway will touch the sea at Mersina, but Mersina is as far from Aleppo as is Beyrout. That a line should be laid direct from Aleppo to Alexandretta is extremely improbable, since the Sultan fears above all things to connect the inland caravan routes with the coast, lest the troops of the foreigner, and particularly of England, should find it perilously easy to land from their warships and march up country. Aleppo should be still, as it was in times past, the great distributing centre for the merchandise of the interior, but traffic is throttled by the fatal frequency with which the Government commandeers the baggage camels. Last year, with the Yemen war on hand and the consequent necessity of transporting men and military stores to the coast that they might be shipped to the Red Sea, this grievance had become acute. For over a month trade had been stagnant and goods bound for the coast had lain piled in the bazaar—a little more and they would cease to come at all, the camel owners from the East not daring to enter the zone of danger to their beasts. Here, as in all other Turkish towns, I heard the cry of official bankruptcy. The Government had no funds wherewith to undertake the most necessary works, the treasuries were completely empty.

THE CASTLE, ALEPPO

Though my stay was short I was not without acquaintances, among whom the most important was the Vāli. Kiāzim Pasha is a man of very different stamp from the Vāli of Damascus. To the extent that the latter is, according to his lights, a real statesman, in so far is Kiāzim nothingbut afarceur.He received me in his harem, for which I was grateful when I saw his wife, who is one of the most beautiful women that it is possible to behold. She is tall and stately, with a small dark head, set on magnificent shoulders, a small straight nose, a pointed chin and brows arching over eyes that are like dark pools—I could not take mine from her face while she sat with us. Both she and her husband are Circassians, a fact that had put me on my guard before the Vāli opened his lips. They both spoke French, and he spoke it very well. He received me in an offhand manner, and his first remark was:

"Je suis le jeune pasha qui a fait la paix entre les églises."

I knew enough of his history to realise that he had been Muteserrif of Jerusalem at a time when the rivalries between the Christian sects had ended in more murders than are customary, and that some kind of uneasy compromise had been reached, whether through his ingenuity or the necessities of the case I had not heard.

"How old do you think I am?" said the pasha.

I replied tactfully that I should give him thirty-five years.

"Thirty-six!" he said triumphantly. "But the consuls listened to me. Mon Dieu! that was a better post than this, though I am Vāli now. Here I have no occasion to hold conferences with the consuls, and a man like me needs the society of educated Europeans."

(Mistrust the second: an Oriental official, who declares that he prefers the company of Europeans.)

"I am very Anglophil," said he.

I expressed the gratitude of my country in suitable terms.

"But what are you doing in Yemen?" he added quickly.

"Excellency," said I, "we English are a maritime people, and there are but two places that concern us in all Arabia."

"I know," he interpolated. "Mecca and Medina."

"No," said I. "Aden and Kweit."

"And you hold them both," he returned angrily—yes, I am bound to confess that the tones of his voice were not those of an Anglo-maniac.

Presently he began to tell me that he alone among pashas had grasped modern necessities. He meant to build a fine metalled road toAlexandretta—not that it will be of much use, thought I, if there are no camels to walk in it—like the road he had built from Samaria to Jerusalem. That was a road like none other in Turkey—did I know it? I had but lately travelled over it, and seized the opportunity of congratulating the maker of it; but I did not think it necessary to mention that it breaks off at the bottom of the only serious ascent and does not begin again till the summit of the Judæan plateau is reached.

This is all that need be said of Kiāzim Pasha's methods.

A far more sympathetic acquaintance was the Greek Catholic Archbishop, a Damascene educated in Paris and for some time cure of the Greek Catholic congregation in that city, though he is still comparatively young. I had been given a letter to him, on the presentation of which he received me with great affability in his own house. We sat in a room filled with books, the windows opening on to the silent courtyard of his palace, and talked of the paths into which thought had wandered in Europe; but I found to my pleasure that for all his learning and his long sojourn in the West, the Archbishop had remained an Oriental at heart.

"I rejoiced," said he, "when I was ordered to return from Paris to my own land. There is much knowledge, but little faith in France; while in Syria, though there is much ignorance, religion rests upon a sure foundation of belief."

