Richard and Charley Drake sketched and fixed the positions of some fifty ruins which are fated to disappear from the face of the earth. They took squeezes of from twenty to twenty-five Greek inscriptions, of which six or seven have dates, and explored the Harrah, or 'Hot-Country,' the pure white blank in the best maps, and took hydrographic charts, as they found that the guide-books and the maps teemed with mistakes.
"I thought," he said, "when I came here that Syria and Palestine would be so worn out that my occupation as an explorer was clean gone, but I soon found that although certain lines had been well trodden, that scarcely ever a traveller, and no tourists, have ever ridden ten miles off the usual ways. No one knows how many patches of unvisited and unvisitable country lie within a couple of days' ride of great cities and towns, such as Aleppo and Damascus, Hums, and Hamáh.
"Where the maps show a virgin white patch in the heart of Jaydur, the classical Ituræa, students suppose that the land has been examined, and has been found to contain nothing of interest. The reverse is absolutely the case. Finally, as will presently appear, there are valid reasons for that same, for the unexplored spots are either too difficult or too dangerous for the multitude to undertake. To visit carefully even the beaten tracks in the Holy Land occupies six months, and none except a resident can afford leisure or secure health for more, and the reason that these places have escaped European inspection is, that they do not afford provisions, or forage, or water; they are deadly with malarious fever, they are infested by the Bedawi. They do not often detain you for ransom, nor mutilate you; but they will spear you. They will not kill you in cold blood; that is only done for a Thar, which is the blood-feud between tribes. Still, under these mitigated circumstances, travellers may know that their escorts will turn tail, and will hardly care to expose themselves, their attendants, and baggage to a charge of Bedawin cavalry. Indeed, the running away of the escort is the traveller's safeguard. If the tribe could seize all, it knows that dead men are dumb, but it knows that the fugitives have recognized them, and that before evening the tale will be known through all the land.
"There is no reverence in this ancient place for antiquity. Syria would willingly change from ancient and Oriental to modern and European. The ruins of the 'Aláh are pulled to pieces to build houses for Hamáh. The classical buildings of Saccæa are torn down and made into rude hovels for the Druzes, who fled from the Anti-Libanus and Hermon. Syria, north of Palestine, is an old country, geographically and technologically and other ways, but it is absolutely new. A land of the past, it has a future as promising as that of Mexico or the Argentine Republic. The first railway that spans it will restore the poor old lethargic region to rich and vigorous life. 'Lazare, veni foras!'—it will raise this Lazarus of Eastern provinces, this Niobe of nations, from a neglected grave. There is literally no limit that can be laid down to the mother-wit, the ambition, the intellectual capabilities of its sons. They are the most gifted race that I have as yet ever seen, and when the curse shall have left the country—not the bane of superstition, but the bane and plague-spot of bad rule—it will again rise to a position not unworthy of the days when it gave to the world a poetry and a system of religion still unforgotten by our highest civilization.
"My object was to become acquainted with the Haurán and its Druzes, to see the Umm-Nírán Cave, called the 'fire cave,' of which one hears such extraordinary legends, and the Tulúl el Safá, which is the volcanic region, east of the Damascus swamps.
"The South Pacific Coast, and Mediterranean Palestine, are two pendants in the world, only the East is on a much smaller scale. The lakes and rivers, plains and valleys, cities and settlements, storms and earthquakes, in fact, all the geographical, physical, and the meteorological, as well as the social features of the two regions, show a remarkable general likeness with a difference of proportion.
"The world is weary of the past. In these regions there is hardly a mile without a ruin, hardly a ruin that is not interesting, and in some places, mile after mile and square mile after square mile of ruin show a luxuriance of ruin. There is not a large ruin in the country which does not prove, upon examination, to be the composition of ruins more ancient still. The mere surface of the antiquarian mine has only been scratched; it will be long years before the country can be considered explored, before even Jerusalem can be called 'recovered,' and the task must be undertaken by Societies, not by individuals.
"Of history, of picturesque legend, of theology and mythology, of art and literature, as of archaeology, of palæography, of palæogeography, of numismatology, and all the other 'ologies and 'ographies, they have absolutely no visible end. If the New World be bald and tame, the Syrian old world is, to those who know it well, perhaps a little too fiery and exciting, paling with its fierce tints and angry flush the fair vision which a country has a right to contemplate in the days to be. There is a disease here called 'Holy Land on the Brain,' which makes patients babble of hanging gardens and parterres of flowers. The 'green sickness' attacks tourists from Europe and North America, especially where the sun is scarce. It attacks the Protestant with greater violence than the Catholic (the Catholic from long meditation is prepared for it). The Protestant fit is excited and emotional, spasmodic and hysterical, ending in a long rhapsody about himself, his childhood, and his mother. It spares the Levantine, as 'yellow Jack' does the negro. His brain is too well packed with the wretched intrigues and petty interest of material life to have any room for excitement at 'the first glimpse of Emmanuel's Land.' The sufferer will perhaps hire a house at Siloam, and pass his evenings in howling from the roof, at the torpid little town of Jebus, 'Woe! woe to thee, Jerusalem!' Men fall to shaking hands with one another, and exchange congratulations for the all-sufficient reason that the view before them 'embraces the plain of Esdraelon.'
