As we had entered Palmyra with a vivid conception of its life, so we left it with an equally vivid conception of its death.
Standing guard like a row of sentinels at the base of the hills are the square tomb-towers in which Palmyra buried its dead. The proud merchants seem to have been imbued with two main ideas: the erection of columns in their lifetime and of resting places for their families in death. Many of the towers are over a hundred feet high and consist of five and six stories. The bodies were arranged in tiers in the recesses on either side of a central chamber. Some of these buildings are still nearly perfect, others are practically heaps of ruins. The bones of the proud merchants are mingled with the bones of the wild beasts who have sought refuge there through the long ages.
We turn our backs on the city and ride away through the gap in the hills. The city is hidden from view, but the tomb-towers still stand in silent rows down the valley on either side.
We forget the golden pillars and all the ruined magnificence; we can think of nothing but these ghostly towers seeing us out, as it were, from this city of the dead.
High up on the hill above, in the still morning air, a shepherd boy pipes merrily at them, and flocks of goats and sheep browse unconcernedly at their feet.
CHAPTER XXII
AN ARMENIAN AND A TURK
I. Arten.
Arten was an Armenian; he was quick, thin, methodical, dirty, intelligent, and untruthful; he was also the cook. I say the cook advisedly, for a cook he was not. No doubt he would have made an excellent cook if he had known anything about the art; but it was not till after we had engaged him in this capacity that we discovered that he had not thought this qualification necessary. At any rate, he knew, being a hungry man himself, that we were in need of food of some sort at stated intervals. In this he was a decided improvement on the Greek cook we had just dismissed; this man had a habit of coming to us, after we had been waiting hours in momentary expectation of a meal, and saying with a languid air, "Do you wish to eat?" He was a good cook, but always seemed overcome with astonishment when we expected him to cook.