SYRIA
THE LAND
OF
LEBANON

By LEWIS GASTON LEARY

• The Real Palestine of To-Day
• Andorra, The Hidden Republic
• The Christmas City
• Syria, The Land of Lebanon

Evening in the harbor of Beirut

SYRIA
THE LAND OF
LEBANON

BY
LEWIS GASTON LEARY, Ph.D.
FORMERLY INSTRUCTOR IN THE AMERICAN
COLLEGE, BEIRUT, SYRIA

Author of The Real Palestine of To-day,
Andorra, the Hidden Republic, etc.

NEW YORK
McBRIDE, NAST & COMPANY
1913

Copyright, 1913, by
McBride, Nast & Co.

Second Printing
January, 1914

Published, November, 1913

AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED
TO HIM WHO FIRST TURNED MY THOUGHTS
TOWARD SYRIA
MY FORMER PRECEPTOR AND ALWAYS
LOYAL FRIEND
GEORGE L. ROBINSON

PREFACE

Although Syria possesses a rare natural beauty and boasts a wealth of historic and religious interest, its fame has been so overshadowed by that of the neighboring Land of Israel that most travelers are content to take the easy railway journey to Baalbek and Damascus, and know nothing of the wild mountain valleys and snow-capped summits of Lebanon or the many ancient shrines of a country whose history reaches far back of the classic days of Greece.

It is therefore with great pleasure that I accede to the request of the publishers of my “Real Palestine of To-day” and supplement the earlier work by the present companion-volume on Syria; so that, though the books may be read independently, the two together may give a complete view of the lands of the Bible.

The chapter on Palmyra is from the pen of Professor Harvey Porter, Ph.D., of the Syrian Protestant College; and for many of the hitherto unpublished photographs I am indebted to other members of the faculty of that institution. Grateful acknowledgment is also made to The World To-day, The New Era, The Sunday School Times, The Newark (N. J.) News, and especially to Travel and Scribner’s Magazine, for permission to include material which originally appeared in these publications.

In the writing of Arabic words, my aim has been smooth reading, rather than a systematic transliteration of the numerous sounds which are not found in English. As an aid to pronunciation, it should be noted that the stress always falls upon a syllable bearing a circumflex accent.

It will be seen that this book is written from a more intimate and personal viewpoint than the volume on Palestine. I could not write otherwise of the country which was for years my own home and where to-day I have many cherished friends among both Syrians and Franks. In fact, I must write very slowly; for every now and then I lay down my pen and, with a homesick lump in my throat, dream over again the happy days in that land of wondrous beauty which I still love with all my heart.

Lewis Gaston Leary

Pelham Manor, N. Y., October 15, 1913.

CONTENTS

THE ILLUSTRATIONS

SYRIA
THE LAND
OF
LEBANON

Syria, The Land of Lebanon

CHAPTER I
THE WHITE MOUNTAIN

Far off on the eastern horizon the thin haze of an October dawn gently blended into denser masses of silvery white, which rose like dream mountains above the edge of the placid azure sea. The soft, ethereal shapes did not change their outlines, however, as clouds do; and, as the steamer drew nearer to them, the rounded forms gradually took on an appearance of bulk and solidity. These were no mere piles of morning mist, but the massive shoulders of the ancient, famous, glorious range whose strange silvery tint when viewed from afar caused it long, long ago to be called Lebanon—the “White Mountain.”

As we approached the shore, the sun rose into a sky of brighter blue than ever domed Italian seas, and great waves of color swept downward over the round white mountainsides. I have traveled since in many lands; I know the beauty of Amalfi’s cliffs, the rich tints of the southern coast of Spain, the mystic alpenglow on the snow-clad peaks of Switzerland and the delicate opalescence of the Isles of Greece; but I have never seen—I never expect to see—another glory of earth which can compare with the wondrous coloring of the mountains of Lebanon.

We watched floods of red and orange sweep across the lofty summits and then brighten into crowns of mellow gold. We looked into gorges tinged with a purple so rich and deep that the color itself seemed almost a tangible thing. Nearer still we drew, and at the foot of the mountains there came into view dark forests of evergreen and broad, sloping orchards set here and there with tiny villages of shining white. Then there appeared long lines of silvery surf and yellow sand; and we skirted the northern edge of a rock-bound promontory to the crowded harbor of Beirut.

The wording of the Old Testament might lead one to infer that Lebanon is a single mountain, and the modern Syrians also familiarly refer to it as ej-Jebel—“The Mountain.” It is not, however, an isolated peak, but an entire range, which begins at the northern border of Palestine and stretches for a hundred miles along the easternmost shore of the Mediterranean. The narrow coastal plain cannot be distinguished at a distance. Straight out of the water the thousand summits rise in ever loftier ranks up to the level profile of the central ridge, two miles above the sea.

This “goodly mountain,” which dying Moses longed to see, became to Hebrew poets the consummate symbol of all that was most strong and virile, most beautiful and enduring. The springs of Lebanon, the forests of Lebanon, the glory of Lebanon—of these they dreamed and, in ecstatic eulogy or lofty spiritual hope, of these they loved to sing. “Thou art a fountain of gardens, a well of living waters, and flowing streams from Lebanon,” exclaims the hero of the Song of Songs. “The smell of thy garments is like the smell of Lebanon.” The bride, too, sings of her lover, “His aspect is like Lebanon, excellent as the cedars.”[1] In more solemn vein, the prophets who spoke of the coming Day of Jehovah drew imperishable imagery from these northern mountains. “The desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose.... The glory of Lebanon shall be given unto it.”[2] Israel “shall blossom as the lily, and cast forth his roots as Lebanon.... They that dwell under his shadow shall return; they shall revive as the grain, and blossom as the vine: the scent thereof shall be as the wine of Lebanon.”[3] “The glory of Lebanon shall come unto thee, the fir-tree, the pine, and the box-tree together.”[4]

Toward evening I strolled out to the end of the cape and looked for the first time upon what those of us who have called Beirut our home may be pardoned for believing to be the loveliest prospect in all this beautiful world. From this point can be viewed eighty miles of a coast which in the time of Abraham had already seen the rise and fall of many a proud civilization. To the south is the ancient city of Sidon, thirty miles away, and the rocky point of Sarepta and, in the dim distance, the bold headland of the “Ladder of Tyre.” To the north, beyond the gorges of the River of Death and the Dog River, is the River of Adonis, where the loves of heaven and earth were celebrated many centuries before there were Greeks in Greece. Still farther north, Jebail—ancient Byblos—disputes Damascus’ claim to be the oldest of cities; and thirty-five miles away the view of the coast is closed by the cape which the Greeks called Theoprosopon, the “Face of God.” The Syrians, however, have named this Ras esh-Shukkah or the “Split-off Point,” and say that it was torn away from the mountain and thrown bodily into the sea during the great earthquake of July 9, 551, A. D. In this land of fearful cataclysms, the story is quite possible of belief.

View along the coast north of Beirut

Looking up the western slopes of Lebanon

At the west is the expanse of the “Great Sea.” At the east, just back of the cape, are the great mountains. Everything along the shore of the Mediterranean is warm, almost tropical in its verdure, and resplendent in the orient hues painted by the Syrian sun. The lower slopes of Lebanon are soft with vineyards and groves of olive, fig and mulberry. Above the green orchards and white villages are dark pine forests, and somber gorges cut deep between smooth, swelling moorlands. Higher still the desolate, lonely slopes are quite bare of vegetation; yet, in the clear atmosphere, they seem as soft as if they were overlaid with bright velvets and shimmering silks. Last of all, the eye is drawn up to the summits of Keneiseh and Sunnin, tinged with orange and purple in the summer sunset, and in winter covered with vast sheets of snow.

From the tropics to the chill barrenness of the arctics—it is all comprehended in one glorious panorama. What an Arabic poet wrote of yonder towering Sunnin is true of the whole range—

“He bears winter upon his head,

Spring upon his shoulders,

Autumn in his bosom,

While summer lies slumbering at his feet.”

But Lebanon is more than a splendid spectacle. There would be no Syria, no fertile mother of the olive and orange, no land of the long martial history, no tale of ancient culture or modern enterprise, save for the Mountain, whose lofty peaks break the rain-clouds borne hither by the west winds and drop their precious moisture on the thirsty soil below.

CHAPTER II
THE LEFT-HAND LAND

The Arab geographer always faces towards the east. So the southernmost portion of the Arabian peninsula is to him the Yemen or “Right,” and this northern district of ours is called esh-Shâm or the “Left-hand Land.” The name Surîya or “Syria,” an ancient corruption of “Assyria,” is also, however, frequently employed, especially by the Turks.

As this territory is not a modern political unit, its limits are variously defined, both by natives and foreigners. The whole country between Asia Minor and Egypt is often called Syria, and its inhabitants, who have the same language and customs and are of practically the same—very mixed—blood, are known as Syrians. But from the historical viewpoint it is perhaps more exact to distinguish between Palestine and Syria, and confine the latter name to the territory which lies to the north of the Hebrew boundary-town of Dan.

Syria then, as we shall use the word, extends from the southern slopes of Mount Hermon to the Bay of Alexandretta, a distance of about two hundred and fifty miles. It is a long, narrow country. At the west is the Mediterranean; at the east is the Syrian Desert; within these boundaries, the width is never more than fifty miles.

The wealth and power of Syria have always been found in its southern half—the country of Lebanon. Here the mountains are divided into two parallel ranges by the long valley which the Greeks called “Hollow Syria.” Between this valley and the Mediterranean is Lebanon; between the valley and the desert is the twin range of Anti-Lebanon.[5] The western mountains rise gradually toward their northern, end, where they attain an elevation of over 11,000 feet. The eastern chain, however, reaches its culmination in its southernmost peak, Mount Hermon, which is 9,000 feet above the sea. On the coastal plain beside Lebanon lie the ancient cities of Tyre, Sidon and Byblos and the modern ports of Beirut and Tripoli. On a peninsula of fertility watered by the streams of Anti-Lebanon, Damascus stands between the mountains and the desert. The rest of Syria is made up of lofty summits, rocky gorges resounding with the tumult of cave-born torrents, high wind-swept pasture lands and broad, fertile valleys slanting up between the mountains.

The lovelorn Syrian does not sing dolefully of a sweetheart who “lies over the ocean.” To him the typical barrier is not the sea. Beni ubenik ej-jebel runs the plaintive lament—“Between me and thee is the mountain.” The country is more crowded with towering peaks than Palestine or Greece, but it is more fertile than either. No other region of equal size has such a variety of vegetable life; no other land is more healthful; and to those of us who have lived in the shadow of Lebanon, none is more beautiful.

Syria, as we have defined it, includes one entire vilâyet, or province, of the Turkish Empire and parts of three others. Its extreme northern portion is included in the great Vilayet of Aleppo, which stretches far across the desert to Mesopotamia. Anti-Lebanon and most of Hollow Syria lie within the Vilayet of esh-Shâm, or “Syria.” This important province, whose capital is Damascus, takes in all the arable land east of the Jordan as far as the southern end of the Dead Sea. The independent Mutesarrifîyet, or sub-province, of Lebanon is practically co-extensive with this range, but touches the Mediterranean only for a few miles and has no seaport. Almost the entire coast belongs to the Vilayet of Beirut, which reaches from Mount Akra, a hundred and fifty miles north of the provincial capital, to within sight of the harbor of Jaffa and includes nearly all of Palestine west of the Jordan River.

In the absence of any census, we can hardly do more than guess at the population of Syria. It is probably above two million. The Turkish residents are for the most part government officials, and there are few Jews outside of Beirut and Damascus. The mass of the inhabitants are descendants of the Syrians, or Arameans, of Biblical times; but the native blood has been mixed with that of many other races. It is scarcely correct to call these people “Arabs,” except in the sense that they are an Arabic-speaking race. In countenance, as well as customs, they differ considerably from their less civilized cousins who roam the neighboring deserts.

The ecclesiastical bodies of Syria are numerous, jealous and extremely fanatical. In striking contrast to the awkward reticence of the West regarding religious matters, every Syrian not only counts himself an adherent of the faith into which he was born, but he thrusts that fact upon your attention and, on the slightest provocation, is ready to fight for his belief. A man’s ancestors, descendants and home may be cursed with all the wealth of Oriental vituperation, and he will probably accept this as a mere emphatic conversational embellishment. But let the single word dinak! “thy religion!” be spoken with a curseful intonation to a follower of a different faith, and the spirit of murder is let loose.

Islam is, of course, the official religion of the government; but in the southern half of the country the majority of the inhabitants are Christians. The most powerful church is the Greek Orthodox; next in importance come the Maronites and Greek Catholics, who render allegiance to the Pope of Rome. Nearly a dozen other sects, exclusive of the Protestants, are actively working and hating and scheming in Syria. Many of the members of these Oriental churches are sincere and devout; but, on the whole, the organized Christianity of Syria, like that of neighboring Palestine,[6] has been so inextricably entangled with political ambitions, sectarian jealousy and civil warfare that its moral and religious teachings are in danger of being completely neglected.

Syrian Mohammedanism is also divided against itself, though not to such a hazardous degree as is Syrian Christianity. Many villages in northern Lebanon are occupied by adherents of the schismatic Shiite sect. These Metawileh, as they are called, bear an unenviable reputation for their ignorance, dishonesty, brutality and, what is very unusual in Syria, their lack of hospitality. They will refuse accommodations to a traveler and are accustomed to break the earthenware drinking-jug which has been defiled by the touch of a stranger. Still farther north there survive a few settlements of the Ismailians, who during the Middle Ages were known as the Assassins—literally, “hashish-smokers.” Their character is sufficiently indicated by the fact that the only thing they gave the Western world was the word “assassin.”

In the mountains which bear their name are a hundred thousand Nusairiyeh, who migrated hither many centuries ago from Mesopotamia and still hold to a strange, mystic nature-worship. Traces of the vile phallic cults of ancient Syria are also found among the wilder regions of the north.

The sixty thousand Druses of central and southern Lebanon are frequently confused with the Moslems by careless writers; on the other hand they are sometimes referred to as a Christian sect. As a matter of fact, they are neither. Although this faith originated among followers of Islam, the early Druses suffered many persecutions at the hands of the Moslems, who classed them as “infidels,” while their feuds with the Christian populace of Lebanon have led to some of the most cruel and bitter struggles of modern times.

