Chapter 9

CAPITAL IN THE MOSQUE, ḤAMĀH

For the moment, so far as my experience goes, the name of the English carries more weight than it has done for some time past. I noticed a very distinct difference between the general attitude towards us from that which I had observed with pain five years before, during the worst moments of the Boer War. The change of feeling is due, so far as I can judge from the conversations to which I listened, not so much to our victory in South Africa as to Lord Cromer's brilliant administration in Egypt, Lord Curzon's policy on the Persian Gulf, and the alliance with the conquering Japanese.

When I had at last got rid of the Afghan and was sitting alone on the fringe of grass that separated my tent from the city hundreds of feet below, a person of importance drove up to pay his respects. He was the Mufti, Muḥammad Effendi. He brought with him an intelligent man from Boṣrā el Ḥarīr, in the Ḥaurān, who had travelled in Cyprus and had much to say (and little good to say) of our administration there. The Mufti was a man of the same type as the Ḳāḍi of Ḥomṣ and the Sheikh Nakshibendi—the sharp-eyed and sharp-witted Asiatic, whose distinguished features are somewhat marred by an astuteness that amounts to cunning. He established himself upon the best of the camp chairs, and remarked with satisfaction:

"I asked: 'Can she speak Arabic?' and when they answered 'Yes,' verily I ordered my carriage and came."

His talk was of Yemen, whither he had been sent some years before to restore peace after the last Arab revolt. He spoke of the three days' journey over torrid desert from the coast, of the inland mountains covered with trees where there is always rain summer and winter, of theenormous grapes that hang in the vineyards, and the endless variety of fruits in the orchards, of the cities as big as Damascus, walled with great fortifications of mud a thousand years old. The Arabs, said he, were town dwellers not nomads, and they hated the Ottoman government as it is hated in few places. When the armies of the Sultan went out against them they were accustomed to flee into the mountains, where they could hold out, thought the Mufti, for an indefinite number of years. But he was wrong; a few months were enough to give victory to the Sultan's troops, what with daring generalship and the power to endure desert marches, and the rebellion failed, like many another, because the Arab tribes hate each other more vindictively than they hate the Osmanli. But, after the fashion of repressed rebellions in Turkey, it has already broken out again. The Mufti told me also that in Ḥamāh wherever they dug they found ancient foundations, even below the river level.

He was followed by my friend the Turkish telegraph clerk, who rejoiced to see me so well encamped, and then by the Muteserrif, pursuing an anxious and tottering course from his carriage through my tent ropes. The latter lent me his victoria that I might visit the parts of the town that lie on the eastern banks of the Orontes, and Kbēs and I drove off with two outriders quite exceptionally free from rags. The eastern quarter, the Hāḍir it is called, is essentially the Bedouin quarter; the city Arabic is replaced here by the rugged desert speech, and the bazaars are filled with Arabs who come in to buy coffee and tobacco and striped cloaks. It contains a beautiful little ruined mosque, said to be Seljuk, called El Ḥayyāt, the mosque of Snakes, after the twisted columns of its windows. At the northern end of the courtyard is a chamber which holds the marble sarcophagus of Abu'l Fīda, Prince of Ḥamāh, the famous geographer. He died in 1331; his tomb is carved with a fine inscription recording the date according to the era of the Hejra.

A CAPITAL, ḤAMĀH

I gave a dinner party that night to the station-master, the Syrian doctor, Sallūm, and the Greek priest. We talked till late, a congenial if incongruous company. Sallūm had received his training in theAmerican College at Beyrout, from whence come all the medical practitioners, great and small, who are scattered up and down Syria. He was a Christian, though of a different brand from the priest, and Kbēs represented yet another variety of doctrine. On the whole, said the priest, there was little anti-Christian feeling in Ḥamāh, but there was also little respect for his cloth; that very day as he walked through the town some Moslem women had thrown pebbles at him from a house-top, shouting, "Dog of a Christian priest!" Kbēs discussed the benefits conferred by the railway (a remarkably ill-managed concern I fancy) and said that without doubt Ḥamāh had profited by it. Prices had gone up in the last two years, meat that would otherwise have found no market was now sent down to Damascus and Beyrout, and he himself who, when he first came, had been able to buy a sheep for a franc, was now obliged to pay ten.

The Muteserrif of Ḥamāh provided me with the best zaptieh that I was to have on all my travels, Ḥājj Maḥmūd, a native of Ḥamāh. He was a tall broad-shouldered man, who had been in the Sultan's own guard at Constantinople, and had made the pilgrimage three times, once as a pilgrim and twice as a soldier of the escort. He rode with me for ten days, and during that time told me more tales than would fill a volume, couched in a fine picturesque speech of which he was the master. He had travelled with a German archaeologist, and knew the strange tastes of the Europeans in the matter of ruins and inscriptions.

