entertainment provided by wandering Arabs, are often pantomimic, and their crude realism is unspeakably disgusting.
Yet there is a very innocent and cheerful vein in the human nature of Syria. At times it is irrelevant and trying. The camp guards, e.g. who are hired from the nearest village to watch the sleeping tents, are apt to beguile the hours of darkness in a manner hardly conducive to repose. In most of our camps they were silent figures, flitting about in an almost ghostly fashion, with perfectly noiseless footsteps. But MacGregor complains of having had to pay his Egyptian guards “for sleeping very loud to keep away the robbers.” Our difficulties were not exactly the same as his, but in some places the guards kept singing as they paced to and fro, and shouted cheerily to one another along the whole length of the encampment, or whistled incessantly, and occasionally fired guns to prove their vigilance. There is a sense of spontaneity and heartiness about the mirth of the East which throws into strong contrast its subtler and more gloomy characteristics. Irresponsible and gay, Syrians seem to be grown-up children, and they retain the ways of childhood. We rarely saw children playing games, but bands of full-grown men were seen at times playing schoolboys’ field games with much shouting. Everybody in the cities appears to be either selling or eating sweetmeats. Sport is rare, but men go forth with guns to shoot little birds like sparrows. One of the most curious sights of Damascus is that of shopkeepers and artisans who go about the streets followed by pet lambs instead of dogs, the wool of these strange little creatures being dyed in brilliant spots of blue or pink.
The kindliness of the East is as genuine and as pleasing as that of any land in the West. It is not in evidence indeed when there is nothing to call it forth. As you pass through the country, the villagers and townsfolk regard you with indifference if not with scorn. But one must remember the universal acting of the East—its devotion to appearances, and its very curious ideas as to which appearances are most becoming. With that in mind, the indifference and the scorn become less alarming. You may find the whole spirit of the situation suddenly change to one of the kindliest. A traveller who has fallen victim to one of the malarial fevers which are so common in Syria at certain periods, will never forget the tenderness with which his camp-servants come about his tent inquiring, “Ente mabsut?” (Are you happy, or well?). When he returns the inquiry the answer is, “Ente mabsut, ana mabsut” (If you are happy, I am happy). At Sidon we had just arrived and had the tents pitched in the open space next the burying-ground. It was Thursday, and the graves were crowded with visitors—Mohammedan women in black, white, or light-coloured robes. They did not seem very sad, even beside the most recent graves, but gossiped and enjoyed their half-holiday, disappearing before sunset silently, like a flock of pigeons to their dovecots. The spectacle was theatrical and almost unearthly. It was difficult to persuade oneself that these flitting figures were really women at all; they seemed rather to be animated bits of landscape. Just while we were watching this, and feeling all its dreamy remoteness from human life as we had ever known it, two new figures appeared. They were the gardener of a neighbouring garden and his young daughter Wurda (Rhoda, Rose). She was five years of age, a tiny vision of black eyes and hair, the hair being arranged in two pigtails down her back. She brought a little bunch of roses for each of us, and as she gave them kissed our hands with as sweet a shyness as any child anywhere could have done. The incident, like that on the hill of Samaria, lingers on the memory, and bears witness to a world of gentleness and kindliness such as we had little dreamed of. Altogether there are abundant signs that in ancient days there must have been much of that Syrian life described by one scholar as “gay and bright, festive and musical—the very home of songs and dances.” It is pleasant to know that although the fortunes of the land have saddened her so terribly, there still remains something at least of her former gaiety.
