IX.—ALONG THE SYRIAN COAST
OUR only business in Jaffa being to get away from it, we impatiently expected the arrival of the Austrian Lloyd steamer for Beyrout, the Venus, a fickle and unsteady craft, as its name implies. In the afternoon we got on board, taking note as we left the land of the great stones that jut out into the sea, “where the chains with which Andromeda was bound have left their footsteps, which attest [says Josephus] the antiquity of that fable.” The Venus, which should have departed at three o’clock, lay rolling about amid the tossing and bobbing and crushing crowd of boats and barges till late in the evening, taking in boxes of oranges and bags of barley, by the slow process of hoisting up one or two at a time. The ship was lightly loaded with freight, but overrun with third-class passengers, returning pilgrims from Mecca and from Jerusalem (whom the waters of the Jordan seemed not to have benefited), who invaded every part of deck, cabin, and hold, and spreading their beds under the windows of the cabins of the first-class passengers, reduced the whole company to a common disgust. The light load caused the vessel to roll a little, and there was nothing agreeable in the situation.
The next morning we were in the harbor of Haifa, under the shadow of Mt. Carmel, and rose early to read about Elijah, and to bring as near to us as we could with an opera-glass the convent and the scene of Elijah’s victory over the priests of Baal. The noble convent we saw, and the brow of Carmel, which the prophet ascended to pray for rain; but the place of the miraculous sacrifice is on the other side, in view of the plain of Esdraelon, and so is the plain by the river Kishon where Elijah slew the four hundred and fifty prophets of Baal, whom he had already mocked and defeated. The grotto of Elijah is shown in the hill, and the monks who inhabit the convent regard themselves as the successors of an unbroken succession of holy occupants since the days of the great prophet. Their sumptuous quarters would no doubt excite the indignation of Elijah and Elisha, who would not properly discriminate between the modern reign of Mammon and the ancient rule of Baal. Haifa itself is only a huddle of houses on the beach. Ten miles across the curving bay we saw the battlements of Akka, on its triangle of land jutting into the sea, above the mouth of Kishon, out of the fertile and world-renowned plain. We see it more distinctly as we pass; and if we were to land we should see little more, for few fragments remain to attest its many masters and strange vicissitudes. A prosperous seat of the Phoenicians, it offered hospitality to the fat-loving tribe of Asher; it was a Greek city of wealth and consequence; it was considered the key of Palestine during the Crusades, and the headquarters of the Templars and the Knights of St. John; and in more modern times it had the credit of giving the checkmate to the feeble imitation of Alexander in the East attempted by Napoleon I.
The day was cloudy and a little cool, and not unpleasant; but there existed all day a ground-swell which is full of all nastiness, and a short sea which aggravated the ground-swell; and although we sailed by the Lebanon mountains and along an historic coast, bristling with suggestions, and with little but suggestions, of an heroic past, by Akka and Tyre and Sidon, we were mostly indifferent to it all. The Mediterranean, on occasion, takes away one’s appetite even for ruins and ancient history.
We can distinguish, as we sail by it, the mean modern town which wears still the royal purple name of Tyre, and the peninsula, formerly the island, upon which the old town stood and which gave it its name. The Arabs still call it Tsur or Sur, “the rock,” and the ancients fancied that this island of rock had the form of a ship and was typical of the maritime pursuits of its people. Some have thought it more like the cradle of commerce which Tyre is sometimes, though erroneously, said to be; for she was only the daughter of Sidon, and did but inherit from her mother the secret of the mastery of the seas. There were two cities of Tyre,—the one on the island, and another on the shore. Tyre is not an old city in the Eastern reckoning, the date of its foundation as a great power only rising to about 1200 b. c., about the time of the Trojan war, and after the fall of Sidon, although there was a city there a couple of centuries earlier, when Joshua and his followers conquered the hill-countries of Palestine; it could never in its days of greatness have been large, probably containing not more than 30,000 to 40,000 inhabitants, but its reputation was disproportionate to its magnitude; Joshua calls it the “strong city Tyre,” and it had the entire respect of Jerusalem in the most haughty days of the latter. Tyre seems to have been included in the “inheritance” allotted to Asher, but that luxurious son of Jacob yielded to the Phoenicians and not they to him; indeed, the parcelling of territory to the Israelitish tribes, on condition that they would conquer it, recalls the liberal dying bequest made by a tender Virginian to his son, of one hundred thousand dollars if he could make it. The sea-coast portion of the Canaanites, or the Phoenicians, was never subdued by the Jews; it preserved a fortunate independence, in order that, under the Providence that protected the Phoenicians, after having given the world “letters” and the first impulse of all the permanent civilization that written language implies, they could still bless it by teaching it commerce, and that wide exchange of products which is a practical brotherhood of man. The world was spared the calamity of the descent of the tribes of Israel upon the Phoenician cities of the coast, and art was permitted to grow with industry; unfortunately the tribes who formed the kingdom of Israel were capable of imitating only the idolatrous worship and the sensuality of their more polished neighbors. Such an ascendency did Tyre obtain in Jewish affairs through the princess Jezebel and the reception of the priests of Baal, that for many years both Samaria and Jerusalem might almost be called dependencies of the city of the god, “the lord Melkarth, Baal of Tyre.”