"At Ḳal'at el Mudīk I said to him: 'If you would look upon a stonewith a horse written upon it and his rider, by the Light of God! I can show it to you!' And he wondered much thereat, and rewarded me with money. By God and Muḥammad the Prophet of God! you too, oh lady, shall gaze on it."

Now this exploit of Maḥmūd's was more remarkable than would appear at first sight, for one of the great difficulties in searching for antiquities is that the people in out-of-the-way places do not recognise a sculpture when they see it. You are not surprised that they should fail to tell the difference between an inscription and the natural cracks and weather markings of the stone; but it takes you aback when you ask whether there are stones with portraits of men and animals upon them, and your interlocutor replies: "Wāllah! we do not know what the picture of a man is like." Moreover, if you show him a bit of a relief with figures well carved upon it, as often as not he will have no idea what the carving represents.

Maḥmūd's most memorable travelling companion had been a Japanese who had been sent by his government, I afterwards learnt, to study and report on the methods of building employed in the eastern parts of the Roman empire—to such researches the Japanese had leisure to apply themselves in the thick of the war. Maḥmūd's curiosity had evidently been much excited by the little man, whose fellows were snatching victory from the dreaded Russians.

"All day he rode, and all night he wrote in his books. He eat nothing but a piece of bread and he drank tea, and when there came a matter for refusal he said (for he could talk neither Arabic nor Turkish), 'Noh! noh!' And that is French," concluded Maḥmūd.

I remarked that it was not French but English, which gave Maḥmūd food for thought, for he added presently:

"We had never heard their name before the war, but by the Face of the Truth! the English knew of them."

The Orontes makes a half circle between Ḥamāh and Ḳal'at es Seijar, and we cut across the chord of the arc, riding over the same dull cultivated plain that I had crossed on my way from Masyād. It was strewn with villages of mud-built, beehive-shaped huts; they are to bemet with on the plains all the way to Aleppo, and are like no other villages save those that appear in the illustrations to Central African travel books. As a man grows rich he adds another beehive and yet another to his mansion, till he may have a dozen or more standing round a courtyard, some inhabited by himself and his family, some by his cattle, one forming his kitchen, and one his granary. We saw in the distance a village called Al Ḥerdeh, which Maḥmūd said was Christian and used to belong entirely to the Greek communion. The inhabitants lived happily together and prospered, until they had the misfortune to be discovered by a missionary, who distributed tracts and converted sortie sixty persons to the English Church, since when there has not been a moment's rest from brawling in Al Ḥerdeh. As we rode, Maḥmūd told tales of the Ismailis and the Noṣairis. Of the former he said that the Agha Khān's photograph was to be found in every house, but it is woman that they worship, said he. Every female child born on the 27th of Rajab is set apart and held to be an incarnation of the divinity. She is called the Rōẓah. She does not work, her hair and nails are never cut, her family share in the respect that is accorded to her, and every man in the village will wear a piece of her clothing or a hair from her body folded in his turban. She is not permitted to marry.

"But what," said I, "if she desire to marry?"

"It would be impossible," replied Maḥmūd. "No one would marry her, for is there any man that can marry God?"

The sect is known to have sacred books, but none have yet fallen into the hands of European scholars. Maḥmūd had seen and read one of them—it was all in praise of the Rōẓah, describing every part of her with eulogy. The Ismailis read the Ḳur'ān also, said he. Other strange matters he related which, like Herodotus, I do not see fit to repeat. The creed seems to spring from dim traditions of Astarte worship, or from that oldest and most universal cult of all, the veneration of the Mother Goddess; but the accusations of indecency that have been brought against it are, I gather, unfounded.[10]

Of the Noṣairis Maḥmūd had much to tell, for he was we acquainted with the hills in which they live, having been for many years employed in collecting the capitation tax among the sect. They are infidels, said he, who do not read the Ḳur'ān nor know the name of God. He related a curious tale which I will repeat for what it is worth:

