Not less clear is the second impression, which is that of the unfinishedness and imperfection of all things Syrian. It is a place of wreckage, new and old. But the peculiarity of that wreckage is that it was always there, more or less. None of the ideals of the land were ever quite realised. It was never completely conquered by the Israelites, their ambition stopping short and their energy flagging before their task was done. It was never completely cultivated, or made to yield its full harvest of natural wealth. In countless small things this incompleteness is evident. The contrast between the beauty of the distant view and the disorder and slovenliness of the near has been already noted. The post-office in Damascus is a quite good post-office, so far as letters and telegrams go. But you inquire for these in a hall which looks like a very dirty stable-yard with a very dirty fountain in the middle of it, furnished with little rough-sawn wooden boxes for private letters, such as no self-respecting grocer would pack with oranges. Even the tombs, about which so much sacredness is supposed to gather, are the untidiest of sepulchres. You may see a large and expensive tombstone, shining white in the distance, with all the air of aristocratic self-importance which man’s pride can lend to death; but when you approach, it is railed off with bamboo and barbed wire which might have been picked off a rubbish-heap. There are good roads in places, but they lead to nowhere. Generally they collapse into mere watercourses after a few miles, or they run on in a squared and measured lane of sharp boulders down which no horse can walk. Nor is this incompleteness a peculiarity of Turkish administration. Probably nothing in Palestine is older than the landmarks which divide the fields. From generation to generation these have been held sacred, laws against their removal having been in force among the ancient Canaanites before the conquest by Israel. So sacred are they that even murderers and thieves will seldom dare to tamper with them. Yet through all the long past the landmarks are said to have remained as the first men laid them down—mere inconspicuous heaps of little stones, the easiest things in the world to remove.
When we take the unfinishedness of the land along with the revelation and consider them together, we can hardly fail to gain a lesson of far-reaching meaning. The great incompleteness of Syria—the thing in which her life has been most lamentably unfinished—was her response to the revelation of her God. She never was at pains to understand it; she never fully opened her heart to its new progress, nor felt her high destiny as the bearer of good tidings to the world. She never seriously set herself to obey its plainest ethical demands. The wreckage is her price paid for the neglect. No man nor nation can finish any task to perfection, who has not done justice to such revelation of God as his heart and conscience have received. It is truth to the inward light that keeps us from losing heart and enables us to feel that energy and patience to the end are worth our while. Right dealing with revelation is the secret of all efficient performance. The combination in Palestine of such revelation and such defect in strenuous action shows us a land that has just missed the most amazing destiny on earth.
It is in the remembrance of these thoughts that the chapters of this part should be read. The Shadow of Death has fallen because these men could not escape their knowledge of some greatness in death, more moving than anything life had to show. The spectral is but a degenerate and perverse form of their sense of God. The Cross gives its ethical significance to the burden and sorrow of the land. Resurrection shows signs even now that God has not yet done with Syria. But first, before we treat these aspects of her spirit, let us look at it on its brighter side—the smile and song of the land.
INTERIOR OF THE DOME OF THE ROCK (MOSQUE OF OMAR), FROM THE SOUTH-EAST.
CHAPTER I
THE LIGHTER SIDE OF THINGS
One easily forgets, among the many sorrows of the Holy Land, that there is any lighter side to the picture there. Yet such a side there is, and always has been. Nature is not always severe, nor the spirit of man melancholy, in the East. Both nature and man are sometimes found in lighter vein here as elsewhere. Stevenson’s most charming good word for the world he always defended so gallantly, is specially applicable to the Syrian part of it.—“It is a shaggy world, and yet studded with gardens; where the salt and tumbling sea receives rivers running from among reeds and lilies.” Syria has always known the value of her gardens, and felt the sweet enchantment of her reeds and lilies. Was not her first story told of a garden where four such rivers flowed, and her noblest sermon that whose text was “the lilies of the field” and “the birds of the air”? What pleasantness of open nature there is in these two latter expressions! What sense of field-breadth and sky-space, in which the Preacher had room for breathing and for delight! Every Israelite, sitting under his vine and fig tree, or going forth to meditate in the fields at evening, knew this charm. From of old the inhabitants have taken delight in exchanging roofs for bowers in their fields and gardens, or for booths, built with green branches on their house-roofs. Many a sweet vista is seen in Palestine framed in trellised vines or in passion-flower swinging over a roofed fountain or a garden house. The mountains were often bare and unhomely, for at no time can any but a minor part of them have been cultivated; yet even the wind-swept heights were inhabited by health and hope and gladness, and when a shepherd passed by, or the reapers shouted in the harvest-fields, the heart of the men of Israel sang aloud. In the words of the 65th Psalm this exhilaration and childlike glee finds its most perfect expression; we quote them in that old Scottish rhymed version which has so singularly caught their spirit:—
They drop upon the pastures wide,
That do in deserts lie;
The little hills on ev’ry side
Rejoice right pleasantly.
With flocks the pastures clothed be,
The vales with corn are clad;
And now they shout and sing to thee,
For thou hast made them glad.