“See the ploughman strutting home, his goad in his hand, his plough on his shoulder, as if he had done his duty. Allah be praised, the flowers in the terrace-walls are secure. That is why, I believe, my American brother Thoreau liked walls with many gaps in them. The sweet wild daughters of Spring can live therein their natural life without being molested by the scythe or the plough. Allah be praised a hundred times and one.”
CHAPTER IX
SIGNS OF THE HERMIT
Although we claim some knowledge of the Lebanon mountains, having landed there in our journey earthward, and having since then, our limbs waxing firm and strong, made many a journey through them, we could not, after developing, through many readings, Khalid’s spiritual films, identify them with the vicinage which he made his Kaaba. On what hill, in what wadi, under what pines did he ruminate and extravagate, we could not from these idealised pictures ascertain. For a spiritual film is other than a photographic one. A poet’s lens is endowed with a seeing eye, an insight, and a faculty to choose and compose. Hence the difficulty in tracing the footsteps of Fancy––in locating its cave, its nest, or its Kaaba. His pine-mosque we could find anywhere, at any altitude; his vineyards, too, and his glades; for our mountain scenery, its beauty alternating between the placid and the rugged––the tame terrace soil and the wild, forbidding majesty––is allwhere almost the same. But where in these rocky and cavernous recesses of the world can we to-day find the ancient Lebanon troglodyte, whom Khalid has seen, and visited in his hut, and even talked with? It is this that forces us to seek his diggings, to trace, if possible, his footsteps. 193
In the K. L. MS., as we have once remarked and more than once hinted, we find much that is unduly inflated, truly Oriental; much that is platitudinous, ludicrous, which we have suppressed. But never could we question the Author’s veracity and sincerity of purpose. Whether he crawled like a zoöphyte, soared like an eagle, or fought, like Ali, the giants of the lower world, he is genuine, and oft-times amusingly truthful. But the many questionable pages on this curious subject of the eremite, what are we to do with them? If they are imaginary, there is too much in this Book against quackery to daunt us. And yet, if Khalid has found the troglodyte, whom we thought to be an extinct species, he should have left us a few legends about it.
We have visited the ancient caverns of the Lebanon troglodytes in the cliffs overhanging the river of Wadi Kadeesha, and found nothing there but blind bats, and mosses, and dreary vacuity. No, not a vestage of the fossil is there, not a skull, not a shinbone. We have also inquired in the monasteries near the Cedars, and we were frankly told that no monk to-day fancies such a life. And if he did, he would not give his brother monks the trouble of carrying his daily bread to a cave in those forbidden cliffs. And yet, Simeon Stylites, he of the Pillar, who remained for thirty years perched on the top of it, was a Syrian shepherd. But who of his descendants to-day would as much as pass one night on the top of that pillar? Curious eleemosynary phases of our monkish system, these modern times reveal. 194
On our way from a journey to the Cedars, while engaged in the present Work, we passed through a pine forest, in which were some tangled bushes of the clematis. The muleteer stops near one of these and stoops to reach something he had seen therein. No treasure-trove, alas, as he supposed; but merely a book for which he lacerated his hands and which he cursed and handed to us, saying, “This must be the breviary of some monk.”
No, it was an English book, and of American origin, and of a kind quite rare in America. Indeed, here were a find and surprise as agreeable as Khalid’s sweetbrier bush. Henry Thoreau’s Week! What a miracle of chance. Whose this mutilated copy of the Week, we thought? Who in these mountains, having been in America, took more interest in the Dreamer of Walden Woods than in peddling and trading? We walk our mule, looking about in vague, restless surprise, as if seeking in the woods a lost companion, and lo, we reach a monarch pine on which is carved the name of––Khalid! This book, then, must be his; the name on the pine tree is surely his own; we know his hand as well as his turn of mind. But who can say if this be his Kaaba, this his pine-mosque? Might he not only have passed through these glades to other parts? Signs, indeed, are here of his feet and hands, if not of his tent-pegs. And what signifies his stay? No matter how long he might have put up here, it is but a passage, deeply considered: like Thoreau’s passage through Walden woods, like Mohammad’s through the desert. 195
This leisure hour is the nipple of the soul. And fortunate they who are not artificially suckled, who know this hour no matter how brief, who get their nipple at the right time. If they do not, no pabulum ever after, will their indurated tissues assimilate. Do you wonder why the world is full of crusty souls? and why to them this infant hour, this suckling while, is so repugnant? But we must not intrude more of such remarks about mankind. Whether rightly suckled or not, we manage to live; but whether we do so marmot-like or Maronite-like, is not the question here to be considered. To pray for your bread or to burrow in the earth for it, is it not the same with most people? Given a missionary with a Bible in his hip-pocket or a peasant with a load of brushwood on his back and the same gastric coefficient, and you will have in either case a resulting expansion for six feet of coffin ground and a fraction of Allah’s mercy. Our poor missionary, is it worth while to cross the seas for this? Marmot-like or Maronite-like––but soft you know! Here is our peasant with his overshadowing load of brushwood. And there is another, and another. They are carrying fuel to the lime-pit ahead of us yonder. What brow-sweat, what time, what fire, what suffering and patient toil, the lime-washing, or mere liming, of our houses and sepulchres, requires. That cone structure there, that artificial volcano, with its crackling, flaming bowels and its fuliginous, coruscating crater, must our hardy peasants feed continually for twenty days and nights.