"Oh lady, it happened in the winter that I was collecting the tax. Now in the month of Kānūn el Awwal (December) the Noṣairis hold a great feast that occurs at the same time as the Christian feast (Christmas), and the day before, when I was riding with two others in the hills, there fell a quantity of snow so that we could go no further, and we sought shelter at the first village in the house of the Sheikh of the village. For there is always a Sheikh of the village, oh lady, and a Sheikh of the Faith, and the people are divided into initiated and uninitiated. But the women know nothing of the secrets of the religion, for by God! a woman cannot keep a secret. The Sheikh greeted us with hospitality and lodged us, but next morning when I woke there was no man to be seen in the house, nothing but the women. And I cried: 'By God and Muḥammad the Prophet of God! what hospitality is this? and are there no men to make the coffee but only women?' And the women replied: 'We do not know what the men are doing, for they have gone to the house of the Sheikh of the Faith, and we are not allowed to enter.' Then I arose and went softly to the house and looked through the window, and, by God! the initiated were sitting in the room, and in the centre was the Sheikh of the Faith, and before him a bowl filled with wine and an empty jug. And the Sheikh put questions to the jug in a low tone, and by the Light of the Truth I heard the jug make answer in a voice that said: 'Bl... bl...' And without doubt, oh lady, this was magic. And while I looked, one raised his head and saw me. And they came out of the house and seized hold of me and would have beaten me, but I cried: 'Oh Sheikh! I am your guest!' So the Sheikh of the Faith came forth and raised his hand, and on the instant all those that had hold of me released me. And he fell at my feet and kissed my hands and the hem of my coat and said: 'Oh Ḥājji! if you will not tell what you have seen I will give you tenmejides!' And by the Prophet of God (upon him be peace!) I have never related it, oh lady, until this day."

ḲAL'AT ES SEIJAR

After four hours' ride we came to Ḳal'at es Seijar. It stands on a long hog's back broken in the middle by an artificial cutting and dropping by steep bluffs to the Orontes, which runs here in a narrow bed between walls of rock. The castle walls that crown the hill between the cutting and the river make a very splendid appearance from below. There is a small village of beehive huts at the bottom of the hill. The Seleucid town of Larissa must have lain on the grassy slopes to the north, judging from the number of dressed stones that are scattered there. I pitched my camp at the further end of the bridge in a grove of apricot trees, snowy with flower and a-hum with bees. The grass was set thickly with anemones and scarlet ranunculus. The castle is the property of Sheikh Aḥmed Seijari and has been held by his family for three hundred years. He and his sons live in a number of little modern houses, built out of old stones in the middle of the fortifications. He owns a considerable amount of land and about one-third of the village, the rest being unequally divided between the Killānis of Ḥamāh and the Smātiyyeh Arabs, a semi-nomadic tribe that dwells in houses during the winter. I had a letter of introduction to Sheikh Aḥmed fromMuṣṭafa Barāzi, and, though Maḥmūd was of opinion that I should not find him in the castle owing to a long-drawn trouble between the Seijari family and the Smātiyyeh, we climbed up to the gate and along a road that showed remains of aulting, like the entrance to Ḳal'at el Ḥuṣn, and so over masses of ruin till we came to the modern village where the Seijari sheikhs live. I inquired which was the house of Aḥmed, and was directed to a big wooden door, most forbiddingly shut. I knocked and waited, and Maḥmūd knocked yet louder and we waited again. At last a very beautiful woman opened a shutter in the wall above and asked what we wanted. I said I had a letter from Muṣṭafa to Aḥmed, and wished to see him. She replied:

"He is away."

I said: "I would salute his son."

"You cannot see him," she returned. "He is in prison at Ḥamāh, charged with murder."

ḲAL'AT ES SEIJAR, THE CUTTING THROUGHTHE RIDGE

And so she closed the shutter, leaving me to wonder how good manners would bid me act under these delicate conditions. At that moment a girl came to the door and opened it a hand's breadth. I gave her the letter and my card written in Arabic, murmured a few words of regret, and went away. Maḥmūd now tried to explain the matter. It was one of those long stories that you hear in the East, without beginning, without end, and without any indication as to which of the protagonists is in the right, but an inherent probability that all are in the wrong. The Smātiyyeh had stolen some of the Seijari cattle, the sons of Aḥmed had gone down into the village and killed two of the Arabs—in the castle it was said that the Arabs had attacked them and that they had killed them in self-defence—the Government, always jealous of the semi-independence of ruling sheikhs, had seized the opportunity to strike down the Seijari whether they were at fault or no; soldiers had been sent from Ḥamāh, one of Aḥmed's sons had been put to death, two more were in prison, and all the cattle had been carried off. The rest of the Seijaris were ordered not to stir from the castle, nor indeed could they do so, for the Smātiyyeh were at their gates readyand anxious to kill them if they stepped beyond the walls. They appealed to Ḥamāh for protection, and a guard of some ten soldiers was posted by the river, whether to preserve the lives of the sheikhs or to keep them the more closely imprisoned it was difficult to make out. These events dated from two years back, and for that time the Seijaris had remained prisoners at Ḥamāh and in their own castle, and had been unable to superintend the cultivation of their fields, which were running in consequence to rack and ruin. Moreover, there seemed to be no prospect of improvement in the situation. Later in the afternoon a messenger arrived saying that Aḥmed's brother, 'Abd ul Ḳādir, would be pleased to receive me and would have come himself to welcome me if he could have left the castle. I went up without Maḥmūd and heard the whole story again from the point of view of the sheikhs, which helped me to no conclusion, since it was in most essentials a different story from that which I had heard from Maḥmūd. The only indisputable point (and it was probably not so irrelevant as it seems) was that the Seijari women were wonderfully beautiful. They wore dark blue Bedouin dress, but the blue cloths hanging from their heads were fastened with heavy gold ornaments, like the plaques of the Mycenæan treasure, one behind either temple. Agreeable though their company proved to be I was obliged to cut my visit short by reason of the number of fleas that shared the captivity of the family. Two of the younger women walked down with me through the ruins of the castle, but when we reached the great outer gate they stopped and looked at me standing on the threshold.