In the eleventh century an insane ruler of Egypt named Hakim Biamrillah declared himself to be the Imâm, or incarnation of the Deity, and his preposterous claims found an enthusiastic prophet in a Persian resident of Cairo called ed-Durazy, from whom is derived the familiar name “Druse.” The adherents of this sect, however, call themselves Muwahhidîn, or “Unitarians.” Such was the wrath of the Egyptian Moslems at ed-Durazy’s preaching that he was forced to flee to the mountains of Syria, where the new faith spread rapidly among the inhabitants of Hermon and southern Lebanon. Shortly after ed-Durazy’s flight the caliph Hakim mysteriously disappeared. Doubtless he was assassinated; but the Druses believe that he is miraculously concealed until the appointed day of his final revelation as the victorious Mahdi.

The peculiar doctrines of the Druses were systematized by a companion of the prophet’s exile, Hamzeh ibn Ahmed, since known as the “Guide.” The tenets of this faith are still, however, only partly understood by Western scholars; for its most important beliefs are kept in great secrecy, none of the women and only a very small proportion of the men are initiated into its esoteric teachings, converts to other faiths are practically unknown, and the Druses hold that, in conversation with a Moslem or a Christian, it is permissible for them to pretend acquiescence in the other’s statements.

Their extreme emphasis on the unity of God, whom they divest of all attributes, goes even beyond that of Mohammedanism. Yet this is accompanied by a belief in the divine self-revelation through a succession of incarnations which began with Adam and ended with the Caliph Hakim and included Jesus and Mohammed. They also hold the doctrine of transmigration of souls and think that many of them will be reincarnated in the heart of China, where, according to their strange tradition, there are multitudes of Chinese Druses. They do not practice the Moslem virtues of prayer, fasting, formal almsgiving and the pilgrimage to Mecca; but the few initiates rigorously abstain from both wine and tobacco.

Probably all that most Druses know about their religion is that they are Druses. Yet their feeling of separation from the other inhabitants of the country, which amounts to a sense of racial difference, has made them the most proud and independent—not to say ungovernable—class in the Turkish Empire. The faces of the Druse men are the handsomest and haughtiest in Syria, and their forms are tall and stalwart. They are a brave, intellectual, courteous, hospitable people; they treat their wives far better than do the Moslems, and in time of war they never massacre women. Some of the Druse emirs whom I have met are refined, correctly dressed, well-educated gentlemen who are as much at home on the boulevards of Paris as they are among their own mountains. Yet anything more than a superficial acquaintance with them is prevented by the suave hypocrisy which their religion inculcates; their otherwise admirable courage is marred by heartless cruelty and a relentless carrying out of the ancient law of blood for blood; and the splendid organization with which they meet the aggressions of an alien enemy is weakened by their interminable intertribal feuds. The history of the great Druse families of Lebanon is stained by many an awful record of treachery, fratricide and massacre.

In the summer of 1860, twenty years of intermittent altercations between the Druses and Maronites culminated in an outbreak of fearful religious warfare. The Druses were perhaps no braver than their opponents; but they showed better discipline, had more able leaders and, from the beginning, were encouraged by the support of the Moslem government. So the war soon developed into a mere succession of massacres of the unfortunate Maronites. Turkish officials connived at these outrages, and Turkish regiments, presumably sent to restore order in the troubled districts, either disarmed the Christians and then turned them over to be dealt with by their enemies, or else themselves added to the horrors of the slaughter by killing even the women whom the Druses had spared. Maronite monasteries were sacked and their monks put to death with barbarous tortures, a hundred villages were burned, and multitudes of unarmed peasants who had sought protection in the courtyards of government buildings were allowed to be shot down by their relentless enemies. It will never be known just how many Christians were slain during that awful summer. Seven thousand are said to have perished in Damascus alone; and some conception of the vast number of survivors who were left homeless and destitute is gained when we learn that the Anglo-American Relief Committee of Beirut had upon its lists the names of twenty-seven thousand refugees.

The Christian nations were shocked into activity by the terrible tidings from Syria. Fifty European warships soon reached the harbor of Beirut, and an army of ten thousand French soldiers was landed. Just in time to avoid foreign intervention, however, the sultan sent two of his own regiments from Constantinople to quell the disturbance, and shortly afterwards the grand vizier himself came to Syria with additional troops. These soldiers were but a handful in comparison with the Druse army or even the Turkish regiments which had been assisting in the slaughter; but when the mysterious, unwritten messages go forth from Constantinople commanding that a massacre shall be stopped—or shall be begun—they are understood at once in the most inaccessible mountain villages of the empire.

As soon as order was restored, the conscription, from which holy Damascus had been exempt since the days of Mohammed, was strictly enforced as a punitive measure; and over twenty thousand Damascene Moslems were sent in chains to the coast, whence they were transported to regiments in distant provinces of Turkey. Furthermore, a levy of a million dollars was laid upon the city, and its governor and a hundred prominent Moslem residents were hanged for their share in the massacres, as were also a few officials in other parts of the country. Not a single Druse, however, was executed for partaking in the awful slaughter.

The European powers now insisted that there should never be another Moslem ruler over the Christians of Lebanon, and such pressure was brought to bear upon the Turkish government that the district was made a practically independent province. Its governor must be, like the Maronites, a Latin Christian, although, in justice to the Druse population, he may not be an inhabitant of Syria. His appointment is subject to the approval of the six great powers and he cannot be removed without the consent of their ambassadors at Constantinople. The province pays no taxes to the imperial government, nor may Turkish troops be stationed within its boundaries except under certain stringent restrictions. Lebanon has its own army of volunteer militia; and the free, independent bearing of these mountaineers is in striking contrast to that of the underpaid, underfed and poorly clothed conscripts of the regular army.

The rulers appointed under the new régime have not all been equally capable and honest. Some have understood the language of bakhsheesh as well as their Turkish predecessors. The commercial growth of the province has also been hampered by the lack of a seaport. Yet since 1861 the mountaineers, Druses and Maronites alike, have enjoyed an unprecedented quiet and an increasing material prosperity. The old feudal wars have ceased, the tyrannical political power of the Maronite hierarchy is greatly diminished, education is rapidly advancing and the valuation of property in the Lebanon district has greatly advanced. In the words of Lord Dufferin, who was a member of the international commission which framed the new plan of government, “until the present day the Lebanon has been the most peaceful, the most contented and the most prosperous province of the Ottoman Dominion.”

A guard of Lebanon soldiers

The village of Deir El-Kamr, where no Druse dare dwell

Yet the cruel past has not entirely sunk into oblivion. The Maronite village of Deir el-Kamr, for instance, has still one mosque; but no Moslem dwells there, nor dare a Druse pass through this neighborhood where the massacre of unarmed Christians lasted until more than two thousand corpses lay within the enclosure of the government-house. On the other hand, there are Druse hamlets where no Maronite would trust himself. Ten years ago, when Beirut was in one of its periodic tumults, five thousand Lebanon soldiers, stalwart, brave and well-armed, encamped just outside the city limits, waiting for one more anti-Christian outbreak—which fortunately did not come—as an excuse for wiping out the Moslem population. Looking across a deep gorge of Lebanon, I once saw a file of Turkish soldiers laboriously making their way up the steep mountainside. They were seeking a murderer, so I was told, but a murderer of no common mettle; for from his inaccessible retreat among the cliffs he had sent to the government of Beirut a bold acknowledgment of his crimes, accompanied by the threat that whenever in the future a Christian should be assassinated in that city he would immediately descend to the coast and take the life of a Moslem in exchange.

On a stormy winter night I sat by the charcoal fire in a Maronite hut high up among the mountains, and heard read from a grimy, much-thumbed manuscript a long poem which described the brave part played by that village in the struggles of fifty years ago. The sonorous Arabic sentences had almost an Homeric ring. Like the list of Grecian ships sounded the rhythmic roll of the local heroes of half a century gone by. And as the dull light of the fire shone on the circle of dark, bearded mountaineers, the grim lines of their faces showed that the valor of the village had not weakened with the passing years, nor had the wrongs of the village fathers been forgot.

To the traveler, bewildered by strange customs and by peculiar ways of doing familiar things, this seems indeed a “Left-hand Land.” The Syrian holds a loose sheet of paper in his palm and writes from right to left. Yet numbers are written, like ours, from left to right. In beckoning, the fingers are turned downward. To nod “No” the head is jerked upward, and added emphasis is sometimes given by a sharp cluck of the tongue. The carpenter draws his saw toward him on the cutting stroke. The oarsman likes to stand up and face the bow of his boat. When digging, one man holds the handle of the shovel while two others do most of the work by pulling it with ropes. Except in cities which have felt European influence, it is the men who wear skirts or flowing bloomers, and the women who wear trousers. Keys are put into the locks upside down. In entering a house, the hat is kept on the head, but the shoes are removed.

Grown men greet one another in public with embraces and kisses. You see them walking along hand in hand, or smelling little nosegays. Yet these acts are not necessarily indicative of effeminacy. For all you know, these same fellows may occupy their leisure moments with highway robbery. The slightest difference of opinion gives rise to excited vituperation and offensive gesticulation; but a blow is seldom given. When a Syrian does smite, he employs no half-way measures: he smites to kill. I only once saw a blow struck in anger: then a club four inches thick was, without warning, brought down with full force upon the head of an unfortunate boatman.

In this topsy-turvy land, parents take the name of their first-born son, and use it even in signing legal papers. The gate-keeper at the American College, for instance, was never called anything but Abu Mohammed, “the Father of Mohammed.” When a son is despaired of, the public humiliation is sometimes avoided by inventing one. It is quite possible that Abu Zeki or Abu Saïd has no children at all.

The daughters of the family are often called after jewels or flowers or constellations; yet, except in Protestant families, the birth of a girl is not an occasion for rejoicing. One father insisted on christening an unwelcome girl baby Balash, which might be translated “Nothing doing!” Another parent, who already had six daughters, was so disgusted at the advent of a seventh that he named her Bikeffeh, “Enough!” A Maronite proverb says, “The threshold mourns forty days when a girl is born.” Nevertheless the lot of the Christian woman, even in communities where Christianity means hardly more than a political organization, is usually far better than that of her Moslem sisters.

Surnames are very indefinite and shifting matters. If Musa has a son named Jurjus, the boy will naturally be known as Jurjus Musa. But the father will, of course, change his own name to Abu Jurjus. Many surnames are taken from occupations. Haddad or “Smith” is here, as in every country, one of the most common. Others are derived from localities. Hanna Shweiri is “John from Shweir,” and Suleiman Beiruti is “Beirut Solomon.” Real family or clan names, however, are not uncommon, especially among the aristocracy.

As a man becomes more prosperous he will often drop his commonplace appellation in favor of a more dignified one, which perhaps revives an ancient but long neglected designation of his family. This easy putting on and off of names sometimes leads to considerable confusion. I once asked all over a mountain village for the house of a friend whom I had known in Beirut, and met with the most positive assurances that no such person lived there. Fortunately I happened to remember that my friend’s father was a baker. “John Baker! Oh, yes, everybody in town knows him! But that other fellow you’ve been asking about—we never heard of him.”

The mountain boys, especially, used often to take new surnames when they came to college. Sometimes they afterward exchanged these for still better ones. So a facetious professor greeted a returning student with “Well, Eliya, what is your name this year?” An exasperated inquirer, who had vainly tried to pin down a certain youth to a satisfactory statement of his chosen titles, finally exclaimed, “Now, tell me, what is your name?” Then came the maddeningly irritating answer which so frequently tempts the Occidental to commit homicide, “As you like, sir!” Another young man, who had narrowly escaped expulsion for his various misdeeds, decided to turn over a new leaf; so he came back to the college the next autumn with a different name—and made it good. The Syrian understands better than do we the full content of the divine promise of “a new name.”[7]

At first this seems a land of inexplicable contrasts. I could write of its ravaging pestilences so that one would find it hard to believe that Syria is notable for its healthfulness. I could record fearful massacres until the reader would think me foolishly daring for never carrying a weapon during all my travels. I could—quite truthfully—tell how a Syrian landscape lacks so many of the old familiar aspects of our home scenes, and give no hint of the glorious panoramas of this fertile, well-watered, bright-colored land—where the mountains sit with their feet in the Great Sea and their heads among the glorious clouds, while mantles of shimmering silver fall above their richly tinted garments.

As is the land, so are its people; not easy to understand and justly appraise. They are cruel and cunning and prefer to destroy an enemy by a sudden rush of overwhelming odds rather than to meet him in equal combat. Yes, this is true of many of them; yet they have a childlike delight in sweet scents, bright colors, beautiful flowers and simple games. Although they may live in poverty and squalor, they are very frugal and temperate. They are ignorant; but when the opportunity comes they study with a pathetic earnestness and an unrivaled quickness. At half-past three of cold winter mornings I used to hear a servant going the rounds of my dormitory to waken the young men, at their own request, so that they might spend four hours before breakfast at their books. Some of those same indefatigable students have since led their classes in great American and European universities.

It is true that the Syrians nurse vengeful feuds for generation after generation. That is partly because family ties are so wonderfully strong among them. “I and my brother against my cousin; I and my cousin against my neighbor,” runs the proverb. When two brothers are in the same class at school or college, they seldom have other chums, but insist upon sitting side by side in the classroom, and during their free hours they wander about the campus with arms around each other’s shoulders. If an elder brother goes away to make his fortune in some distant country, he never forgets the loved ones at home; but year after year the remittances will come, until all the younger children have been educated or have been brought across the sea to share in the opportunities of the new land of promise. A trusted American missionary had at one time in his possession no less than five thousand dollars which had been sent from America for the parents and younger children of a single mountain village.

The ambition of the Syrian is as boundless as his daring, and his courageous persistence is a buttress to his splendid capacity for both business and scholarship. The son of any laboring man may, for all one knows, become a high Egyptian official, a wealthy merchant of the Argentine, a French poet or the pastor of an American church. The “Arab” dragoman of your tourist party may be the proud father of a boy whose learned works in choicest English you hope sometime to read, or whose surgical skill may be called upon to carry you through a critical operation. These are not fanciful possibilities. I have particular names in mind as I write; and the tale of the bravely endured hardships of some of these sons of Syria who have made good in many a far-off land would match the romantic story of the early struggles of Garfield or Lincoln.

The hospitality of the Syrians is no mere form or pretense, but a sincere, winsome joy in ministering to the poor and the stranger. Their courtesy is fortified by an invincible tact and a very keen knowledge of human nature. Their speech, the strange guttural Arabic which sounds so uncouth to the passing stranger, is one of the most beautiful, expressive and widespread of languages, and has a wealth of fascinating literature. Their religious fanaticism is grounded in an intense, unshakable belief in the fact and the necessity of a divine revelation; and he who in the heat of a ferocious bigotry will kill his neighbor is willing, if need be, to die himself for the faith, whether it be in open warfare or by the tortures of a slow martyrdom.

