Of the Naw’arinah, or people of the Auranitis (the great Hauran Valley), we are told that:
They thrice bewildered the Apostle of Allah [Mohammed].
The modern inhabitants of ancient Heliopolis, where Burckhardt found the handsomest woman in Syria, is dubbed:
A Ba’albak bear.
The Halbem village near Damascus is a standing
joke with the witty citizens on account of the huge woollen turbans, the loud voice, and the peculiar dispositions of the people. They make “kass,” or lamp-wicks, for Damascus, and it is said that on one occasion, when their shaykh was imprisoned, they threatened, by withholding the supply, to keep the city in total darkness. Also, as a bride was being led home, mounted on an ass, when the doorway was found too low, the popular voice said that her head should be cut off, till some local wise man of Gotham suggested that she might dismount.
Beyrut in my day was connected with Damascus by the only carriageable road in the Holy Land, which was supposed to boast of two others, the Jaffa-Jerusalem and the Alexandretto-Aleppo. These two, however, are utterly unfit for wheels, the reason being that they were laid out by native engineers and administered by the Turks, a nation that has succeeded in nothing but destruction. The distance is forty-seven and a half geographical miles, prolonged to sixty by the old road and to seventy-two by the new one.[8]
We could travel to Damascus by night coach or
by day diligence, preferring the latter, which enables us to see the land. At 4 a.m. we leave the harbour-town, and we shall reach our destination at 6 p.m. The section between the Mediterranean and Damascus, the sea and the Euphrates Desert, is an epitome of Syria, which has been described to be an epitome of the whole world; a volume might be easily written upon what is seen during that day’s journey. After a couple of miles through suburbs, cemeteries, and scattered villas, orchards of mulberry and olive, lanes hedged with prickly pear and dense clumps of young stone-pines, the road begins to ascend the westward, or maritime, slope of the Lebanon. It works gradually towards the left bank of the great gorge called Wady Hammánah, in one of whose hamlets Lamartine lived and wrote. After some twelve miles from the Beyrut Plain, we reach the watershed of the Jurd, or Highlands of the Lebanon. Here we are about 5,500 feet above sea-level, and feel immensely relieved, in fine weather at least, from the damp heat of the malarious seaboard, which robs the stranger of appetite and rest. The view, too, is charming: a glimpse of sparkling sea, a well-wooded sandstone region, and a long perspective of blue and purple chain and peak, cut and torn by valley, gorge, and ravine, scarring both flanks of the prism. Looking eastward, we sight for the first time that peculiar basaltic bed which gives rise to the Jordan, the Orontes, and the Litani (a river of Tyre). It appears to be a volcanic depression
sunk in the once single range of secondary limestone, and splitting it into two parallel chains, the Libanus and the Anti-Libanus. Viewed from above it is a Spanish viga, a plain of wondrous wealth and fertility, whilst the surface appears smooth as a lake. It is, however, in places dangerously swampy, and though raised some 2,500 to 3,000 feet above sea-level, it is an unwholesome and aguish site, alternately very hot and very cold, curiously damp and distressingly dry. And the same may be said of Damascus, which has to the east the scorching desert, and to the west mountains, mostly snowy: it is no wonder that the old author called it the “windy.” But the climate of Damascus is complicated by perhaps the worst and hardest water in Syria, by the exceeding uncleanliness of the place, and by the habits of the population. To say that man can exist there at all speaks volumes in his favour.