"Allah!" said one, "you go forth to travel through the whole world, and we have never been to Ḥamāh!"

I saw them in the gateway when I turned again to wave them a farewell. Tall and straight they were, and full of supple grace, clothed in narrow blue robes, their brows bound with gold, their eyes following the road they might not tread. For whatever may happen to the sheikhs, nothing is more certain than that women as lovely as those two will remain imprisoned by their lords in Ḳal'at es Seijar.

We rode next day by cultivated plains to Ḳal'at el Mudīk, a short stage of under four hours. Although there were several traces of ruined towns—one in particular I remember at a hamlet called Sheikh Ḥadīd, where there was a mound that looked as if it might have been an acropolis—the journey would have been uninteresting but for Maḥmūd's stories. His talk ran through the characteristics of the many races that make up the Turkish empire, with most of which he was familiar, and when he came to the Circassians it appeared that he shared my aversion to them.

"Oh lady," said he, "they do not know what it is to make return for kindness. The father sells his children, and the children would kill their own father if he had gold in his belt. It happened once that I was riding from Tripoli to Ḥomṣ, and near the khān—you know the place—I met a Circassian walking alone. I said: 'Peace be upon you! Why do you walk?' for the Circassians never go afoot. He said: 'My horse has been stolen from me, and I walk in fear upon this road.' I said: 'Come with me and you shall go in safety to Ḥomṣ.' But I made him walk before my horse, for he was armed with a sword, and who knows what a Circassian will do if you cannot watch him? And after a little we passed an old man working in the fields, and the Circassian ran out to him and spoke with him, and drew his sword as though to kill him. And I called out: 'What has this old man done to you?' And he replied: 'By God! I am hungry, and I asked him for food, and he said "I have none!" wherefore I shall kill him.' Then I said: 'Let him be. I will give you food.' And I gave him the half of all I had, bread and sweetmeats and oranges. So we journeyed until we came to a stream, and I was thirsty, and I got off mymare and holding her by the bridle I stooped to drink. And I looked up suddenly and saw the Circassian with his foot in my stirrup on the other side of the mare, for he designed to mount her and ride away. And, by God! I had been a father and a mother to him, therefore I struck him with my sword so that he fell to the ground. And I bound him and drove him to Ḥomṣ and delivered him to the Government. This is the manner of the Circassians, may God curse them!"

I asked him of the road to Mecca and of the hardships that the pilgrims endure upon the way.