Even the religion of Syria has its lighter side. Every student of the Bible knows how much there was of rejoicing and fresh childlike revelling in the situation, in the worship of ancient Israel. It is peculiarly interesting to find that in the Semitic worship before and apart from the invasion of Israel, so kindly and friendly a relation subsisted between man and his gods. “The circle into which a man was born was not simply a group of kinsfolk and fellow-citizens, but embraced also certain divine beings, the gods of the family and of the state, which to the ancient mind were as much a part of the particular community with which they stood connected as the human members of the social circle.”[32] Accordingly it would appear that among these ancient Semites the conception of sacrifice was by no means so gloomy as it came to be later, when the moral tragedy of life was more clearly realised. The idea was that of “communion with the deity in a sacrificial meal of holy food.” They “go on eating and drinking and rejoicing before their god with the assurance that he and they are on the best of jovial good terms.... Ancient religion assumes that through the help of the gods life is so happy and satisfactory that ordinary acts of worship are all brightness and hilarity, expressing no other idea than that the worshippers are well content with themselves and with their divine sovereign.”[33]
Of course the severer truth and cleaner conscience which Israel’s revelation brought her gradually deepened the shadows on her religious life. She substituted duty for happiness, the beauty of holiness for the mere joie de vivre, and the tragic blessedness of forgiveness for the careless pleasures of life. Yet to the end she retained and insisted on the gladness of religion. The duty of joy was a command and not merely an epigram for Israel. Dante himself was not more explicit in his condemnation of perverse sullenness than was he who wrote, “Because thou servedst not the Lord thy God with joyfulness, and with gladness of heart, for the abundance of all things: therefore shalt thou serve thine enemies.”[34]
It is surely a very striking fact that the spots which all travellers select as those in which the gladness of the land dwells most freely still are Nazareth and Bethlehem. For beauty of feature and of dress, and for their general air of pleasant and light-hearted gaiety, these are the acknowledged centres. It was of Bethlehem that we felt this most true. Its name, signifying “House of Bread,” is significant of plenty and of comfort. Its associations, even apart from the song of angels there, are sweet and gracious. While approaching it, you look across a pleasant and lightsome landscape to the dim blue mountains of Moab, and remember how Ruth looked across these very fields, when the reapers of Boaz were working in them, to her distant home in those mountains. Here it was that King David in his boyhood played and tended the flocks of his father, and it was the water of that sweet well for which he longed in the days of his adversity. These and a hundred other memories prepare the traveller for a place of gracious and kindly sweetness.
CHAPTER II
THE SHADOW OF DEATH
We now turn sharply to the other side of things, and it must be apparent to every one that we are passing from the smaller to the vastly greater element in the spirit of Syria. The text in Deuteronomy which we quoted[35] shows us joy commanded at the sword’s point, as if the nation were unwilling and unlikely to obey easily the happy command. Even when Jesus Christ repeats the injunction in His great words, “Rejoice and be exceeding glad,” it is a defiant gladness He enjoins. The context shows that the rejoicing is that of persecuted and slandered men. A recent writer has bitterly described our march through life in the words: “We uphold our wayward steps with the promises and the commandments for crutches, but on either side of us trudge the shadow Death and the bacchanal Sex.”[36] The words sound profane to Western ears, but they are not untrue of the spirit of Syria. It is of “the shadow Death” that the present chapter treats.
As primitive religion decayed and men lost their sense of kinship and their easy and friendly relations with the old gods, they were left alone with death, which everywhere stared them in the face and claimed them for its own. Next to God, death is the most impressive fact in human experience, with sin for its sting. When old and defective views of God are passing away, two courses are open to men. As death closes in upon them, and they feel its grasp upon their unprotected souls, they may appeal from it to God, and find Him revealing Himself, with eternal life for them in the knowledge of Him. This was what the noblest of Israel’s thinkers did, and the growing revelation of the Bible was their reward. God showed Himself to them in ever-increasing clearness, until one and another and another of them found that the hand that grasped them was “not Death but Love.” But another course is open. They may enthrone death in place of the broken gods—“Death is king, and vivat rex!” They may “say to corruption, Thou art my father; to the worm, Thou art my mother, and my sister.” Then the emphasis of thought will fall on the grave, and all men’s imaginations will grow morbid.
The tombs of the Holy Land are of many patterns. In his Haifa, Laurence Oliphant describes several different kinds of them, from the cave-sepulchres, or the underground galleries, to the little wayside graves or narrow holes driven into rock which seem such tightly-fitting homes for the dead. There are, of course, the modern graves sacred to the wives and children of missionaries who have laid down their lives in the loving service of Christ and man. Buckle the historian sleeps in the Christian burying-ground at Damascus, and Henriette Renan was laid to rest in Byblus. These graves and others dear to the Western world are, as graves have been since Abraham’s day, symbols of the strangers’ inheritance and lot in the Holy Land. From these, back to the tombs of hoariest antiquity, the country is bound by an unbroken chain of death. Through all the centuries the dead have been thrust upon the notice of the living in a fashion so obtrusive as to make this the most obvious impression of the land. Most of the graves are those of persons now unknown and quite forgotten. Small and great, common men and heroes, are alike conspicuous in death. Each of the invaders has left his memorial, and the sites of ancient cities are traced by help of their burying-grounds.