Damascus in the midst of its far-reaching orchards
After we became accustomed to the peculiar features of the landscape we could now and then distinguish a village. Yet at a very short distance the largest settlements were blurred into the brown plain; for the houses are all built of a dull black basalt and, save for one or two square towers, the compact hamlets are hardly to be distinguished from rough out-croppings of rock. All of the dwellings look like deserted ruins: some of them are. All seem centuries old: many have been occupied for more than a thousand years, for the hard basalt seems never to crumble.
The extraordinarily rich earth of the Hauran is only disintegrated lava, and as we near the end of the plain we pass tracts where presumably more recent eruptions have not yet been weathered into fertile soil. Two or three miles to the east of the railway a long line of dark rock some thirty feet high marks the western edge of the Leja, which in New Testament times was known as the Trachonitis[22] or “Rocky Place.” From now-extinct volcanoes at the northern end of the Druse Mountain there flowed these three hundred and fifty square miles of lava, which has broken in cooling into such a maze of irregular fissures that its surface has been likened to that of a petrified ocean. Yet this rugged region contains also little lakes, and pockets of arable soil, and numerous ruins of villages and roads and bridges which point to a considerable population in former days. Lejâ means “hiding-place” or “refuge,” and the Druses call this forbidding district the “Fortress of Allah.” The entire lava mass is honeycombed with caves. Indeed, the people of the Hauran say that one who knew the labyrinth of subterranean passages could make his way from one end of the Leja to the other without once appearing above ground. It is no wonder that this immense natural citadel, with its unmarked trails, its innumerable hiding-places in dark caves or deep-cut fissures of the rock, and its easy dominance over the dwellers on the level plain below, has always been a thorn in the side of whatever government pretended to rule the Hauran. Eighty years ago the Druses of the Leja, although they were outnumbered by the attacking force twenty to one, routed with terrible slaughter the entire army of Ibrahim Pasha, the great Egyptian conqueror.
The description of the Leja and its inhabitants which was written in the first century A. D. by Josephus would serve for any period in its wild history. “It was not an easy thing to restrain them, since this way of robbery had been their usual practice, and they had no other way to get their living, because they had neither any city of their own, nor lands in their possession, but only some receptacles and dens in the earth, and there they and their cattle lived in common together: however, they had made contrivances to get pools of water, and laid up corn in granaries for themselves, and were able to make great resistance by issuing out on the sudden against any that attacked them; for the entrances of their caves were narrow, in which but one could come in at a time, and the places within incredibly large and made very wide; but the ground over their habitations was not very high, but rather on a plain, while the rocks are altogether hard and difficult to be entered upon unless any one gets into the plain road by the guidance of another, for these roads are not straight, but have several revolutions. But when these men are hindered from their wicked preying upon their neighbors, their custom is to prey one upon another, insomuch that no sort of injustice comes amiss to them.”[23] Josephus’ diction is as involved as the labyrinthine trails of the Leja, but his facts are still correct.
Further evidences that we are in a volcanic region are found in the round black stones, about the size of large bowling-balls, which now begin to appear on the plain. At first they do not seriously interfere with cultivation, for the farmers gather them into heaps along the edges of their fields. A few miles farther on, however, there are so many that there has been no attempt to remove them and the light plow has simply scratched whatever narrow strips of earth might lie between the rocks. At last they cover the land as far as we can see, with hardly their own diameter separating them. There must be ten thousand of them to the acre. Millions upon millions of black spots dot the nearer landscape and in the distance merge into an apparently solid mass of dark, hard sterility.
By this time most of the passengers in our coach have become very tired and irritable, though the loud breathing of some indicates that they have fallen into a restless slumber. Several are quite sick from the heat. At half-past five in the afternoon the sun has lost none of its midday glare, and the noisy wind from the desert still scorches with its furnace breath. On either side, the monotonous multitude of round black rocks strew the brown, burnt earth. The hills, which constantly draw in closer to us, seem as if they might have fair pasture-land on their lower slopes; but, save for the shining white dome of one Moslem tomb, they bear nothing higher than scattered grass and dusty thorn-bushes. We climb slowly over the watershed in the narrow neck of the plain, then speed swiftly down a steep incline; and, lo, we behold a veritable paradise of running water and heavily laden orchard trees, above which the glory of the setting sun gilds a forest of slender minarets.
CHAPTER VII
THE EARTHLY PARADISE
According to the Moslem wise men, Jebel Kasyun is a very sacred mount; for upon it Abraham dwelt when there was revealed to him the supreme doctrine of the unity of God. Long before that, however, Adam lived here: some say that he was formed from the earth of this very mountain, and that the reddish streaks upon its sides are nothing less than the indelible bloodstains of murdered Abel.
Yet as we stand by the little shrine known as the Dome of Victory, which crowns the summit, we are not thinking of ancient legends. Below us lies a scene of entrancing interest and of a peculiar beauty which is unlike that of any other beautiful prospect in the world.