The troops merely baited at Carah, and then went for Hassiah: and the rest of the day was employed by the cottagers in replacing their furniture, and lamenting the hardships to which they were subjected from such a lawless soldiery.
On the 31st I went from Carah to Yabrûd, where I took up my lodging at an old Christian’s house. The man was a farrier, and, being ill, had entreated Osman Aga, if I passed through again, to billet me upon him: so that I had an importunate patient, labouring under asthma, close at my elbow.
I amused myself, on Sunday, Nov. 2nd, in a ride towards the springs that supply the brook by which the gardens of Yabrûd are irrigated. At twenty minutes’ distance from the gate of the town, there are two of them, both gushing from the foot of a rock: and, just before reaching them, there is a sarcophagus, hewn out of a mass of rock, and covered by a huge lid, having had on it two circular reliefs sculptured, but now indistinct. The valley is highly cultivated,[19] and terminates, beyond the farthest spring, by a small meadow, where the two chains of mountains approach to within a hundred yards of each other.
My landlord, the farrier, having said much about the curious excavations in the rocks at a village called Mâlûla, I induced him, the next day but one, which was the 4th, to accompany me thither. On reaching the place, my conductor took me to a small monastery, built on the brow of the precipice, which overhangs the bogáz or ravine in which the village stands. On the rock where we were, and in those rocks which to the right and left were still overtopping us, are numerous grottoes cut out of the solid stone. In the ravine beneath is the village: and, beyond it, we looked over the Desert as far as the eye could reach. I was eager to enter some of these grottoes, and did then for the first time believe in the stories of the troglodytes: for many of them had evidently been inhabited; and some of them showed for what purposes they had been used, as for wine-pressing, baking, sleeping, &c. Yet a little reflection told me that they originally must have been intended for sepulchres only: inasmuch as many of them contained sarcophagi, like similar caverns that I had seen elsewhere: and in those that had them not, it was not difficult to imagine that they had been disfigured and enlarged for the purposes of pressing oil and wine, or had been converted into magazines after they had ceased to serve as sepulchres.
We were very civilly received at the convent by Mâlem Michael Rasáti, a native of Damascus, sent hither to collect money for Mâlem Rafaël the Jew, to whom the village belonged: i. e. who, for a certain sum, farmed it from the pasha, to make of it as much as he could by his exactions. Persons, so sent, live on the people of the village until they have completed the collection of the imposts. He had with him his wife and sister, who, as being in a retired Christian village, enjoyed themselves with nearly as much liberty in their walks and amusements as ladies in England would do. Soon after my arrival we dined,[20] drank our coffee, and smoked our pipes: and, whilst Mâlem Rasáti took his afternoon nap, I revisited the excavations. In several there were remains of mouldings and other ornaments in bas-relief, and some appeared to have been stuccoed. About four o’clock we all walked down into the village. A spring from the hills above, carried by a grooved ledge down the ravine, supplied the inhabitants with water. A large shady tree or two afforded them shelter from the rays of the meridian sun, which, when declined from the perpendicular, are shut out by the high precipices on either side. Upon the whole, I would recommend the traveller in Syria to turn from his road to visit Mâlûla. The summag or sumak tree, the leaves of which are used in dyeing, is much cultivated on this spot, and some of the sepulchres were converted into store-rooms for holding them.
Mâlem Rasáti urged me strongly to remain all night, in which my landlord, who found his raki, or brandy, good, joined him: so that, when nothing I could say would persuade them to let me go, I stole out unperceived, bridled my horse, and rode off alone, although not sure of the way. I had not, however, got a mile when my landlord came galloping after me; and could not refrain, when he had overtaken me, from muttering a great deal about the obstinacy of Franks, and of the folly of riding after it was dark. We reached Yabrûd in safety.
