Eothen; with an Introduction and Notes

by Alexander William Kinglake

So simple as this is Asiatic luxury! The Oriental is not a contriving animal; there is nothing intricate in his magnificence. The impossibility of handing down property from father to son for any long period consecutively seems to prevent the existence of those traditions by which, with us, the refined modes of applying wealth are made known to its inheritors. We know that in England a newly-made rich man cannot, by taking thought and spending money, obtain even the same-looking furniture as a gentleman. The complicated character of an English establishment allows room for subtle distinctions between that which is comme il faut, and that which is not. All such refinements are unknown in the East; the Pasha and the peasant have the same tastes. The broad cold marble floor, the simple couch, the air freshly waving through a shady chamber, a verse of the Koran emblazoned on the wall, the sight and the sound of falling water, the cold fragrant smoke of the narghile, and a small collection of wives and children in the inner apartments—all these, the utmost enjoyments of the grandee, are yet such as to be appreciable by the humblest Mussulman in the empire.

But its gardens are the delight, the delight and the pride of Damascus. They are not the formal parterres which you might expect from the Oriental taste; they rather bring back to your mind the memory of some dark old shrubbery in our northern isle, that has been charmingly un-“kept up” for many and many a day. When you see a rich wilderness of wood in decent England, it is like enough that you see it with some soft regrets. The puzzled old woman at the lodge can give small account of “the family.” She thinks it is “Italy” that has made the whole circle of her world so gloomy and sad. You avoid the house in lively dread of a lone housekeeper, but you make your way on by the stables; you remember that gable with all its neatly nailed trophies of fitchets and hawks and owls, now slowly falling to pieces; you remember that stable, and that—but the doors are all fastened that used to be standing ajar, the paint of things painted is blistered and cracked, grass grows in the yard; just there, in October mornings, the keeper would wait with the dogs and the guns—no keeper now; you hurry away, and gain the small wicket that used to open to the touch of a lightsome hand—it is fastened with a padlock (the only new looking thing), and is stained with thick, green damp; you climb it, and bury yourself in the deep shade, and strive but lazily with the tangling briars, and stop for long minutes to judge and determine whether you will creep beneath the long boughs and make them your archway, or whether perhaps you will lift your heel and tread them down under foot. Long doubt, and scarcely to be ended till you wake from the memory of those days when the path was clear, and chase that phantom of a muslin sleeve that once weighed warm upon your arm.

Wild as that, the nighest woodland of a deserted home in England, but without its sweet sadness, is the sumptuous garden of Damascus. Forest trees, tall and stately enough if you could see their lofty crests, yet lead a tussling life of it below, with their branches struggling against strong numbers of bushes and wilful shrubs. The shade upon the earth is black as night. High, high above your head, and on every side all down to the ground, the thicket is hemmed in and choked up by the interlacing boughs that droop with the weight of roses, and load the slow air with their damask breath. [292] There are no other flowers. Here and there, there are patches of ground made clear from the cover, and these are either carelessly planted with some common and useful vegetable, or else are left free to the wayward ways of Nature, and bear rank weeds, moist-looking and cool to the eyes, and freshening the sense with their earthy and bitter fragrance. There is a lane opened through the thicket, so broad in some places that you can pass along side by side; in some so narrow (the shrubs are for ever encroaching) that you ought, if you can, to go on the first and hold back the bough of the rose-tree. And through this wilderness there tumbles a loud rushing stream, which is halted at last in the lowest corner of the garden, and there tossed up in a fountain by the side of the simple alcove. This is all.

Never for an instant will the people of Damascus attempt to separate the idea of bliss from these wild gardens and rushing waters. Even where your best affections are concerned, and you, prudent preachers, “hold hard” and turn aside when they come near the mysteries of the happy state, and we (prudent preachers too), we will hush our voices, and never reveal to finite beings the joys of the “earthly paradise.”

CHAPTER XXVIII
PASS OF THE LEBANON

“The ruins of Baalbec!” Shall I scatter the vague, solemn thoughts and all the airy phantasies which gather together when once those words are spoken, that I may give you instead tall columns and measurements true, and phrases built with ink? No, no; the glorious sounds shall still float on as of yore, and still hold fast upon your brain with their own dim and infinite meaning.

Come! Baalbec is over; I got “rather well” out of that.

The path by which I crossed the Lebanon is like, I think, in its features to one which you must know, namely, that of the Foorca in the Bernese Oberland. For a great part of the way I toiled rather painfully through the dazzling snow, but the labour of ascending added to the excitement with which I looked for the summit of the pass. The time came. There was a minute in the which I saw nothing but the steep, white shoulder of the mountain, and there was another minute, and that the next, which showed me a nether heaven of fleecy clouds that floated along far down in the air beneath me, and showed me beyond the breadth of all Syria west of the Lebanon. But chiefly I clung with my eyes to the dim, steadfast line of the sea which closed my utmost view. I had grown well used of late to the people and the scenes of forlorn Asia—well used to tombs and ruins, to silent cities and deserted plains, to tranquil men and women sadly veiled; and now that I saw the even plain of the sea, I leapt with an easy leap to its yonder shores, and saw all the kingdoms of the West in that fair path that could lead me from out of this silent land straight on into shrill Marseilles, or round by the pillars of Hercules to the crash and roar of London. My place upon this dividing barrier was as a man’s puzzling station in eternity, between the birthless past and the future that has no end. Behind me I left an old, decrepit world; religions dead and dying; calm tyrannies expiring in silence; women hushed and swathed, and turned into waxen dolls; love flown, and in its stead mere royal and “paradise” pleasures. Before me there waited glad bustle and strife; love itself, an emulous game; religion, a cause and a controversy, well smitten and well defended; men governed by reasons and suasion of speech; wheels going, steam buzzing—a mortal race, and a slashing pace, and the devil taking the hindmost—taking me, by Jove! (for that was my inner care), if I lingered too long upon the difficult pass that leads from thought to action.

I descended and went towards the west.

The group of cedars remaining on this part of the Lebanon is held sacred by the Greek Church on account of a prevailing notion that the trees were standing at a time when the temple of Jerusalem was built. They occupy three or four acres on the mountain’s side, and many of them are gnarled in a way that implies great age, but except these signs I saw nothing in their appearance or conduct that tended to prove them contemporaries of the cedars employed in Solomon’s Temple. The final cause to which these aged survivors owed their preservation was explained to me in the evening by a glorious old fellow (a Christian chief), who made me welcome in the valley of Eden. In ancient times the whole range of the Lebanon had been covered with cedars, and as the fertile plains beneath became more and more infested by Government officers and tyrants of high and low degree, the people by degrees abandoned them and flocked to the rugged mountains, which were less accessible to their indolent oppressors. The cedar forests gradually shrank under the axe of the encroaching multitudes, and seemed at last to be on the point of disappearing entirely, when an aged chief who ruled in this district, and who had witnessed the great change effected even in his own lifetime, chose to say that some sign or memorial should be left of the vast woods with which the mountains had formerly been clad, and commanded accordingly that this group of trees (which was probably situated at the highest point to which the forest had reached) should remain untouched. The chief, it seems, was not moved by the notion I have mentioned as prevailing in the Greek Church, but rather by some sentiment of veneration for a great natural feature—a sentiment akin, perhaps, to that old and earthborn religion, which made men bow down to creation before they had yet learnt how to know and worship the Creator.