By Eastern metaphor Damascus was “a handful of pearls in its goblet of emerald.” The perennial streams from Lebanon spread into rivulets, and gurgle and disport themselves, forming the bases for blooming gardens of flowers and fruits—a terrestrial paradise.
Again they descended to the brown, scorched plain, [pg 238]and the torrid noonday was at hand. But before the flight of another hour they would be in Damascus, encircled and refreshed by its clear cool streams—their journey ended.
The time since they had left Jerusalem seemed well-nigh age-long to the young zealot. Deprived of the hot hunt, which for months had hardly afforded space for a quiet thought, he was forced to think. In vain he essayed to still the confused hum of the mechanism of his soul. To a mind under less intense pressure, and free from a stored-up mass of vivid tragic pictures, the changing scenery and stirring events of the journey would have afforded occupation. But to Saulus every hour was an hour of agony, its slowness interminable.
The outward world of variety and beauty meant nothing to Saulus now, for he was dwelling in a thought-world of his own contriving. He had walled himself around with abnormal and inhuman elements, and look which way he might, they must stare at him, face to face.
Nearer, vastly nearer than his surrounding comrades, were the living, barbed thoughts, which like imps of darkness peopled his mind.
On the walls and corridors of his soul were hung, high and low, moving, burning panoramas, and gaze upon them he must. The hellish art, which he had unwittingly moulded and upreared, thickly curtained the picturesque hills and valleys, the grand mountains, blue seas, and flowing rivers, which were incidental to the journey. The prods of an ox-goad to his outer flesh would have seemed tolerable could they have been re[pg 239]ceived in exchange for those unseen goadings which punctured his guilty consciousness.
What subtle and often warring forces make up the mind of man! How it may kindle, unwittingly and even conscientiously, at its own centre, hellish flames; while the same energies, used after the divine order, will create heavenly harmonies and immortal loves!
How prolific are thought-activities, and how blind the world to the related sequences which are bound to them by hooks of steel! How untiringly the false self, in the ignorance of its own deeper nature, forges bonds for its own inthralment!
But though unheeded, the Inner Guide is ever awaiting an opportunity to blaze the path to freedom.
It matters not that the intangible scorpions which sting the human consciousness have been invoked in the name and guise of religion. Their retributive venom is not thereby lessened.