The native ideals of truthfulness and business honor are not, to be frank, those of Anglo-Saxon nations. It is not considered very insulting to call a Syrian a liar. But even in the Western business world all is not truth and uprightness, and these men and women have an excuse which we have not. For centuries their land has been ruled by a government based upon untruth and injustice, and very often the only protection for life or property lay in evasion and deceit. The wonder is that, in spite of all, there are still so many Syrians who would swear to their own hurt and change not, and who boldly urge upon their people the eradication of what is perhaps their greatest racial shortcoming.

In brief, with all his faults, which we of the West are apt to over-emphasize because they are not the same as our faults, the Syrian is frugal, temperate, ambitious, adaptable, intellectually brilliant, capable of infinite self-sacrifice for any great end, essentially religious, generously hospitable, courteous in social intercourse and, to his loved ones, extremely affectionate and faithful.

When to these admirable racial traits is added a sincere acceptance of the moral teachings of religion, then, whatever his creed, the Syrian makes a friend to be cherished very close to your heart.

CHAPTER III
THE CITY OF SATURN

“And behold, I am now in Beirut.” Thus wrote Prince Rib-addi to his royal master, Pharaoh Amenhotep, thirty-three centuries ago; and when the Tell el-Amarna Letters were sent from Syria to Egypt, about 1400 B. C., Beirut had long been one of the chief commercial cities of the eastern Mediterranean. According to a Greek tradition, it was founded in the Golden Age by the Titan Kronos, or Saturn, the father of Zeus. The tutelary deity of the seaport, however, was Poseidon (Neptune), another son of Saturn, who is represented on its coins driving his sea-horses, or standing on the prow of a ship with his trident in one hand and a dolphin in the other.

The Bay of Beirut and Mount Sunnin

Among the pine groves of the Cape of Beirut

The authentic history of the city begins with the records of its conquerors. Rameses II. of Egypt and Sennacherib of Assyria commemorated their successful Syrian campaigns by inscriptions still existing on the cliffs of the Dog River, just north of Beirut. Centuries later, Alexander the Great marched his conquering army through the city, Pompey added it to the Roman Empire, and Augustus visited here his son-in-law, the local governor. It was in Beirut that Herod the Great appeared as the accuser of his two sons, who were thereupon convicted of conspiracy and put to death by strangling. Vespasian passed through its streets in triumphal progress on his way to assume the imperial crown, and in its immense amphitheater Titus celebrated his capture of Jerusalem by a magnificent series of shows and gladiatorial contests. During the First Crusade, Baldwin, Count of Flanders and ruler of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, wrested the city from the Moslems after a long siege and put its inhabitants to the sword. Seventy years later, the greatest of all Saracen leaders, Saladin, recaptured the city from the Christians. The names of the mighty warriors who since then have fought for the possession of this old, old seaport are less familiar to Western readers; yet few cities have had for so many centuries such intimate association with the most renowned characters of history. There is a local tradition that Christ Himself visited Beirut on the occasion of His journey “into the borders of Tyre and Sidon,” and during the Middle Ages there was exhibited here a miracle-working picture of Him, which was said to have been painted by Nicodemus the Pharisee.

The inner harbor, still known as Mar Jurjus or “St. George,” is associated with what is perhaps the oldest of all myths. This took on varying forms during the millenniums of its progress westward from the Euphrates to the Atlantic. We find it first in the Babylonian Creation Epic, which tells of the destruction of the chaos-monster by the solar deity, Marduk. When the Greeks took over the ancient Asiatic mythology, it was Perseus, child of the sun-god, who slew the dragon at Jaffa and released the beautiful Andromeda. In the sixth century A. D., the exploit was transferred to St. George, whose victory over the sea-monster was perhaps an unconscious parable of the overthrow of heathenism by Christianity.

St. George appears to have been a real person, who suffered martyrdom about the year 300, possibly at Lydda in Palestine, where his tomb is still shown. Singularly enough, this Syrian Christian has not only been the patron saint of England since Richard Cœur de Lion came to the Holy Land on the Third Crusade, but is also a very popular hero of the Moslems.

The historic character had, of course, nothing to do with any dragon, and it was only many centuries after his death that he became identified with the hero of the ancient Semitic myth, under its Perseus form. A mighty monster, so the story runs, had long terrified the district of Beirut, and was prevented from destroying the city only by receiving the annual sacrifice of a beautiful virgin. One year the fateful lot fell upon the daughter of the governor. When the poor girl was taken to the appointed place, she knelt in prayer and besought God to send her a deliverer. Whereupon St. George appeared in shining armor and, after a tremendous battle, slew the monster, delivered the maiden, and freed the city from its long reign of terror. Whether, like his prototype Perseus, he married the rescued virgin, the story does not relate. We are told, however, that the grateful father built a church in honor of the valiant champion and also instituted a yearly feast in commemoration of his daughter’s deliverance. During the Middle Ages, this was celebrated by Christians and Moslems alike. Beside the Dog River can still be seen the ruins of an ancient church and a mosque, both of which marked the supposed locality of the contest; and here also is a very old well, into which the body of the slain dragon is said to have been thrown.

The word Beirût is doubtless derived from the ancient Semitic place-name Beeroth,[8] which means, “wells,” and throughout the Arab world such a designation immediately calls up a picture of fertile prosperity. The triangular cape on whose northern shore the city is situated projects from the foot of Lebanon five miles into the Mediterranean and has an area of about sixteen square miles. This level broadening of the coastal plain appears in striking contrast to the country just north and south of it, where there is often hardly room for a bridle-path between the cliffs and the sea. Beirut itself has a population of nearly 200,000, and within sight are many scores of flourishing villages. Indeed, with the possible exception of Damascus and its environs, this is the most densely populated, intensely cultivated and prosperous district in either Syria or Palestine.

The southwest side of the cape is bordered by great piles of sand, which is said to have been brought hither by wind and tide all the way from Egypt. Perhaps it did not travel so far as that; but after every heavy rain a yellow stream runs northward through the Mediterranean close to the shore and deposits its sediment when it strikes the edge of the cape. The rapid shifting of these sand dunes under the influence of the prevailing west winds is a continual menace to the city, and the surrounding orchards would soon be overwhelmed if it were not for a series of closely-planted pine groves which, since the first trees were set out here in the seventeenth century by the Druse prince Fakhreddin, have served as a barrier against the inroads of the wind-swept sand.

Back of the dark line of protecting pines, millions upon millions of olive trees appear as one great mass of shimmering green. When Ibrahim Pasha, the Egyptian conqueror of Syria, looked down from Lebanon upon the country about Beirut, he exclaimed that three seas lay beneath him; the blue Mediterranean, the yellow waste of sand and the silvery surface of the olive forest which floods the fertile plain.

Near the lighthouse on the point, where perpendicular cliffs rise two hundred feet out of the Mediterranean, the storm waves have cut a number of lofty caverns. The water in most of these is so filled with fallen rocks that, except when the sea is absolutely calm, it is unsafe to take a boat into them; but the series of deep, gloomy caves is a challenge to the swimmer. Beneath the surface of the crystal water can be seen huge boulders covered with brilliant sea-anemones and sharp-spined sea-urchins. From the liquid pavement the roof arches up into the darkness like the nave of an old cathedral, or like some ruined palace of Neptune. Occasional ledges provide convenient resting-places where one can sit and watch the pigeons flying in and out, or listen to the twitter of the swallows and the chatter of the frightened bats. The caves sometimes harbor larger denizens than these. More than once, when swimming before them, I have been startled to see the dog-like head of a seal appear in the water close beside me.

Slanting up into the walls of these caverns are narrow tunnels where the softer rock has been worn away by the seeping of the surface water from above. If one cares to risk losing a little skin from the elbows and knees, it is possible to climb many yards up these steep, slippery shafts. One day, while walking along the top of the cliff, I came upon the upper end of a natural chimney whose formation appeared so unusually regular that I became curious to see what it might lead to. So I slid down twelve or fifteen feet and dropped into the ashes of a recent fire which had been built in the center of a cozy little cave high above the water. The rocky point of the cape, honeycombed with dark passages and secret hiding-places, is a favorite resort of smugglers, especially on moonless nights; and in the bazaars of the city you can buy many articles which have not been submitted to the extortions of the Turkish custom-house. While I was a resident of Beirut, the “king of the smugglers,” who lived near me, killed three revenue officers who were interfering with his illicit trade. Bribery and intimidation, however, soon removed all danger of prosecution for his various crimes; and a few days later I saw him driving defiantly along the Shore Road in his elegant carriage.

Beirut has suffered so severely from earthquakes, as well as from besieging armies, that there remain no traces of very old buildings except some columns of reddish Egyptian granite. Only a few of these can now be seen above ground or lying under water at the bottom of the harbor, where doubtless they were rolled by earthquake shocks; but from the frequency with which they appear whenever excavations are made, there must be a multitude of them scattered all over the site of the ancient city.

Among the mountains just back of the cape are the ruins of a Roman aqueduct, which supplied the city from a spring in the valley of the Beirut River, six miles away. The ravine was bridged by a series of six arches, arranged in four tiers. The lowest of these had two spans; the highest had twenty-five, and rose a hundred and sixty feet above the river-bed. On the west bank, the water was carried through a tunnel cut in the solid rock of the mountainside. This opening is now filled with fallen stones, and of the aqueduct itself there remain only a few broken arches at the eastern end; yet the massive ruin, rising high above the river amid these desolate, lonely surroundings, still suggests the wealth and enterprise of the centuries long gone by.

During the last forty years Beirut has been abundantly provided with water piped from the Dog River by an English company. So pure is this supply that since its use became common the city has not known a single outbreak of cholera or plague, though the surrounding country has often been devastated by these diseases. One memorable year we watched a fearful epidemic creep up the coast toward us, curve inland round the edge of the district supplied with Dog River water, and then sweep back again to the seashore and continue its terrible journey northward.

The Dog River was in ancient times known as the Lycus or “Wolf” River. It is said to have received its present name from a marvelous statue of a dog set above the cliffs, which opened its stone mouth and barked lustily at the approach of a hostile ship. Indeed, to this very day a vivid imagination can discern the likeness of a huge mastiff in a certain boulder, now submerged in the center of the stream.

The pass up its rocky gorge has been trod by many a great army. The well-preserved bridge which now spans the stream was built by the sultan Selim four hundred years ago; but a Latin inscription on the cliff indicates that a military road was constructed here by Marcus Aurelius as early as the second century, and on the sheer rocks at the left bank of the river are cut panels whose records far antedate the days of Roman supremacy. Ashur-nasir-pal, Shalmaneser, Tiglath-pileser, Sennacherib, Esarhaddon, Rameses—such are the strange sounding names given to the forms in bas-relief which still lift above the rushing stream the scepters of their long-vanished power. The boastings of Greek and Arabic conquerors are also found along this path of ancient armies and—what seems in such surroundings a weak anti-climax—upon a panel which originally bore one of the Egyptian inscriptions now appears the record of the French expedition of 1860.

Four miles from the mouth of the Dog River, its principal tributary bursts from a cave which extends far into the heart of Lebanon. Within this are found stalactites of every shape and color, natural columns as large and almost as symmetrical as those of the Parthenon, enormous cathedral-like chambers, labyrinthine passages without number, deep icy pools, and cascades whose dull thunder reverberates through the dark depths of the mountain. With the aid of portable rafts, adventurous explorers have penetrated this wonderful cavern for nearly a mile; but at that distance there was no diminution of the volume of the stream or any other indication that they had come at all near to the source of the mysterious underground river. The light of their torches but dimly revealed the roaring torrent ceaselessly speeding out from dark, distant channels like those

“Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man

Down to a sunless sea.”

Although the Bay of Beirut opens to the Mediterranean at an obtuse angle, it is so well protected from storms by the long cape that it provides the safest anchorage between Port Saïd and Smyrna. I remember only one tempest which blew so strongly that anchors could not hold and steamers had to leave the port for the open sea. The harbor is crowded with shipping of all sizes and shapes, from the little coastwise barks and the queer, low Egyptian boats with their one triangular sail to the great transatlantic liners which bring multitudes of tourists on cruises to the Holy Land. About four thousand merchant vessels clear the port annually. Since the dawn of history, Damascus has sent its exports hither by the ancient caravan road. For the past eighteen years there has been a railway across the mountains, and its recently completed branch to Aleppo will doubtless attract more and more of the trade of northern Syria.

The exports from Beirut amount each year to over $4,000,000. About one-third of this value is made up of raw silk; other important commodities are olive oil, licorice and fruit. The character of the chief imports is determined by the fact that the mountains are almost denuded of large forest trees. Immense quantities of timber, metal girders, firewood and petroleum must therefore be brought from abroad. The dependence of Syria upon other countries for the materials used in modern construction was illustrated in the building of the American Girls’ School in Beirut. The lumber came from Maine, the doors and windows from Massachusetts, the desks and chairs from New York, the clay tiles from France, the zinc roof of the cupola from England, and the glass from Austria.

Bridge over the Dog River built by Sultan Selim

Procession in the Serai Square of Beirut in celebration of the granting of a constitution to the Turkish Empire in 1909

The cream-colored sandstone for this and a multitude of other structures was, however, quarried near Beirut. The stone makes a fine building material, as it is easily worked, attractive in appearance and very durable. But unfortunately it is at first quite porous, and newly-erected houses are dangerously damp until the rains of two or three winters have, on their way through the walls, first dissolved a certain amount of the stone and then deposited it in the interstices. So the Syrian proverb says, “When you build a house, rent it the first year to your enemy, the second year to your friend, and the third year move into it yourself.”

The traveler who journeys to Beirut from the west is naturally impressed by its scenes of Oriental life; but to one who has come hither from Lebanon or Damascus or even from Jerusalem, it seems almost a European city. Here is a French gas company, an English waterworks, a German hospital and an American college; here are post and telegraph offices, a harbor filled with shipping, and the terminus of a busy railway system. Four lines of electric tram-cars furnish quick transportation through the main streets to the attractive suburbs, and many of the wealthier residents possess automobiles. A score of printing-presses are at work and daily newspapers are sold by shouting newsboys. There are a dozen good hotels; and well-equipped stores, run on European lines, are rapidly crowding out the tiny shops of the typical Oriental merchant. Gaudy billboards extol the virtues of French cosmetics, English insurance companies and American sewing machines, phonographs and shoes, or announce the subjects of the moving-picture dramas for the coming week. Carriages throng the principal thoroughfares, the better class of citizens wear European costumes, and no passenger-steamship drops anchor in the harbor without being met by the red-shirted boatmen and suave interpreters of the enterprising tourist-agencies.

To the casual visitor, Beirut seems therefore a very peaceable, matter-of-fact place. He does not experience the feeling of half-confessed uneasiness which marked his strolls through the native quarters of other Oriental cities. Yet the busy every-day life of the seaport moves upon the thin crust of a seething volcano of hate, which all too often breaks out into murderous rage.

