We scrutinize the dates
Of long-past human things,
The bounds of effaced states,
The lines of deceased kings!
We search out dead men’s words
and works of dead men’s hands.
Matthew Arnold, “Empedocles on Etna.”
After a delightful but an all-too-short sojourn in Aleppo, made doubly delightful by our amiable Franciscan hosts and by their charming and hospitable friends whose number here, as everywhere else in Syria, is legion, we were once more on the road with our faces turned toward the mysterious and spell-weaving Orient. Although every hour that we had spent under the genial Syrian sun had been replete with its peculiar interest or pleasure, we longed to set foot on the land that is bounded by the famed rivers of the Euphrates and the Tigris. Our feeling, indeed, was somewhat akin to that expressed in Kipling’s Mandalay, “If you’ve ’eard the East a-callin’, why, you won’t ’eed nothin’ else.”
Boarding a train of the Bagdad Railway at the station on the site of the erstwhile camp of the Crusaders under Baldwin, we were soon on our way towards our first objective, Jerablus on the Euphrates. Our course lay through the heart of a fertile country strewn with ruins and dotted with mud-built villages. The puffing locomotive made its way alternately along fruitful valleys and over rolling uplands whose state of cultivation showed that this region well deserved the name of “granary of northern Syria.” And, notwithstanding the advent of the iron horse, the winding caravans which we frequently passed or overtook were proof conclusive that the service of the patient camel is likely to continue for a long time to come.
It was but a few hours after leaving Aleppo that we caught the first glimpse of the Euphrates as it flowed through arid wastes and washed barren rocks and hills of sand. Although, like Ulysses, I
Much had seen and known; cities of men