The Circe of the deserts

by Paule Henry-Bordeaux

The slowness of the journey was full of charms. Sometimes they passed naked women who were washing their linen at the fountain and who, without being troubled the least in the world at the sight of them, carelessly turned their backs. They had just traversed the Nalsr and Kasimaze when five blind men emerged suddenly, holding each other by the shoulders and walking one after the other. These joyous fellows astonished them by their pleasant appearance and their merry air.

And in the evening they encamped on the margin of springs, sometimes in one of those sanctuaries dedicated to some unknown Mohammedan saint which the commercial sense of the Arabs has transformed into a café. Such was that of Kludder. The history of the occupier is too significant not to be related. This worthy son of Allah had a wife, old and of canonical appearance, who carried on the business admirably. He preferred to her a young and pretty girl, who, however, understood nothing about business. He therefore recalled the first and kept them both, joining thus the useful to the agreeable. For five years they shared the task of enriching him and amusing him.

Sidon was sleeping in its orchards of orange-trees when the travellers stopped at the entrance to the town. Between its two castles in ruins, of which one is expiring to the rhythm of the waves, it seemed a princess of "The Thousand and One Nights" guarded by two black giants. But the arches of the prison were infinite, and lamps of gold watched over her slumber.

Lady Hester and her people were lodged at the French caravanserai, prepared by the diligent attentions of the French consul, M. Taitbout. Scarcely were they installed there than an invitation arrived from the Prince of the Druses, the Emir Bechir, accompanied by twelve camels, twenty-five mules, four horses and seven foot soldiers. The two sons of a merchant of Sidon, the brothers Bertrand, half-dragomans, half-doctors, were joined to the expedition. They had the quality of being interchangeable, and travellers never knew exactly with which they had to deal.

Rather unpleasant rumours were in circulation at Sidon in regard to the emir. He was born of Moslem parents, but practised in secret the Christian religion. He was a tyrant, said some, a hypocrite, said others. Worthy emulator of Djezzar, had he not just caused the eyes of his nephews, the sons of the Emir Yusef, to be torn out, because they ventured to compromise his power? He had had a magnificent palace built in the heart of the Lebanon. And, whispered the best informed people, there was in the great hall of Beit-ed-Din, a ceiling of such beauty that the delighted emir had, by way of recompense, caused the two hands of the artist to be cut off, in order that he might never be able to begin another. A protector of the arts rather out of the common!

By a narrow path which embraced the circuit of the Nahr-el-Damour, Bechir's escort guided Lady Hester towards Deir-el-Kammar (the convent of the moon), which they reached at nightfall. In the morning they had an elating spectacle: dominating the bounding waters of the torrent, clinging to the flanks of the mountain, the palace stretched towards the sun, raising its flowering roofs, its white terraces, its towers, its arcades, its gardens, which fell back as though in despair at not having been able to kiss the sky and descended exhausted to the foot of the slope.

The doctor noted down briefly on his tablets:

"The palace is devoid of all beauty. It is new, but irregular; it has not two parts alike, and it has been built in pieces and bits, in accordance with fancy or necessity, in accordance with leisure or money. The emir has made a present to Lady Hester of a fine horse, richly caparisoned."

But the English find it difficult to admire what is not their fief. Scarcely twenty years later, Lamartine was to find other expressions to proclaim aloud his admiration. The lack of symmetry! But it is that which ought to possess charm for lovers of the beautiful! And what a wonderful view was this medley of square towers pierced by ogives, of long galleries with files of arcades slender and light as the stems of pine-trees, of graceful colonnades of unequal shape rearing themselves to the roofs. And the animation of the courts blooming with roses: pages throwing the djerid, arrival of camels, horses pawing the ground, comings and goings of Druses, Marionites, Metaoulis!... The doctor saw nothing; but it must be said in his defence that the palace had hardly been completed, and that in the East the stones, like the women, grow old quickly. The masonry crumbles to dust; the rain pierces the roofs; and the sun, like a skilful magician, gives to the crumbling façades the golden rust and the rose tint of very old ruins.

But what is unpardonable in the doctor for not having admired, is the site. Beit-ed-Din is the "Palace of the Waters," with the vaporous mists which mount from the torrent, with the fountains of its mysterious gardens, with the eternal murmur of the humid earth which chants its joy, and the countless cascades and the dropping of the spray which bathes in the dew, and the silvery foam of the numberless streams and frolicsome springs. And down there, at the extremity of the valley, the sea, which presents itself like a pearl at the bottom of a cup.