The conclusion that may be drawn from this statement is not flattering to the Church, but I refrained from comment.

He appeared in the afternoon to return my call—from the Vāli downwards all must conform to this social obligation—wearing his gold cross and carrying his archiepiscopal staff in his hand. From his tall brimless hat a black veil fell down his back, his black robes were edged with purple, and an obsequious chaplain walked behind him. He found another visitor sitting with me in the inn parlour, Nicola Ḥomṣi, a rich banker of his own congregation. Ḥomṣi belongs to an important Christian family settled in Aleppo, and his banking house has representatives in Marseilles and in London. He and the Archbishop between them were fairly representative of the most enterprising and the best educated classes in Syria. It is they who suffer at the hands ofthe Turk,—the ecclesiastic, because of a blind and meaningless official opposition that meets the Christian at every turn; the banker, because his interests call aloud for progress, and progress is what the Turk will never understand. I therefore asked them what they thought would be the future of the country. They looked at one another, and the Archbishop answered:

"I do not know. I have thought deeply on the subject, and I can see no future for Syria, whichever way I turn."

That is the only credible answer I have heard to any part of the Turkish question.

The air of Aleppo is judged by the Sultan to be particularly suitable for pashas who have fallen under his displeasure at Constantinople. The town is so full of exiles that even the most casual visitor can scarcely help making acquaintance with a few of them. One was lodged in my hotel, a mild-mannered dyspeptic, whom no one would have suspected of revolutionary sympathies. Probably he was indeed without them, and owed his banishment merely to some chance word, reported and magnified by an enemy or a spy. I was to see many of these exiles scattered up and down Asia Minor, and none that I encountered could tell me for what cause they had suffered banishment. Some, no doubt, must have had a suspicion, and some were perfectly well aware of their offence, but most of them were as innocently ignorant as they professed to be. Now this has a wider bearing on the subject of Turkish patriotic feeling than may at first appear; for the truth is that these exiled pashas are very rarely patriots paying the price of devotion to a national ideal, but rather men whom an unlucky turn of events has alienated from the existing order. If there is any chance that they may be taken back into favour you will find them nervously anxious, even in exile, to refrain from action that would tend to increase official suspicion; and it is only when they have determined that there is no hope for them as long as the present Sultan lives, that they are willing to associate freely with Europeans or to speak openly of their grievances. There is, so far as I can see, no organised body of liberal opinion in Turkey, but merely individual discontents, founded on personal misfortune. It seemsimprobable that when the exiles return to Constantinople on the death of the Sultan they will provide any scheme of reform or show any desire to alter a system under which, by the natural revolution of affairs, they will again find themselves persons of consideration.

There is another form of exile to be met with in Turkey, the honourable banishment of a distant appointment. To this class, I fancy, belongs Nāzim Pasha himself, and so does my friend Muḥammad 'Ali Pasha of Aleppo. The latter is an agreeable man of about thirty, married to an English wife. He accompanied me to the Vāli's house, obtained permission that I should see the citadel, and in many ways contrived to make himself useful. His wife was a pleasant little lady from Brixton; he had met her in Constantinople and there married her, which may, for ought I know, have been partly the reason of his fall from favour, the English nation not being agens grataat Yildiz Kiosk. Muḥammad 'Ali Pasha is a gentleman in the full sense of the word, and he seems to have made his wife happy; but it must be clearly understood that I could not as a general rule recommend Turkish pashas as husbands to the maidens of Brixton. Though she played tennis at the Tennis Club, and went to the sewing parties of the European colony, she was obliged to conform to some extent to the habits of Moslem women. She never went into the streets without being veiled; "because people would talk if a pasha's wife were to show her face," said she.