The Moslem inhabitants are, of course, backed by all the power of the government, legal and illegal; but they are much inferior in numbers and in wealth to the Christian population. Religious jealousy is therefore never far from the boiling-point. Any insult or violence offered by an adherent of the one faith to a believer in the other is the signal for a long series of reprisals and counter-reprisals, and there is always the possibility that these may culminate in general rioting and massacre.

The morning I first landed in Beirut, the Christian watchman of the American Press was found almost literally cut in pieces. The assassin was absolutely identified by the print of his bare foot in a mass of soft mortar; but, being a Moslem, the authorities quickly released him and, without any evidence whatever, arrested a near relative of the dead man. The poor fellow had a perfect alibi, yet he was kept in prison until the family signified their willingness to have the police department refrain from any further investigation of the murder. This is a favorite method of procedure when a Moslem is guilty of a crime against a Christian.

It used to be a rare week that we heard of no assassinations, and a rarer year that knew no general rioting. One winter there was a murder each night for six weeks, Christians and Moslems being killed alternately. So regular was the succession of reprisals that a friend whom I had invited to make an evening visit with me postponed the trip on the ground that “this is the night for a Christian to be killed.” Frequent rumors would reach us of impending invasions of the Christian Quarter by Moslem mobs, and more than once the portentous war-cry of Din! Din Mohammed!—“The Faith! The Faith of Mohammed!”—rang in the ears of the terrified Christians. The morning I ended my residence in Beirut it was a prominent Moslem who was assassinated at the door of his own home. A few days afterwards, murderous mobs swept through the city chanting, “Oh, how sweet; oh, how joyful to cut the Christians’ throats!” The empty cartridges picked up after the slaughter were of the make imported exclusively for the use of the Turkish soldiers at the government barracks.

The undying religious hatred and frequent violence do not, however, endanger the lives of European or American residents, and probably never will do so unless some insane mob should get quite beyond the control of its leaders. Islam has learned the power of foreign warships. It should also be added that the native Protestants are hardly ever molested, save by accident, during these internecine conflicts; for the Moslems realize that this portion of the population never takes any part in religious strife. Even in the terrible summer of 1860, when all Syria was drenched with blood, only nine Protestants were killed.

During the past few months there has developed a new and unexpected phase of Beirut strife. Since the revolution of the Young Turks, a vigorous demand for political righteousness and even-handed justice has, in spite of all set-backs, been growing steadily among every race and faith of the empire. In Syria the new ideals and hopes found expression in the organization of a “Committee of Reform,” which demanded such elemental rights as the appointment of an Arabic-speaking governor of Beirut and the use of the vernacular in the courts of justice. Up to the present time, the governor has always been a Turk, and Turkish judges have understood the language of bribery better than the Arabic pleas of poor men who appeared before them.

Last spring the differences between the people of Beirut and the government became so acute that the city was put under martial law by the pasha, who also issued a proclamation dissolving the local branch of the Reform Committee and forbidding further gatherings of the citizens or discussion in the public press. Every newspaper of the city protested against these despotic acts by printing an issue which was absolutely blank, save that in the center of the first page there appeared the odious proclamation. Since then the governor has been recalled and, on the surface, the city is more quiet. But the startling, unhoped-for feature of this latest contest is that—for the first time in the sanguinary history of Beirut—Moslems and Christians and Jews have for the moment put aside their ancient feuds, that they might present a united front to the aggressions of the tyrannical local government. This spirit of union, even more than the desire for political reform which gave it birth, promises a new era of peace and prosperity for the most progressive city of beautiful, blood-stained Syria.

As has been said, however, the ordinary traveler sees no evidences of strife in the streets of Beirut. The largest and most conspicuous class of people whom he meets are not assassins or revolutionists, but students. This is no new thing, for the city has long been famous as a seat of learning. From the third to the sixth centuries A. D., its law school was the greatest in the Roman Empire, excelling even that of the capital and numbering its students by the thousand. One of the three commissioners who prepared the Institutes of Justinian was Professor Dorotheus of Beirut. In the early Saracen centuries, also, the city attained much scholarly fame and sent forth many of the foremost authorities on Moslem law and doctrine.

At the present day it is the greatest educational center in the Near East. Besides the schools maintained by each of the native churches and the mosque-schools and government academies, and institutions supported—presumably for political reasons by Italy and Russia, there are schools or colleges of the French Sisters of Charity, Sisters of the Holy Family, Ladies of Nazareth, Lazarists, Franciscans, Capuchins and Jesuits, the German Deaconesses of Kaiserswerth, the British Syrian Mission, the Church of Scotland Mission to the Jews, and the American Presbyterian Mission, not to mention a number of others which have been organized by private individuals of missionary and philanthropic spirit. The total number of students who are being educated along modern lines is over twenty thousand.

Yet in this city of schools and colleges, if the stranger tells his coachman to drive to el-Kulliyet—“the College”—he will be taken without question to an institution which is incorporated under the laws of the State of New York; and a short visit here will show why this is acknowledged to be the college of Beirut. Upon a beautifully situated campus of fifty acres, twenty imposing stone buildings house the seven departments of what is really a large, well-equipped university of eighty instructors and nearly a thousand students, with observatory and library and scientific laboratories and hospitals, as well as literary, dramatic, musical and scientific societies and its own printing-press and monthly magazine.

Many important things are being learned and done at the Syrian Protestant College; but what strikes the observant visitor as most admirable of all is the spirit of the institution, a spirit of thoroughness and manliness and loyal fraternity and encouraging optimism. More than anything else in Beirut—yes, more than anything else in western Asia—the “S. P. C.,” as its students and alumni call it, stands for the best gifts of Western civilization and for a new hope which, lighted first in beautiful Syria, is already beginning to shine on many a land far out of sight of heavenward-reaching Lebanon.

CHAPTER IV
THE SPIRIT OF OLYMPIA

Mount Lebanon looks to-day upon such a contest as it has never seen before. Yet Syria has witnessed many struggles. From the time men first began to fight, this land has hardly had opportunity to learn what peace and quiet mean. There are people on the campus of the American College this afternoon who can remember when the slopes of the mountain ran with blood; some of the best sprinters know what it is to flee for their lives, and even this week there has been killing on the streets of Beirut.

The contest to-day, however, is a new thing under the Syrian sun. It is not the first time that athletic games have been held—there was a field-day as far back as 1898—but this time the preparations have been of an unusual character. During the whole week, men have been busy rolling and marking the track and removing every stick and pebble from the football field. The classrooms have been emptied of all their chairs and benches, and the faculty committee has erected four grand stands, seating over a thousand people. These will not begin to accommodate all the spectators, however, and students living in dormitories that front on the athletic field find that they have suddenly become very popular among the ladies of the city.

The football teams have ordered sweaters and shin-guards from England, and the Beirut tailors have been puzzling their brains over queerly shaped garments for the sprinters. The medals on exhibition in the college library were struck in Boston especially for this occasion, and bear on their faces the college emblem, a cedar of Lebanon. Besides the prizes for each event, the American consul will give a gold medal to the champion all-round athlete. Best of all, the governor of Lebanon has promised to attend and has sent his famous military band to provide the afternoon’s music. When to these various good things is added the glory of a Syrian springtime, and a campus set high on a bluff overlooking the blue Mediterranean, with Mount Lebanon raising its snow-capped summits high in the background, it is an occasion and a setting to quicken the slowest pulse.

To-day is so full of excitement, however, that nobody thinks very much of anything outside the athletic field. The governor’s band has come early, with all kinds of instruments, especially those which make a very loud noise. A tent has been erected for them in the center of the field, and over the tent is a little American flag. The East is always so incomprehensible and contradictory that it occasions no particular surprise that a Syrian military band should be playing Sousa marches under the American colors.

But it looks as if we had at last succeeded in making the East hustle a little. All Beirut seems to be crowding into the campus. It is almost a part of his religion for an Oriental never to do anything on time; yet the grand stands are already full, and the soldiers stationed at the gate-house can hardly hold the crowds back long enough for the porter to collect their tickets. The scene is dazzling, dizzying, bewildering, like Coney Island and the Derby and the Yale-Princeton game all jumbled together.

There must be at least five thousand strangers on the college grounds, and every color of the spectrum is here, especially the very brilliant ones. The military band, with their blue uniforms and red fezes, seem almost shabby and dull in comparison with the more garish coloring all around them. The seats are mostly filled with women, whose showy dresses are hideous individually and beautiful as part of the general color scheme. Moslem harems are here with their weird veils, and there are many pretty Levantines in rich, inappropriate silks and satins. In Syria, however, the ladies do not monopolize the bright garments. Handsome young Turkish officers swagger along under yards of gold lace, merchants from the city are wearing their best and baggiest satin trousers and embroidered waistcoats and broad silk sashes, while the sons of Egyptian millionaires sport the elegantly fitting coats and tinted vests which now form the favorite costume of the streets of Cairo. The color spreads over the field and up the grand stands, with bright splashes along the sides of the dormitories. Long strips of red and white bunting flaunt the college colors; American and British and Greek and Turkish flags wave above, and the students’ windows are decorated with their national emblems or class banners.

Early in the afternoon an American tutor, while ushering the women of a Moslem harem across the campus, suggested, in rather labored Arabic, that they pass around the back of one of the dormitories so as to avoid the crowd. Imagine his surprise and consternation when one of the ladies replied, “No, thank you; I’d rather go around in front”—and said it in perfect English, with just a suspicion of a Yankee twang! Who was hidden behind that black veil? What foolish, tragic venture had brought it about that an American girl should dwell behind the latticed windows of a Moslem seraglio?

But the students have no intention of being obscured by their guests. They are out a thousand strong, with their best clothes and their loudest voices. They represent every race and tongue and faith of the Near East, with here and there a stranger from Europe or South America. At first thought, it seems as though they could never be amalgamated, even for an afternoon. Here, for example, are a dozen names, representing as many nationalities; Hafiz Abd-ul-Malik, Neshan Hamyartsumian, Ahmed Zeki, Basileios Theodoropolous, Tahir Huseini, Carlos d’Oliveira, Aldo Villa, Mordecai Elstein, Emmanuel Mattsson, Joseph Miklasievicz, Eugène Faure, Emile Kirchner. As to religion, they are Moslems, Jews, Druses, Babites, and Christians of every sect. Some of the languages they speak are Arabic, Turkish, Armenian, Chaldean, Persian, Greek, Yiddish, English, Swedish, Bulgarian, Abyssinian, Italian, German, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Polish and Russian. As to geographical distribution, they come from the Balkans in the north and from Baghdad, forty days’ journey to the east; from a thousand miles up the Nile, and from New York and Brazil in the west.

Probably no other institution in the world includes such a mixture of antagonistic peoples and religions, and, until quite recently, the members of each of the more largely represented races kept closely together. It used to be seldom that a Jew, for instance, associated with an Armenian outside of class hours. In the evenings the Greek students would gather in one another’s rooms, or march around the campus arm in arm, singing their national songs. The Egyptians, most of whom were of very wealthy families, promenaded together, discussing the fleshpots of Cairo. Even among the Syrians, who have always formed the majority of the student body, there were lines of division between the men from Tripoli in the north and from Sidon or Jedeideh in the south. If these groups are considered as being separated by latitudinal lines, there were also the longitudinal divisions between Christian and Moslem and Jew; and sometimes long-cherished feuds broke into flame and pitched battles took place on the campus.

Students of the American College celebrating an athletic victory

The Cape of Beirut viewed from Mount Lebanon

Not the least benefit arising from the introduction of American athletic sports has been a weakening of these ancient racial and religious barriers. The antagonisms still exist, strong and danger-breeding; but there has been a large advance made toward a more catholic college spirit. It would not be true to say that athletics has been the only cause, or even the chief cause of this change; for by precept and example, by religious instruction and social intercourse, the faculty are continually molding the characters of these young men. Yet it is true that in the case of more than one recalcitrant student whom no other influence seemed able to touch, the latent manliness has been brought out through his newly awakened interest in sports.

Most Orientals are very averse to physical exercise. Their traditional idea of enjoyment is to sit under an awning, drinking coffee and playing backgammon. That a man should go out and run around a track in shameless nakedness, and this with no hope of gain, only strengthens their conclusion that all Franks are mad. The Syrians are an imitative people, however, and some years ago the influence of the younger instructors tempted a few of the preparatory boys out for foot-races. But you cannot run a hundred-yard dash with long, baggy trousers and a silk robe which flops about your ankles. Even if you “gird up the loins” by tucking your skirts into your sash, the effect is more startling than speedy. Soon, one by one, the students ordered trousers from the city tailors. At first these garments were poorly cut and viewed with suspicion; but to-day there are hardly three men in the academic and graduate departments who wear the native costume outside of their rooms, and many of the students dress with an elegance that their professors cannot afford to emulate.

It was football, however, that did the most toward unification of the heterogeneous student body. The value of team-work is a comparatively new idea to western Asia and eastern Europe. Since the days of Alcibiades and Absalom the old ideal has been that of “every man for himself.” If it had not been so, the history of the world might have been different. It was comparatively easy to understand the joy of winning a foot-race or a tennis tournament; but to play an untheatrical part in a match, obeying the captain and working for the good of the team—that was a very different thing. The students always play the association game, and it used to be the ambition of every youth to get the ball, and carry it down the field all by himself, while the audience cheered, “Bravo, bravo!” So the faculty arranged matches with the crews of visiting British warships, and from sad experience the college learned the value of side plays and frequent passes, and began to see dimly that good football is played, not with the legs and mouth alone, but with the head, and that hard team-work is better than grand stand exploits.[9] That lesson may some day change the map of Asia.

The physical director of the college now has under his charge no fewer than eighteen football teams, besides twelve basketball teams, six hockey teams, four baseball teams and a cross-country running club; thirty men play at cricket regularly, forty-seven hold certificates or medals of the (British) Royal Life Saving Society, and there are a hundred and thirty-five entries for to-day’s field and track events.[10]

It makes one homesick to hear the cheers. With the exception of an occasional “meet” with some mission school, like those at Jerusalem and Sidon, there is no opportunity to compete with rival institutions. Indeed, there is no other college in the Near East which would have any chance of winning in competition with the “S. P. C.” So the enthusiasm finds a vent in cheering for the various schools of the university and for the class champions. Three of the departments—the preparatory, academic and medical—are each as large as many an American college. The competition among these runs very high, and to-day a banner is to be given to the one whose members shall score most points. Now the various department “yells” have stopped for a moment, and an upper classman starts the college cheer, just as inane to read and just as soul-stirring to hear as are those of Harvard or Yale or Princeton. There is a good deal of singing, too. The college song, like that of Cornell, is set to the tune of “Annie Lisle,” but the words are full of local allusions—

“Far, far above the waters

Of the deep blue sea,

Lies the campus of the college

Where we love to be.

