Intolerable though El Bārah may be by night, by day it is most marvellous and most beautiful. It is like the dream city which children create for themselves to dwell in between bedtime and sleep-time, building palace after palace down the shining ways of the imagination, and no words can give the charm of it nor the magic of the Syrian spring. The generations of the dead walk with you down the streets, you see them flitting across their balconies, gazing out of windows wreathed with white clematis, wandering in palisaded gardens that are still planted with olive and with vine and carpeted with iris, hyacinth and anemone. Yet you may search the chronicles for them in vain; they played no part in history, but were content to live in peace and to build themselves great houses in which to dwell and fine tombs to lie in after they were dead. That they became Christian the hundreds of ruined churches and the cross carved over the doors and windows of their dwellings, would be enough to show; that they were artists their decorations prove; that they were wealthy their spacious mansions their summer houses and stables and out-houses testify. They borrowed from Greece such measure of cultivation and of the arts as they required, find fused with them the spirit of Oriental magnificence which never breathed; without effect on the imagination of the West; they lived in comfort and security such as few of their contemporaries can have known, and the Mahommadan invasion swept them off the face of the earth.
TOMB, SERJILLA
I spent two days at El Bārah and visited five or six of the villages round about, the Sheikh of El Bārah and his son serving me as guides. The Sheikh was a sprightly old man called Yūnis, who had guided all the distinguished archæologists of his day, remembered them, and spoke of them by name—or rather by names of his own, very far removed from the originals. I contrived to make out those of de Vogüé and Waddington, and another that was quite unintelligible was probably intended for Sachau. At Serjilla, a town with a sober and solid air of respectability that would be hard to match, though it is roofless and quite deserted, he presented me with a palace and its adjacent tomb that I might live and die in his neighbourhood, and when I left he rode with me as far as Deir Sanbīl to put me on my way. He was much exercised that day by a disturbance that had arisen in a village near at hand. A man had been waylaid by two others of a neighbouring village who desired to rob him. Fortunately a fellow townsman had come to his assistance and together they had succeeded in beating off the attack, but in the contest the friend had lost his life. His relations had raided the robbers' village and carried off all the cattle. Maḥmūd was of opinion that they should not have taken the law into their own hands.
"By God!" said he, "they should have laid the case before the Government."
But Yūnis replied, with unanswerable logic:
"Of what use was it to go to the Government? They wanted their rights."
In the course of conversation I asked Yūnis whether he ever went to Aleppo.
"By God!" said he. "And then I sit in the bazaars and watch the consuls walking, each with a man in front clothed in a coat worth two hundred piastres, and the ladies with as it were flowers upon their heads." (The fashionable European hat, I imagine.) "I always go to Aleppo when my sons are in prison there," he explained. "Sometimes the gaoler is softhearted and a little money will get them out."