We reached the citadel in the one hour of sunlight that shone on Aleppo during my stay, and were taken round by polite officers, splendid in uniforms and clanking swords and spurs, who were particularly anxious that I should not miss the small mosque in the middle of the fortress, erected on the very spot where Abraham milked his cow. The very name of Aleppo, said they, is due to this historic occurrence, and there can be no doubt that its Arabic form, Ḥaleb, is composed of the same root letters as those that form the verb to milk. In spite of the deep significance of the mosque, I was more interested in the view from the top of the minaret. The Mesopotamian plain lay outspread before us, asflat as a board—Euphrates stream is visible from that tower on a clear day, and indeed you might see Baghdad but for the tiresome way in which the round earth curves, for there is no barrier to the eye in all that great level. Below us, were the clustered roofs of bazaar and khān, with here and there a bird's-eye glimpse of marble courtyards, and here and there the fine spire of a minaret. Trees and water were lacking in the landscape, and water is the main difficulty in Aleppo itself. The sluggish stream that flows out of the Maṭkh dries up in the summer, and the wells are brackish all the year round. Good drinking water must be brought from a great distance and costs every household at least a piastre a day, a serious addition to the cost of living. But the climate is good, sharply cold in winter and not over hot for more than a month or two in the summer. Such is Aleppo, the great city with the high-sounding name and the traces of a splendid past.

[11]The line is now completed as far as Aleppo.

400A WATER-CARRIER

A WATER-CARRIER

All my leisure moments during the two days in Aleppo were occupied in changing muleteers. It seemed a necessary, if a regrettable measure. At Antioch we should reach the limits of the Arabic speaking population. Ḥabīb and his father had no word of Turkish, Mikhāil owned to a few substantives such as egg, milk and piastre, while I was scarcely more accomplished. I shrank from plunging with my small party into lands where we should be unable to do more than proclaim our most pressing needs or ask the way. The remarkable aptitude of north Syrian muleteers had been much vaunted to me—the title of muleteer is really a misnomer, for as a fact the beast of burden in these parts is a sorry nag, kadish, as it is called in Arabic; from Alexandretta to Konia I doubt if we ever saw a mule, certainly we never saw a caravan of mules. I had heard, then, that I should not begin to know what it was to travel in comfort, without worry or responsibility, and with punctuality and speed, until I had reorganised my service, and that when I reached Konia I should be able to break up my caravan if I pleased, and as I pleased, and the Aleppo men would find their way home with another load. So I said good-bye to my Beyroutīs—and to peace.

The system on which the journey was henceforth conducted was the sweating system. The sweater was a toothless old wretch, Fāris by name, who shared with his brother one of the largest teams of baggage animals in Aleppo. Owing to his lack of teeth he spoke Arabic and Turkish equally incomprehensibly; he supplied me with four baggage-horses and rode himself on a fifth, for his own convenience and at his own expense, though he tried vainly to make me pay for his mount when we reachedKonia; he hired two boys, at a starvation wage, to do all the work of the camp and the march, and fed them on starvation fare. This unhappy couple went on foot (the independent men of the Lebanon had provided themselves with donkeys), and it was a part of their contract with Fāris that he should give them shoes, but he refused to do so until I interfered and threatened to dock his wages of the price of the shoes and buy them myself. I was obliged also to look into the commissariat and see that the pair had at least enough food to keep them in working condition; but in spite of all my efforts the hired boys deserted at every stage, and I suffered continual annoyance from the delays caused by the difficulty of finding others, and, still more, from the necessity of teaching each new couple the details of their work—where the tent pegs were to be placed, how the loads were to be divided, and a hundred other small but important matters. I had also to goad Fāris, who was furnished with a greater number of excuses for shirking labour than any man in Aleppo, into doing some share of his duty, and to superintend night and morning the feeding of my horses, which would otherwise have escaped starvation as narrowly as the hired boys. Finally, when we came to Konia, I found that Fāris had turned the last of his slaves on to the street, and had refused categorically to take them back to their home at Adana, saying that when he escaped from my eye he could get cheaper men than they; and since I would not abandon two boys who had, according to their stupid best, done what they could to serve me, I was obliged to help them to return to their native place. To sum up the evidence, I should say that those who recommend the muleteers of Aleppo and their abominable system can never have directed a well-trained and well-organised camp, where the work goes as regularly as Big Ben, and the men have cheerful faces and willing hands, nor can they have experience of real businesslike travel, for that is possible only with servants who show courage in difficulties, enterprise and resource. I admit that my experience is small, and I confidently assert that it will never be larger, for I would bring muleteers from Baghdad rather than engage Fāris or his like a second time.