“Far away, behold Keneiseh!

Far beyond, Sunnin!

Rising hoary to the heavens,

Clad in glorious sheen.”

Suddenly an usher comes running from the gate-house with the news that the governor’s carriage is in sight. It can hardly be true, however; for it still lacks a few minutes of two o’clock, and it would be contrary to Syrian custom for an official of such exalted rank to arrive at the same time with ordinary people. Probably he will come at about three o’clock, and stay a half hour or so, just to assure the college of his good-will. Indeed, this will be the first time that a governor has even put in an appearance at the annual games. But, after all, the usher is right. The pasha is coming—three minutes ahead of time! There is hardly a consul on the dignitaries’ platform; even the American representative has not arrived yet, and there would be no one properly to welcome the governor, if the president of the college did not throw dignity to the winds and sprint across the campus to meet him.

The escort rides in at a slow canter, with sabers glistening and accouterments clattering. First come young officers, handsome and foppish, their bosoms heavy with gold lace and medals, and their Arab stallions snorting and prancing; then follows the guard of grizzled, sunburned Lebanon soldiers, clothed in blue Zouave uniforms and holding repeating-rifles across the pommels of their saddles. Behind the soldiers are carriages containing the members of the staff and their ladies; and last of all, attended by outriders, the carriage of his excellency. The pasha is a thin little old man with a gray beard and shrewd, tired eyes; and, in striking contrast to his gayly caparisoned escort, he is quietly dressed in a dark business suit. He is a Pole by birth, a Roman Catholic by religion, a Turkish soldier by profession, and a gentleman by instinct and breeding. A son of the governor is also here. He is an attaché of the Turkish embassy at Paris, and one would take him for a cultured Frenchman. The wife of the attaché is a young American woman, a member of one of our best-known and wealthiest New York families.

Among the other guests in the seats of honor are a Greek priest, a Moslem mollah and a Druse emir. The senior missionary is telling the professor of philosophy how Yale used to play football back in the fifties, while the lady of the German consul is talking babies to the senior missionary’s wife. The Welsh doctor, who used to live in Brazil, is talking French to the Italian professor from Cairo. The exporter of Damascus rugs is swapping Dakota stories with the Syrian editor who took the Arab troupe to the Chicago Exposition.

And in the middle of the field the official announcer is lifting up a megaphone to shout across the babel of tongues—

“Winner of the dromedary race, Saladin; second, Haroun al Raschid; third, Sinbad. The next event will be the high jump on enchanted carpets!”

At least, that is what one would expect to hear amid this brilliant theatrical setting. But instead the call comes in faultless English—

“All out for the hundred-yard dash!”

In the finals of this race there are four men; a Greek, an Egyptian and two Syrians. Khalil Meshaqah, of the medical school, wins in ten and two-fifth seconds, without spikes, and on a dirt track[11] without guiding ropes. The college is not ashamed of its athletic records. Among its prize winners this afternoon are the best jumper of the Island of Cyprus, the champion swimmer of Alexandria, and the Greek who won the hundred-meter race in the recent Pan-Hellenic Games at Athens. On the first few field-days the Greeks carried everything before them; indeed, on one occasion three Greeks from Cyprus made more points than all the other students combined. Now, however, after only a few years of training, some splendid athletes are being developed among the Syrians, Armenians and Egyptians. Of the six men who win most points to-day, four are Syrians, one is a Greek and one is a Scotchman.

The announcer comes out again into the center of the field and shouts through his megaphone, first in English and then in Arabic—

“The discus has just been thrown one hundred and ten feet, breaking the college record!”

So the campus bursts into a new uproar of shouting and singing, and the students make quite unnecessary inquiries as to “What’s the matter with McLaughlan?” while somebody tries to explain what it is all about to the Turkish governor, who understands neither English nor Arabic, and the governor’s daughter-in-law looks as if she were thinking of Travers Island.

It would take too long to describe all the events of the day: how Nedrah Meshaqah wins the thousand-yard “campus race,” how Iatrou keeps the shot-put in the Greek ranks, or how Bedr breaks the record for the high jump. The real significance of the occasion is that it is all so like the field-meets of our American colleges at home.

The only typically Syrian event is the jareed-throw—and the javelin has since been included among American field-events. The jareed is a blunt dart about four feet long and an inch in diameter, and it is always thrown underhand. The Arabs use it in various games, somewhat as the old Greeks employed the javelin. At the college it is thrown for distance; and this is one of the most interesting contests, as it requires not only strength and quickness but a peculiar knack which it is almost impossible for a foreigner to learn. It looks very easy to one who has tossed baseballs all his life; yet when the American first attempts to throw the short, light stick, he sends it whirling around like a windmill. But watch that young Druse sheikh, as he carefully balances the jareed upon his finger, and then grasps it gently but firmly at the approved spot. A few slow swings of the arm to get the direction, a lean backward until the stick nearly touches the ground behind, then a jump forward and a throw so long that his hand moves fully nine feet in a straight line before it lets the missile go with a furious rifling motion—and the jareed darts up and off with a queer little nervous twist like an angry snake, and drops nearly two hundred feet away, with a force that would have broken a man’s skull.

It is a proud moment for thirty Eastern athletes when they step up to the platform where the governor and his staff are sitting, and receive their medals from the Norwegian wife of the American consul and the American daughter-in-law of the Turkish pasha. Everything is over now except the football game, and the governor has stayed through it all, thus giving a most signal mark of his interest and approval. He indicates his wish to retire, and the crowd gives way for his escort. The carriages drive up to the grand stand with much snapping of whips, and the outriders prance gayly around on their restive Arabs. But just then the football teams run out into the field, resplendent in their new uniforms; and the governor repents of his decision to leave, sinks back into his seat and motions the carriages to drive away.

The captain of the medical team is a great, bearded Syrian, six feet tall. The captain of the collegiate eleven is two inches taller, also a Syrian in name and very proud of his country and race, but with a sense of humor and a knowledge of team-work which he probably inherited from his American mother. One of the full-backs is a very sturdy fellow who was born in Cyprus of a French mother and speaks Greek as his native tongue; but there is a canny twinkle in his eye and a burr in his speech which make it seem quite natural that his name should begin with “Mac.” Many brilliant plays are made by the son of an Egyptian millionaire, the Druse sheikh who won the jareed throw, and an American from Jerusalem. The collegiate eleven is composed of four Syrians, three Egyptians, an Armenian, a Scotchman, an American and an Austrian; but racial and religious differences are forgotten as they play together for the honor of their side. It is a hard game, yet a very fair one, and when the “Medics” win by a score of two goals to one, even the college men lustily cheer the victors.

As the gay-colored crowd breaks over the field, his fellow-students seize the captain of the winning team and carry him around on their shoulders, singing and shouting all the while. Medical banners wave, medical hats and fezes are thrown into the air and medical men cheer until they can cheer no more. Soon the other students join in, and department rivalries are forgotten in a loud enthusiasm for alma mater. At the dinner hour the usual rules of decorum are for once relaxed, and the happy pandemonium continues until bedtime. Then at last, tired and sleepy and voiceless, the college settles down to a long rest, after the best field-day that has ever been held in the Turkish Empire.

CHAPTER V
ACROSS THE MOUNTAINS

Railways and carriage-roads in Syria are chiefly due to French enterprise. The Société Ottomane des Chemins de Fer de Damas, Hama et Prolongements has less rolling stock than its lengthy name might lead one to expect, and its slow schedule is not always observed with a mechanical Western exactness. Although Damascus is barely fifty miles from Beirut, the journey thither takes ten hours; for the constantly curving railway measures more than ninety miles and the total rise of its numerous steep grades is over 7,000 feet. This single, narrow-gauge road, which is carried over two high mountain ranges, is an admirable example of modern engineering, and the scenery through which it passes is a source of unbroken delight.

As we zig-zag up the western slope of Lebanon there appear, now at our right and now at our left, a succession of beautiful panoramas which differ one from the other only in revealing a constantly widening horizon. Rich, populous valleys, lying deep between the shoulders of the mountains, slope quickly downward to the coast where, farther and farther below us, the silvery-green olive orchards and golden sands of Beirut reach out into the ever-broadening azure expanse of the Mediterranean.

Sometimes great masses of billowing clouds drift up the valleys, so that for a while we seem to be traveling along a narrow isthmus between foaming seas. The people of Aleih—a charming summer resort where the mountainside is so steep that there is no room for a curve and the train has to back up the next leg of the ascent—are the butt of many a popular tale. One day, so the wits of the neighboring villages relate, these foolish fellows mistook the rising tide of mist for the sea itself, and the whole populace prepared to go fishing.

Another time a number of residents of Aleih went to Beirut to buy shoes. On their way back they all sat on a wall to rest; and when they were ready to go on again, behold, the new shoes were all exactly the same size, shape and color, and no man could tell which of the feet were his. So there they sat, in sad perplexity as to how they should ever reach home, until a passer-by, to whom they explained their difficulty, smote the shoes smartly one after the other with his stick and thus enabled each person to recognize his own feet.

A third Aleih story also exemplifies the ridiculous exaggeration which so delights a Syrian audience. It seems that the only public well in the village used to be the subject of frequent quarrels between the inhabitants of the upper and lower quarters. So finally the sheikh stretched a slender pole across the middle of the opening and commanded that thenceforth each of the two opposing factions was to draw only from its own side. For a time all went peaceably; but one dark night a zealous partisan was discovered diligently at work dipping water from the farther side of the pole and pouring it into his half of the well!

Shortly after leaving Aleih, the train turns straight east and climbs with labored puffings up the shoulder of Jebel Keneiseh to the watershed, 4,800 feet above Beirut. It is very much cooler now. In mid-summer, refreshing breezes blow down from unseen snowbanks among the mountaintops. In winter—if, indeed, the traffic is not entirely blocked by drifts which choke the railway cuts—the journey is memorable for its piercing, inescapable cold, and the natives who gather idly at the stations wear heavy sheepskin cloaks and keep their heads and shoulders swathed in thick shawls, though, strangely enough, their legs may be bare and their frost-bitten feet protected only by low slippers.

At last the jolting of the rack-and-pinion ceases, the train quickens its speed, passes through two short tunnels, swings around a high embankment; and over the crests of the lower hills we see a long, narrow stretch of level country, bordered on its farther side by a wall-like line of very steep mountains. The profile of the “Eastern Mountains”—as we behold them from this point we can hardly avoid using the Syrian name for Anti-Lebanon—seems almost exactly horizontal, and the resemblance of the range to a tremendous rampart is heightened by the massive buttresses which reach out at regular intervals between the courses of the winter torrents.

The valley before us is that which the Greeks named Coele-Syria or “Hollow Syria.” In modern Arabic it is called the Bikaʿ or “Cleft.” Just as in Palestine the Jordan River and its two lakes are hemmed in by mountains which rise many thousand feet above, so in Syria the Bikaʿ stretches between the parallel ranges of Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon. There is, however, one striking difference between the two valleys. That of the Jordan is a deep depression, and the mouth of the river is nearly 1,300 feet below the surface of the Mediterranean. On the other hand, the central valley of Syria throughout its entire length lies considerably above sea-level, and at its highest point reaches an elevation of about 4,000 feet. The Bikaʿ, which is seventy miles long and from seven to ten miles wide, is exceedingly fertile, and in it rise the two largest rivers of Syria. Near their sources the Orontes and Leontes pass within less than two miles of each other; yet the former flows to the north past Kama and Aleppo, while the latter turns southward and reaches the Mediterranean between Tyre and Sidon.

Conventionalized cross-section of Syria from Beirut (B) to Damascus (D). The horizontal distances are marked in miles, the vertical in feet.

The Bikaʿ extends north and south as far as we can see and is apparently as level as a floor. There are hardly any trees on it, only two or three tiny hamlets and no isolated buildings. The Syrian farmers prefer to dwell on the hillsides; for there the water of the springs is cooler, it is easier to guard the villages against marauding bands, and all of the arable land below is left free for cultivation. So the great flat fields of plowed earth or ripening grain which fill the valley seem the pattern of a long Oriental carpet in rich reds and browns and greens and yellows, unrolled between the mountains.

As we pass from the shadow of a last obstructing embankment, there bursts upon our vision the glorious patriarch of Syrian peaks. Twenty-five miles to the south the splendid crest of Hermon towers into the cloudless sky a full mile above the surrounding heights.

The familiar Hebrew name of this famous mountain means the “Sacred One,” and the expression “the Baal of Hermon,”[12] seems to indicate that in very ancient times it bore a popular shrine. The Jews also knew it by its Amorite title Senir, the “Banner.” Modern Syrians sometimes refer to it as the “Snow Mountain,” for its summit is capped with white long after the summer sun has melted the drifts from the lower peaks. Most commonly, however, it is called esh-Sheikh, which means “the Old Man,” or rather “the Chieftain,” for age and authority are indissolubly associated in the thought of the Arabic-speaking world.[13]

Hermon is by far the most conspicuous landmark in all Palestine and Syria. I have seen it from the north, south, east and west. I have admired it from its own near foothills and from a hundred and fifty miles away. Viewed from every side it has the same shape—a long, gently rising cone of wonderful beauty; wherever you stand, it seems to be squarely facing you; and from every viewpoint it dominates the landscape as do few other mountains in the world.

This sacred peak influenced the religious idealism of many centuries. Upon its slopes lay Dan, the farthest point of the Land of Promise. “From Dan to Beer-sheba,” from the great mountain of the north to the wells of the South Country, stretched the Holy Land. Hebrew poets and prophets sang of the plenteous dew of Hermon, its deep forests, its wild, free animal life. Upon its rugged shoulders the Greeks and Romans continued the worship of the old Syrian nature-gods. Hither, in the tenth century, fled from Egypt Sheikh ed-Durazy and made it the center of the new Druse religion. Above its steep precipices the Crusaders built two of their largest castles. But one most solemn event of all uplifts the sacred mountain even closer to the skies; for on some unnamed summit of the “Chieftain” the supreme Leader stood when the heavens opened for His transfiguration.

We cross the valley rapidly to the junction-station of Rayak and then, again ascending, penetrate the Eastern Mountains by a winding river-course which, as we follow it higher and higher, affords fine views over the Bikaʿ to the range of Lebanon through which we were so long traveling. Directly opposite us stands Jebel Keneiseh, bare, brown and forbidding, while beside it rises the loftier Sunnin. When viewed from the coast, this noble mountain reveals one long, even slope to its topmost crest; but its back is made up of a multitude of rounded eminences, so that it resembles an enormous blackberry. Twenty miles to the north of Sunnin, near the famous Cedars of Lebanon, the range culminates in a group of snow-capped peaks which lack the impressiveness of Hermon’s haughty isolation, yet which actually rise two thousand feet above even the Sheikh Mountain.