The arts of the Phoenicians the Jews were not apt to learn; the beautiful bronze-work of their temples was executed by Tyrians, and their curious work in wood also; the secret of the famous purple dye of the royal stuffs which the Jews coveted was known only to the Tyrians, who extracted from a sea-mussel this dark red violet; when the Jews built, Tyrian workmen were necessary; when Solomon undertook his commercial ventures into the far Orient, it was Tyrians who built his ships at Ezion-geber, and it was Tyrian sailors who manned them; the Phoenicians carried the manufacture of glass to a perfection unknown to the ancient Egyptians, producing that beautiful ware the art of which was revived by the Venetians in the sixteenth century; the Jews did not learn from the Phoenicians, but the Greeks did, how to make that graceful pottery and to paint the vases which are the despair of modern imitators; the Tyrian mariners, following the Sidonian, supplied the Mediterranean countries, including Egypt, with tin for the manufacture of bronze, by adventurous voyages as far as Britain, and no people ever excelled them in the working of bronze, as none in their time equalled them in the carving of ivory, the engraving of precious metals, and the cutting and setting of jewels.
Unfortunately scarcely anything remains of the abundant literature of the Phoenicians,—for the Canaanites were a literary people before the invasion of Joshua; their language was Semitic, and almost identical with the Hebrew, although they were descendants of Ham; not only their light literature but their historical records have disappeared, and we have small knowledge of their kings or their great men. The one we are most familiar with is the shrewd and liberal Hiram (I cannot tell why he always reminds me of General Grant), who exchanged riddles with Solomon, and shared with the mountain king the profits of his maritime skill and experience. Hiram’s tomb is still pointed out to the curious, at Tyre; and the mutations of religions and the freaks of fortune are illustrated by the chance that has grouped so closely together the graves of Hiram, of Frederick Barbarossa, and of Origen.
Late in the afternoon we came in sight of Sidon, that ancient city which the hand-book infers was famous at the time of the appearance of Joshua, since that skilful captain speaks of it as “Great Zidon.” Famous it doubtless had been long before his arrival, but the epithet “great” merely distinguished the two cities; for Sidon was divided like Tyre, “Great Sidon” being on the shore and “Little Sidon” at some distance inland. Tradition says it was built by Sidon, the great-grandson of Noah; but however this may be, it is doubtless the oldest Phoenician city except Gebel, which is on the coast north of Beyrout. It is now for the antiquarian little more than a necropolis, and a heap of stones, on which fishermen dry their nets, although some nine to ten thousand people occupy its squalid houses. What we see of it is the ridge of rocks forming the shallow harbor, and the picturesque arched bridge (with which engravings have made us familiar) that connects a ruined fortress on a detached rock with the rocky peninsula.
Sidon cames us far back into antiquity. When the Canaanitish tribes migrated from their seat on the Persian Gulf, a part of them continued their march as far as Egypt. It seems to be settled that the Hittites (or Khitas) were the invaders who overran the land of the Pharaohs, sweeping away in their barbarous violence nearly all the monuments of the civilization of preceding eras, and placing upon the throne of that old empire the race of Shepherd kings. It was doubtless during the dynasty of the Shepherds that Abraham visited Egypt, and it was a Pharaoh of Hittite origin who made Joseph his minister. It was after the expulsion of the Shepherds and the establishment of a dynasty “which knew not Joseph” that the Israelites were oppressed.