"By the Face of God! they suffer," said he. "Ten marches from Ma'ān to Medā'in Ṣāleḥ, ten from there to Medīna, and ten from Medīna to Mecca, and the last ten are the worst, for the Sherif of Mecca and the Arab tribes plot together, and the Arabs rob the pilgrims and share the booty with the Sherif. Nor are the marches like the marches of gentlefolk when they travel, for sometimes there are fifteen hours between water and water, and sometimes twenty, and the last march into Mecca is thirty hours. Now the Government pays the tribes to let the pilgrims through in peace, and when they know that the Ḥājj is approaching they assemble upon the hills beside the road and cry out to the Amīr ul Ḥājj: 'Give us our dues, 'Abd ur Raḥmān Pasha!' And to each man he gives according to his rights, to one money, and to another a pipe and tobacco, to a third a kerchief, and to a fourth a cloak. Yet it is not the pilgrims that suffer most, but those who keep the forts that guard the water tanks along the road, and every fort is like a prison. It happened once that I was sent with the military escort, and my horse fell sick and could not move, and they left me at one of the forts between Medā'in Ṣāleḥ and Medina till they should return. Six weeks or more I lived with the keeper of the fort, and we saw no one, and we eat and slept in the sun, and eat again, and slept, for we could not ride out for fear of the Ḥoweiṭāṭ and the Beni 'Atiyyeh who were at war together. And the man had lived there ten years and never gone a quarter of an hour from that spot, for he watched over the stores that feed the Ḥājj when it passes. By the Prophet of God!" said Maḥmūd, with a sweeping gesture of the hand from earth to sky,"for ten years he had seen nothing but the earth and God! Now he had a little son, and the boy was deaf and dumb, but his eyes saw further than any man's, and he watched all day from the top of the tower. And one day he came running to his father and pointed with his hands, and the father knew he had seen a raiding party far off, and we hastened within and shut the doors. And the horsemen drew near, five hundred of the Beni 'Atiyyeh, and they watered their mares and demanded food, and we threw down bread to them, for we dared not open the doors. And while they eat there came across the plain the raiders of the Ḥoweiṭāṭ, and they began to fight together by the castle wall, and they fought until the evening prayer, and those who lived rode away, leaving their dead to the number of thirty. And we remained all night with locked doors, and at dawn we went down and buried the dead. But it is better to live in a fortress by the Ḥājj road," he continued, "than to serve as a soldier in Yemen, for there the soldiers receive no pay and of food not enough on which to live, and the sun bums like a fire. In Yemen if a man stood in the shade and saw a purse of gold lying in the sun, by God! he would not go out to pick it up, for the heat is like the fire of hell. Oh lady, is it true that in Egypt the soldiers get their pay week by week and month by month?"

I replied that I believed it to be the case, such being the custom in the English army.

"As for us," said Maḥmūd, "our pay is always due to us for half a year, and often out of twelve months' pay we receive but six months'. Wāllah! I have never touched more than eight months' pay for a complete year. Once," he added, "I was in Alexandria—Māsha'llah, the fine city! Houses it has as big as the palaces of kings, and all the roads have paved edges whereon the people walk. And there I saw a cabman who sued a lady for his fare, and the judge gave it to him. By the Truth! the ways of judges are different with us," observed Maḥmūd thoughtfully; and then, with an abrupt transition, he exclaimed: "Look, oh lady! there is Abu Sa'ad."

I looked, and saw Abu Sa'ad walking in the ploughed field, with hiswhite coat as spotless as though he had not just alighted from a journey as long as one of Maḥmūd's, and his black sleeves folded neatly against his sides, and I made haste to welcome the Father of Good Luck, for in Syria the first stork is like the first swallow with us. He cannot, however, any more than the swallow make summer, and we rode that day into Ḳal'at el Mudīk, in drenching rain.

A CAPITAL, ḤAMĀH

Ḳal'at el Mudīk is the Apamea of the Seleucids. It was founded by Seleucus Nicator, that great town builder who had so many cities for his god-daughters: Seleucia in Pieria, Seleucia on the Calycadnus, Seleucia in Babylonia, and more besides. Though it has been utterly destroyed by earthquakes, enough remains in ruin to prove its ancient splendour, the wide circuit of its walls, the number of its temples and the magnificence of its columned streets. You can trace the main thoroughfares from gate to gate by the heaped masses of the colonnades, and mark the stone bases of statues at the intersections of the ways. Here and there a massive portal opens into vacuity, the palace which it served having been razed to the ground, or an armed horseman decorates the funeral stele on which the living merits of his prototype are recorded. The Christians took up the story where the Seleucid kings had left it, and the ruins of a great church with a courtyard set round with columns lie on the edge of the main street. As I plunged in the soft spring rain through deep grass and flowers and clumps of asphodel, to the discomfiture of the grey owls that sat blinking on the heaps ofstones, the history and architecture of the town seemed an epitome of the marvellous fusion between Greece and Asia that came of Alexander's conquests. Here was a Greek king whose capital lay on the Tigris, founding a city on the Orontes and calling it after his Persian wife—what builders raised the colonnades that adorned this and all the Greek-tinged towns of Syria with classic forms used in a spirit of Oriental lavishness? what citizens walked between them, holding out hands to Athens and to Babylon?

The only inhabited part of Ḳal'at el Mudīk is the castle itself, which stands on the site of the Seleucid acropolis, a hill overlooking the Orontes valley and the Noṣairiyyeh mountains. It is mainly of Arab workmanship, though many hands have taken part in its construction, and Greek and Arabic inscriptions are built pellmell into the walls. To the south of the castle there is a bit of classical building of which I have seen no explanation. It looks as if it might be part of the proscenium of the theatre, for the rising ground behind it is scooped away in the shape of an auditorium. A very little digging would be enough to show whether traces of seats lie under the grassy bank. In the valley there is a ruined mosque and a fine khān, half ruined also. The Sheikh of the castle gave me coffee, and told me yet another version of the Seijari story, irreconcilable with either of the two first, whereat I congratulated myself on having early determined not to attempt to resolve that tangled problem. From the castle top the valley of the Orontes seemed to be all under water: it was the great swamp of the 'Asī, said the Sheikh, which dries in summer when the island villages (as I saw them now) resume their places as parts of the plain. Yes, certainly they were very unhealthy, summer and winter they were fever-stricken, and most of the inhabitants died young—lo, we belong to God and unto Him do we return! In winter and spring these short-lived folk follow the calling of fishermen, but when the swamp dried they turn into husbandmen after a fashion of their own. They cut the reeds and sowed maize upon them, and set them alight, and the maize rose out of the ashes and grew—a phœnix-like method of agriculture.