After crossing the watershed of Anti-Lebanon, we turn south through the lovely little vale of Zebedani. At our left are the highest summits of the range; at our right are precipitous cliffs which, save for a glimpse of the snows of Hermon, shut off the distant view; but between these heights is a scene of quiet, comfortable beauty. The tract is well-watered and fertile, and its wheat-fields are as level as the surface of a lake. Indeed, there surely must have been a lake here once upon a time. Along the eastern edge of the grain-land are charming, green-hedged gardens and closely planted orchards and long lines of poplar trees, while low-bent vines hug the sunny slopes at the mountain’s foot. This high but sheltered valley is one of the few places in Syria where really fine apples are grown, and the grapes and apricots of Zebedani are famous throughout the whole country.

In a small marshy lake among the hills that border the rich, slumbrous little plain there rises one of the world’s greatest rivers; great not in size—at its widest it is hardly more than a mountain brook and no ship has ever sailed its waters—but great because it has made one of the proudest cities of earth; for this slender stream which winds so leisurely through the wheat-fields of Zebedani is the far-famed Abana, and Abana is the father of Damascus.

At the lower end of the valley, the brook turns sharply eastward through a break in the mountains, and we follow it swiftly down a succession of narrow chasms and wild ravines, all the way to the end of our journey. The first two hours of our ride we traveled but twelve miles: the last two hours we slide forty miles around short, confusing curves. Sometimes there are distant views of bare, reddish summits; often we are hemmed in by the dense growth of trees which border the stream; but we are never far from the rushing waters of the Abana.

There is ancient history along our route, not to speak of legends innumerable. The little village of Suk Wadi Barada or “Barada Valley Market,” was once called Abila, and was the chief city of the Tetrarchy of Abilene, the fixed date of whose establishment helps us to compute the chronology of the Gospels.[14] The valley itself is still known here as Abila; and therefore, through a characteristic confusion of names, the Moslems locate the grave of Abel on the summit of an adjoining hill. Cain, they say, was at his wits’ end how to dispose of the dead body of his brother, for burial was of course unknown to him; so the murderer carried the corpse on his back many days, seeking in vain a place where he might securely conceal the evidence of his crime. At last, according to the Koran, “God sent a raven which scratched upon the ground, to show him how he might hide his brother’s corpse.”[15]

Across the ravine from Suk Wadi Barada we can see the remains of an ancient road hewn in the solid rock, and a ruined aqueduct which some say was built by Queen Zenobia to carry the water of the Abana across the desert to Palmyra. It is almost certain, however, that both road and aqueduct, as well as the tombs whose openings appear higher up in the cliff, were constructed in the second century by the Romans.

Ain Fijeh, the next important village, bears a peculiarly redundant name, which reminds us of German Baden-Baden. The first word is Arabic and the second is a corruption of the Greek pege, and both mean “spring.” But, after all, “Spring Spring” is not such a bad name; for there gushes from a cave in the rock such an abundant fountain that the Abana here increases threefold in volume, and mediæval Arab geographers, as well as the modern inhabitants of the mountains, are unanimous in considering this the principal source of the river. From the cold, clear spring, a small tile aqueduct has for the last few years carried drinking-water to Damascus. Unfortunately, however, only a few of the more important buildings are as yet supplied from this source, and the common people are loath to journey to the public fountains when there are all over the city so many nearer—and dirtier—streams from which to draw. “The Moslems, especially, prefer to drink water which runs in the open rather than that which is piped,” said a native physician in answer to my questions as to the health of Damascus. “So, you see,” he added facetiously, “my practice has not suffered appreciably since the completion of the aqueduct.”

An old bridge over the Barada River

Cascade falling over the edge of the Hauran into the Yarmuk Valley

As we descend the narrow, winding valley of the Abana, it becomes more and more choked with verdure. We now begin to understand why the Greeks called this the Chrysorrhoas or “Golden River.” If we take advantage of one of the lengthy stops to step across the track and plunge our hands into its icy waters, we realize the fitness of its modern Arabic name, Baradâ—the “Cold Stream.” Occasionally we still glimpse far above us grim, treeless heights; but, between the cliffs, dense thickets or closely planted orchard trees line the river-banks. Now the Abana is a roaring, foaming torrent; now it flows chill, deep and silent; but always it hurries as if it were racing with the train. This, in its turn, goes more rapidly. It twists and swings and bumps as it takes dangerously short curves at—for a Syrian train—full speed. We pass into the shadow of a beetling precipice and, beneath the thick foliage which overhangs it, the river runs black as ink. Then, suddenly, we have left the gloom of the mountains and are out in the bright sunlight which floods a boundless plain. We have crossed to the eastern edge of Syria and before us, just beyond the orchards of Damascus, lies the desert.

CHAPTER VI
THE LAND OF UZ

To appreciate truly the significance of Damascus, one should approach it from the east, across the thirsty wilderness which stretches between the Euphrates and the Syrian mountains. The long, wearisome journey would be worth while if only for the first glimpse of the city as it appears to the wondering eyes of the desert-dweller. But the twentieth century visitor may be excused if he prefers to save time and strength by utilizing the railway. To-day there is even a choice of routes. He can travel to Damascus from the west comfortably, or from the south speedily. But the adverbs are not interchangeable.

We have already taken the slow, beautiful journey from Beirut across the two mountain ranges. The other railway between Damascus and the coast starts from the seaport of Haifa, at the foot of Mount Carmel, and follows at first a fairly easy grade through the historic Plain of Esdraelon to the Jordan Valley at Beisan. From here it runs northward along the river to the Sea of Galilee,[16] then in a general easterly direction up the valley of the Yarmuk to the plateau of the Hauran, where the Haifa branch joins the main line of the Mecca railway. Although the distance to Damascus by this route is a hundred and seventy-seven miles, or almost twice that from Beirut, the journey takes no longer. But in warm weather it is not a very comfortable trip, for more than half the time the train is below the level of the sea.

From Semakh, which lies at the southern end of the Sea of Galilee six hundred feet below the Mediterranean, the railway ascends the Yarmuk gorge through the most wild and desolate scenery imaginable. The entire region northeast of Galilee is volcanic. Prehistoric flows of molten rock extended over large areas, and the subsequent erosion of the river has cut through a solid layer of hard basalt from ten to fifty feet thick, whose perpendicular black cliffs appear in striking contrast to the irregular outlines of the softer limestone beneath.

For two hours after leaving the Sea of Galilee we do not pass a human habitation; indeed, for the first few miles there is no evidence of vegetable life except now and then a small clump of bushes at a bend of the stream. As the train puffs slowly up the bed of the steep, twisting ravine, all that can be seen is the narrow torrent rushing madly along between white walls of lime or chalk, above these a smooth, regular layer of shining black basalt and, as we look straight up or down the valley, a few bare, brown mountaintops showing above the nearer cliffs. After a while, however, oleanders appear along the riverside, and for mile upon mile their thick foliage and gorgeous flowers add the one touch of life to the wild, lonely landscape. We pass a strange monolithic pyramid a hundred feet high, which has been carved by some freak of the winter floods. A little farther on, a recent landslide has covered the bottom of the valley with black stones and soot-like dust. Even early in the morning it is hot and stifling in this breezeless trench below the level of the ocean.

As we rise higher, however, scattered olive trees appear among the oleanders by the riverside, and a few little patches of thin wheat are seen among the rocks. A small herd of black, long-haired goats are drinking in the stream. We are startled to behold a rude oil-well. A dozen men are gathered at each railway station, though the villages from which they have come are still invisible on the heights above us. Then the valley suddenly turns and broadens, and we see against the cloudless sky the clean-cut profile of the highland country toward which we have been so long ascending. The track now leaves the river’s bank and, in great loops, quickly mounts the side of the valley. From the edge of the plateau there comes tumbling a magnificent succession of cascades, which finally roar under a railway bridge and break in spray at the bottom of the gorge far below us. Another broader waterfall drops in a solid sheet of silver from the unseen land beyond the level summit of the precipice. Our train twists up a last steep grade, straightens out on the level ground—and, after looking for three hours at the close cliffs which hemmed in a narrow valley, it gladdens our eyes to gaze now on the vast prospect which is revealed in the shimmering light of the noonday sun.

Before us stretches the Hauran, the ancient Land of Bashan, a rolling sea of soft brownish earth and waving wheat: From time immemorial this has been the chief granary of western Asia. Until we become accustomed to the new perspective, we can not distinguish a village or tree or living creature. Here and there a few apparently low hills show their summits above the horizon. The Arabs, who came from the high eastern desert, called this the Haurân, or “Depression,” because it lies flat between the mountains. But to us who have climbed hither from a point 2,500 feet below, the broad acres of Bashan seem set far up among the lonely skies. An endless, level, undivided expanse of wheat; dim summits far away; fertility and spaciousness and freedom and strong, ceaseless wind—this is the Hauran.

Muzeirib, the first station on the plateau, is the terminus of the earliest railway from Damascus to the Hauran, which was completed by the French in 1895. During recent years this has suffered severely from the competition of the Hejaz Railway begun in 1901 by Abdul Hamid; for the Turkish line is somewhat cheaper, has better connections, and enjoys the odor of sanctity. In fact, its chief avowed object is ultimately to connect Damascus with Mecca and thus provide transportation for the multitude of the Faithful who each year make the pilgrimage to the holy city. Only Moslems were employed on the construction of this sacred railway, large numbers of Turkish soldiers were detailed as guards and laborers; and, besides special taxes which were levied, voluntary subscriptions for the pious enterprise were sent in from all over the world of Islam. On account of the revolution of the Young Turks and the troublous times which followed the enforced abdication of Abdul Hamid, no work has been done on the railway for several years. Already, however, it extends 823 miles to Medina, which is four-fifths of the distance to Mecca; but non-Moslems are strictly forbidden to travel beyond Maʿan, 285 miles from Damascus, without a special permit from the government.

Derʿa, where we join the Hejaz main-line, has since the earliest days of Christianity been identified with Edrei, the capital of Og, the giant king of Bashan.[17] Beneath the ancient citadel, which stands some distance to the south of the station, is a wonderful labyrinth of caves, with real streets and shops as well as dwelling-places. This underground city doubtless was intended as a refuge for the entire population of the capital in time of siege, but it has not been used for many centuries.

As our train now turns northward from Derʿa, Mount Hermon comes into full view at our left, in all its splendor of towering summit and dazzling whiteness, and the lofty blue cone with its long streaks of summer snow stays with us for the rest of the day.

Thirty miles to our right, Jebel Hauran, also known as the “Druse Mountain,” rises from the level sea of grain like a long, low island. At such a distance we find it difficult, even in this crystal air, to realize that the isolated mountain is really forty miles long and only a little short of six thousand feet high. It is one of the few localities in the region where are still found the once famous “oaks of Bashan.”[18] Since the religious struggles which drenched Syria with blood in 1860, many thousand Druses have migrated from Lebanon to the Hauran, where the special retreat and stronghold of this proud, brave, relentless people is the mountain which bears their name. Hither they flee from the conscription; here they defy the hated tax-collector, flaunt their contempt of the weak Turkish government and, as is their wont everywhere, waste their own strength in bitter family feuds.

A very ancient and plausible Christian tradition, which since the rise of Islam has also been accepted implicitly by the Moslems, identifies the Hauran with the “Land of Uz” where dwelt the patriarch Job. Three towns on the western slopes of the Druse Mountain perpetuate his story. Bishop William of Tyre, writing in the twelfth century, mentions the popular belief that Job’s friend Bildad the Shuhite dwelt at Suweida, and the inhabitants of this village boast that the patriarch himself was their first sheikh. At Kanawat a group of very old ruins is commonly known as the “Convent of Job,” and at Bosra, the ancient capital of the Hauran, there is a Latin inscription in his praise. Probably this belonged to a sixth century leper asylum; for the suffering patriarch early came to be considered the special patron of those who, like himself, were afflicted with the most mysterious and loathsome of diseases.

But it is in the plain that memories of this Biblical drama cluster most closely. Nawa, twenty miles northwest of Derʿa, has for two thousand years been honored as Job’s birthplace. An hour’s ride to the south of this village there stood fifteen hundred years ago a splendid church dedicated to the Man of Uz, and part of the ruined “Monastery of Job” is still in good enough condition to be used as Turkish barracks. Near by is shown the rock on which he leaned while arguing with his three friends—it is a small basalt monument erected by Rameses II.—also the stone trough in which he washed after his afflictions were ended, and the tomb of the patriarch and his wife.

In spite of the naïve and often impossible localization of particular incidents of the story of Job, it is quite possible that the very old tradition is correct, and the mysterious Land of Uz across which roamed the herds and flocks of “the greatest of all the Children of the East” was this same free, fertile tableland along which we are now traveling. Before the Hauran was so largely given over to agriculture, it must have been an ideal grazing country; it has always been subject to forays by robber tribes from the desert;[19] and the “great wind from the wilderness” which smote the dwelling of Job’s eldest son[20] would perhaps nowhere else blow with such fury as on this high, open plateau.

There was just such a great wind from the wilderness the last time I went to Damascus. The Hauran bears a deserved reputation for coolness and healthfulness; but that day, as happens two or three times each summer, there was a sirocco. The wind was indeed blowing—blowing a furious gale of perhaps thirty-five miles an hour; but it came straight from the eastern desert and scorched as if it had been a blast from an opened furnace door. I did not have a thermometer with me; but, from sirocco experiences elsewhere, I should judge that the temperature in the train was not under a hundred and five degrees. The drinking-water that we had brought for the journey became warm and nauseating; but we put it to good use in soaking the back of our necks, where it evaporated so quickly in the dry, burning wind that it stung like ice for a few seconds, and then was gone. Strange as it may seem, the only other way to mitigate the heat was to shut the car windows and keep the breeze out.

There were fortunately some interesting incidents to enliven the long, hot ride over the monotonous plain. We did not see any of the renowned “strong bulls of Bashan,”[21] or any other cattle grazing on the plain, but we watched slow caravans bearing wheat to the coast, as they have been doing for millenniums past. They could never carry all the grain that this productive district might harvest, and the railways should prove a rich boon to the Hauran. We pondered curiously as to why the stations were never by any chance just at the towns and why the track should swing far to the right and left in great curves, as if it were ascending a difficult grade, when the only engineering problem involved in its construction could have been solved by laying a ruler on the map and drawing a straight line down the center of the level plain. A fellow-traveler explained to us that the course of the railway had not been determined by the usual considerations, such as economy of construction and the desirability of passing through the most densely populated districts, but by the amount of bakhsheesh which wealthy landowners would pay the government in order to have the line pass through their estates.

