His three literary necessities were Shakespeare, the Bible, and Euclid, and they were bound up together, with three large clasps, like a breviary, and went everywhere. His method of language-learning he has described in his autobiography. He taught me this way. He made me learn ten new words a day by heart. "When a native speaks, then say the words after him to get his accent. Don't be English—that is, shy or self-conscious—if you know five words, air them wherever you can; next day you will know ten, and so on till you can speak. Don't be like the Irishman who would not go into the water until he could swim. Then take a very easy childish book, in the colloquial language of the day, and translate it word for word underneath the original, and you will be surprised how soon you find yourself unconsciously talking."
At twelve we had our first meal; in the afternoon native Shaykhs, or English from Beyrout or Damascus, came to visit us, or rare tourists would crawl up to see what sort of people we were, and how we lived. They all used to say, "Well, it is glorious, but the thing is to get here." We set up a tir (shooting-place) in the garden, and used to practise pistol or rifle shooting, or fence, or put on the cavesson, and lunge the horses if they had had no exercise. When the sun became cooler, all the poor within sixteen miles round would come to be doctored; the hungry, the thirsty, the ragged, the sick and sorry, filled our garden, and Richard used to settle grievances, and they all got money or clothing, food or medicine, and sympathy. Before dinner we used to assemble in the garden to eat a few mouthfuls of leban salad and drink a liqueur glass of raki, which was quite necessary to give us sufficient appetite. Divans were then spread on the housetop, and we used to watch the moon lighting up Hermon, whilst we smoked the after-dinner narghíleh. The horses were picketed out all these summer nights, and the saises slept with them. The last thing was to have night prayers, and then to go the rounds to see that everything was right, turn out the dogs on guard, and then to bed.
The mails came once a fortnight, and Richard would ride into Damascus and see that all was well. Sometimes we used to give a picnic to some of our Moslem neighbours, and we would gallop out in the plain, and stay in the black tents of the Arabs. I used to have to ride down to the Moslem village Zebedáni every Sunday for church. The path was steep, and covered with rolling stones, so that the horses used mostly to slide down, and it occupied about an hour and a half. The most curious part was that the Shaykhs and chief Moslems always accompanied me to Mass. The thing that astonished the Shaykhs the most, was the small acolytes being able to read and sing in Latin, and they constantly exclaimed, "Máshálláh!"
We were much grieved about this time to hear the sad news of poor Lord Clarendon's death. Few amongst us that have not some happy recollection of that kind, true heart. He belonged to a breed of gentlemen that with one or two exceptions may be said to have died out. R.I.P. At this juncture Mr. E. H. Palmer and Charley Drake had come back from Sinai and the Tih Desert, and came to stay with us.
With Drake and Palmer in the Lebanon.
We wandered about for a long time together. On a long day we might easily zigzag forty or fifty miles, and thirty or thirty-six on a short day. We never rode straight to a place, and always rode two horses, as there is so much to be seen on both sides of a direct way.
Ba'albak is far more beautiful, though much smaller than Tadmor, and can be seen without any danger. Tadmor is more romantic, picturesque, more startling, and there is the attraction of the danger, and being in the absolute desert. Londoners and Parisians would consider Ba'albak in the desert, but we from Damascus do not. This was the holy place of the old Phœnicians, and I do not know a finer sight, from a distant height, when Ba'albak is lit up by the setting sun. The fertile plain of the Buká'a, with its black Turcoman tents and camels, lies in the distance. There is a big stone still lying there, which would weigh eleven thousand tons. The Hajar el Hablah, or pregnant stone, is a huge unfinished block. Our measurements were seventy feet long, fourteen feet two inches high, and thirteen feet eleven inches broad. The extraordinary sight makes you exclaim, "Something must have frightened them before they had time to carry it off."
Riding about, you come to the Turcomans' tents, who have wandered about Syria since the days of the Crusaders, and have preserved, like their neighbours the Nuwar (gypsies), their ancestral language and customs. We then went to live for a short while with the Maronites, two hundred thousand people, under the rule of their Patriarch, and we camped for some time under the cedars of Lebanon. There are only nine of these large and ancient trees left; the four largest are in the form of a cross, and three smaller. There are 555 trees (newer than these nine), all told, and they are 7368 feet above sea-level. While stopping with his "Beatitude the Maronite Primate of Antioch, and of all the East," whom his flock calls "our Patriarch, our Pope, and our Sultan," we saw for once the simplicity and sincerity of the Apostolic ages.
B'sherri, Jezzín, and Sadád produce a manly, independent race of Christians, fond of horses and arms, with whom I am not ashamed to own community of faith. In all my life I have never seen worse riding than the Kasrawán; it consists of nothing but débris of rock, fields, valleys, and mountains, all of the largest jagged stones. Our horses had to do the work of goats, and jump from one bit of rock to another, and it lasted over twelve hours at once. We lost our camp, but after seeing our exhausted horses groomed, fed, watered, and tethered in a warm spot, we were glad to eat a water-melon, and sleep on our saddle-cloths in the open. The next day was just as bad until we reached Affka, but the scenery was glorious. We had three days of this awful riding, which the Syrians call "Darb el Jehannum," the "road of hell." We visited Mr. Palgrave's old quarters, a monastery of fifty or sixty Jesuits, where Mr. Palgrave was a Jesuit for seventeen years. Here we all got fever.