At Apamea the excellent cakes I had bought in Damascus came to anend—it seemed a serious matter at the time when the bill of fare was apt to be monotonous. Lunch was the least palatable of all our meals. Hard-boiled eggs and chunks of cold meat cease to tempt the appetite after they have been indulged in for a month or two. Gradually I taught Mikhāil to vary our diet with all the resources the country offered, olives and sheep's milk cheese, salted pistachios, sugared apricots and half a dozen other delicacies, including the Damascus cakes. The native servant, accustomed to feeding Cook's tourists on sardines and tinned beef, thinks it beneath the dignity of a European to eat such food, and you must go hunt the bazaars with him yourself and teach him what to buy, or you may pass through the richest country and starve on cold mutton.

[9]It will be the terminus only for a month or two longer for the line has at length been continued to Aleppo.

[10]The plural of Ismaili in the vernacular is Samawīleh. I do not know whether this is the literary form, but it is the one I have always heard.

The next day's journey is branded on my mind by an incident which I can scarcely dignify with the name of an adventure—a misadventure let me call it. It was as tedious while it was happening as a real adventure (and no one but he who has been through them knows how tiresome they frequently are), and it has not left behind it that remembered spice of possible danger that enlivens fireside recollections. We left Ḳal'at el Mudīk at eight in pouring rain, and headed northwards to the Jebel Zāwiyyeh, a cluster of low hills that lies between the Orontes valley and the broad plain of Aleppo. This range contains a number of ruined towns, dating mainly from the fifth and sixth centuries, partially re-inhabited by Syrian fellaḥīn, and described in detail by de Vogüé and Butler. The rain stopped as we rode up a low sweep of the hills where the red earth was all under the plough and the villages set in olive groves. The country had a wide bare beauty of its own, which was heightened by the dead towns that were strewn thickly over it. At first the ruins were little more than heaps of cut stones, but at Kefr Anbīl there were some good houses, a church, a tower and a very large necropolis of rock-cut tombs. Here the landscape changed, the cultivated land shrank into tiny patches, the red earth disappeared and was replaced by barren stretches of rock, from out of which rose the grey ruins like so many colossal boulders. There must have been more cultivation when the district supported the very large population represented by the ruined towns, but the rains of many winters have broken the artificial terracings and washed the earth down into the valleys, so that by no possibility could the former inhabitants draw from it now sufficient produce to sustain them. North-east of Kefr Anbīl, across a labyrinth of rocks, appeared the walls of a wonderfulvillage, Khīrbet Ḥass, which I was particularly anxious to see. I sent the mules straight to El Bārah, our halting place that night, engaged a villager as a guide over the stony waste, and set off with Mikhāil and Maḥmūd. The path wound in and out between the rocks, a narrow band of grass plentifully scattered with stones; the afternoon sun shone hot upon us, and I dismounted, took off my coat, bound it (as I thought) fast to my saddle, and walked on ahead amid the grass and flowers. That was the beginning of the misadventure. Khīrbet Ḥass was quite deserted save for a couple of black tents. The streets of the market were empty, the walls of the shops had fallen in, the church had long been abandoned of worshippers, the splendid houses were as silent as the tombs, the palisaded gardens were untended, and no one came down to draw water from the deep cisterns. The charm and the mystery of it kept me loitering till the sun was near the horizon and a cold wind had risen to remind me of my coat, but, lo! when I returned to the horses it was gone from my saddle. Tweed coats do not grow on every bush in northSyria, and it was obvious that some effort must be made to recover mine. Maḥmūd rode back almost to Kefr Anbīl, and returned after an hour and a half empty handed. By this time it was growing dark; moreover a black storm was blowing up from the east, and we had an hour to ride through very rough country. We started at once, Mikhāil, Maḥmūd and I, picking our way along an almost invisible path. As ill luck would have it, just as the dusk closed in the storm broke upon us, the night turned pitch dark, and with the driving rain in our faces we missed that Medea-thread of a road. At this moment Mikhāil's ears were assailed by the barking of imaginary dogs, and we turned our horses' heads towards the point from which he supposed it to come. This was the second stage of the misadventure, and I at least ought to have remembered that Mikhāil was always the worst guide, even when he knew the direction of the place towards which he was going. We stumbled on; a watery moon came out to show us that our way led nowhere, and being assured of this we stopped and fired off a couple of pistol shots, thinking that if the village were close at hand the muleteers would hear us and make some answering signal. None came, however, and we found our way back to the point where the rain had blinded us, only to be deluded again by that phantom barking and to set off again on our wild dog chase. This time we went still further afield, and Heaven knows where we should ultimately have arrived if I had not demonstrated by the misty moon that we were riding steadily south, whereas El Bārah lay to the north. At this we turned heavily in our tracks, and when we had ridden some way back we dismounted and sat down upon a ruined wall to discuss the advisability of lodging for the night in an empty tomb, and to eat a mouthful of bread and cheese out of Mahmūd's saddle-bags. The hungry horses came nosing up to us; mine had half my share of bread, for after all he was doing more than half the share of work. The food gave us enterprise; we rode on and found ourselves in the twinkling of an eye at the original branching off place. From it we struck a third path, and in five minutes came to the village of El Bārah, round which we had been circling for three hours. The muleteers were fast asleep in the tents; we woke them somewhat rudely, and asked whether they had not heard our signals. Ohyes, they replied cheerfully, but concluding that it was a robber taking advantage of the stormy night to kill some one, they had paid small attention. This is the whole tale of the misadventure; it does credit to none of the persons concerned, and I blush to relate it. It has, however, taught me not to doubt the truth of similar occurrences in the lives of other travellers whom I have now every reason to believe entirely veracious.

