Across the intervening desert, Syria wooed him to take her for his slave. Who was there to make him afraid? Leaning on Lebanon, and laving her beautiful feet in the sea, she fascinated him with love. He should taste boundless sway. Eastward lay Bagdad and Persia, thrones of Caliphs who once sat in his seat—why should not he sit in theirs? Then with softer whispers she pointed to the Golden Horn and the Bosphorus, and looked what she dared not speak.
I do not wonder that he was enchanted. I do not wonder that he burned to be master of the superb slave that lay so lovely and fair in the sun, dreaming, as now we see her dream, under the vines and olives. His peer, Napoleon Bonaparte, against whom, in Egypt, his maiden sword was fleshed, whom he loved to name and to hear that they were born in the same year, had thus seen from Elba the gorgeous Fata-Morgana of European empire. How could Mohammad Alee reflect that sallying forth to grasp it, that peer had bitten the dust? That fate deterred the Pacha, as the experience of others always deters ourselves—as a blade of grass stays the wind. Shall not you and I, my reader, swim to our Heros, though a thousand Leanders never came to shore?
It was this Syria through which we plod, this brilliant morning, that seduced Mohammad Alee.
A land of glorious resources and without a population. Here grow wheat, rye, barley, beans and the cotton plant. Oats are rare; but Palestine produces sesame and dourra, a kind of pulse like lentils. Baalbec grows maize. Sugar and rice are not unknown at Beyrout. Lebanon is wreathed with vines. Indigo flourishes without cultivation on the banks of the Jordan. The Druses cultivate the white mulberry. Gaza has dates like those of Mecca, and pomegranates as fine as those of Algiers. Figs and bananas make the gardens of Antioch tropical. From Aleppo come pistachio-nuts. The almond, the olive and the orange thrive in the kindly air; and Damascus revels in twenty kinds of apricot, with all the best fruits of France.
Many of the inhabitants pass us, and we can see what they are. They are repulsive in appearance, the dregs of refuse races. They look mean and treacherous, and would offer small resistance to determination and skill. Mohammad Alee had little fear of the Syrians.
He could not resist the song of the Siren; and suddenly "the Eastern Question" agitated political Europe, and the diplomatic genius of the three greatest states—England, France and Russia—was abruptly challenged by the alarming aspect of the Syrian war, which threatened, with a leader despising the political stagnation and military imbecility of the vast realm of "the Shadow of God on Earth," to issue in a new empire.
Mohammad Alee having subdued Abdallah, Pacha of Acre, and saved his life and throne by intercession with the Porte, was surprised that Abdallah harbored all fugitives from Egypt. He observed that, following his own example, Abdallah was introducing the European discipline into his army, and was enticing into his service many young officers who had been Europeanly instructed at his own expense. He expostulated with Abdallah, and appealed to the Porte. The Sublime Porte, like other political Sublimities, hesitated, meditated—
"Then idly twirled his golden chain,
And smiling, put the question by."
Mohammad Alee, with expectant eyes fixed upon Syria, sat silent, his hand trembling with eagerness and ready to grasp the splendid prize. "The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces" of a new oriental empire rose, possible in the light of hope.
His army was carefully disciplined. The fame of its tried officers had been won upon the battle-fields of the Empire. He had a fleet and all the resources of the latest military and marine science. Over all, he had his son Ibrahim, already proved in Arabia and Greece, of a military genius peculiarly Oriental, swift and stern, rude in thought, but irresistible in action—the slave of his father's ambition, the iron right-hand of his will. Internal prosperity and external prestige sealed Mohammad Alee's hope and determination.