In the mean time, as for myself, my thoughts would often involuntarily turn towards England, and then the prospect of a long residence in the Levant somewhat disquieted me. But I banished these anticipations; determined that no trivial cause should make me leave her ladyship alone and unprotected in so distant a country. Not that my presence could add materially to her safety; for there never was a person who relied more on his own resources than she did; besides, gloomy reflections could take no hold of an individual in this fine climate; for they were forgotten as soon as he emerged from the house into the air, where the inspiration of the balmy atmosphere and the scenes which surrounded him always begat cheerful sensations.
The day after our arrival at Sayda, I rode up to the monastery, in which we were to reside. I had never seen it before, not having been with Lady Hester and Mr. B. when the French consul had led them to it, during their former visit to Sayda. On quitting the city gate, we passed through several hedged lanes, between orchards and gardens filled with trees which shrink from the cold blasts of northern climates. Oranges were as thick on the branches as apples are accustomed to grow; and the broad leaf of the banana tree, which flourishes in great vigour hereabout, was an object singularly striking. The hedges were in most places rendered almost impenetrable by the prickly leaf of the cactus indicus.
At the distance of half a mile we came to the skirts of the gardens, at the foot of Mount Lebanon. It was not very steep, and about a quarter of a mile brought us to the top of the first hill, where we looked down before us into a deep valley; then, carrying our eyes up on the opposite mountain, we descried a low building, which I was told was the monastery. The descent was rugged, but the asses are accustomed to mountains. The soil was bare, rocky, and apparently sterile; and here and there an olive or a fig-tree was the only thing which it seemed capable of nourishing. In ascending on the opposite side, the path, over a loamy soil, was so slippery from recent rains, that I dismounted and walked up, as the ass could not make good his footing.
CONVENT OF MAR ELIAS.
On arriving at the monastery, I found it to be a quadrangular stone building, of one story, with flat roofs or terraces, according to the custom of the country, enclosing a small square paved court, which had a little mould in the centre, with a few flowers, and two small orange trees. The rooms were as neat as whitewashed walls could make them, but without chairs or tables; and in one or two was a long sofa bench of solid masonry against the wall on one side only. There was a small chapel attached to the south-east corner, with an altar in it. A discolouration in one of the walls, in which a staircase ran up to the roof, led me to inquire what it was; when the servant told me that the late patriarch was buried there, seated in an arm-chair. Although his body was said to have been embalmed, it smelt most offensively; and I anticipated that this unusual burial would give rise to many ghost-stories. This chapel is dedicated to St. Elias, whose name the building bears, being called Dayr Mar Elias, or the Monastery of St. Elias, although I could not learn that, within the memory of any one, it had served for anything but the residence of the patriarch of the Greek schismatics, or of the bishop of Sayda: nor were the rooms in any respect adapted for the cells of friars.
The situation is picturesque, but lonely and barren, on the top of a mountain without verdure, surrounded on every side with mountains equally sterile; excepting a few olive and mulberry trees on a shelving bank at the back of the building, which were not to be come at but by a circuitous path, or by leaping down a perpendicular rock of twenty feet. Though now on Mount Lebanon, where the imagination of the reader will supply him with umbrageous cedars at every step, fiction alone could throw their shade over Dayr Mar Elias. From its elevated situation, the monastery commands a most extensive view of the sea, from which it is distant in a straight line about two miles. But the sea, on the Syrian coast, is only a vast waste, where small craft are seen coasting before the wind, and now and then a three-masted vessel in the distance. The magnificent spectacle of a passing fleet, so common in the British Channel, is here unknown.
I found that, during the late rains, the roofs had leaked, and some of our baggage had been damaged. This was an unpromising prospect for the new residence; and several repairs, which were absolutely requisite to render the rooms habitable, must necessarily retard Lady Hester’s removal from Sayda some weeks. The four sides of the quadrangle were not equally commodious. On the west were three good rooms, convertible into saloons or bed-rooms; so that one as a drawing-room, one as her ladyship’s bed-room, and one for her maid, occupied the whole of that side. The north side was made up of a kitchen, a kelár or store-room, and a corner room, in which the patriarch had died. The east side had three small rooms, and an oil and wine cellar; and, as it had already been decided that two of these were to be converted into a vapour bath, the dwelling became reduced to five rooms. This confined space rendered it necessary for me to look out for a cottage for myself in the village, which was a quarter of a mile off, on somewhat higher ground than the monastery: I therefore rode to it. Its name is Abrah, or Abra. I little thought, on first beholding it, that I was destined to spend there nearly three years of my life.
Abra consisted of forty cottages, each of one story, and of the rudest construction. The cement for the unhewn stones, of which they were built, was mud from the road. Rough trunks of poplars or other slight trees formed the beams for the roofs, which were flat, and made in the following manner. Over the trunks were laid rough stakes for rafters, over these brushwood, and the coating was common loam, rolled and trodden down, until it resisted in some degree the passage of wet: but there were few roofs that appeared to be waterproof. Within, the walls were covered with a rough plaster of mould and water without lime, and this was whitewashed.