A HOUSE AT EL BĀRAH

MOULDING AT EL BĀRAH AND LINTEL AT KHIRBET HĀSS

Intolerable though El Bārah may be by night, by day it is most marvellous and most beautiful. It is like the dream city which children create for themselves to dwell in between bedtime and sleep-time, building palace after palace down the shining ways of the imagination, and no words can give the charm of it nor the magic of the Syrian spring. The generations of the dead walk with you down the streets, you see them flitting across their balconies, gazing out of windows wreathed with white clematis, wandering in palisaded gardens that are still planted with olive and with vine and carpeted with iris, hyacinth and anemone. Yet you may search the chronicles for them in vain; they played no part in history, but were content to live in peace and to build themselves great houses in which to dwell and fine tombs to lie in after they were dead. That they became Christian the hundreds of ruined churches and the cross carved over the doors and windows of their dwellings, would be enough to show; that they were artists their decorations prove; that they were wealthy their spacious mansions theirsummer houses and stables and out-houses testify. They borrowed from Greece such measure of cultivation and of the arts as they required, find fused with them the spirit of Oriental magnificence which never breathed; without effect on the imagination of the West; they lived in comfort and security such as few of their contemporaries can have known, and the Mahommadan invasion swept them off the face of the earth.

TOMB, SERJILLA

I spent two days at El Bārah and visited five or six of the villages round about, the Sheikh of El Bārah and his son serving me as guides. The Sheikh was a sprightly old man called Yūnis, who had guided all the distinguished archæologists of his day, remembered them, and spoke of them by name—or rather by names of his own, very far removed from the originals. I contrived to make out those of de Vogüé and Waddington, and another that was quite unintelligible was probably intended for Sachau. At Serjilla, a town with a sober and solid air of respectability that would be hard to match, though it is roofless and quite deserted, he presented me with a palace and its adjacent tomb that I might live and die in his neighbourhood, and when I left he rode with me as far as Deir Sanbīl to put me on my way. He was much exercised that day by a disturbance that had arisen in a village near at hand. A man had been waylaid by two others of a neighbouring village who desired to rob him. Fortunately a fellow townsman had come to his assistance and together they had succeeded in beating off the attack, but in the contest the friend had lost his life. His relations had raided the robbers' village and carried off all the cattle. Maḥmūd was of opinion that they should not have taken the law into their own hands.

"By God!" said he, "they should have laid the case before the Government."

But Yūnis replied, with unanswerable logic:

"Of what use was it to go to the Government? They wanted their rights."

In the course of conversation I asked Yūnis whether he ever went to Aleppo.

"By God!" said he. "And then I sit in the bazaars and watch the consuls walking, each with a man in front clothed in a coat worth two hundredpiastres, and the ladies with as it were flowers upon their heads." (The fashionable European hat, I imagine.) "I always go to Aleppo when my sons are in prison there," he explained. "Sometimes the gaoler is softhearted and a little money will get them out."

