The lovely wife of M. Pierre Gerardin, who had also just returned to her home from Beyrout, astride on a kedýsh,[57] in the space of seven hours, alighted from her horse at the garden-gate, when she learned who was within, and paid us a visit. This lady was married to a son of that Gerardin who had treated us with such politic incivility in 1831, and who had since died. She was in the costume of a Syrian lady: her hair hung in strait tresses down her back, and black braids of silk fell intermingled with it, so as seemingly to lengthen it to the bend of her knees. The whole was bespangled with small gold money, called rubiahs, of which there might be two hundred or more; and a band, set with gold money, encircled her head, on a level with her forehead, in the fashion of a diadem: the whole being surmounted by a marone-coloured skull cap, richly embroidered in gold. A cream-coloured gown, open in front, and buttoned only at the waist, disclosed her silk gauze chemise, which overhung her pantaloons of silk brocade, and served as a handkerchief to her neck. Her feet were without stockings, and covered only by a pair of yellow papooches. She was a lively young creature; and, as it is common in the Levant to suppose that European ladies who go in public unveiled must, on that account, have much levity of conduct, she endeavoured to imitate what she fancied to be their manners by an assumed freedom, which certainly shocked the females of our party. Mulberries were brought, and eaten with little pointed wooden picks, not to stain the fingers. When our new friends were gone, we supped or dined, and passed the night beneath the tent, bitten most dreadfully by fleas and musquitoes.
July 4.—In the morning I walked into Sayda to see the house destined for us; but it was inconvenient, and was still in the possession of its tenants, a Turkish family; so that the idea of locating ourselves there was abandoned. Then, leaving my family under the tent, I set off for Jôon, where I arrived about sunset, it being three hours’ ride from Sayda.
Lady Hester Stanhope’s reception of me was kind and warm, but more serious than it had been in 1830; one would have said it was a welcome, as if I had left her a month before, and had just come back, for she proceeded, as she called it, immediately to business. She told me it would have given her pleasure if I had left my family at Beyrout, for she had no house to offer them; and, from the dreadful effects of the earthquake, which, on the 1st of January of this year, had thrown down or cracked a third of the houses throughout Palestine, it would be difficult for me to find one, if I could not content myself with that which had been fixed upon for us at Sayda.
July 5.—This discussion occupied the whole of the next day; when, towards evening, a letter came from my family to say they were in the greatest trouble and fright, and that my presence was required immediately. It was hastily determined, therefore, that I should take them to the convent of St. Elias, (Dayr Mar Elias, as it is called) which had been the first residence of Lady Hester Stanhope when she settled in this country.
July 6.—In the morning I rode down to the tent, and found my whole family in tears, and apparently inconsolable. To understand this, the reader must fancy himself transported from a comfortable and well-furnished home to a distant, half-civilized country, where he does not comprehend a word of the language, and planted under a tent in the outskirts of a city, without bar or bolt, without table or chair, and with nobody for an interpreter of his wants but two servants, one of whom speaks broken French, and even that hardly intelligible, and the other nothing but Arabic. It is true, the ladies of the French vice-consul’s family paid mine a visit, and assured them there was no danger to be apprehended: but, when I had left them, and had gone up into the mountains, the defiles, ravines, and precipices of which were visible from the tent, it required no very gloomy imagination to conjure up horrors of all sorts.
It so happened that, on the night of my quitting them, a deserter, who expected to be severely bastinadoed or shot next morning, made his escape from the barrack prison[58] which overhung the walls of Sayda towards the sea, by letting himself down through a sewer, which emptied itself into the surf. He ran for his life along the seashore, until, seeing a light burning in M. Conti’s garden, and a tent, he crawled through the hedge of prickly pear in the state he was in, and thought he might find pity, and a temporary hiding-place. A rustling and a noise awoke Mrs. ——, and she saw a man, in a nizàm dress, wet and filthy, standing at the opening of the tent. Her screams awoke the children, the governess, the cook, the gardener, and Abdhu, who slept in the gardener’s shed close by. They seized the man, who did not attempt to escape, but told them his story; and as all the lower classes were suffering from the oppressive conscription, and other onerous burthens imposed by Ibrahim Pasha, whose rule they abhorred, they furnished the poor deserter with a little covering, and directed him by a lane, through the gardens, towards the mountains, where he would find holes in the rocks to secrete himself, until he could obtain succour from the peasantry.
