GOING DOWN TO DAMASCUS
There is a good deal of country, mainly desert, between Baalbec and Damascus, and a good many barren hills. Crossing the Anti-Lebanon mountains there is a little of water and soil and much red, rocky waste. Here and there a guide pointed out a hill where Cain killed Abel—not always the same hill, but no matter, it was a hill in this neighborhood; any one of them would make a good place. Occasionally the train passed a squalid village, perched on a lonely shelf—a single roof stretching over most of the houses—the inhabitants scarcely visible. We wondered where they got their sustenance. They were shepherds, perhaps, but where did their flocks feed?
Across the divide, between snow-capped hills, and suddenly we are face to face with green banks and the orchard bloom of spring. We have reached the Abana, the river which all the ages has flowed down to Damascus with its gift of eternal youth. For as the desert defends, so the river sustains Damascus, and the banks of the Abana (they call it the Barada now) are just a garden—the Garden of Eden, if old tales be true.
It is not hard to believe that tradition here, at this season. Peach, apricot, almond, and plum fairly sing with blossom; birch and sycamore blend a cadence of tender green; the red earth from which Adam was created (and which his name signifies) forms an abundant underchord. If we could linger a little by these pleasant waters we might learn the lilt of the tree of life—its whisper of the forbidden fruit.
SO THE PATRIARCHS JOURNEYED; SO, TWO THOUSAND YEARS LATER, JOSEPH AND MARY TRAVELLED INTO EGYPT
We are among our older traditions here—the beginnings of the race. We have returned after devious wanderings. These people whom we see leading donkeys and riding camels, tending their flocks and bathing in the Abana, they are our relatives—sons and daughters of Adam. Only, they did not move away. They stayed on the old place, as it were, and preserved the family traditions, and customs. I am moved to get out and call them "cousin" and embrace them, and thank them for not trailing off after the false gods and frivolities of the West.
The road that winds by the Abana is full of pictures. The story of the Old Testament—the New, too, for that matter—is dramatized here in a manner and a setting that would discourage the artificial stage. Not a group but might have stepped out of the Bible pages. This man leading a little donkey—a woman riding it—their garb and circumstance the immutable investment of the East: so the patriarchs journeyed; so, two thousand years later, Joseph and Mary travelled into Egypt. No change, you see, in all that time—no change in the two thousand years that have followed—no change in the two thousand years that lie ahead. Wonderful, changeless East! How frivolous we seem in comparison—always racing after some new pattern of head-gear or drapery! How can we hope to establish any individuality, any nationality, any artistic stability when we have so little fixed foundation in what, more than any other one thing, becomes a part of the man himself—his clothing?
These hills are interesting. Some of them have verdure on them, and I can fancy Abraham pasturing his flocks on them, and with little Isaac chasing calves through the dews of Hermon. It would not be the "dews of Hermon," but I like the sound of that phrase. I believe history does not mention that Abraham and Isaac chased calves. No matter; anybody that keeps flocks has to chase calves now and then, and he has to get his little boy to help him. So Abraham must sometimes have called Isaac quite early in the morning to "go and head off that calf," just as my father used to call me, and I can imagine how they raced up and down and sweat and panted, and how they said uncomplimentary things about the calf and his family, and declared that there was nothing on earth that could make a person so mad as a fool calf, anyhow.