SHEIKH YŪNIS

I edged away from what seemed to be delicate ground by asking how many sons he had.

"Eight, praise be to God! Each of my wives bore me four sons and two daughters."

"Praise be to God!" said I.

"May God prolong your life!" said Yūnis. "My second wife cost me a great deal of money," he added.

"Yes?" said I.

"May God make it Yes upon you, oh lady! I took her from her husband, and by God (may His name be praised and exalted!) I had to pay two thousand piastres to the husband and three thousand to the judge."

HOUSE AT SERJILLA

This was too much for Ḥājj Maḥmūd's sense of the proprieties.

"You took her from her husband?" said he. "Wāllah! that was the deed of a Noṣairi or an Ismaili. Does a Moslem take away a man's wife? It is forbidden."

"He was my enemy," explained Yūnis. "By God and the Prophet of God, there was enmity between us even unto death."

"Had she children?" inquired Maḥmūd.

"Ey wāllah!" assented the Sheikh, a little put about by Maḥmūd's disapproval. "But I paid two thousand piastres to the husband and three thousand——"

"By the Face of God!" exclaimed Maḥmūd, still more outraged, "it was the deed of an infidel."

And here I put an end to further discussion of the merits of the case by asking whether the woman had liked being carried off.

"Without doubt," said Yūnis. "It was her wish."

We may conclude, therefore, that ethics did not have much to do with the matter, though he indemnified so amply both the husband and the judge.

This episode led us to discuss the usual price paid for a wife.

TOMB OF BIZZOS

"For such as we," said Yūnis, with an indescribable air of social pre-eminence, "the girl will not be less than four thousand piastres, but a poor man who has no money will give the father a cow or a few sheep, and he will be content."

After he left us I rode round by Ruweiḥā that I might see the famous church by which stands the domed tomb of Bizzos. This church is the most beautiful in the Jebel Zāwiyyeh, with its splendid narthex and carved doorways, its stilted arches and the wide-spanned arcades of its nave—how just was the confidence in his own mastery over his material which encouraged the builder to throw those great arches from pier to pier is proved by the fact that one of them stands to this day. The little tomb of Bizzos is almost as perfect as it was when it was firstbuilt. By the doorway an inscription is cut in Greek: "Bizzos son of Pardos. I lived well, I die well and well I rest. Pray for me." The strangest features in all the architecture of North Syria are the half-remembered classical motives that find their way into mouldings that are almost Gothic in their freedom, and the themes of a classical entablature that grace church window or architrave. The scheme of Syrian decoration was primarily a row of circles or wreaths filled with whorls or with the Christian monogram; but as the stone-cutters grew more skilful they ran their circles together into a hundred exquisite and fanciful shapes of acanthus and palm and laurel, making a flowing pattern round church or tomb as varied as the imagination could contrive. The grass beneath their feet, the leaves on the boughs above their heads, inspired them with a wealth of decorative design much as they inspired William Morris twelve hundred years later.

There is another church at Ruweiḥā scarcely less perfect than the Bizzos church, but not so splendid in design. It is remarkable for a monument standing close to the south wall, which has been explained as a bell tower, or a tomb, or a pulpit, or not explained at all. It is constructed of two stories, the lower one consisting of six columns supporting a platform, from the low wall of which rise four corner piers to carry the dome or canopy. The resemblance to some of the North Italian tombs, as, for instance, to the monument of Rolandino, in Bologna, is so striking that the beholder instinctively assigns a similar purpose to the graceful building at Ruweiḥā.

We camped that night at Dāna, a village that boasts a pyramid tomb with a porch of four Corinthian columns, as perfect in execution and in balanced proportion as anything you could wish to see. On our way from Ruweiḥā we passed a mansion which I would take as a type of the domestic architecture of the sixth-century. It stood apart, separated by a mile or two of rolling country from any village, with open balconies facing towards the west and a delightful gabled porch to the north, such a porch as might adorn any English country house of to-day. You could fancy the sixth-century owner sitting on the stone bench within and watching for his friends—he can have feared no enemies, or he would not have built his dwelling far out in the country and guarded it only witha garden palisade. At Ḳaṣr el Banāt, the Maidens' Fortress as the Syrians call it, I was impressed more than at any other place with the high level that social order had reached in the Jebel Zāwiyyeh, for here were security and wealth openly displayed, and leisure wherein to cultivate the arts; and as I rode away I fell to wondering whether civilisation is indeed, as we think it in Europe, a resistless power sweeping forward and carrying upon its crest those who are apt to profit by its advance; or whether it is not rather a tide that ebbs and flows, and in its ceaseless turn and return touches ever at the flood the self-same place upon the shore.

Back to Index Next