But the Canaanites did not all pass beyond Syria and Palestine; some among them, who afterwards were distinctively known as Phoenicians, established a maritime kingdom, and founded among other cities that of Sidon. This maritime branch no doubt kept up an intercourse with the other portions of the Canaanite family in Southern Syria and in Egypt, before the one was driven out of Egypt by the revolution which restored the rule of the Egyptian Pharaohs, and the other expelled by the advent of the Philistines. And it seems altogether probable that the Phoenicians received from Egypt many arts which they afterwards improved and perfected. It is tolerably certain that they borrowed from Egypt the hieratic writing, or some of its characters, which taught them to represent the sounds of their language by the alphabet which they gave to the world. The Sidonians were subjugated by Thotmes III., with all Phoenicia, and were for centuries the useful allies of the Egyptians; but their dominion was over the sea, and they spread their colonies first to the Grecian isles and then along the African coast; and in the other direction sent their venturesome barks as far as Colchis on the Black Sea. They seem to have thrived most under the Egyptian supremacy, for the Pharaohs had need of their sailors and their ships. In the later days of the empire, in the reign of Necho, it was Phoenician sailors who, at his command, circumnavigated Africa, passing down the Red Sea and returning through the Pillars of Hercules.
The few remains of Sidon which we see to-day are only a few centuries old,—six or seven; there are no monuments to carry us back to the city famous in arts and arms, of which Homer sang; and if there were, the antiquity of this hoary coast would still elude us. Herodotus says that the temple of Melkarth at Tyre (the “daughter of Sidon”) was built about 2300 B.C. Probably he errs by a couple of centuries; for it was only something like twenty-three centuries before Christ that the Canaanites came into Palestine, that is to say, late in the thirteenth Egyptian dynasty,—a dynasty which, according to the list of Manetho and Mariette Bey, is separated from the reign of the first Egyptian king by an interval of twenty-seven centuries. When Abraham wandered from Mesopotamia into Palestine he found the Canaanites in possession. But they were comparatively new comers; they had found the land already occupied by a numerous population who were so far advanced in civilization as to have built many cities. Among the peoples holding the land before them were the Rephaim, who had sixty strong towns in what is now the wilderness of Bashan; there were also the Emim, the Zamzummim, and the Anakim,—perhaps primitive races and perhaps conquerors of a people farther back in the twilight, remnants of whom still remained in Palestine when the Jews began, in their turn, to level its cities to the earth, and who lived in the Jewish traditions as “giants.”
X.—BEYROUT.—OVER THE LEBANON
ALL the afternoon we had the noble range of Mt. Lebanon in view, and towards five o’clock we saw the desert-like promontory upon which Beyrout stands. This bold headland, however, changed its appearance when we had rounded it and came into the harbor; instead of sloping sand we had a rocky coast, and rising from the bay a couple of hundred feet, Beyrout, first the shabby old city, and then the new portion higher, up, with its villas embowered in trees. To the right, upon the cliffs overlooking the sea, is the American college, an institution whose conspicuous position is only a fair indication of its pre-eminent importance in the East; and it is to be regretted that it does not make a better architectural show. Behind Beyrout, in a vast circular sweep, rise the Lebanon mountains, clothed with trees and vineyards, terraced, and studded with villas and villages. The view is scarcely surpassed anywhere for luxuriance and variety. It seems to us that if we had an impulse to go on a mission anywhere it would be to the wicked of this fertile land.
At Beyrout also passengers must land in small boats. We were at once boarded by the most ruffianly gang of boatmen we had yet seen, who poured through the gangways and climbed over the sides of the vessel, like privileged pirates, treading down people in their way. It was only after a severe struggle that we reached our boats and landed at the custom-house, and fell into the hands of the legalized plunderers, who made an attack upon our baggage and demanded our passports, simply to obtain backsheesh for themselves.
“Not to show ‘em passport,” says Abd-el-Atti, who wastes no affection on the Turks; “tiefs, all of dem; you he six months, not so? in him dominion, come now from Jaffa; I tell him if the kin’ of Constantinople want us, he find us at the hotel.”
