BASILICA OF CONSTANTINE, BA'ALBEK
Ḥassan Beg Nā'i was a red-haired and red-bearded man, with a hard-featured face of a Scotch lowland type. He was not at all pleased to see me, but, at the instance of the zaptieh, he slouched out of his bachelor quarters, where he was drinking a Friday morning cup of coffee with his friends, took me across the street to his harem, and left me with his womenkind, who were as friendly as he was surly. They were, indeed, delighted to have a visitor, for Ḥassan Beg is a strict master, and neither his wife nor his mother nor any woman that is his is allowed to put her nose out of doors, not even to take a walk through the graveyard or to drive down to the meadow by the Orontes on a fine summer afternoon. The harem had been a very beautiful Arab house on the model of the houses of Damascus. There were plaster cupolas over the rooms and over the liwān (the audience hall at the bottom of the court), but the plaster was chipping away and the floors and staircases crumbled beneath the feet of those that trod them. A marble column with an acanthus capital was built into one wall, and on the floor of the liwān stood a big marble capital, simple in style but good of its kind. It had been converted into a water basin, and may have done duty as a font before the Arabs took Emesa and after the earlier buildings of the Roman town had begun to fall into decay and their materials to be put to other uses. I passed as I went home a fine square minaret, built of alternate bands of black and white. The mosque or the Christian church to which the tower belonged had fallen; it is reputed, said my zaptieh, to be the oldest tower in the town. The mosque at the entrance of the bazaar was certainly a church of no mean architectural merit.
A STONE IN THE QUARRY, BA'ALBEK
There was nothing more to see in Ḥomṣ, and as the afternoon was fine I rode down to the meadow by the Orontes, the fashionable resort of all holiday makers in spring and summer. The course of the Orontes leaves Ḥomṣ a good mile to the south-west, and the water supply is both bad and insufficient, being derived from a canal that begins at the northern end of the lake. The Marj ul 'Asi, the meadow of the Orontes, is a good type of the kind of place in which the Oriental, be he Turk or Syrian or Persian, delights to spend his leisure. "Three things there are," says an Arabic proverb, "that ease the heart from sorrow: water, green grass and the beauty of women." The swift Orontes stream flowed by swards already starred with daisies, where Christian ladies, most perfunctorily veiled, alighted from their mules under willow trees touched with the first breath of spring. The river turned a great Na'oura, a Persian wheel, which filled the air with its pleasant rumbling. A coffee maker had set up his brazier by the edge of the road, a sweetmeat seller was spreading out his wares by the waterside, and on a broader stretch of grass a few gaily dressed youths galloped and wheeled Arab mares. The East made holiday in her own simple and satisfactory manner, warmed by her own delicious sun.