It was just when the difficulties of the journey multiplied that Mikhāil's virtue collapsed. Two days spent in drinking the health of his departing companions, with whom he was on excellent terms, as the members of a good camp should be, were enough to shatter the effects of two months' sobriety. From that time forward the 'arak bottle bulked large in his saddle-bags, and though an 'arak bottle can be searched for and found in saddle-bags and broken on a stone, no amount of vigilance could keep Mikhāil out of the wine shop when we reached a town. Adversity teaches many lessons; I look back with mingled feelings upon the uneasy four weeks between our departure from Aleppo and the time when Providence sent me another and a better man and I hardened my heart to dismiss Mikhāil, but I do not regret the schooling that was forced on me.

Ḥājj Maḥmūd reached at Aleppo the term of his commission, and from him also I took a most reluctant farewell. The Vāli provided me with a zaptieh whose name was Ḥājj Najīb, a Kurd of unprepossessing appearance, who proved on acquaintance a useful and obliging man, familiar with the district through which we travelled together, and with the people inhabiting it. We were late in starting, Mikhāil being sodden with 'arak and the muleteers unhandy with the loads. The day (it was March 30) was cloudless, and for the first time the sun was unpleasantly hot. When we rode away at ten o'clock it was already blazing fiercely upon us, and the whole day long there was not a scrap of shade in all the barren track. We followed for a mile or so the Alexandretta high road, passing a café with a few trees about it, soon after which we struck away to the left and entered a path that led us into the bare rocky hills, and speedily became as rocky as they. Our course was east with a touch of north. At half-past twelve we stopped to lunch, and waited a full hour for the baggage, during which, time I had leisure to reflect upon the relative marching speed of the new servants and the old, and on the burning heat of the sun that had not been so noticeable when we were ridings Half an hour further we passed a hovel, Yaḳit 'Ades, where Najīb suggested that we might camp. But I decided that it was too early, and after we had given strict injunctions toFāris concerning the route he was to follow and the exact spot where we should camp, the zaptieh and I bettered our pace, and without going beyond a walk were soon out of sight of the others. We rode along the bottom of a bare winding valley, past several places that were marked on the map though they were no more than the smallest heaps of ruins, and at four o'clock turned up the northern slope of the valley and reached a hamlet, unknown to Kiepert, which Najīb informed me to be Kbeshīn. Here amid a few old walls and many modern refuse heaps we found a Kurdish camp, one of the spring-time camps in which half nomadic people dwell with their flocks at the season of fresh grass. The walls of the tents, if tents they may be called, were roughly built of stone to a height of about five feet, but the roofs were of goats' hair cloth, raised in the centre by tent poles. The Kurdish shepherds crowded round us and conversed with Najīb in their own tongue, which sounded vaguely familiar on account of its likeness to Persian. They spoke Arabic also, a queer jargon full of Turkish words. We sat for some time on the rubbish-heap watching for the baggage animals till I became convinced, in spite of Najīb's assurances, that some hitch must have occurred and that we might watch for ever in vain. At this point the Kurdish sheikh announced that it was dinner time, and invited us to share the meal. One of the advantages of out-door life on short commons being that there is no moment of the day when you are not willing and ready to eat, we fell in joyfully with the suggestion.