We stopped an unconscionable length of time at every station, for no evident reason; and when we did get ready to start there were so many vociferous warnings that very naturally none of them was heeded by the passengers who had got off for refreshments. So finally the rapidly moving train would be chased by a crowd of excited peasants, most of whom carried big bundles and wore long, hampering garments. Several were left behind at lonely stations. There would be another train—to-morrow! Of course, all the dogs ran after us. Provided they are well-fed, dogs and children are exactly the same the world over; and these were not the starved, sullen curs which lie in Oriental gutters, but were wide-awake, fun-loving fellows who ran merrily alongside the train for a half-mile from the town, and had no difficulty in understanding our English shouts of encouragement. As we were pulling out of one of the stations, a very reverend, gray-bearded old farmer stole a ride on the running-board; but he misjudged the quickly increasing speed of the train, and, when he at last decided to jump off, rolled head-over-heels down the steep embankment. The last we saw of him, he was gazing after us with a ludicrously dejected countenance whose every lineament expressed stern disapproval of the nervous haste of these degenerate modern days.

As a rule the other travelers were too hot and tired to afford us much entertainment; but one new arrival, not finding a seat elsewhere, tried to force his way into the harem-compartment which Turkish railways always provide for the seclusion of Moslem ladies. The lord and master of the particular harem occupying this compartment resented the intrusion with such a frenzy of threatening gesticulation and insulting malediction that the members of our party who were unaccustomed to the ways of the East expected to see murder committed forthwith. The conductor, who interposed as peace-maker, was—as is usual on this holy railway—a Turk who knew no Arabic, and he consequently had great difficulty in determining what the quarrel was about; but the Syrians have a healthy fear of any one wearing a uniform, so the trouble was finally adjusted without bloodshed.

Long, slow caravans have always been crossing the Hauran

Damascus in the midst of its far-reaching orchards

After we became accustomed to the peculiar features of the landscape we could now and then distinguish a village. Yet at a very short distance the largest settlements were blurred into the brown plain; for the houses are all built of a dull black basalt and, save for one or two square towers, the compact hamlets are hardly to be distinguished from rough out-croppings of rock. All of the dwellings look like deserted ruins: some of them are. All seem centuries old: many have been occupied for more than a thousand years, for the hard basalt seems never to crumble.

The extraordinarily rich earth of the Hauran is only disintegrated lava, and as we near the end of the plain we pass tracts where presumably more recent eruptions have not yet been weathered into fertile soil. Two or three miles to the east of the railway a long line of dark rock some thirty feet high marks the western edge of the Leja, which in New Testament times was known as the Trachonitis[22] or “Rocky Place.” From now-extinct volcanoes at the northern end of the Druse Mountain there flowed these three hundred and fifty square miles of lava, which has broken in cooling into such a maze of irregular fissures that its surface has been likened to that of a petrified ocean. Yet this rugged region contains also little lakes, and pockets of arable soil, and numerous ruins of villages and roads and bridges which point to a considerable population in former days. Lejâ means “hiding-place” or “refuge,” and the Druses call this forbidding district the “Fortress of Allah.” The entire lava mass is honeycombed with caves. Indeed, the people of the Hauran say that one who knew the labyrinth of subterranean passages could make his way from one end of the Leja to the other without once appearing above ground. It is no wonder that this immense natural citadel, with its unmarked trails, its innumerable hiding-places in dark caves or deep-cut fissures of the rock, and its easy dominance over the dwellers on the level plain below, has always been a thorn in the side of whatever government pretended to rule the Hauran. Eighty years ago the Druses of the Leja, although they were outnumbered by the attacking force twenty to one, routed with terrible slaughter the entire army of Ibrahim Pasha, the great Egyptian conqueror.

The description of the Leja and its inhabitants which was written in the first century A. D. by Josephus would serve for any period in its wild history. “It was not an easy thing to restrain them, since this way of robbery had been their usual practice, and they had no other way to get their living, because they had neither any city of their own, nor lands in their possession, but only some receptacles and dens in the earth, and there they and their cattle lived in common together: however, they had made contrivances to get pools of water, and laid up corn in granaries for themselves, and were able to make great resistance by issuing out on the sudden against any that attacked them; for the entrances of their caves were narrow, in which but one could come in at a time, and the places within incredibly large and made very wide; but the ground over their habitations was not very high, but rather on a plain, while the rocks are altogether hard and difficult to be entered upon unless any one gets into the plain road by the guidance of another, for these roads are not straight, but have several revolutions. But when these men are hindered from their wicked preying upon their neighbors, their custom is to prey one upon another, insomuch that no sort of injustice comes amiss to them.”[23] Josephus’ diction is as involved as the labyrinthine trails of the Leja, but his facts are still correct.

Further evidences that we are in a volcanic region are found in the round black stones, about the size of large bowling-balls, which now begin to appear on the plain. At first they do not seriously interfere with cultivation, for the farmers gather them into heaps along the edges of their fields. A few miles farther on, however, there are so many that there has been no attempt to remove them and the light plow has simply scratched whatever narrow strips of earth might lie between the rocks. At last they cover the land as far as we can see, with hardly their own diameter separating them. There must be ten thousand of them to the acre. Millions upon millions of black spots dot the nearer landscape and in the distance merge into an apparently solid mass of dark, hard sterility.

By this time most of the passengers in our coach have become very tired and irritable, though the loud breathing of some indicates that they have fallen into a restless slumber. Several are quite sick from the heat. At half-past five in the afternoon the sun has lost none of its midday glare, and the noisy wind from the desert still scorches with its furnace breath. On either side, the monotonous multitude of round black rocks strew the brown, burnt earth. The hills, which constantly draw in closer to us, seem as if they might have fair pasture-land on their lower slopes; but, save for the shining white dome of one Moslem tomb, they bear nothing higher than scattered grass and dusty thorn-bushes. We climb slowly over the watershed in the narrow neck of the plain, then speed swiftly down a steep incline; and, lo, we behold a veritable paradise of running water and heavily laden orchard trees, above which the glory of the setting sun gilds a forest of slender minarets.

CHAPTER VII
THE EARTHLY PARADISE

According to the Moslem wise men, Jebel Kasyun is a very sacred mount; for upon it Abraham dwelt when there was revealed to him the supreme doctrine of the unity of God. Long before that, however, Adam lived here: some say that he was formed from the earth of this very mountain, and that the reddish streaks upon its sides are nothing less than the indelible bloodstains of murdered Abel.

Yet as we stand by the little shrine known as the Dome of Victory, which crowns the summit, we are not thinking of ancient legends. Below us lies a scene of entrancing interest and of a peculiar beauty which is unlike that of any other beautiful prospect in the world.

Back of us are the mighty, rock-buttressed Mountains of the East, from whose sterile heart is rent a deep, dark ravine which thunders with the cascades of the Abana. Then, issuing from its narrow defile, Abana is suddenly tamed. It spreads fan-like into seven quiet branches; and these in turn divide and subdivide into a myriad life-giving streams which sink at last in wilderness sands, but, ere they sink, make the desert to rejoice and blossom as the rose.[24]

In the foreground of the picture, Damascus seems like an immense silver spoon laid on a piece of soft, green plush. The long, slender handle, which is made up of the modern peasant-markets, stretches away two miles southward. The nearer bowl is the site of the ancient city. Above its monotonous succession of solidly massed houses are seen high, cylindrical roofs which cover the most important bazaars; in the very center stands the famous Omayyade Mosque with its splendid dome and spacious court and three lofty towers, while a multitude of other graceful minarets—it is said that they are exactly as many as the days of the year—rise above the most mysterious and fascinating of Moslem capitals. Surely the traveler must be ignorant of history and bereft of sentiment who does not feel a deep, strange thrill as he first looks upon the great city which since the dawn of history has sat in proud strength between the mountains and the desert.

From the viewpoint of physical geography, Syria is Lebanon; but politically, commercially and socially, it is still true that “the head of Syria is Damascus.”[25] Indeed, the city is now hardly ever called by its real name, Dimeshk. It is simply esh-Shâm—Syria!

History does not recall a time when Damascus did not nestle here among the orchards which sweep out to the edge of the desert. The Moslem tradition that it was founded by Eliezer, the chief servant of Abraham, points to far too late a date. Josephus tells us that it was built by Uz, the grandson of Shem the son of Noah, and that when Abraham came hither from Ur with an army of Chaldeans, he captured the already old capital and for a time reigned here as king of Syria.[26] “The name of Abram is even now famous in the country of Damascus,” adds the Jewish historian. Eighteen hundred years later, that is still true.

Without discussing further its legendary claims to supreme antiquity, it is safe to say that Damascus is the oldest important city in the world with an unbroken history reaching to the present day. The fame of its artificers and gardeners is embodied even in our English language; for we speak of Damascus steel, the damask plum, damask rose, damask color, damask decoration and damaskeened metal-work. Many of the greatest men of earth have trodden its streets or fought before its walls or worshiped at its shrines. Abraham the Hebrew, Tiglath-pileser the Assyrian conqueror, Herod the Great, Paul of Tarsus, Khaled the “Sword of Allah,” Baldwin of Flanders, Louis VII. of France, Nureddin the Syrian, Saladin the Kurd, Tamerlane the Tartar—such are only a few of the names which come to mind as we gaze upon the time-stained, battle-worn, but still rich and haughty city. To tell adequately the story of this most ancient of capitals would necessitate covering all the centuries of human history.

At the foot of the hill we shall find a tram-car waiting to take us to a modern hotel with electric lights and city-water, and in the evening we can hear a phonograph in any one of a hundred cafés, or visit moving-picture shows in the Serai Square, where a tall column commemorates the completion of the telegraph-line to Mecca. Yet, for all these recent innovations from the Western world, the real Damascus is quite unchanged. It is still the most brilliant, entrancing, fanatical and intolerant of Moslem cities, the one which best preserves the manners and customs of the early centuries of Islam. Indeed, this is to-day the typical Arabian Nights city; for Cairo, where those thrilling fairy tales were first related, is rapidly becoming Europeanized through British influence, Constantinople is thronged with Greeks and Armenians and intimidated by foreign embassies, and the glory of Baghdad has long since departed. But Haroun al-Raschid and his faithful vizier might wander through the tortuous mazes of the bazaars of Damascus and recognize hardly an essential change from the life of a Moslem capital of a thousand years ago.

Its Oriental characteristics have been thus preserved, and will doubtless be preserved for many years to come, because of all great Arabic-speaking cities Damascus is least dependent on the West. An impassable wall might cut it off entirely from intercourse with Europe, and still it would thrive and wax strong on the wealth of its own orchards and its commerce with the lands across the Syrian desert.

As we view the wide prospect from the Dome of Victory, the city seems a whitish island, half hidden by the billows of an ocean of luxuriant foliage. Far as the eye can see—far as the dim blue hills which mark the eastern horizon—the plain is flooded with leaves and blossoms. At closer view we shall recognize the fig and pomegranate, the mulberry, pistachio, peach, almond and apricot, the tall poplar and waving cypress and bending grape-vine and short, gnarled olive tree. But from Jebel Kasyun we perceive only one great expanse of warm, rich verdure; all shapes and colors are merged into a soft, level green.

Behind us rise the bare, chalky cliffs of Anti-Lebanon. Beyond those low azure hills at the east is the cruel desert. But between the mountains and the desert hills lies the hundred square miles of the Ghûta—the “Garden” of Damascus. No language is too extravagant for the Arabic writers who describe this land of fruits and flowing waters. It is “the most excellent of all the beautiful places of earth,” exclaims the learned Abulfeda; and the famous geographer Idrisi says, “There are grown here all sorts of fruits, so that the mind cannot conceive the variety, nor can any comparison show what is the fruitfulness and excellence thereof, for Damascus is the most delightful of God’s cities in the whole world.” Indeed, this is the place which, among all the habitations of men, comes nearest to the description of the Moslem paradise—

“The people of the Right Hand!

Oh, how happy shall be the people of the Right Hand!...

In extended shade,

And by flowing waters,

And with abundant fruits,

Unfailing, unforbidden ...

Gardens beneath whose shades the rivers flow.”[27]

The prophet who sang thus of the celestial delights of the Faithful once stood, it is said, on the summit of this sacred mountain and gazed with wondering admiration, as we are gazing, on the bounteous splendor of the Garden of Damascus. But Mohammed refused to go down into the city for fear lest, having tasted the joys of this earthly paradise, he might lose his desire for the heavenly.

CHAPTER VIII
THE PORT OF THE WILDERNESS

Although it is ninety miles by railway from navigable water, Damascus partakes of the characteristics of a seaport. It is, in fact, the port of the wilderness. Just to the east of its fertile “garden” is the Syrian desert, across which slow caravans have always been coming and going—traveling from the rich river-bottoms of Mesopotamia, from Persia and India, and even from far distant China, to bring the riches of Asia to the overflowing warehouses of Damascus. The lands from which the city derives its prosperity cannot compete with European industries, and so only a small proportion of their products is now sent westward across the Mediterranean. Yet Damascus remains still the metropolis of the desert peoples. From the viewpoint of the peasant or Bedouin Arab, it is a very modern place; and to the stranger who can see beneath the alluring glamour of its Orientalism, its chief characteristics are abounding prosperity and noisy activity. This oldest of cities is no mere interesting ruin or historical pageant. Even in the fast-month of Ramadan, its streets are as crowded as the most congested shopping district of London or New York or Paris.[28]

The most characteristic feature of the bazaar is its smell—that peculiar, inescapable blending of licorice and annis and pungent spices and heavy perfumes, combined with a vague odor of age and staleness which pervades the dust-laden air, and sometimes with an odor not at all vague which arises from the filth of unswept streets. It is not when I “hear the East a-callin’” but when I smell the East that the waves of homesickness sweep deepest over me. I love the scent of the bazaar. Sometimes I catch a whiff of it through the open door of a little basement store in the Syrian Quarter of New York; and in a moment my thoughts are five thousand miles away among the old familiar scenes.

The next most vivid impression of the bazaar is its weird combination of bright coloring and gloom. The narrow, winding street is guarded from the glaring sun by striped awnings and old carpets which reach across from house to house. Some few of the chief thoroughfares, like the “Street called Straight,” are enclosed by great cylindrical roofs of corrugated iron. You are indoors and yet out-of-doors. The light is dim; but it is daylight, and you feel that all the while the sun is shining very brightly overhead. Along the fronts of the shops and hanging on ropes which stretch across the street, are shining brasses and pieces of inlaid woodwork and cloths of the most gorgeous orient hues; but the rear of these same shops is usually wrapped in impenetrable gloom. Sometimes there is visible only a square black hole surrounded by a frame of gaudy silks. When you pass a blacksmith’s forge, with shadowy figures moving among the sparks at the back of the inky darkness, it seems like a glimpse into inferno.

