1870
I AM “partant pour la Syrie,” and though it is comparatively near, we find the journey long. We take steamer to Alexandria, and there await the first vessel going northwards. We embark in a foreign steamer, much preferring the Russian, and after passing, perhaps without sighting, the base of the Nile Delta and the northern terminus of the Suez Canal, we run rapidly up the coast of the Holy Land. We are near enough to see certain of its features, and to feel a throbbing of the heart. Here is Ascalon, the “Bride of Syria,” still redolent of the days of the lion-hearted king and of the right royal Saláh-el-Din. There is Jaffa, the Joppa ever full of the memories of St. Peter. We touch there, but we may not land unless the sea is of the calmest. Now we steam along the site of Cæsarea, the busy city of Herod Agrippa, converted into the most silent waste of ruins that it has ever been our fate to look upon. There we cast anchor for a few days, at the second station, Hazfa, opposite St. Jean d’Acre, that “Key of Palestine” from the days of the Crusaders to the times of Bonaparte, Sir Sydney Smith, and Sir Charles Napier. From this point we swerve
rapidly past the brown headland of Carmel, type of excellent beauty to the Hebrew poet, past the white Scala Tyrivrum, whose promontorium album might be a fragment of the white cliffs of Albion, past the bright little town of Tyre, a phœnix rising a third time from its ashes, and past Sidon and Lebanon, memorial names engraved upon our childish hearts too deeply for time or change ever to erase them from the memory of the man. So memorial, indeed, are all these regions that the traveller must keep watch and ward upon himself, under penalty of suffering from what I may call “Holy Land on the brain.” The essence of it consists in seeing all things, not as they are, but as they ought to be; for instance, “hanging gardens” at Damascus, “Roman bridges” in Saracenic arches, and “beautiful blush marble” in limestone stained with oxide. It wrings the hearts of its friends when sighting the Plain of Esdraelon, and in gazing upon a certain mound it exclaims:
What hill is like to Tabor’s hill in beauty and in grace?
This clairvoyance, or idealism, which makes men babble of green fields where only dust meets the eye of sense is by no means an obscure disorder of the brain; on the contrary, it is rather aggressive and violent, whilst writers of guides and handbooks appear abnormally exposed to it. Hence those who prepare for a pilgrimage to the Holy Land must temper information and description with many a grain of salt, or they will undergo no little disappointment. Ideal pleasures ever excel those of reality;
but in this case there is an extra and inordinate supply of ideality.
We disembark at the hopeless, wind-lashed roadstead of Beyrut, within the limits of the Land of Promise, but never yet included in the Land of Possession. The trim little harbour-town, seated upon its sloping amphitheatre, converted into “Colossia Julia Augusta Felix Berytus” must have been a local Pompeii in the fourth and fifth centuries, and its feminine bust was found associated with the medallions of Alexandria and Halicarnassus. During those ages the Roman and Egyptian galleys jostled one another in the inner port, which now looks like a dock; their palaces and villas covered the slopes with pillars and colonnades; paradises and gardens contrasted with proud fanes rising upon well-wooded and well-watered peaks around—fanes dedicated to gods and goddesses now remembered only by the classical dictionaries. In those days, students of philosophy and theology, of law and language, flocked to Berytus from the most distant lands. But the terrible earthquake of A.D. 551, which laid waste a pleasant site, seems to have been the turning-point of its destinies; the roadstead apparently became shallow, and, despite a noted miracle in the eighth century, Beyrut saw her glory depart for many a generation. At last, in the beginning of the nineteenth century, it had sunk to its lowest, and the petty port, placed under the unimportant Pashalate of Sidon, numbered barely five hundred souls.
Sir Charles Napier, the sailor, changed all that. In the autumn of 1840 he made Beyrut his headquarters, whence he and his gallant crews ranged the hill country around and blockaded the ports, till the career of Ibrahim Pasha was unfortunately cut short. Thereupon the hat began at once to take precedence of the turban, even of the green turban. The headquarters of the Pashalate were transferred from Sidon to Beyrut; European merchants established country houses; missionaries opened schools for both sexes; the different consular corps contended for the construction of roads and the abatement of nuisances; whilst the port was regularly visited by four lines of steamers. Briefly, Beyrut became the only Europeanised place in Syria, and she will probably remain so for many years.
The old part of the city still retains some marks of Orientalism; the old part, with its alleys, wynds, and closes, its wretched lanes, its narrow and slippery thoroughfares, resembling unroofed sewers, is peculiarly sombre and Syrian, full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanliness. Nothing can be meaner than the Customs House, where millions of piastres annually change hands. Of the stately buildings which once adorned it no traces remain but three granite monolithic columns, still towering above modern misery. But the new town which surrounds the ancient archery is Levantine—that is to say, almost Italian; the points of difference being a scatter of minarets and a sprinkling of tropical vegetation, which
tells you that you are somewhat nearer the sun. There are houses and hospitals large enough each to lodge its battalions; piano and bugle sounds catch the ear; the carriage is taking the place of the horse and the mule—here, as in South America, a sure sign of civilisation; and Orientalism is essentially at a discount. You must not think of Beyrut as an Eastern city.