ḲAL'AT SIM'ĀN

The Kurd has not been given a good name in the annals of travel. Report would have him both sulky and quarrelsome, but for my part I have found him to be endowed with most of the qualities that make for agreeable social intercourse. We were ushered into the largest of the houses; it was light and cool, airy and clean, its peculiar construction giving it the advantages of house and of tent. The food consisted of new bread and sour curds and of an excellent pillaf, in which cracked wheat was substituted for rice. It was spread upon a mat, and we sat round upon rugs while the women served us. By the time we had finished it was six o'clock but no caravan had appeared. Najīb was much perplexed, and ourhosts sympathised deeply with our case, while declaring that they were more than willing to keep us for the night. Our hesitation was cut short by a small boy who came running in with the news that a caravan had been seen to pass by the village of Fāfertīn on the opposite side of the valley, and that it was then heading for Ḳal'at Sim'ān, our ultimate destination. There was no time to be lost, the sun had set, and I had a vivid recollection of our wanderings in the night about El Bārah in a country not dissimilar from that which lay in front of us, but before we started I took Najīb aside and asked him whether I might give money in return for my entertainment. He replied that on no account was it to be thought of, Kurds do not expect to be paid by their guests. All that was left me was to summon the children and distribute a handful of metalīks among them, an inexpensive form of generosity, and one that could not outrage the most susceptible feelings. We set off, Najīb leading the way and riding so quickly along the stony path that I had the greatest difficulty in keeping up with him. I knew that the great church of St. Simon Stylites stood upon a hill and must be visible from afar, though the famous column of the saint, round which the church was built, had fallen centuries ago. After an hour's stumbling ride Najīb pointedsilently to the dim hills, and I could just make out a mass of something that looked like a fortress breaking the line of the summit. We hurried on for another half hour and reached the walls at 7.30 in complete darkness. As we rode through the huge church we heard to our relief a tinkle of caravan bells that assured us of the arrival of the tents—we heard also the shouts and objurgations of Mikhāil, who, under the influence of potations of 'arak, was raging like a wild beast and refusing to give the new muleteers any hint as to the way in which to deal with my English tent. Since I was the only sane person who knew how the poles were to be fitted together, the pegs driven in and the furniture opened out, I was obliged to do the greater part of the work myself by the light of two candles, and when that was over to search the canteen for bread and semen for the muleteers, an order to my rebellious cook that he should prepare the customary evening meal of rice having been greeted with derisive howls mingled with curses on all and sundry. It is ill arguing with a drunken man, but with what feelings I kept silence I hope that the recording angel may have omitted to note.

ḲAL'AT SIM'ĀN

At last, when all was ready, I wandered away into the sweet Spring night, through the stately and peaceful church below the walls of whichwe were lying, and presently found myself in a circular court, open to the sky, from whence the four arms of the church reach out to the four points of the compass. The court had been set round with a matchless colonnade, of which many of the arches are still standing, and in the centre rose in former days the column whereon St. Simon lived and died. I scrambled over the heaps of ruin till I came to the rock-hewn base of that very column, a broad block of splintered stone with a depression in the middle, like a little bowl, filled with clear rain water in which I washed my hands and face. There was no moon; the piers and arches stood in ruined and shadowy splendour, the soft air lay still as an unruffled pool, weariness and vexation dropped from the spirit, and left it bare to Heaven and the Spring. I sat and thought how perverse a trick Fortune had played that night on the grim saint. She had given for a night his throne of bitter dreams to one whose dreams were rosy with a deep content that he would have been the first to condemn. So musing I caught the eye of a great star that had climbed up above the broken line of the arcade, and we agreed together that it was better to journey over earth and sky than to sit upon a column all your days.