It is not extraordinary that such an apparition as this should have frightened them all; for, up to the hour of my return, from ignorance of the language, they had hardly comprehended the circumstances that gave rise to it. Entreaties and tears, even then, made it imperative on me to remove them forthwith; and, as the mules had been kept tethered on the ground in readiness for a removal, they were reloaded; and, threading the romantic lanes which wind through the gardens, where lilac-trees, bananas, vines, orange and lemon trees, of extraordinary height, with passionflowers, and other creeping plants, wantoning among the thick foliage, made a delicious shade, we emerged from them at the foot of the mountain. Then, passing the hamlet of Hellaléah, where, at the doors of their country bastides,[59] the Kheláts and Dubâanys, friends of my younger days, stood watching to hail my return among them, whilst the elders pointed to their children, now grown up, that I might notice them, we made a steep descent into a small torrent bed, and, again ascending a rough and zigzag path, reached the elevation on which stands, on a barren and unproductive cliff, the small monastery of Mar Elias Abra, or St. Elias, of the village of Abra, about an hour’s ride from the gates of Sayda.
Mar Elias had originally been the dwelling of a few monks, who performed the duties of a small chapel attached to it. Being a retired and healthy spot, it was chosen by the Bishop of the Schismatic Greeks (to whose see it now belonged) for his residence, and, in 1813, when Lady Hester Stanhope first went to live there, was inhabited by one of his successors to the see, Macarius, who was also Patriarch of Antioch. At the request of the Emir Beshýr, prince of the Druses, the patriarch[60] had given it up to Lady Hester, who lived there five or six years, until she removed to Dar Jôon. After that time she only occasionally visited it, and, since Miss Williams’s death, had never been there. General Loustaunau[61] occupied one of the rooms, and an old woman, the widow of Metta, the village doctor, with her son, lived in the lodge, and served as porters.
The injuries caused by the earthquake were very extensive. It seems to have begun somewhere near the sea of Tiberiàd, burying the town of that name, Suffad, and some others, in ruins, and throwing down or damaging the greater part of the dwellings in every city or village along the coast as far as Beyrout, which latter place did not suffer. The monastery of Mar Elias was shaken to its very foundations; and, on taking possession of our new residence, the state it was in sufficiently showed how terrible the terrestrial convulsion had been. General Loustaunau described it to me as follows:—He was sitting under the verandah which runs round a part of the small quadrangle, reading his Bible, when his chair gave a tilt under him. He raised his eyes from his book, and saw the side of the building facing him rock. A cloud of dust immediately rose above the roof. He knew it was an earthquake, but was not, or had not time to be, terrified; for, before he could well think about it, it was over, and he found himself unhurt. He never quitted the spot where he was, until his maid, the porter, and the porter’s mother, called to him with loud cries. When they came to examine the mischief that had been done, they found the store-room, which was the corner room of the quadrangle to the north-west, entirely fallen in, burying in its ruins more than two hundred weight of copper utensils. The wall of the room which formerly served as Lady Hester Stanhope’s bed-room, next to the store-room, had peeled from top to bottom—half having fallen, and half being left standing. The kitchen roof had fallen in. In the centre of the quadrangle, the parterre, bordered with oblong freestones, had been raised perpendicularly about two feet, with a zenzeluct tree, the rose-bushes, and a palm-tree on it; and so we found them still, the pavement giving a hollow sound to the tread. The arch of the gate of the stable-yard was lifted out of its curve, and the wood-house was down. The room inhabited formerly by Monsieur Beaudin, then her ladyship’s secretary, and now French vice-consul at Damascus, was a heap of ruins; and numberless rents and partial fissures manifested themselves everywhere. The chapel, General Loustaunau’s room, the saloon, and another large room of equal size, had escaped entirely, together with the bath, and two or three small rooms adjoining. The beams of what had been Lady Hester’s bed-room were now propped up by balks of wood; and thus we had three large rooms at our disposal.
Here then I fixed my family; and hiring two women, Tabithâ and Helôon, a girl, Werdy, and a boy, Habyb, from the village of Abra, which was about ten minutes’ walk from Mar Elias, as servants, there seemed a prospect of great comfort and tranquillity for us all, whilst I could give my undivided attention to Lady Hester’s health and affairs, passing my time alternately between the two places.