The hotel Bellevue, which looks upon the sea and hears always the waves dashing upon the worn and jagged rocks, was overflowed by one of those swarms, which are the nuisance of independent travellers, known as a “Cook’s Party,” excellent people individually no doubt, but monopolizing hotels and steamboats, and driving everybody else into obscurity by reason of their numbers and compact organization. We passed yesterday one of the places on the coast where Jonah is said to have left the whale; it is suspected—though without any contemporary authority—that he was in a Cook’s Party of his day, and left it in disgust for this private conveyance.
Our first care in Beyrout was to secure our passage to Damascus. There is a carriage-road over the Lebanons, constructed, owned, and managed by a French company; it is the only road in Syria practicable for wheels, but it is one of the best in the world; I suppose we shall celebrate our second centennial before we have one to compare with it in the United States. The company has the monopoly of all the traffic over it, forwarding freight in its endless trains of wagons, and despatching a diligence each way daily, and a night mail. We went to the office to secure seats in the diligence.
“They are all taken,” said the official.
“Then we would like seats for the day after to-morrow.”
“They are taken, and for the day after that—for a week.”
“Then we must go in a private carriage.”
“At present we have none. The two belonging to the company are at Damascus.”
“Then we will hire one in the city.”
“That is not permitted; no private carriage is allowed to go over the road farther than five kilometres outside of Beyrout.”
“So you will neither take us yourselves nor let any one else?”
“Pardon; when the carriage comes from Damascus, you shall have the first chance.”
Fortunately one of the carriages arrived that night, and the next morning at nine o’clock we were en route. The diligence left at 4 a. M., and makes the trip in thirteen hours; we were to break the journey at Stoura and diverge to Ba’albek. The carriage was a short omnibus, with seats inside for four, a broad seat in front, and a deck for the baggage, painted a royal yellow; three horses were harnessed to it abreast,—one in the shafts and one on each side. As the horses were to be changed at short stages, we went forward at a swinging pace, rattling out of the city and commanding as much respect as if we had been the diligence itself with its six horses, three abreast, and all its haughty passengers.
We leave the promontory of Beyrout, dip into a long depression, and then begin to ascend the Lebanon. The road is hard, smooth, white; the soil on either side is red; the country is exceedingly rich; we pass villas, extensive plantations of figs, and great forests of the mulberry; for the silk culture is the chief industry, and small factories of the famous Syrian silks are scattered here and there. As the road winds upward, we find the hillsides are terraced and luxuriant with fig-trees and grapevines,—the latter flourishing, in fact, to the very top of the mountains, say 5,200 feet above the blue Mediterranean, which sparkles below us. Into these hills the people of Beyrout come to pass the heated months of summer, living in little villas which are embowered in foliage all along these lovely slopes. We encounter a new sort of house; it is one story high, built of limestone in square blocks and without mortar, having a flat roof covered with stones and soil,—a very primitive construction, but universal here. Sometimes the building is in two parts, like a double log-cabin, but the opening between the two is always arched: so much for art; but otherwise the house, without windows, or with slits only, looks like a section of stone-wall.
As we rise, we begin to get glimpses of the snowy peaks which make a sharp contrast with the ravishing view behind us,—the terraced gorges, the profound ravines, the vineyards, gardens, and orchards, the blue sea, and the white road winding back through all like a ribbon. As we look down, the limestone walls of the terraces are concealed, and all the white cliffs are hidden by the ample verdure. Entering farther into the mountains, and ascending through the grim Wady Hammâna, we have the considerable village of that name below us on the left, lying at the bottom of a vast and ash-colored mountain basin, like a gray heap of cinders on the edge of a crater broken away at one side. We look at it with interest, for there Lamartine once lived for some months in as sentimental a seclusion as one could wish. A little higher up we come to snow, great drifts of it by the roadside,—a phenomenon entirely beyond the comprehension of Abdallah, who has never seen sand so cold as this, which, nevertheless, melts in his hands. After encountering the snow, we drive into a cold cloud, which seems much of the time to hang on the top of Lebanon, and have a touch of real winter,—a disagreeable experience which we had hoped to eliminate from this year; snow is only tolerable when seen at a great distance, as the background in a summer landscape; near at hand it congeals the human spirits.