Most of the shops are tiny affairs only six or eight feet square, which open on the street for their entire width and have the floor raised to about the height of the customer’s waist. The resemblance of a bazaar to a long double row of pigeon-holes is increased by the manner in which the box-like recesses follow continuously one after the other, with no doorways between, as the entrance to their upper stories is by ladders in the rear.

In the middle of his diminutive emporium, the typical Damascus merchant sits all day cross-legged, smoking his water-pipe, reading from a Koran placed before him on a little wooden book-rest, and eternally fondling his beard. Frequently he says his prayers. Sometimes he varies the monotony of a dull day by chatting with a fellow-merchant in a neighboring shop fully ten feet away. The Jews and Christians of the city may be annoyingly importunate; but the Moslems, who form the large majority, seem insolently careless as to whether the passing stranger pauses to examine their goods or not. Over their places of business they hang gilded invocations to “the One who giveth sustenance,” and then leave matters entirely in His hands. If nothing is sold all day, it is the will of Allah: if a customer does come, it is the will of Allah—that he shall be overcharged as much as possible.

Shopping in Damascus is not an operation to be hurried through with careless levity. If you appear a promising customer, the merchant will set coffee before you and, while you and he are drinking together, will talk about anything under the sun except business. When you ask him the price of an article, he may tell you to keep it for nothing, just as did Ephron the Hittite when Abraham was bargaining for the Cave of Machpelah.[29]

If, however, you offer a fair amount for that same “gift,” he will protest that to accept such a paltry sum would necessitate his children’s going hungry and naked. So he names a price about double what he expects to get, and you suggest a sum equal to half what you are willing to pay. Then follow vociferous exclamations, indignant gesticulations, and sacred oaths, while his price slowly comes down and yours slowly goes up, until at last they almost, though not quite, meet. Neither will change his “last word” by a single piaster. Negotiations are at an end. You turn scornfully to leave the shop of the extortioner, while the merchant commends his business to God and resignedly begins to wrap up the goods and return them to their shelves. He does this very deliberately, however, and just then—because you two are such good friends, whose appreciation of noble character finds its ideal each in the other’s life—you decide to split the difference, the purchase is completed, and you part with mutual protestations that only a deep, fraternal regard forces you—and him—to conclude the bargain at such a ruinous figure.

“It is bad, it is bad, saith the buyer;

But when he is gone his way, then he boasteth.”[30]

Perhaps the shop-keeper will still, however, detain you for a glass of sherbet. If he does, then you have probably paid too much, after all.

A friend of mine was obliged to spend no less than two weeks in purchasing a single Persian rug; but during those two weeks the price went down ninety dollars. One winter I had occasion to buy, at different times, several small picture frames. They were all exactly the same size, shape and material, were obtained from the same salesman at the same shop, and in the end I paid for them the same price to a piaster. Yet the purchase of each one necessitated a half-hour of excited bargaining.

It should be understood, however, that there is really nothing dishonest about such a procedure as that described above; for neither party is misled in the least by the other’s protestations, and neither believes that he is deceiving the other. It is just the leisurely, intensely personal Oriental way of doing business. After you once become used to it, bargaining in the bazaars is far more full of excitement and human interest than buying something in the West, where fixed prices are distinctly marked. If you are so crude as to ask a Moslem merchant to tell under oath what he paid for an article, he will often speak the exact truth. But be sure to swear him by a formula which he considers binding. Every detail of a Syrian business transaction is embellished by one or more of the fervent oaths of the East. The traveler from the Occident, however, needs only one: the “word of an Englishman”[31] is still accepted at face value. Indeed, a generation ago, Moslems who would unblushingly call upon almighty God to witness to the most patent falsehoods, could be trusted to speak the exact truth when they swore by the beard of a certain upright English merchant of Beirut.

One of the more modern avenues of Damascus

A typical Syrian Café

No picture can ever adequately represent the bazaar, not even a moving picture; for besides the unending kaleidoscopic changes of coloring, as brightly dressed peddlers and purchasers move hither and thither, there is a ceaseless, deafening, indescribable and untranslatable tumult of sound. Yet to one who understands Arabic, this is more than noise: it is music, poetry and romance. The hawker of each commodity uses a peculiarly worded appeal which, in eloquent circumlocution, extols the virtues of his wares. These calls are usually rhyming; often they include one of the ninety-nine sacred titles of Allah, and frequently they are sung to a set tune. Back and forth through the perilously crowded streets they go—boys with great trays of sweetmeats on their heads, men with tubs of pickled vegetables, peasants bearing heavy loads of fresh figs, water-carriers stooping low under their goatskin bottles, peddlers of cakes and nuts and sherbets and the nosegays which the Syrian gentleman loves to hold—literally under his nose—as he strolls through the city. All are shouting their wares. “Oh, thirsty one!” “Oh, father of a family!” “Oh, Thou who givest food!” “Allay the heat!” “Rest for the throat!” When Abraham passed through Damascus he doubtless heard these same cries.

If we are driving, as is possible in the wider bazaars, our gallant coachman adds to the din as he proudly snaps his long whip, toots the strident automobile horn which is now affixed to all Damascus carriages and, in courteous gentleness or bawling rage or sighing relief, keeps up an unintermitting flow of Arabic adjuration to the passers-by whom he almost, but never quite, runs down. “Look out for your back! Hurry up, uncle! Your back, your back!—may your house be destroyed! Your right, lady! Your left, sir! Slowly, oh, inmates of the harem! Oh, pilgrim, your back! Child, beware! Your back, my friend! Your back! Your back! E-e-eh! A-a-ah!”

High above the other calls rises now and then the shrill, nasal song of the vender of sweetened bread, Allah er-Razeek!—“God is the Nourisher!” A half-naked beggar changes his pathetic whine to a lusty curse as he slinks out of the way of a galloping, shouting horseman. Any one who feels in the mood kneels down anywhere he happens to be and prays aloud. As a kind of accompaniment to the vociferous chorus there sounds the continuous tinkling of the brass bowls which are rattled against each other by the lemonade-sellers. And—very frequently in Damascus—there pierces through the deafening tumult the thin, penetrating chant of the muezzin who, from his lofty minaret or from the mosque door in the crowded, narrow street, calls to the greedy bazaar to think on the things that are unseen and eternal.

The great conflagration of 1911 destroyed the heart of the business district by the Omayyade Mosque, and those who knew the city of a few years ago find it sadly strange to climb over the heaps of dusty rubbish which cover once familiar streets. But during the rebuilding, which is progressing rapidly, there is no appreciable diminution of business, and the intricate maze of the bazaars still presents scenes of marvelous variety and endless fascination. There is the Water-pipe Bazaar, where narghileh bowls are made out of cocoanuts ornamented with gold and silver, the Draper’s Bazaar filled with shoddy European stuffs, the Saddle Bazaar with its brightly covered Arabic saddles and gorgeous accouterments, the almost forsaken Bazaar of the Booksellers, where now hardly a half-dozen poorly stocked booths hint at the intellectual conquests of the Damascus of centuries gone by, and the Spice Market, whose long rows of bottles scent the air with their essences and attars. The Silk Bazaar is the most brilliant, and its gaudiest patterns are hung out for the inspection of admiring Bedouin visitors. The Second-hand Bazaar of the auctioneers is commonly known as the Louse Market, not because of the uncomplimentary suspicion which first suggests itself, but from a very small and agile coin known by that name, which is frequently used in increasing the bids.

As we pass along one street after another, we see open-front bakers’ shops where paper-like loaves are sold, still hot from the oven, and confectioners’ booths filled with all manner of sherbets and jellies and delicious preserved fruits and the infinite variety of sweet, indigestible pastry in which the Syrians delight. In one little square there are great piles of thin apricot paste which look exactly like bundles of brown paper. The merchant offers us a sample to taste, but we are not quite sure as to the quality of the dust that has been settling upon it all the morning. A long towel hung over yonder doorway indicates that it is the entrance to a hammâm or public bath, within whose steaming court we can see brown, half-naked forms reclining on dingy divans. The intricate lattice-work of overhanging balconies guards the harems of the merchants from the vulgar gaze of the crowds below. This little gate, curtained by a hanging rug and edged with a line of slippers, leads from the deafening tumult of the bazaar to the solemn quiet of a cool, spacious mosque.

From time immemorial the merchant-artisans of Damascus have been united in powerful associations. There is even a guild of beggars, though, to do them justice, these are neither so numerous nor so importunate as in most Syrian cities. On the other hand, the curs which infest the busiest streets are innumerable and are disgusting in appearance beyond any other dogs I have ever seen. Yet these sore, starved racks of bones, with hardly the energy to get out of the way of a passing carriage, have organizations of their own. At any rate, they recognize definite boundaries; and a dog who ventures outside the territory occupied by his own clan does so at peril of his life. One evening a friend of mine, who is a good mimic, was so unwise as to bark lustily just as he entered our hotel. In a moment every cur in the district was giving voice; and far into the night, as unhappily was all too strongly impressed upon us, they kept up their vociferous search for the unknown intruder.

But it is never quiet in Damascus. Most Orientals go to bed very early. Jerusalem is like a city of the dead by half-past eight in the evening. The Damascenes, however, seem to need no sleep, and the noises of the streets never cease. The only noticeable change in their volume is that, when the shops close, just before sunset, the tumult suddenly increases. Then, hour after hour, you can hear the heavy murmur of the multitude, broken occasionally by the voice of someone singing, or by a chorus of loud cheers. An interminable succession of songs and marches, all of them fortissimo and in a strident minor key, shatter what ought to be the midnight stillness as they rattle from phonographs whose Arabic records are prepared by the German subsidiary of an American talking-machine company. Very far off, a dog lifts up his voice in a faint howl which starts a pandemonium of barks and growls and yelps all over the neighborhood. The freshening breeze rustles among the orchards; then it slams a window shut. The bell of a tram-car rings sharply; carriage horns give loud double toots which just fail of forming any known musical interval, and always there is the sound of water—rushing, purling, rippling, splashing—the eternal anthem of Damascus’ greatness.

So when his second day in this noisy city draws to a close, the wise traveler decides that, as there is no use trying to get to sleep early, he will go out and himself share in the midnight enjoyments. I do not know how many cafés there are in Damascus: I should be quite ready to believe anyone who told me that there were ten thousand. They are said to be the finest in Syria. Indeed, the Damascenes boast that the first of all coffee-shops was established in their city, and also that sherbet was invented here.

The best cafés are situated beside the main branch of the Barada. Those near St. Thomas’ Gate have very attractive shaded gardens, where the tables are set out under spreading trees and are surrounded by tiny streams of running water. An evening visit to one of these riverside resorts is a memorable experience, and it is quite safe; for, unless corrupted by European influence, no Moslem ever touches alcoholic beverages, and one need therefore fear none of the drunken roughness which is associated with the “cafés”— which of course are not cafés at all—of Christian America. The Damascene seeks his recreation amid an atmosphere of ease and leisure and refined enjoyment. If a patron wishes to dream away the whole evening over one cup of coffee or a five-cent narghileh, there is no one to object. Itinerant musicians beguile the hours of darkness with plaintive minor ditties sung to the accompaniment of the guitar or zither; story-tellers spin endless fairy tales to circles of breathless listeners, and—alas!—the tireless phonograph roars its brassy songs. Many of the regular habitués of the place are absorbed in interminable games of backgammon. Coffee, fruit syrups, pastry, candy, nuts, cool water-pipes and mild cigarettes—such are the favorite refreshments of the fierce, fanatical Moslem!

As the cups in which the coffee is served are tiny, handleless things, hardly larger than a walnut, they are usually set in holders of filigree work. These are, as a rule, made of brass, but in homes of wealth they may be silver or even gold. The liquor is often flavored with rose-water and is very thick and sweet, though it will be prepared murr if anyone has such an outlandish taste as to prefer it “bitter.” The unpalatable sediment which fills a good third of the cup must on no account be stirred up. Many a stranger has found to his cost that the coffee is served exceedingly hot; and it is a necessity as well as a sign of good breeding to keep the lips from quite touching the surface and to suck up the drink with a loud hissing noise. In a private house, this formality should by no means be neglected, even if the coffee has become cooled, as the omission would be equivalent to a criticism of the host.

Around the coffee-pot centers the social life of the Moslem world. It has an important place in every kind of ceremonial and festive occasion, from the circumcision of the child to the funeral of the old man. The merchant offers it to his prospective customer. The desert sheikh starts his women grinding the beans in a large wooden mortar as soon as a stranger enters his tent. Not to give coffee to a guest would signify that he was unwelcome.[32] It is invariably served at the beginning of a call. Later on, sherbet is brought in, and then the visitor knows that it is time for him to leave.

Coffee sometimes plays a more serious part in Eastern affairs. Its heavy sweetness disguises varied and deadly poisons. The bacilli of typhoid fever are said, in this scientific generation, to be drunk unsuspectingly by many a venturesome meddler in affairs of state. The death penalty is seldom inflicted in the Turkish Empire. Deposed ministers and irrepressible busybodies and troublesome reformers are merely imprisoned or exiled. Often they are sent to Damascus. Then, shortly, they die of indigestion or heart failure.

CHAPTER IX
THE RICHES OF DAMASCUS

The great khans, or wholesale warehouses, of Damascus lie in the center of the city near the Omayyade Mosque. As a rule they are not detached structures, but are hidden by the surrounding shops and are entered through tunnels which pierce the sides of the bazaars. The finest of them is the Khan Asad Pasha, which was erected a hundred years ago by the governor whose name it bears, and is still owned by his family. This is one of the few really impressive pieces of Arabic architecture in Syria, rich and massive, yet effectively adapted to the purposes for which it was intended. The building is constructed of alternate courses of dark brown and yellow limestone, and its principal entrance is a high, vaulted “stalactite” gateway covered with beautiful carvings. The central court is a hundred feet across and, as one comes suddenly from the dim light of the crowded bazaar, it seems of an astounding brightness and spaciousness. The pavement is divided into squares by four pillars, and from these spring the arches of nine lofty domes, which are ornamented with elaborate arabesques and pierced by a number of small windows. On the sides of this great court, and also on a gallery above, are the offices of wholesale merchants and brokers, and at the rear are situated smaller courts and the vaulted storerooms of the khan. Around the central fountain between the pillars of the largest dome and crowding through the gateway and thronging the street outside, a vociferous throng of muleteers and camel-drivers are unloading the caravans which have come from Beirut on the coast and from northern Aleppo and across the desert from the Euphrates, bearing the choicest merchandise of the East, and some few machine-made products of the West, to swell “the riches of Damascus.”[33]