"A long and happy life should be still before it. The ruined heaps show us what has been; the appliances of civilization, provided with railways and tramways, will offer the happiest blending of the ancient and the modern worlds. It will become another Egypt, with the advantages of a superior climate, and far nobler races of men. Time was when I dreamt of the Libanus as my future pied à terre. When weary with warfare and wander, one could repose in peace and comfortable ease. I thought of pitching a tent for life on Mount Lebanon, whose raki and tobacco are of the best, whose Vino d'oro is compared with the best, whose winter climate is like an English summer, whose views are lovely, a place at the same time near and far from society—it was riant in the extreme;[4] but in the state of Syria in my time, the physical mountain had no shade, the moral mountain no privacy, the village life would have been dreary and monotonous, broken only by a storm, an earthquake, a murder, a massacre. Such is the rule of the Wali in this unfortunate time, when drought and famine, despotism and misrule, maddens its unfortunate inhabitants.
"We now determined the forms and bearings of the Cedar Block, the true apex of the Libanus. We then went to the unknown and dangerous region called Tulúl el Safá, the Hillocks of the Safá district, a mass of volcanic cones lying east of the Damascus swamps called lakes. Then we explored the northern Anti-Libanus, a region which is innocent of tourists and traveller, and appears a blank of mountains upon the best maps. Of my fellow-traveller Charley Drake I can only say that every one knows his public worth. At the end of my time here came three tedious months of battling unsupported, against all that falsehood and treachery could devise; the presence of this true-hearted Englishman, staunch to the backbone, inflexible in the cause of right, and equally disdainful of threats and promises, was our greatest comfort: I can only speak of him with enthusiasm. Our journey to the northern slopes of Lebanon, and the 'Aláh or the highland of Syria, is an absolute gain to geography, as the road lay through a region marked on our maps 'Great Syrian Desert,' and the basaltic remains in the extensive and once populous plain lying north-east and south-east of Hamah have been visited, sketched, and portrayed for the first time. We found lignite, true coal, bituminous schists and limestone, the finest bitumen or asphalt, mineral springs of all sorts, and ores of all kinds, and plants and rhubarb. And then the duty of a Consular officer in Syria is to scour the country, and see matters with his own eyes, and personally to investigate the cases which are brought before him at head-quarters, where everything except the truth appears.
"After our visit to Ba'albak and the northern Libanus, we 'did' the southern parts of the mountain, the home of the Druzes as opposed to that of the Maronites; then we ascended Hermon, then we had our gallop to the Waters of Merom, that hideous expanse of fetid mire and putrefying papyrus. We paid a visit to the only Bedawin Amir in this region, the Amir Hasan el Fa'úr of the Benú Fadl tribe, and then we visited most of the romantic and hospitable Druze villages which cling to the southern and eastern folds of Hermon."
We used to spend all the summers in the Anti-Lebanon. Bludán is a little Christian village, Greek orthodox, which clings to the Eastern flank of the mountain overlooking the Zebedáni valley, which is well known to travellers, because it leads from Damascus to Ba'albak. In it we found the official sources of the Barada, the river of Damascus, but its real source is a pool just behind our quarters, fed in winter by the torrent of Jebel el Shakíf. The Bludán block is a few miles north of the site of Abila, the highest summit of Anti-Lebanon, and is fronted on the west by Jebel el Shakíf, or "Mountain of Cliffs," with gaps and gorges. Bludán lies twenty-seven miles to the north-west across country, away from Damascus.
Ours was a large claret-case-shaped house of stone; the centre was a large barn-like limestone hall with a deep covered verandah; a wild waste of garden extends all round the house, a bare ridge of mountain behind; a beautiful stream with two small waterfalls rushes through the garden. It is five thousand feet high—an eagle's nest, commanding an unrivalled view. The air was perfect, only hot at three p.m. for an hour or two, and blankets at night. There was stabling for eight horses; no windows, only wooden shutters to close at night. We see five or six ranges of mountains, one backing the other, of which the last looks down upon the Haurán. We can see Jebel Sannin, which does not measure nine thousand feet above sea-level, monarch of the Lebanon, and on the left, Hermon, king of the Anti-Lebanon. The Greek villages cling like wasps' nests to our mountain, and Zebedáni, on the plain beneath, contains thirty-five thousand Mohammedans.
THE BURTONS' HOUSE AT BLUDÁN, IN ANTI-LEBANON. By Charles Tyrwhitt-Drake.
The utter solitude, the wildness of the life, the absence of luxe, and no society, the being thoroughly alone with Nature and one's own thoughts, was all too refreshing; we led half-Eastern lives and half-farmhouse life. We made our own bread, we bought butter and milk from the Bedawi, we bought sheep or kids from passing flocks. We woke at dawn, and after a cup of tea, we used to take the dogs, and have long walks over the mountains with our guns.
The game were bears (very scarce), gazelles, wolves, wild boars, and a small leopard called nimr, but for these we had to go far, and watch in silence before dawn. But Richard had opinions about sport; he only wanted to kill a beast that would kill us if we did not kill it, and the smaller game, partridges, quails, woodcocks, hares, and wild duck, we never shot unless we were hungry, and we would not have the gazelles hunted. He had the greatest contempt for the Hurlingham matches, and the battue slaughters in English parks, where, instead of honestly walking for your game, and bringing it home to eat, the young men of to-day have a gentle stroll to eat pâté de foie gras, drink champagne, and the keeper hands them a gun with a pheasant almost tied to the end of it to blow to pieces. And what Richard thought about sport I heartily agreed with. The hot part of the day was spent in reading, writing, and studying Arabic. He sent home from Bludán, during 1870, "Vikram and the Vampire" (Hindú tales), "Paraguay," and "Proverbia Communia Syriaca" (Royal Asiatic Society, 1871)—three works he had been long preparing.