When we were over the summit and had emerged from the thick cloud, suddenly a surprise greeted us. Opposite was the range of Anti-Lebanon; two thousand feet below us, the broad plain, which had not now the appearance of land, but of some painted scene,—a singularity which is partially explained by the red color of the soil. But, altogether, it presented the most bewildering mass of color; if the valley had been strewn with watered silts over a carpet of Persian rugs, the effect might have been the same. There were patches and strips of green and of brown, dashes of red, blotches of burnt-umber and sienna, alternations of ploughed field and young grain, and the whole, under the passing clouds, took the sheen of the opal. The hard, shining road lay down the mountain-side in long loops, in ox-bows, in curves ever graceful, like a long piece of white tape flung by chance from the summit to the valley. We dashed down it at a great speed, winding backwards and forwards on the mountain-side, and continually shifting our point of view of the glowing picture.
At the little post-station of Stoura we left the Damascus road and struck north for an hour towards Ba’albek, over a tolerable carriage-road. But the road ceased at Mu’allakah; beyond that, a horseback journey of six or seven hours, there is a road-bed to Ba’albek, stoned a part of the way, and intended to be passable some day. Mu’allakah lies on the plain at the opening of the wild gorge of the Berduny, a lively torrent which dances down to join the Litany, through the verdure of fruit-trees and slender poplars. Over a mile up the glen, in the bosom of the mountains, is the town of Zahleh, the largest in the Lebanon; and there we purposed to pass the night, having been commended to the hospitality of the missionaries there by Dr. Jessup of Beyrout.
Our halted establishment drew a crowd of curious spectators about it, mostly women and children, who had probably never seen a carriage before; they examined us and commented upon us with perfect freedom, but that was the extent of their hospitality, not one of them was willing to earn a para by carrying our baggage to Zahleh; and we started up the hill, leaving the dragoman in an animated quarrel with the entire population, who, in turn, resented his comments upon their want of religion and good manners.
Climbing up a stony hill, threading gullies and ravines, and finally rough streets, we came into the amphitheatre in the hills which enclose Zahleh. The town is unique in its construction. Imagine innumerable small whitewashed wooden houses, rising in concentric circles, one above the other, on the slopes of the basin, like the chairs on the terraces of a Roman circus. The town is mostly new, for the Druses captured it and burned it in 1860, and reminds one of a New England factory village. Its situation is a stony, ragged basin, three thousand feet above the sea; the tops of the hills behind it were still covered with snow, and we could easily fancy that we were in Switzerland. The ten or twelve thousand inhabitants are nearly all Maroyites, a sect of Christians whom we should call Greeks, but who are in communion with the Latin church; a people ignorant and superstitious, governed by their priests, occasionally turbulent, and always on the point of open rupture with the mysterious and subtle Druses. Having the name of Christians and few of the qualities, they are most unpromising subjects of missionary labor. Yet the mission here makes progress and converts, and we were glad to see that the American missionaries were universally respected.
Fortunately the American name and Christianity are exceedingly well represented in Northern Syria by gentlemen who unite a thorough and varied scholarship with Christian simplicity, energy, and enthusiasm. At first it seems hard that so much talent and culture should be hidden away in such a place as Zahleh, and we were inclined to lament a lot so far removed from the living sympathies of the world. It seems, indeed, almost hopeless to make any impression in this antique and conceited mass of superstition. But if Syria is to be regenerated, and to be ever the home of an industrious, clean, and moral people, in sympathy with the enlightened world, the change is to be made by exhibiting to the people a higher type of Christianity than they have known hitherto,—a Christianity that reforms manners, and betters the social condition, and adds a new interest to life by lifting it to a higher plane; physical conditions must visibly improve under it. It is not enough in a village like this of Zahleh, for instance, to set up a new form of Christian worship, and let it drone on in a sleepy fashion, however devout and circumspect. It needs men of talent, scientific attainment, practical sagacity, who shall make the Christian name respected by superior qualities, as well as by devout lives. They must show a better style of living, more thrift and comfort, than that which prevails here. The people will by and by see a logical connection between a well-ordered house and garden, a farm scientifically cultivated, a prosperous factory, and the profitableness of honesty and industry, with the superior civilization of our Western Christianity. You can already see the influence in Syria of the accomplished scholars, skilful physicians and surgeons, men versed in the sciences, in botany and geology, who are able to understand the resources of the country, who are supported there, but not liberally enough supported, by the Christians of America.