ḲAL'AT SIM'ĀN, THE WEST DOOR

The members of the American survey have mapped and thoroughly explored the northern mountains as far as Ḳal'at Sim'ān, but neither they nor any other travellers have published an account of the hilly region to the north-east of the shrine.[12]I, who rode through it, and visited almost all the ruined villages, found that it was generally known to the inhabitants as the Jebel Sim'ān, by which title I shall speak of it. The Mountains of Simon, with the Jebel Bārisha, to the south-west, and the Jebel el 'Ala still further to the west, belong to the same architectural system as the Jebel Zāwdyyeh, through which we had passed on our way to Aleppo. It would be possible to draw distinctions of style between the northern group and the southern; the American architect, Mr.Butler, with his wide experience of the two districts, has been able to do so, but to the hasty observer the differences appear to depend chiefly on natural conditions and on the fact that the northern district fell more directly under the influence of Antioch, the city which was one of the main sources of artistic inspiration (not for Syria alone) in the early centuries of the Christian era. The settlements in the Jebel Sim'ān are smaller and the individual houses less spacious, possibly because the northern mountains were much more rugged and unable to support so large and wealthy a population; they would seem to have begun earlier and to have reached the highest point of their prosperity a little later, nor did they suffer the period of decline which is evident in the South during the century preceding the Arab invasion.[13]The finest sixth-century churches in the north show an almost florid luxuriance of decoration unapproached in the latest of the Southern churches, all of which are to be dated a century earlier, except the Bizzos church at Ruweiḥā. It is interesting to observe that theRuweiḥā church, though it is a little later than Ḳal'at Sim'ān, is far more severe in detail, and to this it may be added that even small houses in the north present not infrequently a greater variety and lavishness of decoration than is customary in the South.[14]When the traveller reads the inscriptions on church and dwelling, and finds the dates reckoned in the north always by the era of Antioch, he may be pardoned for surmising that it was the magnificent hand of Antioch that touched here architrave and capital, moulding and string-course. The church of St. Simon was raised not by local effort only but as a tribute to the famous saint from the whole Christian world, and probably it was not executed by local workmen but by the builders and stone-cutters of Antioch; if that be so it is difficult not to attribute the lovely church of Ḳalb Lōzeh to the same creative forces, and a dozen smaller examples, such as the east church at Bāḳirḥa, must be due to similar influences.

ḲAL'AT SIM'ĀN, THE CIRCULAR COURT

I spent the morning examining the church of St. Simon and the village at the foot of the hill, which contains some veryperfect basilicas and the ruins of a great hostelry for pilgrims. At lunch time there appeared upon the scene a Kurd, so engaging and intelligent that I immediately selected him to be my guide during the next few days, the district I proposed to visit being blank on the map, stony and roadless. Mūsa was the name of my new friend, and as we rode together in the afternoon he confided to my private ear that he was by creed a Yezīdi, whom the Mohammedans call Devil Worshippers, though I fancy they are a harmless and well-meaning people. The upper parts of Mesopotamia are their home, and from thence Mūsa's family had originally migrated. We talked of beliefs as we went, guardedly, since our acquaintance was as yet young, and Mūsa admitted that the Yezīdis worshipped the sun. "A very proper object of adoration," said I, and thinking to please him went on to mention that the Ismailis worshipped both sun and moon, but he could scarcely control his disgust at the thought of such idolatry. This led me to consider within myself whether the world had grown much wiser since the days when St. Simon sat on his column, and the conclusion that I reached was not flattering.

ḲAL'AT SIM'ĀN, THE CIRCULAR COURT

The rain interrupted our wanderings among the villages at the foot of Jebel Sheikh Barakāt, the high peak to the south-east of Ḳal'at Sim'ān, and drove us home, but the clouds lifted again towards evening, and I, watching from the marvellous west door, saw the hills turn the colour of red copper and the grey walls of the church to gold. Mikhāil, depressed and repentant, served me with an excellent dinner, in spite of which I should have dismissed him if St. Simon could have supplied me with another cook. Indeed, I was half inclined to send back to Aleppo for a new man, but the doubt whether I should secure a good servant by proxy, combined with the clemency of indolence, led me to a course of inaction which I attempted to justify by the hope that Mikhāil's repentance would be of a lasting nature. Thus for a month we lived on a volcano with occasional eruptions, and were blown up at the end. But enough of this painful subject.

