Took the road towards Mokhtârah, the seat of the rival chief, the Druse Jonblât. For some distance after Beteddeen the roads have been carefully constructed, over an unusually level plateau for the Lebanon; but an enormous ridge of mountain stands conspicuous in the N.-E. This is the highest part of the Shoof, near the sources of the river Barook, so named from being the first place where the Arab camels knelt on arriving in the Lebanon in A.D. 821. The sad spectacle of villages and good farm-houses desolate and blackened by fire, frequently met the view; for this open tract, called the Sumkanîyeh, has frequently been a scene of conflict between the leading factions; it was especially the ground of the considerable battle of the Ameer Besheer and the Jonblatîyeh in 1825. At length, from the commencement of a descent, we saw Mokhtârah upon an opposite hill, commanding the view of our approach—a great advantage in times of warfare. Our road lay downwards by odd turns and twists, and over a precipice to the river Barook, with its romantic banks and fruit-trees peering between overhanging rocks.
On our arrival, the great man, Said Bek
Jonblât, [408] came out with a train of ’Akâl councillors and a crowd of humbler retainers. He was a handsome man of about twenty-eight, and richly apparelled. Beneath a large abai or cloak of black Cashmere, with Indian patterns embroidered about the collar and skirts, he wore a long gombaz of very dark green silk embossed with tambour work; his sash was of the plainest purple silk, and his sidrîyeh or vest was of entire cloth of gold with gold filigree buttons: on the head a plain tarboosh, and in his hand sometimes a cane ornamented with ivory or a rosary of sandal-wood. His gold watch and chain were in the best European taste.
I need not here expatiate on the sumptuous reception afforded us; it may be enough to say, that having some hours to spare before sunset—the universal time for dinner in the East—we walked about, and the Bek shewed me the yet unrepaired damages, inflicted in his father’s time, at the hands of the victorious Ameer Besheer’s faction, on that palace and paradise which his father Besheer had created there, thus teaching the Shehâb Ameer how to build its rival of Beteddeen,—and the limpid stream brought from the high sources of the Barook to supply cascades and fountains for the marble courts, which the other also imitated in bringing down the Suffâr to his place. We sat
beside those streams and cascades, so grateful at that season of the year, conversing about the Arab factions of Kaisi and Yemeni, or the Jonblât and Yesbeck parties of the Druses, or his own early years spent in exile either in the Hauran or with Mohammed ’Ali in Egypt,—but not a word about actual circumstances of the Lebanon, or about his plans for restoring the palace to more than its former splendour, which he afterwards carried out. This was all very agreeable, but a curious fit of policy assumed at the time rendered my host to some degree apparently inhospitable to us Christians.
It is well known that the Druse religion allows its votaries to profess outwardly the forms of any other religion according to place and circumstances. The Bek was now adopting Moslem observances; consequently, it being the month of Ramadân, we could have nothing to eat till after sunset. What could have been his reason for this temporary disguisement I have never been able to discover. Even the adân was cried on the roof of his house, summoning people to prayer in the canonical formula of the Moslems, and Saïd Bek, with his councillors, retired to a shed for devotional exercises, as their prayers may be appropriately termed; and I remarked that at every rising attitude he was lifted reverently by the hands and elbows, by his attendants,—an assistance which no true Mohammedan of any rank, that I had ever met with, would have tolerated.
At length the sunlight ceased to gild the lofty peaks above us, and pipes, sherbet, and ice were served up as a preparation for the coming dinner.
There is in front of the house a square reservoir of water, with a current flowing in and out of it; this is bordered by large cypress-trees, and in a corner near the house wall grows a large acacia-tree, the light-green colour and drooping foliage of which gave somewhat of an Indian appearance to the scene.
Lamps were then lit beneath an arcade, and near the water a huge cresset was filled with resinous pine splinters, and the light of its burning flickered fantastically over the pool, the house, and the trees.
Next came the dinner, late for the appetites of us travellers, and tedious in its duration—with music outside the open windows.