Within a few miles of Yabrûd is Nebk, a small village, where resided a person whom Lady Hester wished me to seek out. His name was Lascaris, and his history is singular. He considered himself a descendant of Lascaris, emperor of Trebizond: but, not to go so far back, his uncle was Grand Master of the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem at Malta, and of the Piedmontese family of Lascaris de Ventimiglia. He himself was a knight, and one of those, who, after the capitulation of the Island of Malta, followed General Buonaparte into Egypt. He then held a post of considerable emolument as receiver of imposts; and, being an ardent favourer of universal fraternization, he married a Georgian slave, who had belonged to the harým of a kashef of Murad Bey. She was stolen from Georgia at the age of fifteen, and pretended that she never had changed her religion.
The history of her bondage, as related to me by herself, may, if true, serve to give an idea how slaves are carried off from the countries which supply the market of Turkey. She was walking from the village of Warran, her native place, to an adjoining town, when, in an unfrequented part of the road, five men sprang out from an ambush and seized her. They stuffed her mouth with a pocket handkerchief, and carried her to a retired cottage in the mountains near at hand. A master of a merchant vessel awaited them, to take off whatever prey they might make; and, her price being settled, she was conveyed to the sea-side, and embarked. Until they reached the sea, they always travelled by night, and by day remained concealed in unfrequented places, at which time they tied her by the leg, but otherwise treated her well. She was transported to Constantinople, but, the market being dull, was re-embarked for Grand Cairo. Mohammed Kashef bought her; and his harým being dispersed after the defeats of the Mamelukes by the French, she fell into the hands of the Chevalier Lascaris, who married her. She was a large masculine woman: she seemed to have been handsome, but her beauty was now gone; for, in these climates, women at thirty are in their wane.
On the evacuation of Egypt, M. Lascaris took his wife to Paris; but her manners and education were so little adapted to the society of the French capital, that, after an exhibition of her shawls, her Turkish dress, and the few novelties she had to show, the lady found herself out of her sphere, and, we may suppose, worried her husband to return to a country where she could meet with people like herself. The aunt of M. Lascaris was dame d’atour to the Empress Josephine;[21] and, for this or some other reason, he aspired to a post of importance, which not being able to obtain (for it is said he rejected with disdain that of sous-prefet of a department), his own dudgeon, joined with his wife’s, induced him to depart for Constantinople. They there planned a journey into Georgia, to her native place, where M. Lascaris, who was extremely visionary, proposed civilizing the inhabitants and introducing a new system of agriculture. An Armenian, who found out that the projector had a good deal of money at his disposal, undertook to conduct his affairs, to provide articles of barter, implements of agriculture, &c. They embarked together on the Black Sea, landed in the Crimea, and were proceeding on their way to Georgia, when they were arrested as French spies, by the Russians; and, the Armenian having plundered and deserted them, M. Lascaris and his wife were conveyed as prisoners to Petersburg, with the loss of the greatest part of their fortune. Their innocence being proved, they were set at liberty. I forget what next became of them, but gradually M. Lascaris frittered away all that he possessed, and, in 1811, became a school and music-master at Aleppo. I recollect, however, that one of his intermediate schemes was a copartnership with the shaykh of a village near Latakia, where he proposed to raise double crops from the soil by the use of European agricultural instruments, &c. He had not been long there when some unguarded expressions on politics caused his intentions to be suspected; and, had he not retired in haste to Latakia, he would probably have been the victim of the suspicions of the natives. At the time when, as will be presently related, I found him at Nebk, he had just come from Aleppo with a bale or two of red cotton stuffs, which he hoped to sell to the women of the neighbouring villages for petticoats and aprons, at a great profit, and thus make his fortune.
On the 3rd of November, according to my instructions, I rode over to the village of Nebk. On entering it, I inquired for the house of the bishop, to which I had been directed. As I went up the street, a girl about twelve years old, looking out at a door, stared very hard at me. I repeated the question as to the bishop’s residence, when she immediately begged me to stop, and called her master. It was the servant girl of M. Lascaris himself, who, on her calling him, came to the door in a peasant’s dress. He wore a striped black and white woollen abah, in shape like the coats of Robin Hood’s days: beneath it a pair of loose, blue cotton Turkish brogues, no stockings, and peasants’ red shoes. His beard was long and very handsome, his turban like that of the peasantry.