ḲAL'AT SIM'ĀN, THE APSE

ḲAL'AT SIM'ĀN, THE WEST DOOR

Next day I set off with Mūsa to explore the villages in the Jebel Sim'ān to the east and north-east of the church of St. Simon. We rodealmost due east for rather less than an hour to Burjkeh, which exhibited all the characteristics of these villages of the extreme north. It had the tall square tower, which is nearly universal. All the stone work was massive, the blocks frequently laid not in courses, or if so laid, the courses showed great variety of depth. The church had a square apse, built out beyond the walls of the nave, and a running moulding hooded each window, passed along the level of the sill from one window to another, and ended beyond the last in a spiral, as though it had been a bit of ribbon festooned over the openings with the surplus rolled up. This moulding is peculiar to sixth-century decoration in North Syria. The houses of Burjkeh were very simple square cottages, built of polygonal masonry. Mūsa got wind of a newly opened tomb near the church. I contrived with some difficulty to crawl down into it, and was rewarded by finding on one of the loculi the date 292 of the era of Antioch, which corresponds to 243 A.D. Below the date were three lines of Greek inscription, much defaced. We rode on for half an hour to Surkanyā, a deserted village, charmingly situated at the head of ashallow rocky valley in which there were even a few trees. The houses were exceptionally massive in construction, with heavy stone balconies forming a porch over the door. One was dated, and the year was 406 A.D. The church was almost exactly similar to that at Burjkeh. Another three quarters of an hour to the north and we reached Fāfertīn, where, it began to rain. We took shelter under an apse, which was all that remained of a church larger than any we had yet seen, but rude in workmanship.[15]The village was inhabited by a few families of Yezīdi Kurds. In the streaming rain we rode for an hour north-east to Khirāb esh Shems, but could do nothing there owing to the weather, and so north by Kalōteh to Burj el Kās, where I found my tents pitched on a damp sward. Mūsa was much distressed by the heavy rain, and said that the wet spring had been disastrous to his fields, washing down the soil from the high ground into the valleys. The work of denudation, which has so greatly diminished the fertility of North Syria, is still going forward.

A FUNERAL MONUMENT, ḲĀṬURĀ

At Burj el Kās there was a square tower on the top of the hill and some old houses that had been repaired and re-inhabited by the Kurds. On one lintel I saw the date 406 A.D., on another an inscription difficult to decipher. The end of this stone was hidden by the angle of a rebuilt house, but peering along it I could just make out that there was a smallcarving at the extreme point. The owner of the house announced that it represented without doubt the Lady Mary. This would have been a curious addition to the meagre collection of sculpture in North Syria, as well as a theological innovation, and I expressed my regret that I could not see it better. Thereupon my friend fetched a pickaxe and chipped off a corner of his house, and the figure of the Virgin proved to be a Roman eagle.

KHIRĀB ESH SHEMS

KHIRĀB ESH SHEMS, CARVING IN A TOMB

With Najīb and Mūsa I returned to the villages that I had passed in the rain the previous day. We left Najīb with the horses at Kalōteh, and ourselves walked to Khirāb esh Shems, the path being so rocky that I wished to spare my beasts a second journey over it. Khirāb esh Shems contained a fine church, twenty-one paces long from the west door to the chord of the apse. The outer walls to north and south had fallen, leaving only the five arches on either side of the nave with a clerestory pierced by ten small round-headed windows, a charming fragment like a detached loggia. Further up the hill stood a massive chapel, destitute of aisles, with an apse built out and roofed with asemi-dome of square slabs, resembling the fifth-century baptistery at Dār Kīta.[16]In the hill side we found a number of rock-hewn tombs, in one of which I had the satisfaction to discover some curious reliefs. On the loculus to the left of the door were four roughly carved figures, their arms raised in the attitude of prayer, and on the rock wall in a dark corner a single figure clothed in a shirt and a pointed cap, holding a curious object, like a basket, in the right hand. Returning to Kalōteh we visited an isolated church on some high ground to the west of the village. On the wall by the south door there was a long inscription in Greek. The nave was separated from the aisles by four columns on either side, some of which (to judge by the fragments) had been fluted and some plain. The arcade ended against the corner of the apse with engaged fluted columns carrying beautiful Corinthian capitals. The apse, prothesis and diaconicum were all contained within the outer wall of the church. The west door showed a stilted relieving arch above a broken lintel, the lintel decorated with a row of dentils. To the south of the church there was a detached baptistery, some 9 ft. square inside, the walls still carrying the first course of the stone vault. The church must have been roofed with tiles, for I saw a number of fragments lying in the nave. A massive enclosing wall surrounded both church and baptistery. The village below contained two churches, that to the west measuring 38 ft. by 68 ft., the other 48 ft. by 70 ft. Themouldings round the doors in both churches indicate that they cannot have been earlier than the sixth-century. There Were also some houses with stone verandahs.

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